Pete Michaud

Dominoes and the Price of Admission

I really wanted to quit my job. I was too afraid of the domino effect to do it though. Quitting my job meant not being able to pay my mortgage and take care of my family. We get stuck because we start thinking about the domino effect. The fear that the changes we want are going to cause a cascade of changes...

Words Have Power

“Tiff’s a chocolate whore.” Ben is Tiffany’s husband, and he’s a well-meaning guy. He has a bit of a way with words. The three of us are walking into a Godiva store to pick up a treat for Tiffany. Ben says “Tiff’s a chocolate whore.” “Aficionado?...

How to Break Your Limits

Gema is 23 years old and might be gay. She’s not sure. (Not news.) The problem about being maybe-gay is that Gema lives with her hyper-conservative parents, and has no legal rights as an unmarried Muslim woman in Indonesia. She was in a bind. Her parents expect her to find a nice boy (of their...

Make it Obsolete

“You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.” - Buckminster Fuller Fuller was, among many other interests, a systems theorist. When he said you have to make parts of a system obsolete to change anything...

Akrasia, or How to Stop Checking E-mail

My calendar says I should write today from 8:00am until noon. I began thinking about possibly writing at 9:28, and I’ve been glancing back and forth between potential titles, hacker news, and my e-mail since then. It’s 10:31. I like writing. I want to write. The moment I get stuck on a word or...

How to Benefit from Your Flaws

Part of the mental baggage I carry from a childhood of disfigurement is a need for affirmation. It’s the consequence of an early life in which I felt acutely deprived respect or consideration. I always wanted to be social, but was ridiculed because I was an easy target. I was always a romantic, falling...

Life as a Geoboard

Self sabotage is a complicated subject that could fill its own series if not its own blog. Who does it? Why do we do it? What triggers it? How do we do it? I want to give you an intuitive mental model of one type of sabotage before hitting you with statistics and data from academic literature, so...