- November update!
- I analyzed 15 years of testimonials from users of 750words.com to learn how their private journaling habits have helped them
- October report! Month one of this experiment in sustainability
- A new way to share stats
- Want to help 750 Words become sustainable?
- 48 — Be Buster Benson, BBB, Be Be Be, 🐝🐝🐝
- New Partner Program incentives focus on high-quality human writing
- New experimental feature: the Streak Fairy
- 47 — CHALANT! ☄️
- A Quirky Clock That Doesn’t Track Time
- A Big Linky Map of Medium
- How To Coach Yourself
- Ideas I'm Mulling
- Blog about ideas I'm mulling
- This Could Work podcast interview about 750 Words
- 46: A Blagenflorble Heart
- Pocket Tarot
- 45: Year of Reconstellation
- Brackish Notes, Spring 2021
- Visualizing our shared mood, take one
- A house covered in kudzu
- Notes on Tim Urban's epic blog post series, "A Story of Us"
- Letter.wiki conversation on White Fragility
- Notes on White Fragility, by Robin DiAngelo
- Notes on Awakening from the Meaning Crisis, by John Vervaeke
- 44: Year of the Amateur
- An Amateur’s Unfinished Map of Whatever Comes to Mind as This is Happening
- 750 Words V2 Updates, Timeline, Bugs
- One meaningful thing
- Why We Should Create Personal Mythologies (and How)
- Snake Fables, Book I
- What are the qualities of a wicked problem?
- We need an alternative to the Hero’s Journey
- Working on 750 Words V2
- We Now Know Why We Are Yelling!
- My book, Why Are We Yelling? The Art of Productive Disagreement
- To Argue Productively, Meet in a Neutral Space
- Testing the disagreement template
- On Facebook, content moderation, free speech, and personal responsibility
- The Marvelous, Thinking Fractal That Is Us
- 8 ways to practice the art of productive disagreement
- Ooh look, a book
- Podcast tour for Why Are We Yelling?
- An alternative to zingers
- What Can We Do About Our Bias?
- 43: All in & with the flow
- Pocket Biases
- Well that backfired
- How I bootstrapped my side project into a $20k/mo lifestyle business
- $1/month early bird special ⛅️
- Oakland schools are struggling
- The Green New Deal is a 1-Pager for America
- History of my name
- The definition of “emotional labor” has changed
- Guidelines for Fruitful Dialogue
- The Beginning of a Fruitful Dialogue
- The Hippocratic Oath
- Can a friendly and diverse dialogue exist between liberals and conservatives on the internet?
- Announcing a new friendly and diverse community: Fruitful
- 30 fundamentals
- Equilibriums and Limits: a better way to look at most every political issue
- Sarah Mei’s thread about the negative space of technology
- History of my beliefs (so far)
- Monopoly’s Anti-Capitalist, Socialist Roots as a Teaching Game at Wharton
- Should We Be Happy?
- A prisoner’s dilemma cheat sheet
- Dilemma!
- 42: Dig deeper
- A rational person's 1-minute guide to why rational thinking often fails to persuade people
- Great zinger! 💫
- 41: Seek endarkenment
- 7 Habits of Highly Effective People
- Cognitive bias cheat sheet, simplified
- Cognitive bias cheat sheet
- Codex Vitae - Better Humans
- Life of Clodia
- 40: Mind the loops
- How Did This Happen?
- Systems Thinking For Kids
- 39: Make wiggle room
- The Element of Irreducible Rascality
- Self-coaching experiment results
- Better than meditation
- Universe ↔ soloverse
- 3-lane product development
- The Technology
- 38 is great: cultivate quality time
- How I track my life
- The concept of a person
- Smarter than smart
- Make better resolutions
- Make your own @horse_ebooks
- Managing my internet rage
- Live like a hydra
- What's your life change score?
- The Elephants
- The death bed game
- Know Thy Umwelt
- Experimenting with subjectivity
- 37: More kiloslogs
- Celebrate your next death day
- If I lived 100 times
- 1 metric kiloslog
- Three cognitive biases walk into a bar...
- Too simple, cheap, easy, obvious bias
- How to change yourself (v0.1)
- Are your habits tiny or huge?
- The game of life
- My two brains
- Our filters
- The long slog
- $1 for you (conclusion)
- Is this your best possible work?
- Starter kit for a solar-powered self-replicating 3D printer that can make enough money to buy its own materials, pick them up, and print children when it feels ready.
- My 2013 resolution: memento morning
- Rabbit Rabbit Resolution Accountability Squad
- "Anything is possible."
- Codex Vitae
- Disconnect Saturdays
- A/B fit
- What I'm tracking now and why
- Zoomed out
- Behavior change is belief change
- Who you are vs who you want to be
- Look, look, look
- $1 for you
- The "I don't want to" habit
- Tweet fearlessly
- The half-plants diet
- A friendly safety reminder
- Why 'Just Do It' is bullshit
- Everything I (currently) know about starting and keeping habits in one long manifesto
- A duck bears no grudges
- 36: Talk it out
- What I’ve learned taking photos every day at 8:36 p.m.
- 35: Love the struggle
- Spring, Sponge, or Stone?
- I'm a techno-futuro-optimist
- Why Wasn't I Consulted?
- We are paper boats
- 34: Cultivate the core
- 750 words a day, or a defense of private, unfiltered, unplanned writing
- 33: Frugal to the max
- 32: No problem
- 31: Double down
- History of my self-tracking
- 30: Higher highs and lower lows
- Designed to break
- Post-futility
- A self-explanatory object
- Lazy, distributed universe
- Build reputation, avoid credit
- An effective individual
- Game the system
- 2003 Old Year Reflections
- Month of Mecember
- More about purpose
- Reputation rank
- My first book, Man Versus Himself
- Meta-fundamental purpose
- Fundamental purpose
Month 2 of 9 in this experiment to grow 750 to sustainability
Or, how I plan to get around the task of marketing my site by letting people speak for themselves
Month 1 of 9 in this experiment to grow 750 to sustainability
Testing a new sharing feature on 750 Words
A 9-month experiment in growing to sustainability
My 48th year in review
Changes are coming in August to the way we pay writers for great stories and which countries we support. Here’s what’s happening, why, and what it means for you.
Repair your writing streak
My 47th year in review
The conspiracy of Time and how to let go.
An attempt at sketching out a bird’s eye view of the wide variety of different kinds of stories people are writing on Medium
The standard model of behavior change is silly. Come read about my much weirder systems model!
A disorganized collection of short notes with no center.
A slow meditation of unrelated ideas that I'm mulling for various reasons.
Good questions about how I use private journaling.
My 46th year in review
Early notes on the language in tarot cards.
My 45th year in review
A low-expectations, low-value blog of sorts
Results from the question about how we can best help
A return after 8 months of quiet with questions about a question
I found a lot in here that resonated with me about how humans, and groups, and society all interconnect, and how it can become dysfunctional.
A conversation with Jonathan Church on Robin DiAngelo's book, White Fragility.
Raw notes on Robin DiAngelo's book
Raw notes with one quick pass on summarizing the 50 YouTube series.
My 44th year in review
My new website.
I’ll keep it super simple and just keep this doc updated with the latest changes and news and thoughts happening as V2 is being built. Feel free to add comments or questions.
A space within upheaval.
An experiment in using mythic mode to confront the meaning crisis.
A few prototype myths offered as an experiment in designing a personal mythology.
They're personal, difficult, complex, and make us feel very conflicted.
A pleasant oath to remember our humanity.
10 years later, a chance to give this little side project the love it deserves.
O. M. G. My book is finally out!
Published November 19th, 2019 by Penguin Random House
The spaces where we disagree have a hidden effect on our arguments
If you're in a gnarly disagreement and you feel like the conversation keeps going in circles, here's one way out: tease apart the questions that get raised in the disagreement into FACTS, VALUES, and PROPOSALS.
Using head, heart, and hands to understand a disagreement happening on Twitter about whether people have a moral responsibility to leave their jobs at Facebook.
Take a break from whatever you’re doing to consider just how amazing it is that we exist simultaneously as a collective of intuitions, as individuals, as members of teams, organizations, nations, and as a small part of the natural world — all folded into a marvelous, thinking fractal.
A brief tour of the framework from Why Are We Yelling?
I updated my book website with some new things.
A selection of podcasts I appeared on to talk about productive disagreement.
3 interesting new developments in productive disagreement: etter.wiki, change a view, and impossible conversations.
A 4-step roadmap for developing an always-on, honest relationship to bias.
My 43rd year in review.
Keep your friends close and your cognitive biases closer.
History of a bias that got ahead of itself.
750 Words interview with Indie Hackers
Join the inner circle.
A 1–pager outlining evidence of the problem, diverse perspectives, and existing initiatives that attempt to address the problems.
It's meant to spark a conversation, so let's talk about it!
A lot of people ask me if Buster is my real name. Here's the answer.
A work-in-progress. Feedback encouraged.
Things we’ve seen and learned 10 days into the formation of a new friendly and diverse space on the internet.
A pleasant oath to remember our humanity.
Let’s learn from past mistakes and keep trying.
Call for early adopters!
Lots of things I agree with in John Nerst's 30 Fundamentals.
Understand the difference between equilibriums and limits.
Every technology has both upsides and downsides.
My beliefs are constantly changing, and so are the tools I use to share them.
Games can and have been used as very effective educational tools.
A weird comic about happiness.
Because cooperation is hard.
The 2nd ever prisoner’s dilemma tournament that happens entirely on Facebook.
My 42nd year in review.
Read this if you think learning about biases will make you more persuasive.
You get 1 zinger point for what you just said.
My 41st year in review.
A classic. But one that has earned the reputation.
Follow-up on the original, trying to boil it down some more.
Original full analysis of 200+ cognitive biases.
An incomplete choose-your-own-adventure story about an adventurous asteroid.
My 40th year in review.
Round One: Humanity is destroyed by a super artificial intelligence. How did this happen???
I figure if I can explain it to kids, then I'd understand it myself.
My 39th year in review.
This is one of my favorite phrases coined by Alan Watts
First 9 participants.
Private journaling is a better alternative to meditation.
Each of us has an entire universe stored in our heads, and I call that the soloverse.
My take on building products people love.
A sort of winding manifesto for building technology products.
My year in review.
The most important thing to track is quality time.
The most important interface ever developed.
There are 2 ways to be smart.
Consider the environment that your resolutions are made in.
Long live @horse_ebooks!
Getting super angry isn’t as fun as it used to be.
Thoughts on how to get stronger when things are chaotic.
The higher, the more difficult it might be.
Using accountability as the primary tool for self-improvement is well-articulated here.
He/she who dies with the most death bed points, wins.
I find a German word to help me articulate the idea of our internal mental copy of the universe.
After going to the Quantified Self conference last month and thinking about it for a few weeks, I’ve decided to start a new self-tracking experiment…
My 37th year in review.
I just passed the mid-point.
Predicting the year of my death.
Sometimes they can cancel each other out.
I made this one up.
In 6 steps.
Hint: there are no tiny habits.
With 4 levels.
The only way we see things.
Different modes of work.
Reflections on the experiment.
This is the only question that really matters.
A silly invention that could destroy us.
My resolution for 2013.
Make only 1 resolution.
As long as you have infinite time and resources.
A book that captures everything that you think is worth knowing about your life. Doesn't have to be a real book.
A challenge.
Quality doesn’t exist as a stand-alone attribute. Only fitness does.
My father passed away 19 years ago today.
Are we what we repeatedly do?
My first glimpse of IFS (Internal Family Systems).
Robin Sloan's Fish tap-essay / manifesto about returning to things we love.
Help me stop complaining.
Addressing our inner voices.
My reaction to the more careful social-media personas emerging when the internet started becoming professional.
I’ve been trying to reduce everything I know about health, and behavior change, and habits, into their simplest possible implementations. Here’s one I’ve been kicking around that’s eating related and I’d love your feedback on it (especially if you think you’d want to try to do it with me).
Nothing is safe.
Because everything isn't possible.
Written for the Bold Academy blog.
The post I wrote when we closed down Habit Labs.
My 36th year in review.
I’ve learned that there is beauty in the impossible, in the unfinishable, in the imperfect. I’ve learned that it’s okay to be boring, and to let other people know you’re boring.
My 35th year in review.
Every day, when you wake up, ask yourself: am I a SPRING, a SPONGE, or a STONE?
Thoughts related to Kevin Kelly's What Technology Wants
The web is a customer service medium more than anything else.
Appreciate the impermanence
My 34th year in review.
Launching 750words.com
My 33rd year in review.
My 32nd year in review.
My 31st year in review.
I've been interested in self-tracking since 2002, here's how I was thinking about it in 2007.
My 30th year in review.
Life should be designed to break.
What exists after futility?
What would it take to write a book that not only was a book, but taught the reader how to read the book as well?
What if every person had their own copy of space and time?
The stunning conclusion to the search for a fundamental purpose.
The 21st century hero.
Exploiting a game's design flaws.
My year in review.
An experiment in changing myself.
Take four on finding a fundamental purpose for my life.
Take three on finding a fundamental purpose for my life.
A novel I wrote about an 89-year old man who is CEO of 2 companies and gets stabbed in the eye.
Take two on finding a fundamental purpose for my life.
Early take on identifying a fundamental purpose for my life.