Three field-tested lessons from my pioneering mentor — If you’re anything like me, you find yourself a tad confused by some of the most celebrated people of our time. By all accounts, they are geniuses, the titans of industry so ahead of us mere mortals that some surmise they’re shape-shifting lizards. …

New advances in artificial intelligence spell the dusk of the era of human-computer symbiosis — In 1997, IBM’s Deep Blue defeated the reigning world chess champion Garry Kasparov. The world was in shock. It seemed computers, thus far thought to be little more than glorified calculators, had finally intruded upon the human domain of imagination and creativity. The worry was in vain. Deep Blue had…

The secret is in the optics — Programmers are wizards— poor, ragged characters turning coffee into code. I don’t know magic, I‘m merely an illusionist. My job is to be more authentic in being a fake programmer than real programmers are in being themselves. I’m great what I do, an absolute beast of a charlatan. I’ve tricked…

When Gilles Vandewiele noticed a large number of studies reporting near-perfect accuracy in predicting whether would-be mothers will undergo premature delivery, his jaw dropped. This was huge. The unbearably high mortality rate of infants has plagued humanity since its inception. Preterm birth, which afflicts every tenth newborn in the US…

My journey out of an existential crisis — If it really takes 10,000 hours to become an expert in something, then I’m an expert in but one thing — enduring an existential crisis. For over a decade, I stumbled through life in a steady state of distress, my every hour of potential bliss invariably violated by life’s insistence…

An affirmation of life — He stood dangerously close to the edge of a cliff, staring hesitantly at the raging sea below. He felt the fear coursing through his body — not the fear of falling, but the fear that he might jump. …

You’ve merely forgotten it — They say a wise man learns from the mistakes of others. If wisdom had indeed been bestowed upon me, I’d have learned from Saint-Exupéry’s Little Prince. The story is simple enough. The Prince lives on a small asteroid. He’s lonely. His sorry days are spent tearing out hazardous baobab roots…

A philosophy for a productive life. — Newton’s first law states that an object at rest stays at rest. To get it moving in any useful direction, great force needs to be applied. Although Newton‘s principle talks about inanimate matter, we’ve come to regard it as a law of human nature, too. Rest is our natural state…

Two words is all it takes — For Bryan Cranston, acting had always been an end in itself. While many of his colleagues burned out groveling for a part in the next Hollywood megahit, he marched steadily forward, perfectly content with honing his craft on less glamorous jobs. …