“Absorb what is useful, reject what is useless, add what is specifically your own.” – Bruce Lee Being highly productive is not an innate talent; it’s simply a matter of organizing your life so that you can efficiently get the right things done. So, what behaviors define highly productive people?…

Of all the occupational golden ages to come and go in the twentieth century—for doctors, journalists, ad-men, autoworkers—none lasted longer, felt cushier, and was all in all more golden than the reign of the law partner. There was the generous salary, the esteem of one’s neighbors, work that was…

Recently, one of my mentees – “upstarts” as we call them – asked for advice in negotiating a job offer. He had two competing offers – one from a large well-known tech company, and the other from a startup. The offer from the bigger company was better financially by a long stretch, but he was more…

Breaking into the hedge-fund world is harder than before IF SETTING up a hedge fund were easy, more people would do it: bar inheritance or winning the lottery, there are few swifter paths to immense riches. Sadly for aspiring plutocrats, it is getting ever harder to launch a fund. Swaggering…

I'm often asked what my job is like at Google since I left academia. I guess going from tenured professor to software engineer sounds like a big step down. Job titles aside, I'm much happier and more productive in my new role than I was in the 8 years at Harvard, though there are actually a lot of…

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For decades, dozens of forgotten Navy and merchant ships have been corroding in Suisun Bay, 30 miles northeast of San Francisco. These historic vessels—the Mothball Fleet—served their country in four wars: WWII, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, and Desert Storm. After a decade of impasse, the ghost…

March 18, 2013 Analyzing my DNA I recently bought 23andme , a service which requires you to send off a DNA sample, and in return performs a series of interesting tests concerning your health and ancestry. I bought the test as a birthday present to myself, somewhat because I was interested in the…

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Photograph by Marco Grob for TIME At some level, I knew I was standing in the middle of New York City traffic, but my mind was in another dimension entirely. Reminders of your mortality will do that. The day hadn't started off so strangely and scarily, but it hadn't started off to be much fun…

version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"? Seedcamp Photos Venture capitalist Fred Wilson, of Union Square Ventures , has helped his firm post some of the best returns in the entire VC industry over the past five years. The firm's performance has been nothing short of spectacular, and Fred Wilson's reputation…

NYT bestselling author Ramit Sethi and I continued our earlier discussion about getting your first consulting client by addressing a common pain point for freelancers/consultants, particularly those just starting out: how do you price your offering? If you want me to tell you “You’re a Rails…

Someday, it will go down in history as the first trial of the modern American mafia. Of course, you won't hear the recent financial corruption case, United States of America v. Carollo, Goldberg and Grimm , called anything like that. If you heard about it at all, you're probably either in the…

FRENCH WOMEN DON'T GET FAT By Mireille Guiliano. 263 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $22. When I was 15, I studied in France, at the University of Strasbourg, for six weeks. On weekdays, my fellow American students and I ate lunch in the school cafeteria and discovered the wonders of braised rabbit and coq au…

Most of you probably don’t know this, but one of the very first profitable businesses I ran was an importing company. From the age of 13 til the age of 16, I imported a whole bunch of random stuff and sold it on various websites. It was really difficult when I was getting started, partially due to…

So, you’ve decided to stop hanging out with women and start dating them ? Bully for you! Now you must take on that ever-intimidating first date. While a first date can be a road fraught with obstacles and snafus, when you have the proper guide, you can make it go off without a hitch. To help you not…

E-mail marketing software has all the charm of a tax form, unless it’s Mailchimp , a service that brings bold style to a banal task. While MailChimp’s publicly traded competitors acquire customers by advertising on Rush Limbaugh’s radio show, the primate-themed mailing-list company builds its loyal…

Law school applications are collapsing December 13, 2012 | In 2010 87,900 people applied to ABA law schools. This number was down 12.6% from the all-time high of 100,600 six years earlier — a fact that ought to have served as an early warning signal to law schools. After all, in 2008 and 2009 the…

Even af­ter his parachute opened, Tyler Stark sensed he was coming down too fast. The last thing he’d heard was the pilot saying, “Bailout! Bailout! Bail—” Before the third call was finished, there’d come the violent kick in the rear from the ejector seat, then a rush of cool air. They called it…

http://www.flickr.com/photos/paulhami/ Election tech 2012 The GOP arms itself for the next “war” in the analytics arms race How Team Obama's tech efficiency left Romney IT in dust Which consultants built Romney's "Project Orca?" None of them Built to win: Deep inside Obama's campaign tech Orca was…

[Foreword from Ben]: MailChimp has more than 2 million users and is currently growing at roughly 6,000 users per day. This growth curve started back in 2009 when we launched our freemium plan. Here’s what I mean: That’s a graph taken from Joe’s post about our infrastructure . This kind of rapid…

In fall 2009, I found myself in a Tanzanian hotel lobby, sitting across from Suleiman Abdallah, a lanky man with a goofy smile and a broken tooth. Over the next few days, he would describe in excruciating detail how he had been captured in Mogadishu in 2003 by a Somali warlord and handed over to…

Europe not only has a euro crisis, it also has a growth crisis. That is because of its chronic failure to encourage ambitious entrepreneurs THE St Oberholz café in eastern Berlin is as hip as any of the area’s bars: graffiti-covered doors, in-your-face art, edgy fashion and the Beastie Boys in the…