All Articles

Newcomers to social media and influencer marketing naively assume that if they can build a big following, those followers will buy from them. But that's not always the case.

Marketing

Be Yourself, Not a Niche

Try to be a legitimately interesting person with all the varied things you find fascinating, and don't worry if it takes longer than the growth you see from others.

Marketing

My Goals and Guidelines for 2021

Everything I hope to do and stay aligned on throughout this year, with monthly updates along the way.

Life

Intentional Laptoping

Health, happiness, connection, community, the most important things in life do not happen behind a laptop.

Happiness

My 2020 Review, Reflection, and Key Lessons

By far the most extensive, and most useful, annual review I've ever done.

Life

The Best Things I Read in 2020

The 40+ best articles I read last year, plus a few favorite books and the best things I wrote.

Learning

Not a Full-Time Creator

Once your art becomes a business, it stops being as artful.

Life

My Last Day at Growth Machine

Coming into 2020, I had a goal: turn Growth Machine into an actual business that could grow and thrive without me.

Life

Personal Leverage: How to Truly 10x Your Productivity

Keep going until you're left with the few core things you need to, and want to, be doing.

Productivity

The Problem with Retirement Funds

Why get rich slowly?

Finance

I'm a Stupid Monkey and You Are Too

Instead of relying on Willpower, or even Habits, I use the Stupid Monkey model: how do you get a stupid monkey to not do something it really wants to do?

Psychology

My First Elk Hunt

In the fall of 2020 I went on my first elk hunt. Here's how it went, and what I learned from it.

Hunting

The Mental Model Behind Every High-Performer I Know

What makes the systems mindset so powerful, how we can use it to be more effective in our personal and professional lives, plus some common challenges with using it and how to overcome them.

Productivity

Announcement: I'm Also Posting on Everything!

If you're not familiar with Everything, it is the future of online publications.

Life

The 75% Rule for Lifestyle Creep & Early Retirement

Following the 75% rule can ensure you’re always getting closer to early retirement as your salary increases.

Finance

How to Eat Meat While Caring About the Environment

Industrial meat production is causing significant harm to the environment. There's no denying that. But you can support and protect the environment with a few small tweaks to how you eat meat.

Health

How to Make Podcast Listening Productive with Audio Highlighting

How to remember more of what you hear with audio highlights that automatically export into your note taking app of choice.

Productivity

30 Year Thinking

What do you want to be doing in 30 years? And is that reflected in how you spend your time?

Life

How to Start a Blog that Changes Your Life

I can’t guarantee following what worked for me will get you to the same place. But I can guarantee it will get you somewhere you never expected.

Entrepreneurship

Improving Idea Flow

Having an opinion should require seriously thinking about something. Not just repeating someone else's opinion.

Learning

College After COVID: How to Get The Best of Both Worlds

No one will pay $50,000 a year to watch Zoom lectures. For all the bad it has done, hopefully COVID-19 is the shock to the system the university system needs.

Education

Old Business, New Tricks

If you can come up with a clever tweak to make customers happier or more successful, you could have a huge business on your hands.

Entrepreneurship

5 Lessons from Year 27

Today's my 27th birthday! Here's a few things I learned this past year.

Life

How to Take Smart Notes: A Step-by-Step Guide

My guide on how you can use the "smart notes" or "zettlekasten" method to get more out of every book you read, and turn that knowledge into your own creative works.

Learning

Money or Wealth

You can have work that is high in wealth creation or work that is high in income generation, and typically they’re different kinds of work, but both are worth having.

Finance

Making Money, Making Happiness

Having money is unlikely to make you happy. But earning money can make you very happy. Depending on how you get it.

Psychology

Roam: Why I Love It and How I Use It

Roam has a learning curve, but after a few weeks of playing with it I already love it much more than Evernote and Notion. Here's why, and how I'm using it.

Productivity

The Procrustean Bed of Productivity

If you can set annual goals and hit them on the expected timeline, you’re not thinking big enough or you work in a factory.

Productivity

Beyond Happy Hour

Because happy hour is such an easy default, replacing it takes effort, but I’ve found some good ways to introduce more sober social activities into your schedule.

Social

Cup & Leaf Cafe pt. 3: Getting Our Permits

After 4 months of going back and forth with the city, we finally have all the permits we need to start work on the Cup & Leaf cafe! Here's everything that went into the permitting process, and the bumps we hit along the way.

Cafe

How to Make Passive Income

Forget the hacks. This is the step-by-step guide you need to make thousands of dollars of passive income per month.

Entrepreneurship

6 Lessons from Year 26

Since it's my 26th birthday, here are a few things I've thought about this year and hopefully started to learn.

Life

Cup & Leaf Cafe pt. 2: Finding and Leasing a Commercial Space

In part two of the Cup & Leaf cafe series, I explain how we found and signed on a commercial space for creating the cafe.

Cafe

The 6 Best Cheap Project Ideas for Learning Marketing

If you're just starting out, projects are absolutely essential to learning marketing and becoming competent enough to get hired. Here are some ideas for things you can work on to learn marketing.

Marketing

Cup & Leaf Cafe pt. 1: Why Would We Open a Cafe?

We've officially signed the lease and started work on the Cup & Leaf cafe in Austin Texas. Here's what led to the decision to start it, and why it makes more sense than you might think.

Cafe

Increasing the Difficulty

How can I make this more challenging... in a way that won't destroy me?

Psychology

No, You Don't Need a Budget

It's the slowest, least interesting, and most limited way to achieve its goal.

Finance

An Easy, Fast, Personal CRM for Making and Maintaining Friendships

It's hard to meet new people and keep in touch with them after college. This is the system I'm using to remember who I'm meeting, what they're interested in, where they live, and to stay in touch with them.

Social

The Best Books and Articles I Read in 2018

A collection of the most interesting books and articles I read throughout 2018, to give you some ideas for the holidays or 2019.

Books

Systems Without Goals is a Path to Mediocrity

The idea we should dispense with goals and focus on systems has taken the productivity-sphere by storm, but it's a terrible strategy for accomplishing anything interesting.

Productivity

Maybe You Should Go Hunting

If you care about buying free range, ethically sourced meat, a hunted animal is as free range and ethically sourced as it gets.

Hunting

How to Raise $25,000 in One Day Without Investors

For my first company, I raised $25,000 from investors after spending months courting and pitching them. Now, I realize there's a faster, much better way to do it.

Entrepreneurship

How to Play Liar's Poker (The Card Game)

Liar’s Poker is a card game based on probability, memory, and deception. It can be played with 2 or more people, with 8 being a good maximum. 4-6 is ideal, in which case a game typically lasts 20-45 minutes.

Fun

Growing Growth Machine: How We Went from 0 to $100k MRR in One Year

How we grew our content marketing agency from zero to $100k MRR in one year, where we're going from here, and some advice for other agency or service business owners.

Entrepreneurship

Two Years with No Shampoo: My Results, and How to Quit it Yourself

I stopped using shampoo (and conditioner) two years ago. Here's what happened, what I've seen change in my hair, and how you can quit shampoo yourself.

Health

Webflow vs. WordPress: Why I Moved My Site to Webflow

I’ve been using WordPress for 4 years, but now I’ve moved this site, and am moving my other sites, exclusively to Webflow. Here’s why.

Writing

How to Be Really, Really, Ridiculously Productive

A complete system you can use to be crazy productive, including everything from macro-level goal setting level down to the daily habits to keep you on track.

Productivity

How to Train a Dog (or Human)

We can apply all of the same principles to changing the behavior of people around us, and we’re already doing much of it whether we know it or not.

Psychology

The Need for Social Disobedience

For every person so intolerant of other views that they block you on Facebook, there are two or more others who will think “finally someone said something.

Social

Nat Chat is LIVE! College is Broken, So What Should Young People Do?

What do you do if you’re a student or recent grad who feels like they don’t fit in the world of grades, lecture halls, and one size fits all careers?

College

Practice Reverse Kegels to Last Longer in Bed

Exactly how to do the #1 BEST exercise for increasing your stamina in bed and giving you more control over your ejaculation.

Sex

Kegel Exercises for Men

Learning how to do kegels will help you strengthen your pelvic floor muscles to beat premature ejaculation, avoid erectile dysfunction, and have stronger erections.

Sex

16 Popular Psychology Myths You Probably Still Believe

With fewer than half of major psychology studies failing reproduction, it's not crazy to assume a new psych study is more likely to be false than true.

Psychology

How to Start an Ecommerce Business in 3 Weeks: Launching Cup & Leaf

Including finding a supplier, setting up the online store, packaging and preparing the initial products, designing the blog to drive sales, and launching!

Entrepreneurship

Yes, You Should Delete Facebook. Here's Why.

Quitting Facebook does actually matter. It sends the message that companies can’t, and shouldn’t, try to have that much power over our lives. If Facebook thinks they can keep focusing on addiction, ad revenue, and data collection with no consequences, they’ll keep doing it.

Social

21 Tactics to Help You Become a Better Writer

While I still feel unqualified to tell you how to write better, I decided it could be helpful if I shared the advice that’s helped me improve.

Writing

6 Lessons from Year 25

Today is my 25th birthday, so I thought it would be fun to reflect on a few lessons I’ve (hopefully) learned this year. A “year-in-review” post with less of the “look how much money I made.”

Life

Forget Commitment: Invest in Something

If you grew up in rural North Dakota with a dozen mates your age, and no intentions of leaving the lovely Billings County, you’d feel perfectly comfortable getting married in your early 20s.

Psychology

Easy Keto: How to Sustain a Ketogenic Diet with 5 Simple Rules

Follow these five rules, and you should have no problem getting into and staying into ketosis. The first week might be a little rough, but after that you’ll find it’s a surprisingly easy diet to live on.

Health

Level 3 Thinking: A Unified Theory of Self-Improvement

A model for how to improve our thinking. For how to be a little less dumb, naive, or mistaken. How to broaden our perspectives, learn more effectively, and accelerate personal development.

Psychology

The 12 Best Books I Read in 2017

This year I read 60-65 books. You can find get my notes from all of them, and these were my favorite 12 that I’d highly recommend anyone read next year.

Books

A Simple Exercise to Discover What Skills You Should Learn

You can use the Internet to teach yourself anything. This exercise will help you figure out exactly what skill, or skills, you should focus on.

Learning

Cultivating High-Quality Inputs for High-Quality Outputs

Unless we want to become info-obese, unable to resist the tasty clickbait in front of us, we’ll need to fight our evolutionary tendencies.

Productivity

The 18 Best Books for College Students to Read Before Graduating

These are the must-read books for college students, high school students, and any young adult trying to take more control of their life.

Books

How to Be More Productive with a Daily System for High Output

This systems makes productivity effortless. It minimizes the amount of self-control you need to do your best work. It makes productivity a habit.

Productivity

The Goal Setting Template for a High-Output Life

What we need is a reliable system for clarifying big life goals, and then breaking them down into manageable pieces. A template for maintaining high output.

Productivity

How to Start a Podcast in 2019: 8 Steps from Idea to Launch

Now that I’ve gone through it twice, I’ve figured out a step-by-step method you can follow to easily start, record, edit, and publish your own podcast.

Entrepreneurship

How to Break Through Any Learning Plateau and Never Stop Growing

Any time not spent improving the weakest part of your skill is a waste. When you see you’re stuck, start improving the weakest part of your skillset.

Learning

The Motivation Machine: How to Get & Stay Motivated for Any Goal

What I designed is a motivation machine, a reliable system you can use where any goal you desire will be started and completed.

Productivity

The Article MVP: How to Test Business Ideas Fast, Free, and Solo

In a world of infinite opportunities, one great business challenge is picking which opportunities to go after.

Entrepreneurship

Negative Exercise Might be Killing You

Negative exercise can explain why some people manage to gain weight, or at least not lose much weight when starting an exercise routine.

Health

How to Free Yourself from Facebook (While Keeping Messenger)

At one point, Facebook was fun and exciting to use, but for many, it’s now somewhere between a compelled membership and a guilty addiction.

Social

The Destructive Switch from Search to Social

When your life can be spent partying for free on the Las Vegas strip, it’s hard to choose to go to the library instead.

Social

The Spotlight Effect: Why No One Cares About That Thing You Did

Unfortunately, most people spend their days obsessed with what other people are thinking about them, never realizing that no one is thinking about them.

Psychology

The Best Articles to Learn about Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Cryptocurrency

Trying to learn more about cryptocurrencies and the blockchain but not sure where to start? Here's a great collection of articles and white papers to guide you.

Finance

How to Move to a New City

From moving around so much, and having to quickly get situated and comfortable in new cities, I’ve become somewhat of an expert at moving to a new city.

Social

Fake News is a Real Problem

With incentives that decrease the quality of reporting to the point of being fake, the problem won't go away. We must be better consumers of information.

Social

The 10 Best Marketing Books for Growing Any Business

If you're starting learning marketing, or have been doing it for years and are looking to improve your mental models, here are the best books I’ve found.

Marketing

How to Easily Start Investing in Bitcoin and Cryptocurrencies

An easy way to invest in a collection of cryptocurrencies over time to spread out your risk, and still capture the long term gains in the market.

Finance

How to Drop Out of College (With No Risk)

How to quit or take time off college, with no risk, with your parents being okay with it, and while still getting closer to graduating.

College

The Incredible Value of Mental Models in a World of Infomania

This gives us a meta-mental model. The question you should be asking yourself as you read, or decide to read anything.

Psychology

How to Learn Digital Marketing for (almost) Free in 6 Months

I’d expect that anyone could take a gameplan like this and go from zero to hireable digital marketer in 6 months or less, so long as you work hard at it and don’t get too distracted.

Marketing

To Change Reality, Stop Denying It

If an idea or some research offends you, that doesn’t mean it’s wrong. We have to assess whatever information we have regardless of how painful it is.

Psychology

The Wiki Strategy: How to Grow Your Blog to 100k+ Monthly Visitors

Done properly, it can lead to tens or hundreds of thousands potential new customers a month, arriving at your site naturally instead of by ads.

Marketing

10 Books to Read After Discovering Stoicism

Once you’ve read Letters, Meditations, Discourses, and Enchiridion, try these ones to broaden your introduction to practical philosophy.

Books

Does Your Blog Need a Niche? Maybe Not

Plenty of blogs, including this one, do well without any clearly defined niche. You can make it work too, so long as it fits with your goals.

Marketing

45 Deliberate Practice Examples for Rapidly Improving Your Skills

These are ways to give yourself constraints, feedback, new challenges, and make sure that you never hit a learning plateau again.

Learning

How to Use Deliberate Practice to Reach the Top 1% of Your Field

Study it, internalize it, return to it, keep pushing yourself beyond your comfort zone, and in time, you’ll become a true master of your craft.

Learning

10 Books to Read After Discovering Stoicism

Once you’ve read Letters, Meditations, Discourses, and Enchiridion, try these ones to broaden your introduction to practical philosophy.

Books

The Problem With Putting Ourselves in Boxes

When you define yourself by an ideology, you look to that ideology to form your opinions, instead of forming your opinions yourself.

Psychology

Does Your Blog Need a Niche? Maybe Not

Plenty of blogs, including this one, do well without any clearly defined niche. You can make it work too, so long as it fits with your goals.

Marketing

45 Deliberate Practice Examples for Rapidly Improving Your Skills

These are ways to give yourself constraints, feedback, new challenges, and make sure that you never hit a learning plateau again.

Learning

How to Use Deliberate Practice to Reach the Top 1% of Your Field

Study it, internalize it, return to it, keep pushing yourself beyond your comfort zone, and in time, you’ll become a true master of your craft.

Learning

The Step-by-Step Guide to Go From Novice to Expert in Any Skill

I’ve been trying to find a more rigorous way to define different skill levels and how to move between them, and I think I’ve found it in the Dreyfus model.

Learning

The Math and Strategy Behind Working Only 4 Months a Year

There's no reason to wait till you're older or richer to experience long-term travel and working on your own projects.

Finance

Why I Sold My Index Funds and Quit the Stock Market (Mostly)

The typical investment advice is smart for most people, but the question you have to ask yourself, is could you double your money in 10 years on your own?

Finance

30 Image Composition Styles for Taking Good Pictures

30 styles you can use in your own photography to ensure good composition.

Photography

Practice Reverse Kegels to Last Longer in Bed

Exactly how to do the #1 BEST exercise for increasing your stamina in bed and giving you more control over your ejaculation.

Sex

Kegel Exercises for Men

Learning how to do kegels will help you strengthen your pelvic floor muscles to beat premature ejaculation, avoid erectile dysfunction, and have stronger erections.

Sex

The Case Against Soap

When you dig into it, there’s no reason to use so much soap if you still look and smell fine without it and if you’re not getting sick.

Health

Use Direct Actions to Get More Freedom in Your Life

Taking direct action is harder than sitting back and hoping other people will change, but it’s the only way to have control of your life.

Psychology

A 5-Minute Hack to Stop Feeling Sad, Anxious, Annoyed, etc.

If you go through this routine and at the end you still want to feel upset, anxious, annoyed, or whatever else, go ahead. But I’m confident you won’t.

Psychology

Nat Chat is LIVE! College is Broken, So What Should Young People Do?

What do you do if you’re a student or recent grad who feels like they don’t fit in the world of grades, lecture halls, and one size fits all careers?

College

GPA vs. Skills: How to Stop Worrying About Grades

There’s no shortage of students with good grades, but there’s a massive shortage of students with marketable skills.

Learning

No, Soylent isn’t Healthy. Here’s Why.

Soylent claims to be a healthy alternative to normal food, but when we dig in on why they think it's healthy, there's a lot to be suspicious about.

Health

Could that Be Explained by Marketing?

120 years ago, John Harvey Kellogg invented corn flakes to keep people from masturbating, and we've kept the "breakfast is important" myth ever since.

Psychology

I Stopped Using Shampoo, and No One Can Tell the Difference

Not even my mom could tell!

Health

3 Tactics to Remember that Idea You Just Forgot

Even if you carry a notebook, you might end up forgetting an idea or two. Fortunately, these tactics will help you get them back.

Psychology

Lessons from One Year of Nomadic Passive Income

Long-term travel and passive income, despite the incredible appeal, aren’t ends in themselves. They’re tools for something else.

Entrepreneurship

The Freedom Calculator: How to Retire in 10 Years (or Less)

From October to December last year, I did maybe 20 hours of work. Not 20 hours of work per week, but 20 hours total, over the course of those 12 weeks.

Finance

How to Reach Out to a Writer, Thinker, or Person You Respect

These are the tactics that have worked for me, and on me, and I’m confident that if you used them with me or anyone else you’d get a good result.

Networking

How to get Slack-Style Emoji Codes Everywhere on Mac

An extremely simple tactic to get those :amazing: Slack emoji commands everywhere on your Mac. Even for custom emojis!

Productivity

Killing the Lion: How to Turn Anxiety into Excitement

It’s a way to immediately cure anxiety, impostor syndrome, fear, stage fright, and other negative emotions brought on by some form of public performance.

Psychology

Ephemerality vs. Value for Information, Social Media, Life

Here’s a simple heuristic for judging the value of information. The more ephemeral a piece of information is, the less likely it is to be valuable.

Social

The A Priori Diet: Extremely Simple Rules for Healthy Eating

5 extremely simple rules for eating healthy, based on 2 million years of biology. It's the only diet you or I will ever need.

Health

True but Misleading

In March of 2015, I became a best-selling author. Hearing just that, what all did you assume?

Marketing

Learning Through Layers of Abstraction

If there were college courses on sex, the first few weeks would be spent on the details of the labia minora instead of, you know, actually having sex.

Learning

The 12 Best Books I Read in 2016

Looking for a good holiday read, or gift for a fellow book-lover? Here are the 12 best books I found and read in 2016.

Books

How I Put My Blog in Virtual Reality (Mostly)

What would this site look like if it were a physical space, instead of a 2D series of pages?

Escaping this Explosive Diarrhea of Political Outrage

There’s no use to being in an emotional frenzy, especially one you’ve been pulled into by media and other people’s inability to control their feelings.

Social

Why Microdosing LSD Beats Coffee, Adderall, and Other Smart Drugs

Microdosing involves taking small doses of psychedelics to gain some of the benefits without getting the full hallucinatory trip. Here's what it feels like.

Health

Why I'm Learning VR (And Maybe You Should Too)

Why I'm jumping into VR development, the massive opportunity for getting into it right now, and some thoughts on how you can too.

College Students, What Salary Do You ACTUALLY Need?

Instead of saying “I need to make as much as possible,” use the guide in this article to figure out how much you actually need to make.

Finance

Is it Risky? Or Challenging?

Are you hesitant because it’s truly risky? Or are you hesitant because it’s challenging and you don’t know where to start?

Entrepreneurship

Don’t Try to be Less Risk Averse, Rethink Risk Instead

Your goal shouldn't be to become bolder and more of a risk taker. Instead, you need to learn how to accurately assess risk, since we so often do.

Entrepreneurship

How Swearing Leads to a Shitty Vocabulary

The words you choose affect how you think and live. When something bad happens and you describe yourself as feeling “fucking annoyed” instead of “peeved,” you feel different. Seriously, try it now.

Psychology

9 Blogging Tactics for 2 Million Views in 2 Years

How to grow a site from zero to 2 million views in 2 years by following a few key tactics, including evergreen content, not being a charlatan, and SEO.

Marketing

Do You Want to Do It? Or to Have Done It?

Next time you say you want to do [something], think seriously about where you truly want to "do" it, or if you want to "have done" it.

Psychology

38 More Projects till You Die: The Opportunity Cost of Focus

Think carefully before doubling down on your next project. You only get to do that so many times, and you'd hate to run out of opportunities.

Productivity

I Built a 4-Hour Workweek... What Do I Do Now?

What was a lofty goal a few years ago has finally happened: I achieved the 4-Hour Workweek. But what came with it is a feeling of loss and confusion.

Entrepreneurship

Enjoy the Process: Your Intrinsic Motivation Happiness Machine

This is the only way to do intense, sustained, productive work long term and not be miserable.

Psychology

How Dangerous Are Drugs, Really?

Many of us think drugs are bad and scary. But many are less harmful and addictive than alcohol. How can we more reasonably decide what's bad for us?

Health

Decomplication: How to Find Simple Solutions to “Hard” Problems

The problems we think are hard and complex (fitness, productivity, sleep, work, etc.) are secretly simple. But only once we decomplicate them.

Psychology

How to Block Annoying Email Popups in 2 Minutes

The Internet is a better place without email popups. Here's how to make sure they never bother you again.

Productivity

Option not Obligation: How to Beat the Sunk Cost Fallacy

The tendency to feel like once we’ve spent money (or any resource) on something we must earn back our investment impacts our decision-making in all walks of life. And, sadly, it can lead to significant losses of time, money, health, and happiness.

Psychology

Welcome to the Internet: Don’t be a Huckster

If they took a step back and assessed the situation without blinders on, they could do much better, but they’re trapped in the “huckster mindset.”

Marketing

How a Shallow Work Checklist Gives You Back Your Focus

Once you do this, you’ll find it significantly easier to stay focused on the big tasks at hand, without worrying about all the little things.

Productivity

Entrepreneurial Personal Finance: A Contrarian Investment Strategy

If you have some experience taking advantage of your money in creative ways, then maybe this strategy is for you.

Finance

Fauxductivity: 8 Ways You Trick Yourself into Feeling Productive

In many cases, the key to getting more done is simply a matter of removing these fauxductive habits, or significantly reducing the time we spend on them.

Productivity

I'm killing most of my email capture. Here's why.

The best writers don't need to constantly demand your attention, you'll happily give it to them. It's the mediocre writers and products that bombard you.

Marketing

$58,150 in 5 Months: How to Build a Lifestyle Business Step-by-Step (Emails, Tools, Everything)

The exact steps we followed to build a lifestyle business in 5 months and make $58,150 in the process, so you can follow and implement them yourself.

Entrepreneurship

How to Get Lucky: Maximizing Exposure to Life Changing Serendipity

In any situation where a single event can create massive good luck, you simply need to maximize your exposure to possible good luck situations and wait for one to come along.

Entrepreneurship

Introducing Stamena: The App that Helps Men Last Longer in Bed

To last longer in bed, you should practice kegels and reverse kegels. Stamena is the best kegal app, teaching one easy exercise that you can do anywhere!

Sex

Unqualified Experts: 5 Rules for When to Ignore Authority

I’ve resisted sharing this for a while...

Mentorship

Fighting Infomania: Why 80% of Your Reading is a Waste of Time

Unfollow the industry blogs, stop reading the newspaper, don’t go on site aggregators, quit it. It’s all fauxductivity and wasting your time with useless information that will only cause decision paralysis, self-doubt, and decreased confidence in your existing decisions.

Productivity

Productiva Negativa: 7 Tactics to Create More by Doing Less

Going against some of the traditional productivity advice, try cutting these things out of your schedule to gain more time for creation.

Productivity

Make an Order, Not a Schedule (But Only to be Creative)

If you’re doing anything remotely creative, then I suggest creating your own order instead of schedule. Let your body and mind dictate when you move to the next stage, not an artificial indicator (calendars).

Productivity

How to Never Have a Hangover Again

Exactly what causes a hangover, and a few simple things you can do to make sure you are preventing hangovers from this day forward.

Health

Subconscious Sabotage: Why Friends and Family Clip Your Wings

I showed up for my Freshman year of college interested in starting my own business before I graduated, and then my peers beat a bit of that spirit out of me

Psychology

How to Spike Your Testosterone for Sexiness and Productivity

Make sure you're ready for your next lucky night out by timing your masturbation and testosterone like a pro.

Sex

Savable Income: How to Earn 1/3 Less but be 3x Richer

Salary is incredibly deceptive, and should not factor into your decision-making in what job you take. Instead, you should think about your savable income.

Finance

Life After Sumo, Being the Hydra, and What’s Next

“Today is the day I let you go… You need to do your own thing, and I’m helping you do that."

Life

15 “Pivotal” Books that Changed How I Think and Live

A "pivotal" book, once you've put it down, has changed your way of thinking forever. Here's my list, what's on yours?

Books

The Runway Calculator: How to Travel for 6 Months and Come Back Richer

The runway calculator tells you exactly how your savings will change if you travel to any city in the world for long periods. Perfect for digital nomads.

Finance

Take an Afternoon AFK to De-stress, Recharge, and Refocus

There’s something important that you and a dog have in common. It’s not being soft and wonderful to cuddle with (though I’m sure you are). It’s not the tendency to hump random people’s legs (hopefully). It’s that you both need an afternoon walk.

Productivity

Tarnished Bullets: How Productivity Blogs Waste Your Time

We don’t want to hear “well, you’re going to have to pick a skill, get insanely good at it, work really hard for 20 years, and then you’ll be successful.”

Productivity

Why I Went Carless: A Financial and Moral Analysis

All of the reasons you should ditch your car, from cost savings, to reducing your moral risk, to making you happier, and less likely to get a heart attack

Social

Multiple Orgasms During Sex for Men (Positions, Techniques, & More)

This post covers the Best Sex Positions for Men, awesome techniques and more to achieve multiple orgasms during sex.

Sex

Quantitative Life Goals: How to Plan and Finish What You Start

A proven system for planning and achieving your goals, with a template spreadsheet to help you follow through.

Productivity

What Life do You Want?

In college, everyone wants to know what kind of work you're doing post-graduation. The more important question to ask yourself is: 'what do I want in life?'

Psychology

Second-Degree Dinners: The Best Way to Meet Cool People in Your City

A Second-Degree Dinner is the best way to meet interesting new people in your city by leveraging your existing friend networks.

Social

Parkinson's Law Isn't Just About Time

You can reduce how much you use of any resource in your life by reducing the supply of it that you have access to.

Productivity

Male Multiple Orgasms without Ejaculating: Exactly How to Have Them

The steps to follow to start having multiple non-ejaculatory orgasms during masturbation, foreplay, and sex as a man, without the woo-woo nonsense.

Sex

What is Imagined Scarcity, and Why is it Making You Unhappy?

When you’re unaware of Imagined Scarcity, you unnecessarily fear loss and overvalue new things. But, by being aware of it, you can shift how you think in two key ways...

Psychology

How to Never Forget Books You Read

Most people quickly forget info from books they read, but with this method, you can make sure you never forget the important points of every book.

Learning

How to Create Professional Growth

If you want to make sure you're always growing and improving, what can you do to avoid getting stuck on a growth plateau?

Learning

How to Go to Sleep Early and Wake up Early (and Refreshed!)

Learn how to how to go to sleep earlier and wake up early every morning, how your lifestyle affects your sleep, and how to harness sleep for top performance

Health

How to Become Smarter and More Rational (Yes, You Too)

We're fraught with mental biases that hurt our decision making and act against our best interests. Here's how you can start to fix it.

Psychology

Making an Easy 2 Million, Personal Investing for 20 Somethings

A complete guide to investing in your 20s so that you never have to worry about money later in life.

Finance

What to do if You’re a College Student Who Isn't Excited by 9-5 Corporate Work

There is a world of work options out there, all providing a greater degree of personal freedom than corporate work. Here's how to get started.

College

Don't Focus On Local Maxima

We overvalue local maxima, and that overvaluation creates unnecessarily steep competition on narrow planes and sub-optimal outcomes for everyone involved.

Psychology

Focus On Your Mental Operating System, Not Your Apps

Your operating system determines your effectiveness in everything you do. You have to refine it before you can hope to learn or do anything effectively.

Productivity

How to Read More: Finish 100+ Books This Year

You need to read a lot. You can’t just read a little. If you only read a little, it creates problems. Let me explain.

Learning

Don't Make a New Year's "Resolution"

A resolution is, by definition, vague and immediate, which means it's also destined to fail.

Productivity

The News is a Waste of Your Time

You'll have no idea what's going on in the world aside from what other people tell you, and that's perfectly okay.

Productivity

You're Not Stuck That Way

Changing your life is no different than changing your sheets. It's something you choose to do, and if you don't know how, you figure it out.

Psychology

The Best Performance Enhancing Drug You Aren't Using

Most people have a bad mental image of meditation, but odds are someone you look up to professionally is already taking advantage of it.

Health

How to Start Working Out So You Don't Quit

Exercise has been complicated by people who profits from making it seem harder than it is. This routine makes it easy to start working out and stick to it.

Health

Why I Don't Drink Coffee: My Caffeine Overdosing Adventure

A minute by minute look of how coffee can help you get a ton done... then completely destroy your productivity.

Health

FratBoxes: How to Start a Company This Weekend for $25, and do $150 in Sales

A method for quickly and cheaply testing any company idea, based on a gag company for sending fraternities party supplies each month

Entrepreneurship

Exhausted by Options

As you adopt more of these principles, you’ll find you have a lot more time than you thought you did, and much more mental energy. When you’re not wasting decision-making power on minutia, you open yourself up to make much better decisions in the process.

Psychology

Your Brain on Nitrogen

What if, for everything changeable in our lives, instead of assuming we’re on the surface, we assume we’re 120 feet underwater?

Psychology

The Source of Knowledge

You don’t need to rely on others for your education. We probably did 20 years ago, but we simply don’t anymore, and the sooner we learn to self-educate effectively the sooner we can master whatever interests us.

Learning

A Minimalist Set of Apps for Getting Things Done

I had to get out of the bad habit of trying every single popular new app out there to see if it fits into my workflow, or can help me get more things done. If you’re reading this you might have the same habit.

Productivity

Here's What I Learned Eating No Gluten for One Month

Evidence that gluten is bad for you in mounting. So I tried eating a no gluten diet for one month - and I was surprised with the results.

Health

Easily Memorize 80+ Names in a Few Hours

I was recently part of a week-long event where it was useful to memorize 80+ people’s names extremely quickly. I mentioned the idea of trying to memorize all of their names over a weekend casually to a friend, and when he challenged me that he didn’t think I could do it I of course had to.

Learning

How to Make Anyone Your Mentor... Without Asking

All of the digital literature on mentorship is about how to provide value, how to cold call, how to network, etc. This won’t cover any of that. This is how to make anyone your mentor. Whether they want to or not. whether they’re alive or not.

Mentorship

How to Train a Dog (or Human)

We can apply all of the same principles to changing the behavior of people around us, and we’re already doing much of it whether we know it or not.

Psychology

Categories

All Articles

Lessons from Year 29

2021 Year in Review

The Life-Changing Magic of High-Speed Career Sampling

How to Learn Solidity Programming (the Fun Way)

What to Drink Instead of Oatly: Healthy Alternatives

How I Spend 5 Minutes Per Day on Email

The Founder Trap

Schrödinger Claims

Why NFTs are Valuable

Lessons From Year 28

The Money Pile: When should you take money off the table?

Tie Your Camels

Seek Buyers, not Followers

Be Yourself, Not a Niche

My Goals and Guidelines for 2021

Intentional Laptoping

My 2020 Review, Reflection, and Key Lessons

The Best Things I Read in 2020

Not a Full-Time Creator

My Last Day at Growth Machine

Personal Leverage: How to Truly 10x Your Productivity

The Problem with Retirement Funds

I'm a Stupid Monkey and You Are Too

My First Elk Hunt

The Mental Model Behind Every High-Performer I Know

Announcement: I'm Also Posting on Everything!

The 75% Rule for Lifestyle Creep & Early Retirement

How to Eat Meat While Caring About the Environment

How to Make Podcast Listening Productive with Audio Highlighting

30 Year Thinking

How to Start a Blog that Changes Your Life

Improving Idea Flow

College After COVID: How to Get The Best of Both Worlds

Old Business, New Tricks

5 Lessons from Year 27

How to Take Smart Notes: A Step-by-Step Guide

Money or Wealth

Making Money, Making Happiness

Roam: Why I Love It and How I Use It

The Procrustean Bed of Productivity

Beyond Happy Hour

Cup & Leaf Cafe pt. 3: Getting Our Permits

How to Make Passive Income

6 Lessons from Year 26

Cup & Leaf Cafe pt. 2: Finding and Leasing a Commercial Space

The 6 Best Cheap Project Ideas for Learning Marketing

Cup & Leaf Cafe pt. 1: Why Would We Open a Cafe?

Increasing the Difficulty

No, You Don't Need a Budget

An Easy, Fast, Personal CRM for Making and Maintaining Friendships

The Best Books and Articles I Read in 2018

Systems Without Goals is a Path to Mediocrity

Maybe You Should Go Hunting

How to Raise $25,000 in One Day Without Investors

How to Play Liar's Poker (The Card Game)

Growing Growth Machine: How We Went from 0 to $100k MRR in One Year

Two Years with No Shampoo: My Results, and How to Quit it Yourself

Webflow vs. WordPress: Why I Moved My Site to Webflow

How to Be Really, Really, Ridiculously Productive

How to Train a Dog (or Human)

The Need for Social Disobedience

Nat Chat is LIVE! College is Broken, So What Should Young People Do?

Practice Reverse Kegels to Last Longer in Bed

Kegel Exercises for Men

16 Popular Psychology Myths You Probably Still Believe

How to Start an Ecommerce Business in 3 Weeks: Launching Cup & Leaf

Yes, You Should Delete Facebook. Here's Why.

21 Tactics to Help You Become a Better Writer

6 Lessons from Year 25

Forget Commitment: Invest in Something

Easy Keto: How to Sustain a Ketogenic Diet with 5 Simple Rules

Level 3 Thinking: A Unified Theory of Self-Improvement

The 12 Best Books I Read in 2017

A Simple Exercise to Discover What Skills You Should Learn

Cultivating High-Quality Inputs for High-Quality Outputs

The 18 Best Books for College Students to Read Before Graduating

How to Be More Productive with a Daily System for High Output

The Goal Setting Template for a High-Output Life