Reading Time: 2 minutes The parable of Diderot’s Robe was one of the most impactful articles I read in 2015. Here’s the Cliffsnotes: After living his life in poverty, the French philosopher (pictured above) was awarded an ornate robe by the emperor of Russia. Suddenly, everything else he owned looked terrible by comparison. So he bought tons of brand new […]
Reading Time: 3 minutes The exact definition of social entrepreneurship is widely debated, but there is one thing everyone agrees on: it involves a business addressing a social issue. One that extends beyond consumer desires into a greater community impact. But that has an implicit assumption: the business is forgoing some level of profit to address that problem. Why […]
Reading Time: 5 minutes “Time poverty is a common Western phenomenon.” I vividly remember my co-worker saying that a few months ago. We were all discussing how busy we were, and it was the first time I’d heard someone use the phrase ‘time poverty’. It resonated because like many, I considered myself to be an extremely busy person. At […]
Reading Time: 3 minutes I’ve come to believe over the years that the way we experience the world is unavoidably filtered by our perception. To unbox that statement further, our brains can only process so much information about the world around us. Our perception is the lens with which we filter that information, and by extension, where we place […]
Reading Time: 6 minutes I probably don’t need to detail Slack’s meteoric rise as a messaging app. This chart says it all: (Chart removed, sadly) Their growth has been absurd. Millions of teams are using it across the world, and people are going crazy for it. It’s not hard to see why – it has everything you’d want in […]
Reading Time: 3 minutes I recently finished reading Robert Pirsig’s seminal work, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. One of the book’s core themes is the dissatisfaction everyone seems to share about the permeation of technology in our lives. Pirsig’s take on the subject (in a hyper-condensed form) is that we are so uncomfortable with technology in our lives […]
Reading Time: 4 minutes So on Saturday, May 8th, when I lost my shiny new iPhone 6, I considered it a blessing in disguise. I saw it as a golden opportunity to turn myself into a guinea pig. I wanted see how my smartphone was really affecting my life, because I had a feeling it was bad. I set my hypothesis based […]
Reading Time: 5 minutes People often talk about “things that aren’t taught in school”: money management, fixing your car, et cetera. But there’s one thing that isn’t taught and no one mentions it, but is of just as crucial importance: productivity. Productivity, which is loosely defined as “stuff that gets done divided by time spent on stuff”, is the holy grail […]
Reading Time: 2 minutes Like many, I lament the sorry state of journalism today. The problem as a whole is well-documented – this piece from Esquire says it better than I could. This lack of journalistic quality, however, has extended beyond news into every piece of content we consume. There are a couple reasons for this. For one, modern social media has […]
Reading Time: 5 minutes In the summer of 2004 at 13 years old, I told my parents that one of my goals in life was to play basketball for UBC. In the fall of 2012, that goal became a reality. I became the first player to ‘walk on’ (make the team via tryouts) to UBC in over a decade. […]