Fresh reads
Cal Newport's career-capital model is more interesting than his attack on passion. The model is what changed how I think about competence, career capital, and why most people pivot too early.
Kurt Gray's research on moral conflict suggests most disagreements aren't about values - they're about who got hurt. The same model explains almost every client fight I've ever been in.
Bill Perkins wrote Die With Zero for hedge fund managers with predictable income. Then everyone else read it. Here's why the framework breaks for irregular-income workers - and what to use instead.
Dunn and Norton's five Happy Money rules sound obvious. They are. Almost no freelancer actually applies them. Here's how to spend on happiness without your overhead quietly eating your raise.
Most budgeting apps assume a steady paycheck. Here are the ones that actually survive irregular income, from someone who's lived the lumpy months.
You finished 50 books last year and can't remember what was in any of them. Mortimer Adler diagnosed this problem in 1940 and his four-level method is still the best fix I've found.
Browse the shelves
Seven shelves into the catalog. Pick the one closest to what you're working through.
Primary hub
The machinery of running a one-person business. And surviving inside someone else's.
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What survives a real week. And what was always a marketing campaign in disguise.
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Honest reviews. Not summaries. Not five-star inflation. Just what the book actually argued.
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Frameworks that survive contact with reality. And the limits they don't advertise.
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Reviews from someone who runs a one-person business and gets nothing for the endorsement.
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Financial advice for people whose paycheck doesn't show up on the 1st.
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Writing, making, publishing. The unglamorous parts and the strategic ones.
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Sleep, stress, energy, burnout. The body running the business everyone else manages with a team.
Hub · Freelancing
The chicken-and-egg of needing work to get work is fake. Here's how to build a freelance portfolio with no experience, using projects you make for yourself.
Hub · Productivity
Stolen Focus is everywhere. The phone-shaming summary is everywhere too. They're not the same book - and the difference matters more than the discourse admits.
Hub · Books
I loved The Alchemist at 22. I rolled my eyes at it at 32. I picked it up again at 40 and found a third book hiding inside the first two.
Hub · Thinking
Carl Sagan wrote a critical-thinking checklist in 1995 that holds up better than 90% of media literacy content written this decade. Here are the nine questions, updated for AI content and productivity grifts.
