Deeply Personal Current: Co-op Games Can Save Your Relationship Analysis Paralysis All Posts Next Co-op Games Can Save Your Relationship (Or Ruin It) My wife and I play video games together. ...

Stephen King, in his nonfiction book Danse Macabre, identified three distinct types of fear that horror can evoke: Terror - the finest emotion Horror - one step down Gross-out - the fallback when all else fails This isn’t a value judgment about quality. It’s a recognition that different types of fear work on different psychological levels and serve different purposes. Understanding this hierarchy-and when to deploy each-separates effective horror from cheap scares. ...

In 2012, Spotify released a video about their engineering culture. It showed autonomous “squads,” aligned into “tribes,” supported by “chapters” and “guilds.” It looked amazing. Teams working independently. No bureaucracy. Innovation everywhere. The video went viral. Suddenly, every company wanted squads and tribes. Management consultants sold “Spotify Model transformations.” Books were written. Certifications created. There was just one problem: Spotify doesn’t use the Spotify Model anymore. The model that everyone copied was a snapshot of one moment in Spotify’s history. A work in progress. An experiment. ...

It’s 9 AM. You walk into a conference room at Amazon for a major product decision. No one is talking. Everyone is reading. For 20 minutes, the room is completely silent. Executives, directors, engineers-all reading the same six-page document. No PowerPoint deck. No bullet points. No presenter standing at the front of the room. Just reading. Then, after everyone finishes, the discussion begins. Welcome to Amazon’s most powerful cultural practice: the 6-pager. ...

Deeply Personal Current: Analysis Paralysis The Uncanny Valley of Empathy All Posts Co-op Games Can Save Your Relationship Analysis Paralysis: The Psychology Behind Why We Can’t Make a Move My wife and I are experts at one thing: overthinking ourselves into complete paralysis. ...

October 2018. A successful SaaS company with: $10M annual revenue 20% profit margins 200 happy customers Growing 30% year-over-year Filed for bankruptcy. How? They were profitable on paper but bleeding cash in reality. The problem: They paid suppliers in 30 days Customers paid them in 90 days Meanwhile, they needed cash for payroll, servers, and growth The math was simple: For every $100 in new sales: They spent $60 upfront (servers, onboarding, support) They got paid $100 three months later Net: $40 profit… eventually But “eventually” requires cash to survive the wait. ...

Brain Series Current: Earworms Cocktail Party Effect All Posts Next It’s been three hours since you heard that song. You’re trying to focus on work, but there it is again-playing on an endless loop in your head. ...

Brandon Sanderson, one of fantasy’s most prolific worldbuilders, articulated something that had been true of great fantasy for decades but rarely stated explicitly: Magic isn’t about being magical. It’s about being a tool for storytelling. And like any tool, magic systems work better when they follow certain principles. Sanderson codified these into what’s now known as Sanderson’s Laws of Magic. They’re not rigid rules but design principles that help you create magic systems that serve your story instead of undermining it. ...

Brain Series Current: Cocktail Party Effect Change Blindness All Posts Earworms You’re in a loud, crowded room. Dozens of conversations happening simultaneously. You’re focused on talking to someone right in front of you, filtering out all the background noise. ...

Brain Series Current: Change Blindness The Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon All Posts Cocktail Party Effect Watch a video of people passing basketballs. Count the passes made by the team in white shirts. ...