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What Can You Learn About Any Public Company? Public companies disclose extensive information about their finances, operations, leadership, incentives, ownership, and risks. Anyone can use that information to develop a meaningful understanding of a business, provided they know where to look and how to connect the evidence. Imagine receiving a job offer from a company you know primarily by name. Before accepting, you want to understand whether the business is financially healthy, which products generate its revenue, how much debt it carries, and whether its leadership team has incentives aligned with the strategy being described. For a U.S. public company, much of the information needed to investigate those questions is freely available. The challenge is turning thousands of pages of disclosure into a manageable research process. Start With SEC Filings The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission maintains EDGAR, a database containing filings submitted by public companies and other regula...

What Do You Need to Understand About Work That Nobody Is Going to Teach You? Most workplaces teach you how to perform your responsibilities. They rarely explain the informal system that determines how value is recognized, decisions are made, opportunities appear, and careers develop. A new employee usually receives some combination of a job description, manager, policies, processes, and performance expectations. Those things matter because they establish the formal structure of the job. But work also contains an informal structure. People have different levels of influence, organizations reward certain behaviors more than others, and important information frequently moves through relationships that do not appear on an organizational chart. Understanding that structure can matter almost as much as mastering the job itself. Understand What Makes the Work Valuable A job description usually describes activities. Those activities exist because the organization expects them to produce some u...

How can you be a scientist of yourself? Turn your life into a living lab without turning yourself into a project. Framing the Question To be a  scientist of yourself  is to study your own life with curiosity instead of judgment, using experiments instead of guesses. Rather than asking “What’s wrong with me?”, you ask “What’s actually happening, and what happens if I change one thing at a time?” This mindset helps you turn vague self-improvement goals into testable hypotheses about your habits, energy, focus, and emotions. In this post, you’ll learn how to treat your days like a simple, sustainable experiment so you can make smarter changes, not louder resolutions.  It’s about designing tiny tests, collecting just enough data, and using what you learn to iterate on your life—like a kinder, more curious version of R&D for your well-being. The scientist-of-you mindset Before tools and trackers, being a scientist of yourself is a way of  seeing . A scientist doesn’t ...