The Dunning–Kruger effect: you don’t know what you don’t know

Why do ignorant folks tend to overestimate the extent of their knowledge? How do incompetent people often seem to be unaware of how deficient their expertise is? Turns out, we are not very good at evaluating ourselves accurately. And one of the most obvious manifestations of this psychological deficiency is the Dunning–Kruger effect, the cognitive … Read More

Creative challenges with Alyssa X

Welcome to a new edition of our interview series, where we meet with prolific creators and go behind the scenes to understand their creative process. Alyssa X is an incredibly talented designer, full-stack developer, and entrepreneur. Beside her full-time job at Metal, she launched many creative experiments. Her portfolio of projects includes a design tool … Read More

Thinking in maps: from the Lascaux caves to modern knowledge graphs

What do hieroglyphs, flowcharts, road signs, and knowledge graphs have in common? They’re all thinking maps. Humans have been thinking in maps since the very first symbolic communication systems. While thinking in maps may first bring to mind the idea of cartography, a map does not need to be geographic—it can be any symbolic depiction … Read More

Collectors to Creators Meetup Notes

Many people struggle from collecting notes to creating original articles. In this meetup, we discussed our challenges, strategies, and tools to turn content input into creative output. Read text chat Some key points Good note-taking is a multistep, iterative process Good note-taking is selective (notes quality over quantity) It’s essential to use your own words … Read More

You and your mind garden

In French, “cultiver son jardin intérieur” means to tend to your internal garden—to take care of your mind. The garden metaphor is particularly apt: taking care of your mind involves cultivating your curiosity (the seeds), growing your knowledge (the trees), and producing new thoughts (the fruits). On the surface, it’s a repetitive process. You need … Read More

Sustainability over speed: adopting asynchronous communication

With more people working from home, asynchronous communication will become key to being productive while keeping our sanity. What are its benefits? What strategies can you use to embrace asynchronous communication at work? I have a confession to make. I think Slack is awful. It’s distracting, noisy, and makes it hard to get the information … Read More