Podcast Episodes
Back to SearchThe 10,000 Hour Rule Counts the Wrong Thing | Daily Essay
Episode 137
James Dyson built the same vacuum cleaner 5,127 times in an unheated coach house while his wife taught school to cover the mortgage. Four years on on…
2 months, 3 weeks ago
Everything Feels Important? It's a Ranking Problem | Daily Essay
Episode 136
Napoleon's surgeon-in-chief had more wounded men than surgeons, so he threw rank out and sorted by injury instead. Alexander Kotov wrote the same mov…
2 months, 4 weeks ago
Neil Gaiman's Two-Draft Rule | Daily Essay
Episode 135
Each book Neil Gaiman writes gets written twice. He writes the first draft by hand, because a pen is slow enough to think a sentence all the way thro…
2 months, 4 weeks ago
Your Cold Shower Is an Exposure Therapy Rep | Daily Essay
Episode 134
Day 389 the cold water stopped scaring me, and that is the day it stopped being a courage challenge. Clinicians call the mechanism exposure therapy: …
2 months, 4 weeks ago
Your Habit List Is a Single Point of Failure | Daily Essay
Episode 133
Five good habits can be one bet wearing five coats. Mine all covered my health, and nothing else in my life had any cover at all. Three hydraulic sys…
3 months ago
You Stopped Feeling It. It Didn't Stop Working. | Daily Essay
Episode 132
Egypt dammed the Nile to stop the yearly flood, and two years later the sardine catch off the delta had fallen from about 15,000 tons to about 550. B…
3 months ago
Stop Raising Your Standards. Start Proving Them. | Daily Essay
Episode 131
Chris Ferguson had already won a World Series of Poker Main Event when he ran a fresh bankroll from zero to ten thousand dollars, and he never put mo…
3 months ago
190,000 Taste Tests Said Yes. Customers Said No. | Daily Essay
Episode 130
Coke swapped a recipe that worked and 40,000 people wrote in to complain. The bicycle, the honeycomb and the QWERTY keyboard each show a different wa…
3 months ago
Madam C.J. Walker: $1.25 to 20,000 Agents | Daily Essay
Episode 129
Her best proof that her hair formula worked was her own bald head. She carried before-and-after photographs into church basements and told the story …
3 months ago
The 200-Million-Year Test for Any Habit | Daily Essay
Episode 128
I dug the same grave 5 times. All 5 climbed back out, some more than once. A habit that outlives my judgment is one worth keeping, and a crocodile th…
3 months ago