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A quote from Brandon Sanderson’s novel Legion: The Many Lives of Stephen Leeds: Psychology-as-superpower is a recurring theme in my works. I’ve always believed that the personality traits that make us each distinctive (the way we process information, the way we motivate ourselves, the way we shelter our psyche from the bad while learning to cherish the good) can be either our greatest strengths or our most dramatic limitations. How you see yourself, along with how you use what you have, often more important than talents, skills, or even supernatural abilities. Read more...

In his book Mastery, Robert Greene writes about social intelligence and its importance when working with other people. In human behavior, says Greene, we can detect patterns that transcend culture and time. There are positive traits, but also negative ones. He calls these negative qualities The Seven Deadly Realities: Envy, Conformism, Rigidity, Self-obsessiveness, Laziness, Flightiness, and Passive Aggression. “Most of us have these negative qualities (…) in mild doses. But in a group setting, there will be inevitably people who have one or more of these qualities to a high degree that they can become very destructve” (p. Read more...

Fred Wilson, commenting on how diversity happens: A few years at our annual CEO summit, Scott Heiferman, founder and CEO of Meetup, told a room full of startup CEOs that you have to build diversity into your company from day one because if you don’t, it becomes so much harder later on. He explained that nobody wants to join a company where nobody looks like them. That really hit home and woke quite a few people up. Read more...

Coherence, the quality of forming a unified whole, is about our actions matching what we think and what we say. Pablo Ferreiro and Manuel Alcazar, in their book Managing People, refer to lack of coherence as disloyalty. Although it’s obvious, the term disloyalty gave me a new light on the concept: lack of coherence always has an effect on other people. Disloyalty. This is the attitude of an individual whose actions do not match his words. Read more...

The Bullshit Web, excellent article by Nick Heer on why some webpages take more time to load than 20 years ago, even if our connection bandwith is 20x better. An honest web is one in which the overwhelming majority of the code and assets downloaded to a user’s computer are used in a page’s visual presentation, with nearly all the remainder used to define the semantic structure and associated metadata on the page. Read more...