Underrated life advice: Just be easy to work with. Show up on time. Do what you said you'd do. Bring solutions, not problems. Never create drama. Be responsive. Be emotionally consistent. Hit gym everyday. Be kind. People will always want to support someone who just makes their life easier.
HR assigned me 93 minutes of mandatory cybersecurity training because I finished last year’s course in 4 minutes.
The HR director said clicking Next without watching the videos showed I wasn’t taking security seriously.
I told her the course had “instructional threat-model desynchronization.”
That phrase means nothing, I made it up.
I just didn’t want to watch an actor named Kevin explain phishing again.
She told me to document the problem.
Huge mistake.
The course said never reuse passwords, then gave 1,200 employees the same temporary training password.
It warned against unknown links, then arrived from a domain nobody recognized.
The final quiz taught employees to spot suspicious emails while the training email itself contained six tracking links.
I put screenshots into a deck.
Security joined the review and started laughing on slide three.
The vendor got dropped.
HR asked IT to build the replacement.
I made six slides and a five-question quiz.
Average completion time is three minutes.
My boss called it a 97 percent reduction in productivity loss.
I called the final slide “Don’t click stupid shit.”
Legal made me change “shit” to “things.”
Corporate maturity is mostly one redline away from the truth.
Instead of watching an hour of Netflix, watch this 2 hour hour Stanford lecture will teach you more about how LLMs like ChatGPT and Claude are built than most people working at top AI companies learn in their entire careers.
When a top performer checks out, every manager assumes burnout. Sometimes it's the opposite. They're not exhausted. They're bored. Burnout and boredom look similar but need very different fixes. Confuse them and you lose your star. Here are 5 signs it's boredom:
There's a physicist at Stanford named Safi Bahcall who modeled this exact principle and the math is wild.
He calls it "phase transitions in human networks." When you're stationary, your probability of a lucky event is limited to your existing surface area: the people you already know, the places you already go, the ideas you've already been exposed to. Your opportunity window is fixed.
When you move, your collision rate with new nodes in a network increases nonlinearly. Double your movement (new conversations, new cities, new projects) and your probability of a serendipitous encounter doesn't double. It roughly quadruples. Because each new node connects you to their entire network, not just to them.
Richard Wiseman ran a 10-year study at the University of Hertfordshire tracking self-described "lucky" and "unlucky" people. The single biggest differentiator wasn't IQ, education, or family money. Lucky people scored significantly higher on one trait: openness to experience. They talked to strangers more, varied their routines more, and said yes to invitations at nearly twice the rate.
The "unlucky" group followed the same routes, ate at the same restaurants, and talked to the same 5 people. Their networks were closed loops. No new inputs, no new collisions.
Luck isn't random. Luck is surface area. And surface area is a function of movement.
The lobster emoji is doing more work than most people realize. Lobsters grow by shedding their shell when it gets too tight. The growth requires a period of total vulnerability. No protection, no armor, soft body exposed to the ocean.
That's the cost of movement nobody posts about. You have to be uncomfortable first. The new shell only hardens after you've already moved.
My exact system for spotting which companies will make sales reps rich 12 to 18 months before everyone else figures it out.
This has helped 200+ clients position themselves at companies like Snowflake, DoorDash, Samsara, and more recently Tractian before the herd showed up.
Here's the blueprint:
If you’re hunting for a remote job, you just need to figure out how Reddit works, and you’ll never be unemployed for a long time.
Here’s a list of subreddits you should bookmark right now:
colld-emailed a bunch of entrepreneurs, creators, professors, hiring managers, and speakers for collabs, opportunities, and resources and most actually WROTE BACK!
quantity > quality
YOUR RESUME GOT 2 SECONDS OF ATTENTION.
Then it hit the trash.
The recruiter saw "responsible for" and moved on.
Here are 7 words that actually get interviews: