lifelong learning Archives

A collage featuring a partial face overlaid with "I Voted" stickers alongside the text "The Night Crawler," embodying the relentless drive reminiscent of a Zuckerberg mantra.

Mark Zuckerberg’s 4 steps to approach life

Welcome to The Nightcrawler — a weekly newsletter from Eric Markowitz covering tech, innovation, and long-term thinking.

Open book with an abstract pattern on the left page and a black-and-white photo of a smiling woman on the right, reflecting themes of digital wellbeing through its serene and balanced design.

Business

Why “digital wellbeing” is crucial to our work-life transformation

Rather than allowing technology to exacerbate stress and disconnection, we can use it to actively support our wellbeing.

Collage featuring a race car, silhouettes holding diplomas, and the text "The Nightcrawler" on a grid background, embodying a new ethos.

Business

The new ethos permeating the investment world

Welcome to The Nightcrawler — a weekly newsletter from Eric Markowitz covering tech, innovation, and long-term thinking.

An older man with gray hair is sitting in a white chair, smiling. Dressed in a black outfit, he is framed against a large screen filled with abstract shapes and letters that evoke an AI manifesto.

Business

The AI manifesto of a Silicon Valley legend

Welcome to The Nightcrawler — a weekly newsletter from Eric Markowitz covering tech, innovation, and long-term thinking.

A helicopter hovers over the ocean as a person is lowered into the water, creating a circular ripple effect around them.

Smart Skills

How elite rescue swimmers stay calm in life-or-death situations

“Amid the chaos, he remembered his life being eerily calm as he knew it wasn’t if, but when they would be hacked to pieces. He just kept kicking.”

An open book reveals three wrenches on the left page and a dancer balancing gracefully on the right, set against a green background, embodying a skills-powered future where craftsmanship and artistry unite.

Business

6 compelling reasons your work future is “skills-powered”

College degree? Not so much. Employers want teams with a diverse skill set who can adapt to changing industry demands.

Collage with a hand holding a pen, hand grasping a light bulb for idea generation, and graphs depicting optimization.

Business

How to create an “idea generation assembly line”

Welcome to The Nightcrawler — a weekly newsletter from Eric Markowitz covering tech, innovation, and long-term thinking.

The Long Game

The Kevin Kelly interview: The power of “radical optimism”

The co-founder of Wired magazine shares his insights on how a long-term mindset can shape a brighter, more innovative future.

A book spread showing a painting of a person, eyes filled with curiosity, looking outside on the left and four brain scan images on the right, overlaid on an orange background.

Neuropsych

Curiosity plus failure is a passport to brilliance

Research suggests curiosity triggers parts of the brain associated with anticipation, making answers more rewarding once discovered.

A cat, driven by curiosity, has its head and upper body inside a crumpled orange paper bag, with its tail and hind legs visible against a plain light blue background.

Business

5 ways to turn curiosity into long-term success

Want to get ahead? The best leaders are always humble, proactive and — above all — curious, advises Merlin CEO Jeremy Sirota.

An open book with a black-and-white photo of a woman on the left page and a close-up image of a flower bud on the right page.

Smart Skills

3 subtle traits of successful late bloomers

Late bloomers often find their moment of transformation when life throws them a curveball.

Two scenes: Top shows climbers on an ice-covered terrain, embodying fun and success. Bottom captures an airplane in flight against a clear sky.

The Long Game

Play it again: The causal link between fun and resilience

Fun in business is no laughing matter — it can create a golden strategic advantage and bring serious success in the long term.

Three wireframe human heads are depicted against a dark background, their complex overlapping patterns evocative of the Johari window model, revealing multifaceted layers within each head's structure.

Business

Use the “Johari Window Model” to improve your conversations

It’s hard to know what other people know. But it’s not impossible.

A collage featuring a sleeping person, a 3D-rendered hand, and various graphs with dates and "gpt-4" labels, overlaid by the text "The Nightcrawler," subtly highlights themes of the attention economy.

Business

The essential skill to master across life and business

Welcome to The Nightcrawler — a weekly newsletter from Eric Markowitz covering tech, innovation, and long-term thinking.

A book open to a black and white photo of a steaming mug on the left page and a detailed, artistic portrait of an elderly person on the right page, capturing a sense of rival camaraderie through the contrasting images.

Business

Why it pays to treat competitors with “genuine camaraderie”

Why Bob Stiller — founder and former CEO of billion-dollar beverage company Green Mountain Coffee Roasters — believes shared learnings are a win-win.

Collage featuring a surfer, hands holding a Rubik's cube, and text "The Nightcrawler." Abstract elements include graphs, car parts, and a cityscape interwoven with life lessons.

Business

10 life lessons from four decades in the market

Welcome to The Nightcrawler — a weekly newsletter from Eric Markowitz covering tech, innovation, and long-term thinking.

A dark cloud, laced with cynicism, is topped with a colorful iridescent layer against a dim sky.

The Learning Curve

“Hopeful skepticism”: The cure for cynicism and how to apply it

Stanford psychologist Jamil Zaki discusses the dangers of cynicism and how skepticism can invigorate our relationships and communities.

Open book with an image of a brain on the left page and a pencil eraser unlearning old marks on the right page.

Business

Why “unlearning” is your best slayer of “zombie leadership”

By unlearning old leadership mindsets, cultures, and assumptions we can move from Industrial Age thinking to Intelligence Age thinking.

Collage featuring a microchip, an illustration of an armored figure, and text: "The NIGHTCRAWLER." Background includes blue grids and binary code, invoking the power of a digital god.

Business

The trillion-dollar AI race to create “Digital God”

Welcome to The Nightcrawler — a weekly newsletter from Eric Markowitz covering tech, innovation, and long-term thinking.

A silhouette of a person using a metal detector merges seamlessly with a large, centered image of JFK's face against a gradient blue background, symbolizing leadership and discovery.

Business

What JFK learned about leadership from a NASA janitor

Most leaders get the psychology of human motivation all wrong — here’s how a presidential encounter with a leaf-sweeper puts it right.

Abstract image featuring a blue-toned sphere with grid patterns above an orange-toned depiction of a cyclist amidst technical drawings, evoking the principle of golden marginal gains.

The Long Game

The golden strategy of stacked “marginal gains”

For extraordinary long-term success in business we can look to insights from British Olympic cycling, Roger Federer and neuroeconomics.

A stainless steel razor blade in the shape of an open book against a blue background. The razor's edges form the outline of the book's pages.

Business

How two “razors” can help you make smarter decisions

Some news is slow, some news is fast — and there are two simple techniques to help you filter both.

A collage-style graphic features a man with a goatee, the title "The Nightcrawler," stock charts, and abstract shapes in orange and green.

Business

The thin line between genius and madman

Welcome to The Nightcrawler — a weekly newsletter from Eric Markowitz covering tech, innovation, and long-term thinking.

Business

What investors can learn from the world’s most resilient shrub

Welcome to The Nightcrawler — a weekly newsletter from Eric Markowitz covering tech, innovation, and long-term thinking.

A close-up illustration of a Play-Doh container with the words "Kutol" and "Wall" on it, symbolizing its lasting success. The background features text fragments and abstract patterns.

The Long Game

Why the “extremophyte mindset” is crucial to lasting success

Like ultra-hardy plants that thrive in harsh conditions, businesses that see crises as opportunities are likely to win in the long run.

Business

The long-term benefits of “second-level” thinking

Welcome to the Big Think debut of The Nightcrawler — a weekly newsletter from Eric Markowitz covering tech, innovation, and long-term thinking.

Illustration of a key with an ear inside its head part on the left and a hand holding another hand with a keyhole between them on the right. The background, reminiscent of Dale Carnegie's principles, features blue and black geometric shapes.

Business

Timeless influencer? Why Dale Carnegie has not been axed by hindsight

After almost a century in print, “How to Win Friends and Influence People” still has lessons to teach us.

Illustration of a person wearing a hat, facing both left and right. Yellow dotted lines connect their eyes to rectangular frames, echoing the dual perspectives central to Kierkegaard's philosophy. Green splashes and line patterns form the background.

Business

How the Kierkegaard view of hindsight can help us reframe our work-lives

The Danish philosopher’s simple paradox — living forwards while looking backwards — can be translated into golden business insights.

A smiling man in a white shirt is centered in an abstract background featuring yellow and black graphics of interconnected neural networks and brain illustrations, symbolizing wisdom management.

Business

How hindsight can take us to a new level of “wisdom management”

Chip Conley — founder and CEO of JDV Hospitality and Airbnb’s former Head of Global Hospitality and Strategy — maps out an inclusive path from hindsight to wisdom.

A black and white portrait of a man with a large mustache is overlaid on a green collage containing a baseball and a baseball field, subtly evoking the philosophy of hindsight.

Business

What baseball and Nietzsche tell us about the perils of hindsight

Whenever something goes wrong — in business as in life — we tend to get cause and effect totally muddled up.