There are two big challenges in giving good advice.
1. Tailoring it to the receiver.
It’s easy to simply share what worked (or didn’t work) for us or for someone we perceive to be in a similar situation. It’s harder to empathize with the person in front of us and frame the advice in a way that fits their situation. That’s why useful advice often comes in the form of frameworks derived from first principles. They give the receiver a tool to adapt for themselves.
2. Timing it well.
Even the best advice falls flat if it arrives when the receiver isn’t ready to hear it. This requires empathy, intuition, and emotional intelligence – knowing when someone is open to guidance and when they’re not.
Good advice, as a result, is less about wisdom delivered and more about wisdom received.
It’s okay to have a plan that looks five steps ahead. But overthinking those distant steps usually leads to worry and paralysis.
What matters is the sequence – doing the next right thing, then the one after that.
By the time we reach step five, the landscape will have shifted anyway.
Our ability to generate clarity isn’t a function of accurately predicting the future. It comes from sharing the direction, clearly articulating the sequence of steps, and then moving through it one step at a time.
The long-term effectiveness of any team or organization is inversely proportional to the number of people who optimize for convenience.
That’s why small, mission-driven teams often accomplish so much.
It’s rarely just about exceptional talent.
It’s about a collective willingness to embrace inconvenience – to do the harder, slower, less comfortable thing because the mission/longer term objective matters more.
Much of growing up socially is balancing making the effort to make friends with curiosity and openness while not feeling the need to be someone you’re not.
The Waymo research team released a paper analyzing crash data from a combined 56.7 million miles driven by autonomous cars in Phoenix, San Francisco, Austin, and Los Angeles.
This graph tells the story of the data – the difference between Waymo’s accidents vs. that of average drivers. It tells a clear story.
Having experienced a Waymo ride myself, I can see why. Absent emotions, conversations, distractions like mobile phones, autonomous cars reduce most accident types – except rear end collisions that are likely caused by sudden/unexpected braking.
A growth in deployment of self-driving vehicles is shaping up to be a very positive tailwind for efforts to improve road safety.
Prof Debora Spar and Aryanna Garber wrote a beautiful article on the evolution of marriage.
It traces the history of marriage as an institution over the past two thousand odd years – from its beginnings as a necessity for real estate inheritances when we transitioned from hunter gatherers to farmers to its evolution as a key organizing structure in society to the shrinking family sizes after industrialization to the impact of “technology shocks” (the pill, artificial insemination).
The two graphs below tell fascinating stories about the evolution of this institution over the decades.
This all come together in a beautifully written conclusion – one that I thought I’d share in full.
Seen against the long sweep of history, it’s not surprising that marriage is now morphing from what we once knew it to be. It has done that before and will no doubt do so again. What’s different now are the pace and breadth of the disruption, coming in ever-faster waves and engulfing ever-broader swathes of people. It’s difficult to predict exactly how these changes will eventually fall and settle. In the short term, though, several patterns are likely to prevail.
First, overall rates of marriage are almost certain to continue to decline, particularly among those segments of society for whom its traditional values — sex, children, financial security — are either less attractive or more readily available through other channels. Second, individuals and communities that treasure these values may well double down on them, signaling and underscoring their preferences through commitments such as pre-marital purity pledges or “trad wife” marriages.
But most significantly, and perhaps most ironically, as technology sweeps across our social and sexual lives, marriage may actually become more and more about love. Because when all the other elements of marriage’s historical contract have been stripped away, what remains is its most ephemeral and priceless piece. Will some people turn away from marriage if they can’t find the right person with whom to share their love? Absolutely, because now they can. Will others leave a marriage if the relationship becomes unsatisfying or unhealthy? Yes.
Yet the fact that, for most people, marriage has become an option rather than an expectation could also strengthen the institution for those who choose to embrace it. Because once marriage is ripped from the exchange of family commitments and property that initially sat at its foundation, once it is no longer necessary to ensure the legitimacy of children or the financial security of young women, marriage is left, sort of, with love. It is a commitment, plain and simple, to spend one’s life with one other person — to share possessions and pain, dirty laundry and family meals, to grow happy, or grumpy, and old together, to resist the temptation of other paths and people in favor of just one.
Shorn of the requirements it once entailed, what remains in marriage, and what is being exchanged, is love — love for the long term, love intertwined with desire, love that has no greater use than its own existence. It is an ephemeral bargain, of course, one that has moved beyond the realm of material goods to occupy a more intimate and sacred space. But as technology claims an ever-greater share of our lives, these sacred connections may become increasingly vital — priceless goods to preserve, cherish, and protect, for as long as we all shall be.
We’ve been taught to think about “Reduce, Reuse, and Recycle” as if they’re all equally responsible choices.
But the truth is that recycling plastic does virtually nothing. At most, 10% of plastic is recycled. The rest makes its way into our food chains in various ways and causes disease. And plastic pollution is continuing to get worse.
It will take a drastic global intervention to change course – and if history is any guide, our track record of solving long-term problems is dismal.
Perhaps the first step is simply to bring to light the uncomfortable fact – recycling isn’t a solution, it’s a distraction.
Real change begins with reducing and reusing… and rethinking our relationship with plastic altogether.
A Learning a Day 