Chad W. left this exceptional comment on the "Ambitious and Unfocused" post. It's worth reading on and acting in its entirety, some bold added by me for emphasis --

From "THE ROAD TO BUSINESS SUCCESS: A TALK TO YOUNG MEN," an 1885-talk by Andrew Carnegie --

Emphasis mine.

The whole speech has good points mixed in -- definitely worth checking out.

Very important exchange with a reader of the site --

I replied, 

And, J replied --

The Deutsche Demokratische Republik was run as a police state, with as many as one-sixth of the population working as internal security, spies, or informants against their neighbors.

The lifeblood of the East German Police State was the Ministerium für Staatssicherheit; colloquially, the "Stasi." 

You can tour the old Stasi Headquarters today. It's preserved as the Stasi Museum with a mix of preservation of the old office setup, cold war espionage and security artifacts and gadgets on display, propaganda, accounts of prisoners and rights activists, accounts of resistance action and how goods promoting freedom and democracy were promoted in East Germany, and accounts East German culture.

Talked with Jesser Lawler about measuring, performance, tracking, etc. If you're a regular reader here, you'll probably enjoy it --

http://smartdrugsmarts.com/sebastian-marshall-quantified-self/

I met Michael Nelson in Tokyo, Japan. He's built an enjoyable life through hard, focused work in dealing precious metals. I asked him to write up something about how he got there, and what he'd recommend. He graciously wrote this up for us -- 

The Real Truth About Dreaming Big Dreams by Michael Nelson

I was always worried about missing the last S-bahn or U-bahn train in Berlin. They stop at 1AM, and the city is quite dark after that.

Then, tonight, I missed one barely by making a wrong turn to change trains and missing my connection.

Well, it turned out to be no problem. I lost about an hour and had to spend some time walking, but a friendly Berliner helped and showed me how the night bus runs.

Now? Less worries. It's amazing how consistently being exposed to hassle or a minor thing going wrong inoculates you against fearing it.

Sometimes, in the right mood, I go out of the way to get lost or try to figure out something that would be hassle to most people.

Hard work produces near magical results, but we all have an absolute ceiling on how hard we work.

People usually start thinking about working smarter once they're near that limit and getting burned out. Once the realization sets in that you can't work any harder, you've got to get smarter.

To work smart, the first thing you need to do is figure out what you're already doing.

One of the chief requests I got in the "Why do you read this blog?" thread was for more real-life case studies and examples. I was thinking it'd be good to open up more information about how we build and run things.

I also want to give the brilliant people I work and collaborate with a time to show your thinking, and to riff on team-building somewhat. So, expect to see more case studies, more processes, and more behind-the-scenes going forwards.

Recently we welcomed Zach Obront to the GiveGetWin team, and one of the first orders of business is getting more systematic. This is a short announcement to the team, and we're posting it publicly as well. In here, you can briefly see his line of thinking and the questions we have to answer to get systematic.

You'll note that a lot of a lot of this is commonsensical thinking-through of possibilities, and seeing where constraints are to break through them. That's a lot of building systems -- identifying what the constraints are, where the problems arise, and then solving those.

Here's Zach Obront --

Alan Weiss puts forward an interesting idea in a short blog post "Self-Esteem and Control" --

It seems to make some sense. I rarely people who feel fully in control of their lives, time, resources, emotion, thinking, social lives, etc, who are unhappy.