The IPOs of DoorDash and AirBnb this week can leave many with a natural sense of SOMO — Sadness Of Missing Out. It is, I think, quite possible to feel both happiness for the teams at AirBnb and DoorDash (and Y Combinator) and sadness for oneself. The sadness comes from…

When my kids asked me over the weekend how much work I had to do, I answered: “Infinite. I have an infinite number of things to do.” That is in direct contrast to their homework, which is very much finite. Unsatisfied, my kids followed up with: “But how many hours…

Ah, 5th grade. I was a beast in 5th grade, completing homework assignments like it was the most natural thing in the world. I remember sitting down at the time with one of my good friends, Henning, who struggled to complete his schoolwork and wasn’t performing too well on tests…

Are your To-Do’s stale? Do you stare at items on your To-Do list as if they’re old vegetables in the fridge? Then it’s time to inject some freshness into them! You need to mix up your To-Do list and give it some new life! One hack I use to keep…

A little bit of stress can expose many cracks. What is the tensile strength of our society? How much duress can our community endure before we fracture and turn upon each other? The greatest betrayals in life are never physical — as when our body buckles under the force of…

One of my favorite TV shows for a while was The Walking Dead. The zombie apocalypse premise makes for such good drama because it poses the question, “What would humanity look like if civilization were to crumble to nothing?” In times of crisis, some people might rise to extraordinary levels…

The zeitgeist of Silicon Valley can be sampled at any time by dipping into the phrases-du-jour and examining one like a novel specimen. One such phrase is “forcing function.” A forcing function is simply an event that virtually guarantees another event to occur. An example would be me declaring that…

As the credits to the movie “Parasite” rolled, I wondered, “How did the writer, Bong Joon-Ho, compose such a grand masterpiece?” I conducted some quick research and learned that the movie was at least several years in the making. In 2013, while working on a similar-themed movie titled “Snowpiercer,” Bong…

In all likelihood, you are a mental laborer. Like a manual laborer — say, a mason mortaring and laying bricks — you are tasked every day with laying mental brick upon mental brick, applying adhesive, and building something of substance. Frankly, if I were a mental bricklayer, I’m not sure…