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Tinkering with the recipe for gingerbread cake until it's right, adjusting to the variability of local grains, and cherishing the quiet mornings when the sun fills the bakery windows with Sophie Williams, a baker in Bellingham, Washington.

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A Harvard doctor filmed an entire video without leaving plank position. The neuroscience behind it will change how you think about discomfort.

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How To Manufacture Luck
9 Jan 2026
open.substack.com

Rules for Engineering Serendipity

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Ben DiNucci's post went viral after he was cut for the seventh time. He explains lessons he learned about leadership and rejection.

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How People Learn to Become Resilient
1 Aug 2025
newyorker.com

Maria Konnikova writes about resilience and the skills that researches say can be learned to acquire it.

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Resilience is a practice
21 Jul 2025
seths.blog

It’s easy to imagine that we should do our work and then, when it doesn’t work as we hope, improvise to fix it. But perhaps our work is to show up ready and willing to deal with a futur…

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Around the one-year anniversary of Roger Federer's viral commencement speech, The Athletic tried to find out why the speech was resonated.

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Dwayne Washington was a teacher at St. Thomas More Catholic Secondary School, where Gilgeous-Alexander attended, and also his club coach.

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Things that arent progress
22 Apr 2025
blog.aaronkharris.com

A few months ago, I wrote about things that look like work, but aren't. As I paid more attention to founders doing these things, I started thinking about why they were happening. I realized that...

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Useful and Overlooked Skills
16 Jun 2024
collabfund.com

On his way to be sworn in as the most powerful man in the world, Franklin Delano Roosevelt had to…

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Comparing 30,000 years of human history, researchers found that surviving famine, war or climate change helps groups recover more quickly from future shocks.

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The Two Ways of Doing
1 Feb 2024
raptitude.com

Imagine two friends, Steve and Fred, chatting at a New Year’s party. Both of them resolve to abstain from alcohol for January, and attend the gym regularly. They shake on it. They don’t want to let each other down, and they both fulfill their commitments. Afterward, Steve keeps up his routine, and Fred soon drifts back to too much beer

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Jia Jiang adventures boldly into a territory so many of us fear: rejection. By seeking out rejection for 100 days -- from asking a stranger to borrow $100 to requesting a "burger refill" at a restaurant -- Jiang desensitized himself to the pain and shame that rejection often brings and, in the process, discovered that simply asking for what you want can open up possibilities where you expect to find dead ends. TEDTalks is a daily video podcast of the best talks and performances from the TED Conference, where the world's leading thinkers and doers give the talk of their lives in 18 minutes (or less). Look for talks on Technology, Entertainment and Design -- plus science, business, global issues, the arts and much more. Find closed captions and translated subtitles in many languages at http://www.ted.com/translate Follow TED news on Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/tednews Like TED on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TED Subscribe to our channel: http://www.youtube.com/user/TEDtalksDirector

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How to be More Agentic
16 Jan 2024
usefulfictions.substack.com

On a supposedly difficult thing

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Success in nature and culture depends just as much on timing as it does on brilliance.

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American culture celebrates those who persevere in the face of adversity. So how do we know when to walk away from something that’s not working? Today, we kick off our new “Success 2.0” series with economist John List. He says in every domain of our lives, it’s important to know when to pivot to something new.

Shoshikantetsu
16 Mar 2023
asnewman.github.io
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Hacker News
8 Feb 2023
wisdomination.com

If you want to get anything done, there are two basic ways to get yourself to do it. The first, more popular and devastatingly wrong option is to try to motivate yourself. The second, somewhat unpo…

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Why Quitting Is Underrated
11 Oct 2022
theatlantic.com

And grit is not always a virtue.

UserTesting Blog
18 Jul 2022
blog.getenjoyhq.com

Get the best insights into the latest trends and all things human insight, CX, UX , product, marketing and research on our blog.

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Navy SEAL platoon leader James Waters explains what keeps elite operators going and how you can apply this type of grit to your own challenges.

There's an increasing amount of talk around failure and the fear of it, but it's largely missing the point. Here's why

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How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big
18 Jul 2022
farnamstreetblog.com

Don't set goals. Passion is bullshit. Mediocre skills are valuable. These are just a few of the unexpected truths you'll discover in Scott Adams' new book. Here are 10 more takeaways.

How to do hard things
18 Jul 2022
drmaciver.com
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The Invention of Sliced Bread - Priceonomics
18 Jul 2022
priceonomics.com

Sliced bread: the greatest thing since...sliced bread.

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“The absolute certainty that nobody was going to care about, read or buy Kitchen Confidential was what allowed me to write it. I didn’t have to think about what people expected. I didn’t car…

Your idea sucks, now go do it anyway
18 Jul 2022
blog.asmartbear.com
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Constructive Pessimism - SKMurphy, Inc.
17 Jul 2022
skmurphy.com

Many entrepreneurs are naturally optimistic and discouraging pessimistic thinking, but the clever use of constructive pessimism is key to success

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How to Be Consistent
9 Jul 2022
getpocket.com

Five principles on consistency and sustainable progress, all backed by research and practice.

Failing well
28 Jun 2022
informationarbitrage.com

Failure sucks. Nobody wants to fail. But in the start-up world, most people are doing just that. I'm not sure I've read much about "how" to fail, since failure is so depressing and negative. But I'm...

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The Hustler’s MBA
25 Jun 2022
tynan.com
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How to Be a Stoic
25 Jun 2022
newyorker.com

Born nearly two thousand years before Darwin and Freud, Epictetus seems to have anticipated a way out of their prisons.

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Fail Faster at Habits - zen habits
23 Jun 2022
zenhabits.net

By Leo Babauta There are two extremely common obstacles that get in the way of people succeeding at habit change: Messing up on the habit and then quitting. Not starting because the habit change seems to hard or daunting. Have you faced these problems? The answer is almost certainly yes, because pretty much all of […]

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The Dark Art of Pretending You Are Fine
13 Jun 2022
dariusforoux.com

I landed on a documentary about a guy who had a headache for years and never had a check-up. They found out later he had a brain tumor.

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Ditch the tough talk, it won’t help. Instead cultivate your mental flexibility so you can handle whatever comes your way

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When I first started working on Typesense six years ago, I set myself a simple rule: I shall write some code everyday before or after work. That’s it. No deadlines, no quarterly goals, no milestones. I did not have a choice really — I was about to get married and was already working full-time in a demanding role. As you can imagine, building a search engine from scratch is not a trivial undertaking, so that was my way of not having to deal with additional stress.

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On Hustles - The Paris Review
12 Feb 2021
theparisreview.org

For all of its other moving parts, ‘White Men Can’t Jump’ relies on teasing out the part of a hustle that I am most fascinated by in real life.

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The 6 Types of Grit (And How to Develop Them)
3 Feb 2021
artofmanliness.com

We all want to be better than we are today.  And that often requires pushing yourself beyond your comfort zone, even when you don’t feel like it. It requires getting back up and trying again and again when you fail. It requires sticking with a path long enough to see it through.  In short, becoming […]

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The military's toughest training challenges have a lot in common with outdoor sufferfests like the Barkley Marathons and the Leadville Trail 100: you have to be fit and motivated to make the starting line, but your mind and spirit are what carry you to the end. A Ranger graduate breaks down an ordeal that shapes some of the nation's finest soldiers.

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Tails, You Win · Collaborative Fund
23 Dec 2019
collaborativefund.com

Steamboat Willie put Walt Disney on the map as an animator.

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Being able to sustain focus is a key to success in work and study. Here's how you can increase your mental stamina with these five strategies.

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The experience was surreal and taught me a lot about the world, in the way that only personal experience in a difficult task can.

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Underrated | By Stephen Curry
13 Jan 2019
theplayerstribune.com

You didn’t think this was one of those fairytales where the kid gets some pep talk, and everything changes right? It REALLY isn’t that.

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“Anyone who lives within their means suffers from a lack of imagination.” — Oscar Wilde

Objections Are Goals
10 Oct 2018
medium.com

After I published test && commit || revert, I got a variety of responses on Twitter and on Hacker News. The Twitter comments were mostly…