In reality, there are 5 types of wealth:<ul><li>Financial (money)</li><li>Social (relationships)</li><li>Physical (health)</li><li>Mental (health, knowledge, faith)</li><li>Time (freedom)</li></ul>The blind pursuit of financial wealth can rob you of the others. Never let that happen.

Lie: Money Is the Only Type of Wealth

Money is very directly correlated with happiness up to a baseline level of needs (food, shelter, etc.).Beyond that level, there are clear diminishing returns to the happiness derived from each incremental dollar.In some cases, there is negative utility from an incremental dollar as it adds new stress ("mo money, mo problems" right?).The key is to identify:<ul><li>Your current state of income, wealth, and happiness.</li><li>The "happiness return" on an incremental dollar earned. How much happier will you be from an additional $X? Separate the ego and emotion from the question to think about it objectively.</li></ul>

Lie: Money Can Buy Happiness

The timelines we create for ourselves are mostly just arbitrary nonsense.We create these fake timelines:<ul><li>I need to hit [X] title by [X] age.</li><li>I need to have [Y] salary by [Y] age.</li><li>I need to win Forbes [X] under [X] otherwise I'm a failure.</li></ul>Focusing on these timelines is playing the wrong game. It leads you into dangerous comparison traps—envying others who achieved these things.There’s no fixed path—you create your own.

Lie: There Are Timelines to Achieve Things in Life

It's very in vogue to say hard work is overrated—but it’s not quite true.What you work on is more important than how hard you work, but if you're striving for great things, you have to work hard.<ul><li>You can get to the top-10% by either working hard OR smart.</li><li>You can only reach the top-1% by working hard AND smart.</li></ul>It's definitely not for everyone, but it's the reality if you are trying to achieve exceptional results.

Lie: You Don’t Have to Work Hard

The concept of “mentorship” has become way too formal. Asking someone to be your mentor can come across as a big commitment.Instead of focusing on finding a formal mentor, build a Personal Board of Advisors.The key features of a Personal Board of Advisors:<ul><li>Group of 5-10 individuals. The members don't need to know each other or that they are on your board. Informality is a feature, not a bug.</li><li>Unbiased (not family).</li><li>Diverse experiences.</li><li>Willing to provide raw, candid feedback.</li></ul>

Lie: You Need to Have Formal Mentors

There’s no shortage of great ideas, just a shortage of people willing to put in the effort to capitalize on them.Execution requires a combination of:<ul><li>Intensity: To execute sprints of focused energy.</li><li>Consistency: To execute a marathon of these sprints.</li></ul>Ideas are cheap, execution is very, very expensive.The best way to stand out will always be quite simple: Act.

Lie: You Need to Have the Perfect Idea in Order to Build Something Meaningful

It's in vogue to say that you should learn to say no in order to protect your time.In reality, it depends.As a general rule of thumb:Early on, say yes—it puts you into growth-conducive situations. Saying yes allows you to expand your luck surface area.Once you're established, say no—to focus and build leverage. Saying no allows you to focus on the 10x+ opportunities.

Lie: You Should Say No to Most Opportunities

Hustle culture told you that free time is lost productivity.The reality: free time is a "call option" on future interesting opportunities.When you have free time, you have the headspace and bandwidth to pursue new ideas. Free time creates alpha.Learning when to say no creates the free time necessary to capitalize on the alpha-rich opportunities that arise.

Lie: Free Time Is Bad

Life gets so much better when you realize you can learn from anyone. No one is too old, young, rich, or poor to teach you something valuable.Everyone has formed their own map of reality. By gathering data points from the maps of those around us, we sharpen the resolution of our own.

Lie: Very Few People Have Anything of Value to Offer

Nothing just happens—that’s for the movies, not real life. You have to kick down the door and blast through to the other side.Big decisions are better made fast than slow. Slow typically leads to overthinking and paralysis that keeps people from making the leap. Fast allows you to operate from instinct—to trust your gut.With the bigger decisions, don't outsmart your common sense.

Lie: Big Changes Will Just Happen on Their Own

Most of your friends aren’t really your friends.They’re just along for the ride when it’s fun, convenient, or valuable—they'll disappear when it's not.Your real friends are there when it is none of those things. They are there when you have nothing to offer in return.Cherish them.

Lie: Your Friends Will Always Be There for You

If you want to get lucky, start increasing your luck surface area.It’s hard to get lucky watching TV at home. It’s easy to get lucky when you’re engaging and learning—physically or digitally.Put yourself in a position to get lucky.

Lie: You Have to Wait for Luck to Strike

If it bothers you to see other people succeed, you’re definitely not gonna make it.Distance yourself from anyone who spends time bringing others down.Celebrate everyone’s wins and you’ll start winning more. A rising tide lifts all boats.

Lie: The World Is a Zero-Sum Game

Once you're past your first job, no one will ask about that stuff—if they do, you shouldn't take that job.To be successful, you either need to learn how to build or you need to learn how to sell. People who know how to build AND sell are unbeatable. If you aren't technically gifted, that's okay. Just learn to sell—yourself, your ideas, and your vision. If you can do that, you'll always make it.In the real world, EQ still stands out.

Lie: Your GPA and Test Scores Will Define Your Future

An empowering realization: Most of the people you admire are unremarkable.Their success is not due to some intrinsic difference.They simply built leverage to scale efficiently and had a powerful combination of effort, focus, long-term consistency, and luck.

Lie: The world is run by remarkable people

Most advice sucks.It's well-intentioned, but it's dangerous to use someone else's map of reality to navigate yours—even if they're experienced.Winners learn to filter and selectively implement advice—take the signal, skip the noise.

Lie: Take All the Advice that You Can Get

Interesting people sound impressive, but the reality is that being INTERESTED is more important than being INTERESTING.Interested people ask questions, listen, and observe. They are prone to diving deep to understand the world around them.They win by compounding knowledge efficiently.

Lie: You Have to Be Interesting to Get Ahead in Life

It’s really hard to be “too late” with a mega-trend.This fallacy is driven by the fact that humans are terrible at comprehending exponential growth. We see a rapid run-up and assume we're near the peak when the reality is we have just begun the ascent.As a rule of thumb, when facing a mega-trend, you’re probably still early.

Lie: You’re “Too Late"

You can read every business and self-help book in the world, but ultimately the only way to learn is by screwing it up.Reading and studying are nothing without battle-testing.Don’t fear failure—just learn to fail smart & fast.

Lie: You Can Learn Everything You Need to Know by Reading Books

Everyone wants hacks or shortcuts, but there’s literally no such thing.If anyone tries to sell you one, you should run away.The only “hack” is relentless consistency. It’s not glamorous—and it's not fun—but it works.

Lie: There Are Shortcuts to Achieve Success in Life

The most intelligent people don't have the best answers—they ask the best questions.Asking great questions is how you uncover the truth.The sharpest minds will listen intently and then ask the one question that drills down to the core of the issue at hand.It's a legitimate superpower—but one that can conceivably be developed with practice.

Lie: The Smartest People Always Have the Best Answers

Society celebrates experts in any given field.But as author David Epstein finds in Range, many experts succeed because of the range of pursuits that preceded their main endeavour.Become a polymath. Generalize first, specialize later.

Lie: You Have to Become an Expert at Something

Fear generates clicks—the media knows it and they capitalize on it. So if you watch the news, you're hit by a barrage of pain, suffering, and fear.The message is to avoid your neighbour—to fear thy neighbour.Always remember: There are a few bad people out there, but most people are fundamentally good. They just want to be able to provide for their family and live well.Don't fall into the vicious media trap. Love spreads—love thy neighbour.

Lie: Most People Are Bad

The Curiosity Chronicle has quickly become one of the most popular newsletters for growth-minded individuals in the world. Each week, subscribers receive a deep dive that covers topics ranging from growth and decision-making to business, finance, startups, and technology. In addition, subscribers receive The Friday Five, a weekly newsletter with five ideas curated to spark curiosity headed into the weekend.

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Personal Development

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Society, Arts & Culture

Lies You've Been Told About the World

Set up regular (weekly or biweekly) one-on-one meetings with each member of your team to ensure open and honest communication. During these meetings, check-in with them about any challenges they may be facing, what they need from you to do their best work, and how you can improve as their boss or better work together.

Build a Culture of Feedback from The Start

People are hired because they’re experts in their fields or show potential to do great work. Withholding trust can make them feel you’re not acknowledging the skills that brought them to the table in the first place, and potentially lead them to resent you.Remember that you hired your team members for a reason. It all comes down to trust. If you want to show confidence in your direct reports and develop a respectful relationship, give them the benefit of the doubt. You want to build an environment where people feel safe enough to experiment, fail, learn from their mistakes, and grow.

Know that Trust Is Given, Not Earn.

In the hybrid world of work, new managers may be faced with a difficult challenge: leading a team who you have never met in person. This means you’ll likely need to build trust and camaraderie between people in different locations and time zones.

Create Team Rituals to Build Trust with Your Coworkers

Blaming others for your problems can diminish your (and your team members’) accountability. When you use blame — as opposed to thoughtful analysis and communication — to diagnose an issue, you turn yourself into a passive victim and encourage your direct reports to do the same.If something goes wrong on your team — missed deadlines or unmet goals — don’t default to blaming the individuals. Instead, take a system’s approach to solve the problem. This means you consider the problem as a whole, and not in parts.

Eliminate Blame Culture

Instead of asking “Who’s at fault?”, strong leaders ask, “Where did the process break down?”﻿Discussing how to prevent a mistake — rather than shaming colleagues and peers — goes a long way in promoting trust on your team as opposed to fear or contempt.

Asking The Right Question

Ask for help. While it may seem like a hard task when you’re a new leader, remind yourself that you don’t have to know it all.Reach out to your trusted peers, mentors, or your own manager. Don’t let the initial stress of your new role turn into the chronic stress of burnout. Speak up and ask for what you need before it gets to this point. This is not just something you should do for yourself, but also for your team — because working alongside someone who is burned out can affect your team’s productivity.

When Is It Okay To Ask For Help

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Career

leadershipandmanagement

Leadership & Management

5 Pieces of Advice for First-Time Managers

In seeking to understand particular forms of human behaviour, especially social behaviour, it often pays to look for analogues elsewhere in the animal kingdom.Humans are capable of a seemingly infinite variety of individual behaviours, but our patterns of behaviour are constrained by the laws of economics and game theory.For a behavioural pattern to arise, it needs to be both economically productive and game-theoretically stable(or viable).

Understanding Social Behaviour

The clearest non-human analogue to social status is the dominance hierarchy found in many other social species including fish and insects.Sometimes these hierarchies are linear: alpha dominates beta, beta dominates gamma, and so on, as in the "pecking order" among chickens.Other times they're more despotic: when a lone alpha dominates all other members of the group.

Dominance

<ul><li>Dominance works by inspiring fear and other "avoidance" instincts so that low-status people try to steer clear of dominant individuals.</li><li>Prestige, on the other hand, inspires admiration and other “approach” instincts. People actively seek out prestigious individuals and enjoy spending time around them. </li><li>The perks of dominance are taken by force by the high-status (dominant) individual.</li><li>The perks of prestige are given to the low-level admirer.</li></ul>

Dominance Vs. Prestige

To understand dominance, we need to focus on high-status behaviours. To understand prestige, however, we must understand the low-status behaviour.There are two main instincts/behaviours that make up the prestige system: On the high-status side, we have prestige-seeking: striving to impress others. On the low-status side, we have admiration: celebrating or fawning over a prestigious individual.

The Evolution Of Prestige

Dominant individuals expect deference from others and treat it as their natural right. Prestigious individuals, on the other hand, often make an elaborate show of humility when accepting the deference of others. Performers bow as they're being applauded. Oscar-winners profusely thank their supporters. Lay people often blush and smile awkwardly when they're being celebrated, e.g., at a birthday party. To do otherwise — to act entitled to admiration — would risk alienating one's supporters.

Entitlement Vs Gratitude

<ul><li>Low-status admirers are attracted to their prestigious superiors and hope to spend more time around them, and their admiration, therefore, acts as a bribe.</li><li>Admirers, in other words, are sycophants. They pay respect to a prestigious individual in order to cultivate access to him.</li><li>Prestigious people are above all impressive.</li><li>We respect and admire people even when they're less skilled than we are, and when we're unlikely to learn from them.</li><li>If admiration were motivated by a desire to learn, teachers would be among the most prestigious members of society.</li></ul>

Admiration

The Arabian babbler is a small brown bird found in the arid brush of the Sinai Desert and the Arabian Peninsula.It lives in small groups of 3-20 members, defending a small territory of trees and shrubs that provide much-needed safety from predators.Babblers don’t just passively offer to help each other, they compete intensely for the privilege of doing so. They actively help one another and take risks for the benefit of the group.

The Behaviour Of The Arabian Babbler

<ul><li>We voluntarily follow our leaders because good things tend to happen when we do; it pays to be on their team.</li><li>Admiration and prestige-seeking, then, are teaming instincts.</li><li>Our ancestors lived in a semi-permanent "home base" that needed to be guarded collectively.</li><li>This is a prerequisite for the evolution of radical group-level cooperation.</li><li>Our ancestors gravitated toward prestige status because, once we learned to use tools as weapons, the dominance system completely collapsed.</li><li>Another possible explanation is that prestige acts as an indirect form of intimidation.</li></ul>

Being In The Team

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Love & Relationships

Social Status: Down the Rabbit Hole

First released over 20 years ago, Adobe InDesign is a graphic designer’s best friend and most valuable piece of software.
It can be used to create posters, flyers, books and magazines, amongst many, many other things—all those things that immediately spring to people’s minds when you say you’re a graphic designer.
You won’t find a graphic designer who isn’t both a master of InDesign and simultaneously constantly learning new tips and tricks on the programme. It really is amongst the essential skills needed to be a graphic designer.

Adobe InDesign

Photoshop is the world’s most popular photo editing app. 
<ul>
<li>As a designer, you’ll be using Photoshop for editing and modifying raster/bitmap graphics (aka JPEGs, PNGS, and GIFs) for use in your designs—in simpler terms, it uses pixels to make images.</li>
<li>The program can be used for things like cropping, color-correcting, resizing, and editing images and photos.</li>
<li>It’s also used for loads more jobs that will be part of a designer’s repertoire from overlaying text onto an image to combining photography (yours’ or someone else’s) and graphics.</li>
</ul>

Adobe Photoshop

Adobe Illustrator is a vector graphics editor first released in 1987. Vector graphics are not made up of pixels, but instead are made up of paths and can therefore be scaled much more than raster graphics. While Photoshop deals with the latter, Illustrator deals with vectors.
The program can be used to create a variety of digital and printed images—we’re talking logos, charts, illustrations, cartoons, graphs, diagrams—basically anything that may need to be printed or displayed at different sizes or on different formats.

Adobe Illustrator

Digital design is most commonly split into two fields: UI and UX.
<ul>
<li>UI, which stands for User Interface, is focused on visual experience—how a piece of digital design actually looks.</li>
<li>Meanwhile, UX, which stands for User Experience, is focused on usability—how a piece of digital design actually works.</li>
</ul>
Though you may often see jobs advertised as being explicitly UI or UX designers, it is important for all digital designers and all designers, in general, to have a good understanding and skills in both fields.

Digital (UI, UX, Sketch)

Typography means any skills related to typography that a graphic design might use—from picking the right font for a project to really getting in to the nitty-gritty of typesetting with alignment, kerning, and leading.
Most of these typography-related skills will be used when working in InDesign, but will also be used in every programme a designer uses.

Typography (Typesetting etc.)

They are key in creating any successful design. Let us quickly break down what each one means or how it affects a design:<ul><li>Alignment—> creates a sharper, more unified design.</li><li>Repetition—> strengthens a design by tying together otherwise separate parts and, as a result, creates associations.</li><li>Contrast—> is the most effective way to create emphasis and impact with your design.</li><li>Hierarchy—> creates organisation.</li><li>Balance—> provides stability and structure to a design, either through symmetry or tension of elements.</li></ul>

Design Principles

Ideation: In graphic design terms, it can be defined as the creative process of generating, developing and communicating new ideas.It can often be broken down into four steps: Research->Idea Generation->Evaluation->Apply.

Ideation (Moodboards, Idea Generation, etc.)

A brand, put simply, is a set of ideas a company or products stands for in people’s minds.There are five key parts to a brand’s anatomy and a designer should be well aware of all of them: the brief, the brand strategy, the brand values, the brand ideas and the brand identity. Designers should know how to understand a business inside out and pinpoint why it is special and be able to bring a brand to life through logos, colours, typography, illustration, photography, graphic elements and everything else that makes a brand a brand.

Branding

Designers should know the two types of printing, offset and digital, and how to prepare for them. They should know all the terminology associated with printing—bleed, slug, crop, fold marks—and print production—ink limits, dot gain and transparency. Designers should be up to scratch with different file formats, PDF  and Packaged InDesign, when to use the correct colour systems, either CMYK or PMS and beware of knockout and overprinting.

Designing for Print

A designer’s portfolio is arguably their most important tool—it will be used when job searching when pitching to clients and showing off their amazing work to their friends and colleagues. 
There are certain elements of portfolio management that can be learned. For example, things like how to correctly lay it out, what information to include and social media skills, such as properly maintaining and using Instagram and Behance profiles. These, of course, are super important for a designer to know so that they can have the most successful portfolio possible.

Portfolio Management

Why do designers need creativity? This might be quite obvious. A creative mindset in an important graphic design skill as it enables a designer to excel in pretty much every stage of the design process: from coming up with initial ideas when brainstorming a brief through to developing, designing and refining your concepts.

Creativity

First of all, graphic design can be defined as “effective visual communication of an idea or concept” so communication is at the very heart of what a graphic designer does. You’re going to need top communication skills to actually get pen to paper and start designing. On top of this, from your first day as a student all the way up to being a creative director, communication is going to be key to your career. You’re going to have to not only talk but also listen to your teachers, your team, your clients, account managers and so many other people.

Communication

Designers need to develop a strategy for how they tackle a brief. For each brief they work on, designers should have a readymade strategy in place to make the process as streamlined and efficient as possible.

Strategy

Graphic design can actually be seen as one big piece of problem-solving: You’re given a brief by a client, which you can think of as a problem, which you then have to solve using the skills you’ve developed through your graphic design training.
Problem solving actually pops up at several points during the graphic design process. For instance, after you present your design to the client, you’ll be given feedback. You’ll then have to revise your design so it meets the clients’ expectations. In this example, the problem is the feedback and the solution you have to come up with is the revisions.

Problem Solving

Tips to help you become an effective and self-reliant graphic designer

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Business

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Marketing & Sales

Being a Graphic Designer in the Modern World

If you want to be a graphic designer there are a handful of skills you'll need to get hired and succeed. Learn what they are in this brand new guide.

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Learning & Education

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Product & Design

11 Graphic Design Skills That Employers Want To See

“Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge.”&nbsp;

The Dunning-Kruger Effect is the tendency for people to misjudge their abilities. People with less than average abilities tend to overestimate their true abilities, while those with higher than average abilities tend to not realize how much better they are. That is, some people are too stupid to know how stupid they are, while smart people assume most can do what they can.

The Dunning-Kruger Effect

Those with the loudest voices often have the most confidence but little competence. For example, pundits on both sides of the political spectrum speak for hours about topics they know little about. It’s common to see the news cycle dominated by both liberal and conservative hosts expounding endlessly about science, economics, foreign policy, medicine, etc.&nbsp;What are the odds that they are experts in all of these, let alone one of them? Then where do they get such confidence? Yup, they suffer from the Dunning-Kruger effect.

The Loudest Are The Stupidest

The more educated are quiet. Those in the Valley of Despair feel like frauds. For some reason, despite ample evidence to the contrary, some of those on their way towards mastering a subject feel like they aren’t really that educated, their recognition is due to luck, or they have tricked those around them. This is common with PhD students, as they experience high levels of depression, even though they know far more about their chosen field than the general population.

The Paradox Of Knowledge

Perhaps the biggest threat to society is the growing antiscience movement, which is fueled by the Dunning-Kruger effect. Those on Mount Stupid have the biggest influence, often supporting antiscience candidates, intentionally or unintentionally spreading misinformation, or even helping to create antiscience legislation. Because of this, the public’s trust in science is alarmingly low.

Debunking Science With Noise

In April of 1995, McArthur Wheeler covered his face in lemon juice and robbed two Pittsburgh area banks. He reasoned that the lemon juice would make his face invisible to security cameras, in the…

The Dunning-Kruger Effect Explains Why Society Is So Screwed-Up

When white people hear the words privilege or privileged they almost always react negatively to the implication that they have not earned what they have or where they are in life.&nbsp;

7 White Privileges I Didn’t Realize I Was Enjoying

We instinctively recoil at the term ‘white privilege’. We especially balk at the implication that it proves every white liberal’s worst fear — that we’re racist. It doesn’t.

Organizations spend a whopping $82.5 billion on training annually, or $1,111 per employee, according to Statista. But training is only successful if the learning is.
Most conferences and online seminars are focused on success during the session, without sufficient attention to what happens later.

Why most training programs fail

<ul><li>Reflection is a critical part of learning. After a presentation, take a moment to recall the main takeaways. Think about how you can apply them to your job, team, or industry.</li><li>The best way to learn is to teach. Summarizing and sharing your knowledge with someone is also a good way to retrieve information. </li><li>Think about how you can apply what you are learning. During and after the session, link the learning to a situation at work.</li><li>As you get ready for your next training opportunity, plan to keep the learning going.</li></ul>

Make the most of your next learning opportunity

Whether you’re attending an interesting lecture, conference, or training session, here’s how to get better at remembering—and accessing—what you learn.
