Why give a book away for free?
Last week I decided to give away my new book, Mindfire: Big Ideas for Curious Minds, for free from…
Category: Essays
Good, evil and technology: a fun philosophical inquiry
Flipping through old essays I found this one from 2005 – it’s one my favorite but most overlooked essays.…
Keep me honest
The Conference Board Review, a magazine by the folks who create the U.S. Consumer Confidence Index, have re-published a…
New essay: How to be a free thinker
Are you free? I know I’m not. That’s why I write essays about being free, to freely show how…
More on learning from mistakes
Some recent e-mail about my essay on how to learn from mistakes. Brian wrote: I enjoyed reading your article…
New essay: how to innovate right now
One question I hear often is “what can I do right now?”. Well, it turns out there are lots…
New essay: how to be a genius
Genius is one of those tricky words that gets used often, without anyone knowing quite what it means. Well,…
New essay: Creative thinking hacks
Here’s a short, fun, hack-centric essay on creative thinking. It’s loosely based on the course I taught recently at…
Site slow – essay on bullshit hit digg top 10
In case you haven’t noticed, my essay how to detect bullshit hit the top 10 on digg today, and…
Attention and Sex: 5 minute video
At the last Seattle Ignite event, I did this talk, based on this essay, about the changing nature of…
Essay #55 – How to stay motivated
Anyone who does anything year after year has the same challenge: keeping up intensity when the energy, and novelty,…
I will write you an essay – for free!
Confession: I am in serious essay debt and I need your help to get out. The story: I made…
Why smart people defend bad ideas: the mailbag
To my delight, every now and then the fine folks at slashdot or lifehacker mention an essay of mine,…
Essay: Writing hacks (hacks on writing), Part 1
The series of O’Reilly hacks books is tons of fun. Despite how you don’t want to hear about hacks…
Essay: How to detect bullshit
We all like to think we’re good at spotting BS, but how is it done? and why do people…
Essay: Advice for new managers, part two
In part one, I hit on the topics new managers need to know before they shoot themselves, or others,…
Essay: Attention and sex
At e-tech 2006 the theme was the attention economy – but the conversation was mostly technocentric despite attention being…
Essay: advice for new managers, part 1
Someone on the ask Berkun forum requested an essay for new managers. It’s a huge topic – there are…
Best of Berkun
Essay #50 will be published today – Its been 6 years of writing these things, first for MSDN, then…
Essay: How to make a difference
What does it mean to make a difference these days? How do you measure you’re own value in the…