HeyJaredTen-Second Thoughts
Humans require ten seconds of focused attention to properly absorb a new idea. Less than that and it pours off of us, in whole or in part. These are short, direct concepts that are worth ten seconds of your time to absorb.
- Indexed issues, last 90 days
- 14
- Latest publication
- Sep 26, 2026
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- Jul 31, 2026
Latest issues
The Real Reasons Why Cheating Is Bad For You (opens the original)
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Older people frequently tell young people not to cheat at things, and rightly so. Their explanations of why the kids shouldn’t cheat, however, tend to be thin. Now, if you don’t have a better argument, you do the best you can, and I know I’ve done that more than once. But there are two solid reasons why cheating is bad for the cheater, and so I’ll give those to you now.The first reason is this one:Cheating trains you to chase dominance. Winning fairly trains you to chase excellence.As someone wh
Notice Your Binaries (opens the original)
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Humans have a weakness for binaries… for either-or choices. These are the easiest distinctions for us to process, and so we default to them frequently. We see this in word association tests, where the answers go like this:Hot. Cold.Happy. Sad.Hard. Soft.Wet. Dry.The real world is highly complex, of course; it’s almost never binary, and that makes lots of trouble for us. The solution, however, is not to get hyper-vigilant, but just to notice when you’re thinking through binaries. That’s vigilance
Every Man Is The Hero Of His Own Story (opens the original)
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The title above is true. In fact, people arrange not only their lives, but their perceptions of the world, around the stories they tell themselves. The idea that we attach too hard to our stories may have something to it, but let’s stay with our central concept for today: Our internal stories almost inevitably place us in the role of the hero.Our job, then, is to recognize what’s making us heroic. Is it “seeing the truth about XYZ”? “Standing up against the evils of ABC”? Maybe “planting the see
Winning Is Fun… (opens the original)
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Winning is fun, provided it’s done fairly, of course. (Cheating is fake winning and trains us in dominance rather than excellence.) Likewise being noticed and appreciated (everyone loves your outfit, everyone thinks you’re smart, etc.) is satisfying. We can and should appreciate these moments, but we should also take them for what they are: things to be enjoyed, not to build our psyches around.What we are, inside, is far more profound than being crowned champion of whatever. That’s a distinction
If You’re Going To Color Outside The Lines, You Have To Know How Wrong You Can Be (opens the original)
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Coloring outside the lines – thinking and creating as a non-conformist – is essential to the improvement of the human race. All long-accepted ideas are vulnerable to enthronement, calcification, being turned into tools of advantage and so on. New ideas, therefore, are absolutely necessary, and are highly unlikely to arise from the calcified fiefdoms of “consensus” knowledge.So, if you are attempting to think and discover outside of the big, authorized box, I laud you. But please understand that
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