Videos
“The Mom Test”
Originally posted in our November 2024 Top of Mind Newsletter. In “The Mom Test,” Rob Fitz shares three dynamic tips for validating business ideas through customer conversations. He urges entrepreneurs to avoid hypotheticals and instead dig into past behaviors for real insights. By emphasizing specifics over generalities, Fitz reveals how to gather actionable feedback. His third tip focuses on understanding customers’ lives and problems rather than seeking validation of your idea. For those setting out on…
“What is School For?”
Originally posted in our January 2024 Top of Mind Newsletter. For fans of Sir Ken Robinson’s “Do Schools Kill Creativity?” TedTalk, may we introduce Richard Williams’ (Prince EA) spoken word piece, “What is School For?” A poignant reflection on what school is for the typical student, this piece goes through the ups and downs of learning in modern schooling. But what’s more, he does it while citing studies about school start times, referencing the difference between…
“Antifragility: How to use suffering to get stronger | Jonathan Haidt & more”
Originally posted in our December 2022 Top of Mind Newsletter. Glass is fragile, and plastic is resilient, but some systems and functions require stress testing to get stronger. From our muscles and bones to our immune systems, many human systems fit into the “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger” paradigm. Nassim Taleb coined the term “antifragility” to define this tendency in humans. It goes beyond persistence or even resiliency and, in many ways, interconnects with…
“Flow state: How to trigger the best performance of your life”
Originally posted in our November 2022 Top of Mind Newsletter. Have you ever found yourself in a state of near effortless focus? Where you aren’t paying attention to your phone or other tasks and instead are hyper-concentrated on a particular project or job. This situation is what it is like to be in a state of flow. Long-time followers of our work at ELI will know that the “Godfather of Flow Psychology,” Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, has profoundly…
“Redefining the Goal of Education”
Originally posted in our August 2022 Top of Mind Newsletter. As we see the start of the public school year throughout much of the US and other countries, let’s take a moment to reflect on the goal of education and how we might want to reframe it. For starters, many of us believed that the path toward the highest paying and most rewarding job was a college degree. And while it is true that, on average,…