In Over Your Head

Category: clear thinking

  • Talkers vs. Doers

    Doers make things happen. Talkers get the credit. There are always people in the background of any huge project or enterprise. They worked hard, read a lot, and experimented so things could get done. They let achievements speak for themselves, and sometimes, that works for them. More often than not, though, they don’t get enough […]

  • What I Talk About When I Talk About Trains

    Driving a train is very easy. Switching tracks is hard. When I lived in Texas a few years ago, I would wake up in the middle of the night to the distant sound of a train whistle as it passed me on the tracks near the house. I found it soothing, and I would fall […]

  • A Moment of Clarity

    More data is always better– that is, until it paralyzes you. You’ll probably find that, as you learn what happens to the visitors on your site, the more you’ll want to learn. You’ll test pages in relation to each other and see what website’s traffic converts better. Some people make a great living doing this. […]

  • Your happiness is not your own

    So I took the advice of this book last week and made a To-Stop-Doing list. The idea is to notice what activities are sucking your energy, wasting your time, and making you feel horrible– the opposite of a to-do list. Anyway, social media activities, in their various forms, made the top 5. Interesting right? Blogging I […]

  • Choose Your Web Wisely

    Voting, food, career, spending, success– all of these and more are political acts. We don’t realize it while we’re doing them, but all are meaningful in terms of who they help– ourselves, our families and communities, or the world at large. The mere act of paying rent to the stranger who owns your apartment building, […]

  • What Fear Means

    One of the best books I read while in Paris was The Gift of Fear. It was recommended to me by Chris Penn a long time ago, and basically talks about how women can deal with creepy guys and/or stalkers. Chris said I couldn’t understand trust until I understood how people abuse and manipulate trust. […]

  • Why We Say “Because”

    “Because” is the place where experience ends and faith begins. Children have two ways of discovering how the universe works: one is to experiment, and the other is to ask “why.” The result is a complex series of if-then conditions that tell a child what can be done, and what can’t, creating flags that are used […]

  • The Myth of Behind

    There is no such thing as past failure. There is only now. As I write this I am on vacation in Paris, eating like crap, writing no blog posts, not working out– generally doing nothing productive at all. Sometimes, it feels awesome to be this way. Other times, it sucks. As you read this you […]

  • Everyone will judge you (but no one cares)

    “No one is really judging you; they’re too busy wondering if you’re judging them.” I was very easily embarrassed as a child, so this is the kind of thing my mother used to say often. When she talked to strangers, I pretended I didn’t know her, and she’d remind me again not to be so […]

  • You Do Not Have an MBA

    If you’re John Doe, there are a lot of hoops for you to jump through if you want to become Dr. John Doe. Between Jane Doe and Jane the lawyer, there are hoops, too. In both cases they’re pretty important to go through a certain way. This is not the case with an MBA. But […]