My Original Library (2016)

This page was my original library (which I referred to as my almanac) from 2006. At the time it was my entire website.

After a number of years pretending that I was going to blog, I decided to put up a website of cool tools that you might find useful. I’m using the term “cool tool” as anything that is tried and true to make your life better. Kevin Kelly coined the term on his Cool Tools website that is a more modern and digital version of the Whole Earth Catalog. The Whole Earth Catalog might have the best motto ever — Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish which Steve Jobs quote in his famous Stanford Commencement Address.

To start off with, let me tell you about myself. I’m a devoted father and husband to an awesome family, and work at Citigroup in the Transaction and Trade Services group in my off hours (daytime Monday to Friday). For more information about me, please visit my linked profile or my Facebook page.

Some things I’ve written

• Mobile Payments: Ashwin Shivaikar from Citi’s Equity Research group and I joined forces to write two reports Upwardly Mobile I and Upwardly Mobile II. The pieces were very well received and we had the honor of giving out 2000 of these at Money 2020. I also gave a 10 minute summary of the paper at a payments conference. Kate Fitzgerald wrote it up in surprising detail in American Banker in an article called Simplicity, Usefulness Should Guide Mobile Wallet Development.
• Magazine Writing: After college I did some magazine writing including an imaginary history of Christmas, a visit to Geoge Lucas’s ILM right before the release of Star Wars: Episode 1, the world’s most entertaining calculus professor, a guide to the Great American Movie Theaters and an interview with the Editor of The Onion.
• Some Blog Posts: I used to keep up a blog — here are a few of the more interesting posts: Why Default Settings Matter, The Best Magazine Articles on Technology, and Your Product Will Never Be Simple Enough.

Life Management

• Randy Pausch (The Last Lecture) — Randy Pausch was a brilliant computer science professor at Carnegie Melon who gave “The Last Lecture” a year before he died. The Last Lecture is a conceit at Universities with the premise that speakers give a presentation like it were the last lecture they ever would give. Pausch hits is out of the park with a talk called Achieving Your Childhood Dreams., This fantastic and heartfelt lecture is meant as final communication for his children after his death. After The Last Lecture he also gave a great talk on Time Management, pulling from Stephen Covey and David Allen.
• Make sure you are in the right Mindset. Carol Dweck is a university professor with probably the single biggest finding that can change your life. She has learned that how you think about challenges and failure can have a huge impact on your life. She classifies people into those that have a fixed mindset and those that have a growth mindset. In a fixed mindset, people believe their basic qualities, like their intelligence or talent, are simply fixed traits. They spend their time proving their intelligence or talent instead of developing them. In a growth mindset, people believe that their most basic abilities can be developed through dedication and hard work—brains and talent are just the starting point. The Growth Mindset is significantly more helpful but most people are in the Fixed Mindset. She has a website and wrote a book on the topic. Another take on this is Brene Brown who talks about Guilt (I’ve done something bad — a growth mindset) and Shame (I am bad — a fixed mindset). Listen to her great speech and at about 17:20 she discusses this. Po Bronson wrote a great magazine article on how this applies to child rearing. It’s also a great and short introduction to the Mindset concept. The upshot from Po’s article is that you should praise children for how hard they try, not their innate qualities like how smart or pretty they are. Po expands upon this in the book Nurtureshock. He’s also wrote other great books like Nudist on the Late Shift where he convinces people to join the internet boom at the turn of the century and What Should I Do With My Life? Where he apologies and attempts to help people figure out what to do after the crash.
• Allow Yourself to be Vulnerable: Brene Brown gave a number of very powerful presentations about how to listen to others. Check out these animated shorts on Empathy and Blame that are taken from her presentation at the Royal Society of the Arts. She also gave some great TED talks on The Power of Vulnerability and Listening to Shame.
• How to Win Friends and Influence People (Audiobook). This was the FAVORITE book of Barney Liebman, my mother’s father. When I listen to it, I can hear him giving me the same advice. It’s a surprisingly good book that’s still relevant and not nearly as manipulative as the title makes it sound. On the audiobook the narrator is great – providing a strong a wise tone – my grandfather would be proud.
• David Allen’s Getting Things Done (GTD) is the current standard on life and time management. Almost everything that David recommends is powerful and useful. I find the most powerful tool to be the Weekly Review. I try to do one every Friday. I found the GTD methodology a bit overwhelming at first but found the Getting Started on the GTD Path extremely useful.
• Steven Covey’s Seven Habits of Highly Effective People (Audiobook) is a great book. Many of the ideas may seem cliche but at a minimum, they are a wonderful reminder to focus on what’s important in life — both to yourself and those that you love and work with. At it’s best, they provide you with tools to live a better life.⁽¹⁾I’ve read the book so many times that I got a bit tired of it. There’s a series of videos that sums up all the habits extremely well on their website.
• The Sunscreen Song. If you were in college or thereabouts in the late 90’s, no doubt you’d seen the fictitious MIT commencement address by Kurt Vonnegut. It’s simple, humble advice for everyone and only a few minutes long. It actually wasn’t by Kurt Vonnegut but a hypothetical address (if she were to give one) by a Chicago writer named Mary Schmich. It was later turned into an international hit song by Baz Luhrmann. I like to listen to it for advice every so often. Remember that many things in this site are my opinion, trust me on the sunscreen.
• The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin is one of the earliest books to describe the quintessential American. It also has a nice little bit on self improvement. Franklin listed 13 virtues that he thought were the most important and focused on one each week. He would write in his notebook each time he lapsed on the focus virtue. My grandfather Norman Schlaff was a big fan of Benjamin Franklin the entrepreneur and scientist.

Here are some fascinating people who bring amazing insight to the world.

• Ze Frank is one of the most interesting Internet artists. There’s a great retrospective of his work that he did as a TED talk. An early TED talk is equally entertaining if a bit dated. He’s also done two web series (A Show and The Show). And he did a fascinating interview about Social Media at the Paley center.
• Richard Feynman was a Nobel Prize winning physicist who wrote one of the most interesting memoirs of scientific inquiry in Surely You Must be Joking Mr. Feyman. For a real treat listen to Feynman’s telling of his time of Lost Alamos From Below. Feynman was one of the best explainers of science. For a taste of this take a look at Physics is Fun to Imagine where Feynman talks about things like why mirrors reverse left and right and how fire is just stored sunlight.
• Daniel Kahneman is a psychologist who won the Nobel Prize for Economics — becoming the first non-Economist to win that distinction. He summarized the field in a wonderful tome called Thinking Fast and Slow. The basic thrust of the book is that we have a number of unconscious heuristics and biases that drive our decision making — which work well MOST of the time but not ALL of the time. On a different note, Kahneman gave a fascinating TED talk about happiness that’s well worth watching. Kahnemann’s book is a fantastic tome but a little long for the people new to the field. If you want something that’s a little quicker on the topic, check out Dan Ariely’s books Predictably Irrational and The Upside of Irrationality. I wrote a few hundred words summarizing Ariely’s work on default settings as well. For more of a financial look at this, check out Nicholas Nassim Taleb’s books Fooled by Randomness and The Black Swan.
• John Maeda is a Partner at Kleiner Perkins who is just an amazing personality. John is putting together an annual Design in Tech report similar to Mary Meeker’s Internet Trends Report. Maeda has done some really interesting work on STEM to STEAM – combining STEM (Science Technology Engineering and Math) with Art. He’s also done some great TED talks and came up with some fascinating stuff in the 1990s around interactive books. Though I might just like him for things like the following. When he was the head of the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) he was quoted as saying, “America is a weird country. It’s like I was a waitress somewhere, and now I’m in a movie—a futuristic astronaut cast in a new kind of Wild West picture. [At RISD] I get to make, like, a space Western,” in Fast Company.
• Neil Degrasse Tyson, head of New York’s Hayden Planetarium, is a fascinating human being. I’ve really enjoyed listening to his audiobook The Pluto Files and the course The Inexplicable Universe. But here’s a guy who is the head of the Planetarium and hosted the remake of Carl Sagan’s Cosmos who also puts on a Science/Comedy show that Abigail and I saw live! He also does a mean moonwalk.

Life Hacking (Meditation). By far the best way to hack your life is through meditation. Over the last few years I’ve found Meditation and Mindfulness as one of the keys to maintaining stability and happiness:

• Headspace. The is my favorite and I use it everyday. The Silicon Valley version of meditation. Overall it does a great job of providing slightly different meditations that all structure around the same techniques. You can try it for 10 days to get a good feeling of how it all works.
• Practicing Mindfulness: An Introduction to Meditation — The first 12 or so lectures on Mindfulness from the Great Courses is the best introduction to mindfulness that I’ve seen. After lecture 12 it gets a bit too Zen for me. Get it for to get for $15 with an Audible membership.
• Stop, Breathe &Think is a nice little app that has a number of different meditations (like Headspace) and also does some good “Mood Check ins” to suggest medications. I tend to use it when I want a quick meditation on a specific topic like gratitude or a quick walking meditation but not something I use everyday.
• AM Yoga by Rodney Yee is a great Yoga series for waking up. It’s the most effective way of transitioning from sleep to the day.
• On Looking by Alexandra Horowitz is a wonderful escape into mindfulness — especially if you listen to it on Audiobook while walking around a city. When the author talks about signage or how a blind person walks down the street it’s quite a surreal experience to focus on those specific items.
• Meditation Oasis. This company has a number of very interesting apps. My favorite ones are Walking Meditation and Sleep Meditation.
• One Moment Meditation. It’s a bit silly and corny but the overall point is helpful. Meditate for a minute in the middle of the day and you’ll feel better. And there’s helpfully a free app called OMM that helps you do it.
• The Rabbit Who Wants to Fall Asleep. Bedtime meditation for children. I have this on audiobook and the kids listen to it each night.

Life Hacking (Not Meditation)

• Fitness Hacking: Fitstar is a wonderful app that keeps me doing 20 minutes of exercise each day. Since starting with Fitstar I’m much stronger and am in much better shape than I’ve been in for years.
• Mood Hacking: Mood Notes is a wonderful app to easily change your mood and reduce anxiety through mindfulness.
• Memory Hacking: It’s not as hard to build up a great memory as you would think. For a narrative talk about how a reporter became the US Memory Champion, take a read through Moonwalking with Einstein. If you want some more hardcore advice on memory building check out The Memory Book by Harry Lorayne.
• Creativity Hacking: Creative Whack Pack is a wonderful tool to help break through barriers. I found that when I ask it a question, answers seam to arise out of nowhere. It’s amazing what can happen when you look at the world from a slightly different perspective. It’s worth noting that I’ve found it very useful to take step back and ask myself a question like “What should I be focusing on?” and “What’s really upsetting me?”
• Weather Hacking: Dark Sky is a “Hyperlocal” weather app. It basically tells you if it will be raining in your exact location within the next hour. It’s most useful in the middle of a rainstorm when you don’t have an umbrella. The app can tell you “Is it worth it to make a run for it or wait 5 minutes?”
• Other Tools for Lifehacking: Cool Tools is a great site to check out as is the site Lifehacker. Though I’ve spent many hours on the Lifehacker site learning (read: procrastinating) about being “more productive.”

Books and Audiobooks. Running down the streets of New York, I tend to listen to audiobooks more than I read books. Apparently, many others are doing the same thing. Some of my favorite books and audiobooks:

• The Great Courses at Audible.com. The Great Courses are a fantastic way of listening to college lectures at home. Some of my favorites are Robert Greenberg’s lectures especially How to Listen to and Understand Great Music, John McWhorter’s Linguistics Talks and the first Half of Mark Mussey’s Mindfulness lectures. While this lectures are normally quite expensive, as an Audible Listener, you can get one book (or lecture) for $15 or 2 books for $22. And you can find many offer codes (especially from podcasts) to get your first book free.
• You can get dramatic readings of plays via Audible. Some of my favorites are Tom Stoppard’s The Real Thing and Arcadia. I really enjoy The Importance of Being Earnest. I listened to the Neil Simon Collection last year, which was extremely good.
• Don’t Panic. One of my favorite books is The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. It’s such a great satire of modern life. My favorite version of the guide is the original Radio Drama before it became a book.
• The Edge Question Center probably has the most hardcore nerd stuff I’ve seen and I love it. Each year some really smart person poses a question like What Should You Be Worried About? or What Scientific Idea is Ready for Retirement? Then a lot of other really smart people answer it. I learned about this from Maria Popover. Maria runs a blog called Brain Pickings which is amazing but a little intense for me. Here’s a great video of her. Evan Doll, creator of Flipboard, said of Maria, “More than anyone else, she’s the kind of curator for whom Flipboard is a perfect fit. Her prolific Twitter feed becomes an every-changing one-woman magazine.”
• The Story of Art is a truly amazing book on how to love and appreciate art. It’s a classic in the UK but little known in the US. The book was written to target teenagers who had just discovered the world of art. The author writes, “But I have never believed that books for young people should differ from books for adults except for the fact that they must reckon with the most exacting class of critics, critics who are quick to detect and resent any trace of pretentious jargon or bogus sentiment.
• Adam Brandenburger and Barry Nalebuff wrote a great book together called the Co-opetition. Adam was a fantastic teacher at NYU and I’m proud to have been his student. Barry was the founder of Honest Tea (who’s history he tells in comic book form), a professor at Yale’s School of Management and an all around interesting thinker on innovation in his book Why Not? (there’s a really great video summary here)
• I wrote a blog post on The Best Magazine Articles on Technology and they’re all pretty phenomenal. The articles I write about are:
  • The Tinkerings of Robert Noyce by Tom Wolfe, Esquire Magazine, December 1983
  • Secrets of the Little Blue Box by Ron Rosenbaum, Esquire, 10/1971
  • Spacewar by Stewart Brand, Rolling Stone, 11/7/1972
  • Inside The Deal That Made Bill Gates $350,000,000 by Bro Uttal, Fortune, 7/21/1984
  • You’ve Got Blog by Rebecca Mead, The New Yorker, 11/13/2000

Podcasts. Most of my favorite podcasts (with the exception of Marc Maron) kind of clump together as This American Life-Like (no pun intended). I like a lot of podcasts but these are the ones that I tend to listen to every week and have gone deeply into the archives on:

• This American Life – There’s no point in explaining This American Life. It’s the father of all modern podcasts. If you haven’t listened to it you should. You can start here. I’ll let the TV Show “The O.C” describe it as “Is that that show by those hipster know-it-alls who talk about how fascinating ordinary people are? Ekhh. God.” I remember first hearing This American Life on the radio in college but I didn’t know the name. Then I heard it again in a cab in Chicago and listed to all of the archives online. The show spawned a number of other This American Life-Like Podcasts:
  • Planet Money. A business podcast started by two contributors from This American Life – originally a joint project between This American Life and NPR.
  • Startup. A podcast about starting a company called Gimlet to create more podcasts like This American Life.
  • Invisibilia. A podcast about human behavior created by alumnae from This American Life and RadioLab.
• Radiolab is a more sciency take on podcasts (“lab” is short for laboratory). They do episodes on hard topics like logarithms and chirality. They’ve also done more lighthearted bits like the transformation of Professional Wrestling. They also did a great episode on a man who took a very different approach to the prisoner’s dilemma (for anyone who loves game theory, you’ll really love this!) Abigail and I saw them live. It was amazing. I learned about Radiolab from This American Life – Ira really likes them.
• 99 Percent Invisible — This is a phenomenal podcast about design all around us. You can start here for a sampling. I learned about 99 Percent Invisible from Radiolab.
• WTF with Marc Maron — This is the oddball in the bunch. A great podcast by a great interviewer who’s a bit of a troubled soul. His interview with Louis CK is one of the best podcasts ever. He’s also done the only interview of Terry Gross from Fresh Air. Oh, and he interviewed The President. The Obama recap also shows how nutty Maron really is. Unfortunately most of his archive requires a subscription.

Other Miscellany:

• If you like Disney, you should take a look at the books by David Koenig. Koenig has written a great deal about Disneyland in his Mouse Tales books (did you know that Disneyland has a members only private club) If you’re more into Disney World, Realityland is a great story of how Disney World was built (did you know that Disney acquired the right to be a municipal entity over the Disney World Property). The heart of the original plan was EPCOT. You can watch Disney’s original EPCOT presentation online. Spoiler Alert: It’s not a theme park.
• Last year’s I wrote a bit on Man-Computer symbiosis and how computers and people work together to solve hard problems. Gary Kasparov gave a great presentation on how computers and humans can partner together to beat both the best human players OR the best computers. Kasparov also did a great write up of his thoughts in the New York Review of books.
• I’ve been focusing on putting minimal effort into “keeping up with the news.” I’ve found Yahoo News Digest to be a great way of doing this. It provides 2 summaries a day (morning and night) that keep me updated on everything I need to know. To see what interesting things are out in the world, I like the blog Kottke.org and the Nextdraft email.
• In college I was Chairman of The Yale Record, the nation’s oldest college humor magazine and the coiner of the term hot dog in 1895. On April 1st 1999 we did a parody of the New York Times website that’s a lot of fun to read. We were going to get coverage from the Times; however, April Fools Day took a more serious tone that year when NATO bombed Yugoslavia.
• When I applied to NYU for my MBA, there was an essay to “Do something creative!” I wrote the essay My Friend, That Bastard, Benjamin Franklin.

Resources for Kids

• DragonBox: The coolest Math games I’ve seen are from Dragonbox. Dragonbox teaches math concepts through intuitive games. They have algebra for 5 year olds (video), geometry for kids (video) and very interesting game to learn adding and subtracting (video). The kids love them and they learn a lot.
• BrainPop: Brainpop is a wonderful site that provides 5 minute learning videos on Math, History and every other school subject followed by a series of multiple choice questions. My kids (6 and 3) have been using BrainPop Jr. which is targeted for K-3.
  • A 3-year-old can see that learning can be fun.
  • A 4-year-old can start to the grasp the concepts.
  • A 5-year-old can answer the questions.
  • A 6-year-old can read some of the questions and answers himself.
• Learning to Read: Ari learns to read with Learn with Homer which is a pretty awesome interactive reading app. We also found it fun to make our own “word wall” with magnets.
• Other Math Games: We also enjoy the Montessori math games from Enoki. There are some other good math drill games like Math Bingo, Madagascar Math Ops and YodelOh.
• Preschool Games: For the preschool set, we’ve become a fan of the Monkey Preschool series.
• Math Books: Hard Elementary School Math is a great book covering a wide variety of topics that are appropriate for elementary school. A Mathematician’s Lament (free abridged version here) is a great book on math education — focusing on how kids should be learning math. For those of you that want a more “adult” basic math book, check out , Steve Strotgatz’s Joy of X is quite good — you can also read a number of his articles in the New York Times. Bedtime Math is also fun — we like it but it’s especially for parents who aren’t so into math.
• Science (Chemistry): The king of kid science is Steve Spangler. He has a number of amazing videos on 3 YouTube channels: Sick Science, The Spangler Effect, and Spangler Science TV (where he’s on Ellen quite a bit). He sells some interesting kits on his website. We got Fast Physics which basically includes some popsicle sticks, a 20 foot string of beds, a couple other things and some instructions. In some ways it was a bit underwhelming but man, did we have fun! The videos were surprisingly hard to find but Newton’s Beads and Popsicle Stick Chain Reaction are pretty awesome. Ari’s done them (with help) a number of times. The Magic School Bus Chemistry kit was a bit more fun for the kids with bright colors and clearer instructions.
• Science (Electricity): Another favorite in our family is Snap Circuits. We have the basic kit, the extreme kit (with case, learning guides and almost everything you can imagine — though missing some light and sound items) and the deluxe rover. The Snap Circuits Jr. (basic kit) has plenty to get started. Snap Circuits Jr. Select looks even better but seems harder to find (it’s not available on Amazon).
• Placemats: We found it fun to have some reference materials for the kids to look at while they eat. Some of our favorites are: Addition and Subtraction, Presidents, sight words, map of the world, and map of the US . It’s not quite a placemat but I’ve found the the most useful thing for teaching kids basic math is a Hundreds Board (get 10 for $5 here).

Some Pretty Cool Videos.

• NYC Tourism: For those of you who spend any time in New York, take a look at Johnny T’s NYC Tourist Tips
• Yale: I went to Yale. This video does a good job of explaining why i chose Yale. Also, this one, showing the day that Harvard students finally admitted that Harvard Sucks.
• Improv Everywhere: Improv Everywhere is a wonderful group that does “Positive Pranks” in public places. Essentially, people are going about their day and all of a sudden, a magical moment will happen to them. My favorites are the musicals like Food Court Musical and I Love Lunch. But they also do some great pieces like Frozen Grand Central, The Light Switch and Guys in Blue Shirts and Khaki’s at Best Buy. The history of Improv Everywhere is is pretty wonderful as well. Charlie Todd talks about it and they even made a movie. Every year they do a larger more public pranks like the MP3 experiment (which is awesome and I’ve been to 3 times) and No Pants Subway Ride (which I haven’t been but really want to go to)!
• Big and Small: Powers of 10 is a fantastic video by Charles and Ray Eames on how big and small the universe is. It’s great for kids as well as adults.
• Sesame Street: The first season of Sesame Street is available on Netflix. It’s quite compelling and interesting to see. You can also see the original Sesame Street pitch reel which includes the Muppets acting as part of the pitch. I also found a compilation of my favorite bit, the man falling down stairs with baked goods. There’s also some very interesting and old videos of the Muppets before Sesame Street like TV Ads, Kermit meeting puppets of David Brinkly and Chet Hutley, and Cookie Monster’s predecessor staring in an IBM training video.
• Square One Television: Square One is a math based TV show for 8-12 year olds created by the Sesame Workshop. I remember it fondly as one of my favorite educational programs as a kid. I was able to find some episodes online recently.
• Apple: A couple of Steve Jobs Videos you may not have seen. In 1983 Steve Jobs gave a talk on how computing will change once computers got small enough to be embedded around the home and office. While everyone has seen the Macintosh 1984 commercial, I had never realized that Jobs gave an intro to it during a 1983 Keynote. To go along with the Macintosh Ad, take a look at this parody of Every Tech Commercial Ever Made.
• OK Go: This band has done some of the most inventive single shot music videos including a Rube Goldberg Machine, a video shot on a treadmills, and an amazing video shot from a drone. They even did a Sesame Street video on Primary Colors.
• Some Great TED Talks: Here’s the 20 most popular TED talks. I made up a fictitious debate I between Barry Schwartz and Malcolm Gladwell based on their TED talks. Some other great ones are Looks aren’t everything. Believe me, I’m a model, Your body language shapes who you are, and A kinder, gentler philosophy of success.

Almanac — some randomly useful things for your life. I stole this idea from Mark Hurst, Benjamin Franklin and many others:

• Plugging in conference code numbers for a call can be annoying. On an iPhone, you can put the conference code in after in dial-in number. You add a PAUSE in between by holding down the # key. You can also be more clever with IVR systems by plugging in a 3 second WAIT by holding down the * key. Here’s some more ideas on how to use these tricks. For some other phone tricks, check out this short talk from David Pogue.
• We spend a lot of time running from place to place trying to get things done. It’s worth it to take a minute every so often to rebalance in the middle of the day. One Moment Meditation is a fun silly app to help do that. I also heard some good advice from Only Human on WNYC. They advise that before doing something important, like picking up the kids or going into an important meeting, take three minutes of silence to emotionally transition and prepare — you’ll get a lot more out of the experience. And remember that picking up the kids is actually an important experience.
• You’re probably tying your shoes wrong. Watch this 3 minute video to figure out how. For the courageous, take a look at how to properly tie running shoes. And if you want to learn more about knots in general, there’s a site for that as well.
• You’re probably eating your food wrong as well. In Why Not? (video summary) Barry Nalebuff explains that you should be peeling your bananas form the other end (as Gorillas do) and eating your ice cream with the spoon upside down (which will let you taste the ice cream much better).
• Thank people for the little things in life that have made a difference. Watch this 6 minute talk and hear about a truly inspiring Thank You.
• Give yourself fewer choices, you’ll be happier. You’d think that having the ability to choose would make you happier. Oddly enough, as shown by happiness researcher Dan Gilbert, having more choices often makes you unhappy as you can rethink the choices you’ve made. I wrote up a fictional debate on this topic on the value of choice between Malcolm Gladwell and Barry Schwartz a few years ago. The upshot of my fabricated debate is that a few choices are great; however, there is a point when too many choices become detrimental.
• Only pay for things you use. When buying a subscription on an iPhone or App Store, they often default to auto-recurring. This means you can be paying for things forever and never use them. What I do is immediately turn off the recurring subscription. Then, when I need to use the subscribed service again, I renew it.
• On an iPhone you can have Siri remind you of something at a certain time just by speaking the sentence. For instance, just say “Remind me at 8AM tomorrow that I need to file my taxes.” The reminder will come up tomorrow and you’ll have it right on your phone.
• Never be stuck without an umbrella. This one is from Mark Hurst. Buy two umbrellas, and keep one at home and the other at work or school. (Perhaps store another in the car.) Then grab an umbrella whenever it’s raining, and – this is the only hard part – remember to put the umbrella back in its place afterward. I find it best to leave the umbrella with my bag or whatever I’m taking back in the other direction.
• You’re probably overconfident in your predictive abilities. Take this test and see how you do.