Most people screen for chemistry, humor, shared interests. Chris Williamson says they're screening for the wrong thing — and his actual metric is simpler and more clinical than you'd expect.

A quick look back at the snippets created in March 2026. See all monthly recaps. Summary Posts published: 31 Unique tags: 31 Unique categories: 15 Unique creators: 17 Creator Diversity 17 YouTube Channels this month (listed by number of posts): Talks at Google (12) David Perell (2) LeadDev (2) The Knowledge Project Podcast (2) Chris Williamson (1) Daniel Pink (1)

Rushing to catch the bus, carrying heavy grocery bags at a brisk pace, sprinting up stairs: that's not a sign you're too busy to exercise. That's the exercise.

Of all the emotions we experience, joy turns out to be the hardest to hold because it makes us vulnerable. Here's what it takes to stay present for it.

Captain David Marquet banned the word "they" on his submarine. Six months later, the crew functioned more like a team but couldn't say why. The mechanism is simpler than you think.

Everything Pink does — what he reads before writing a word, how he stress tests his ideas, and how he structures a writing day — is engineered to create a work that is worthy of the reader's time.

Most writers think the job is generating words. NYU professor Ocean Vuong says 80 percent of writing is actually observing, listening, and thinking. "The hardest part of writing comes before you write."

Most business communicators get two of the three elements of persuasion right but ignore the one that actually moves people. Here’s how ethos, logos, and pathos work together in practice, and how pathos moves people from “I understand” to “I want to act on it.”

Most people treat leisure as whatever's left after the day ends. Arthur Brooks disagrees: leisure is a skill, and like any skill, it gets better with the right protocols.

Jonah Berger spent years studying why some NYT articles make the most-emailed list, why Cheerios outperforms Disney in word-of-mouth, and why a universally mocked song hit 300 million views. His conclusion: sharing follows six principles.

Our definition of happiness is broken because we select the wrong facts to anchor our worldview. Shawn Achor has a fix.

Your time is finite, and every "yes" displaces an existing commitment. How do you protect your most valuable resource without feeling like a jerk?

That "aha!" moment in the shower isn't bad timing; it's your brain in peak creative mode. Daniel Pink explains why walks, daydreaming, and yes, showers, aren't distractions but an essential part of work.

Asking "could we?" instead of "should we?" produces more creative solutions. That's just one of six research-backed language shifts from Jonah Berger's SPEACC framework.

Bossy. Brutal. Obsessed. Labels like these make us shrink, but Jenny Wood, author of Wild Courage, says we should reclaim them.

Stop waiting for "chemistry" to happen. What feels like natural conversational talent is almost always skill — and that skill is learnable.

Neuroscientist Anne-Laure Le Cunff says that craving certainty in an uncertain world leads to burnout. The fix? Embrace "Tiny Experiments."

Whether you default to being an assertive, an analyst, or an accommodator, a complete negotiator learns to be all three.

If we’re going to change lives, change organizations, and change the world, we’re going to need power - Jeff Pfeffer.

Via Chris Williamson "The only formula that I put in the book — the simplest that I could do — is independence plus purpose. I think it's hard to have a good, meaningful life without both of those things. [...] The independence to be who you are, and to chase something that is bigger than yourself, to work on a problem that is bigger than yourself."

Via The Knowledge Project Podcast "I felt the richest I ever had when I had $1,000 in the bank, when I was a teen. I remember I can't even fathom that much because the gap, [...] A year earlier, I'd probably never had more than $20 in my bank, and I have a thousand... I even fathom that much money. So psychologically, it's the gap.

Via Implementors " provided this definition that I think is applicable to all spheres of activity that requires competition. [...] I'm quoting him, of course it was in German and this is the translation: The talent of the strategist is to define the decisive point, then to concentrate everything on it, removing forces from secondary fronts and ignoring lesser objectives.

Via Stephen Covey Principles HQ “Have you ever lost sleep worrying about something for weeks, talking about it with friends, feeling anxious, checking the news obsessively, only to discover there was absolutely nothing you could do about it? […] While you were consumed by that thing you couldn’t control, what happened to the things you could control? Your patience with your family suffered.

Via LeadDev "I have found that the distinction between these skills is really important because we're going to need different flavors of support as we navigate all of the different challenges in our careers. My goal is to help paint a picture of the different kinds of support that you can get from the people around you." — Mentorship & Sponsorship | Lara Hogan | LeadDev Berlin 2024, …

Via Jenny Stojkovic “Burnout is not just an exhaustion problem. It’s actually a misalignment problem. It’s a disconnect between how we’re asked to show up and what actually fills our tank. And that disconnect looks different for every single person.” — Am I Burned Out? Learn the 6 Types of Burnout, watch at 1:54 Take a weekend off. Practice self-care. Get more sleep.

Via LeadDev "In the modern workplace, humans have six core needs to feel safe and secure at work. Learning about people's core needs has dramatically shifted my management and leadership approach because I can now better understand why this other human is reacting to something that I don't personally consider overwhelming, emotional, or scary." — Navigating Team Friction | Lara Hogan | #LeadDevLondon, …

Via Sleep Doctor “You want to spend about 60 minutes before bed just winding down. I call this the Power Down Hour. Let’s say your bedtime is 11 PM. Set an alarm for 10 PM to remind you, Hey it’s time to get ready for bed. You chop up into three 20-minute segments. The first 20 minutes is everything you need to do so the morning doesn’t suck.

Via TODAY "I call it the 3-2-1 rule because it covers a lot of bases. Three hours before lights out, stop all alcohol — notice I didn't say you couldn't have it. Two hours before, stop food. And one hour before bed is when you stop fluids, so you are not waking up to urinate." — Dr. Michael Breus (The Sleep Doctor), …

Via The Knowledge Project Podcast "It's cold, you can see your breath, and the ice cube sitting on the table. You start heating the room up one degree, another degree, another degree . . . ice cube's still there. Eventually, you get to this tipping point, this phase transition. The ice cube starts to melt. It's this one degree shift, no different than the shifts that had come before, but you hit this transition and things change.

Via Talks at Google "We found there was remarkable consensus within organizations about which mindset their organization has, and more importantly, it made a big difference. In this research, we found that employees in growth-mindset organizations said they felt more empowered by the organization and more committed to it, whereas their counterparts in the more fixed-mindset organizations had one foot out the door waiting for the next highest bidder."

Via TED "Parenting for comfort is not limited to the parents of anxious kids. It's the common thread in the last 30 years of parenting trends, from the helicopter parenting of yore to the gentle parenting of today. All of it is rooted in this (false) idea that healthy is a synonym for happy. But I have watched this approach play out hundreds of times in my office, and I can tell you, there are three big problems with parenting for comfort."

Via Talks at Google "When you call someone smart, you put them in a box, you're putting them on a pedestal. And their life becomes organized around deserving the pedestal, staying on the pedestal. You can only do that by narrowing your life to include only things you're sure you're good at, only things you're sure you can succeed at."

Via Talks at Google "It all started when I learned about a high school in Chicago where students have to pass 84 units to graduate. If they didn't pass a unit, they got the grade "Not yet." I thought, Isn't that great? Because if you get a failing grade, you think "I hate this, I'm out of here, I'm no good at this,"

A quick look back at the snippets created this month. See all monthly recaps. Summary Posts published: 28 Unique tags: 38 Unique categories: 13 Unique creators: 18 Creator Diversity 18 YouTube Channels this month (listed by number of posts): Lenny's Podcast (6) The Knowledge Project Podcast (6) AI News & Strategy Daily | Nate B Jones (1) Annie Tsai…

Via Ryan Peterman "I was that person. I wanted to get the highest grades. I just wanted to get an A+ or 100%. And because of that, I was not accepting feedback as feedback to improve. I was accepting feedback as a grade to judge myself and put pressure on myself to get 100% next time. But I wasn't putting pressure on myself to actually improve.

Via SmarterX.ai "One of the tricks I give people: give AI a problem you're dealing with and say, "What questions should I be asking about this?" The greatest strategic minds I've ever worked with are the best at asking questions. They understand the context, they connect dots, and they think deeply about a problem. So you can use the AI as a true thought partner to help you figure out what questions to ask and then to work through those questions with you."

Via Mel Robbins "I call this moving from the prom date mentality to the life partner mentality. What makes a good prom date? They look cute in pictures. You want to dance the night away with them. Maybe you want to kiss or do a little bit more than that after prom. You're not thinking about: Will this person pick up my kids from the dentist?

Via YC Root Access "Most great people are ammunition, but what you need in your company are barrels. You can only shoot through the number of unique barrels you have. That's how the velocity of your company improves: by adding barrels and them with ammunition. If you go from a one-barrel company to a two-barrel company, suddenly you get twice as many things done per day, per week, per quarter."

Via Sequoia Capital The number one thing that I've learned from a hiring perspective: the main thing that I ask C-suite now if I'm going to hire them is, "Can you draw out what your org would look like in 3 months, 6 months, and a year?" It is insane how many people can't do that. It is wild to me that it is really hard for people to do.

Via The Knowledge Project Podcast On encouraging disagreement: "First, you have to create an environment where to disagree with you. You need to listen. You need to take what they say into consideration. You need to create that kind of atmosphere. In the beginning, in my job, people didn't disagree with me. They all agreed and that's not very good.

Via Lenny's Podcast "This is bringing the product to where the people are. You don't want to make people use a different workflow. You don't want to make them go out of their way to learn a new thing. It's whatever people are doing—if you can make that a little bit easier, then that's just going to be a much better product that people enjoy more.

Via Harvard Business Review "The most effective emerged from roles already accountable for service quality, customer outcomes, and operational judgment. These individuals brought deep domain expertise and a lived understanding of what 'good' looks like in real customer interactions, capabilities that proved more necessary than formal AI credentials. Organizations that developed the role successfully treated the role as an apprenticeship, immersing managers in live operations, failure reviews, and iterative test–deploy–learn cycles, while clarifying decision rights and escalation paths early.

Via Grammar Girl "I believe we may need civic clarity more deeply than we have in my lifetime. Civic clarity means not just gathering facts, checking out facts, making facts available to the public. It requires taking responsibility for what readers and viewers and listeners know and understand about the world." — Why Writing with 'Civic Clarity' Is So Important, with Roy Peter Clark (2020), …

Via Talks at Google It's a cop-out when people say, 'Well, I'm a better manager' or 'I'm a better leader'. Quite a lot of founders will say, 'Oh, well, I've got these leadership skills and other people can do the management.' I do agree that you probably innately spike in one or the other, but as your career progresses, you really have to learn both.

Via Lenny's Podcast "Too many people think your job as a manager is to be the expert and tell people what to do. No, actually, your job is to enable people to be their very damn best on your team. You have to create an environment and a context and provide them information, and then you need to provide them a form of coaching.

Via MindSpring "I was trained for submarine. My guys were trained to do what they were told. That's a deadly combination. We all know organizations where people just follow the leader into disastrous situations. So I got my guys together and I said, "Hey, we got a problem here." — MindSpring Presents: "Greatness" by David Marquet, at 0:19 Most organizations run on a dangerous default: a leader does all the thinking; everyone else follows.

Via TED "I created an elevator pitch and included a complete list of my accomplishments. When I heard "Tell me about yourself," I was ready, and I proudly explained everything that I could do. When I finished, the interviewer said, "Instead of talking about yourself, it would have been more effective if you had explained what you can do for me." My interview lasted five minutes.

Via Lenny's Podcast "Boundaries are what you tell someone else you will do, and it requires the other person to do nothing. Too often I hear people say, "My kid doesn't respect my boundaries. My colleague doesn't respect my boundaries." And with all due respect, I think you have an incorrect definition of boundaries. I think you're making a request." [...] Because if you're setting what you call a boundary and you're really making a request, you're giving all of your power away to the other person.

Via Lenny's Podcast "In our family, we say something . . . we actually now say it at work: 'Perfect is creepy.' I just think it encapsulates that you don't even want to be perfect. It's actually very creepy. Only nonhumans can ever be perfect. What defines the human condition is that we want to do well when we mess up over and over again.

Via AI News & Strategy Daily | Nate B Jones The training market has bifurcated into just those two poles: the 101 Basics and the 401 level - technical implementation. It has skipped the middle entirely and the middle is where most of the productivity gains for most people actually live. The 201 level is where the question shifts from…