Gone are the toll-bridge collectors on the Golden Gate Bridge. Gone are the checkout clerks from your favorite grocery store. But what about us artists? Writers? And thinkers of any stripe? Are we about to get gone too? AI will not mean the death of artists, intellectuals, or anyone else…

Recently I trained an AI on my own paintings and then had it create a few more back for me in my own style. The results are both familiar and strange. I’ve been painting my whole life, not as a way to pass the time, but as a central part…

How to design the story of your life with ten sentences. Use this guide to help figure out who you are, what you love, and what life you hope to create. Step by step Take out a piece of paper or a blank doc and make a list that is ten lines long. Don’t fill in anything yet, just ten blank lines. What we’re…

Use design to defeat the ticking clock of Customer-Product Fit When designing a product… ask yourself this terrifying question: How long does it take to get to WOW? How long does it take for a potential customer to go from initial awareness to fully believing that your app or service…

A few months ago, I gave a lecture at Stanford’s d.school on the terrifying (yet thrilling) call to do your life’s great work. Excerpted here is the emotional heart of the lecture: How to Battle the Problem-Monster. Read this when you need a boost. It starts out rough and dives…

At the risk of ruining all jokes for you forever, here’s the structure of a joke, why it works, and how to write one. Structure of a joke All jokes have two halves: a set-up and a payoff. …

In the new series on how to design anything, we take on different topics. This week: how to use design principles to improve your self-confidence, recognize your shortcomings, and perpetually improve. First, some background: Whether you move through life as a musician, athlete, surgeon, artist, business leader, salesperson, or poet—confidence matters to perform…

A map as big as the world — In Borge’s On Exactitude in Science, he imagines a map as large as the territory it describes, covering the land entirely. The idea seems irresistible to a certain type of literary rascal. Lewis Carrol’s Sylvie and Bruno and Umberto Eco’s On the Impossibility of Drawing a Map of the Empire…

Say hello, change your life. Learn to say hello and you’ll give yourself your best shot at a wonderful life. I know this sounds goofy and unreasonably pretentious—you already say hello many times a day—you don’t really need to learn how to do it. And yet… the stakes are high…