Ideas are free, execution is priceless.

Imagine you’re running late for an important meeting. On the way to the office, you start getting sweaty, hurried and anxious. Sitting in traffic, helpless as a leaf in a gale, you cycle through the excuse barrage in your mind. How will you justify being late so your coworkers aren’t pissed and your client doesn’t fire you? Maybe tell them there was a traffic accident. Say you jumped out…

The time it takes to make a decision increases with the number and complexity of choices. And as the decision time increases, the user experience suffers. This law was first uncovered in the fifties, and since then has become a key tenet of effective web design. Ask any of the programmers you know. Nobody wants to paralyze and frustrate their user. Kill all the pointless features and just give…

The cashier bagging my groceries accidentally dropped a few of my avocados on the floor. No problem. Happens to everybody. They’re just going to be mashed into guacamole in twenty minutes anyway, right? But in that moment, here’s how the woman responded. First, she slammed her face into her hands and started berating herself for being an idiot. Next, she yelled out for one of her coworkers to come…

The emotional and psychological burden of having to think about certain things can be very high. Which doesn’t mean those things are not worth thinking about at all, but we do our nervous system a disservice when we psychologically tie ourselves to more things than are necessary. Isn’t life already burdensome enough? Why not free ourselves from these albatrosses that keep flying after us everywhere we go? Here, let…

Blood simple is when criminals lose control of full rationality at the moment of committing the crime and inevitably leave incriminating clues behind. As a result, the consequences of their acts quickly swirl out of control, and everything goes to hell. Coens made their debut movie about this phenomenon in the eighties. It makes for a compelling plot line. But what’s interesting about the film is, you don’t have…