maoxiaojun23 Articles

What Two Years of Sleeping With Background Noise Taught Me About Quiet

I used to think I needed silence to fall asleep. I would lie in bed at night and notice every car driving by, every creak of the building settling, every..

The Underrated Power of the Strikethrough in Honest Writing

I have been thinking a lot lately about how the simple act of crossing out a word changes what writing means. Not deleting. Crossing out. There is a real difference,..

How I Actually Research a Competitor Without Spending Five Hundred Dollars a Month

When I was working at a larger company, competitive research was easy in a specific way. The marketing department had subscriptions to all the expensive tools. You could open any..

The Box of Old Family Photos My Mom Handed Me, and What I Did With Them

When my grandmother passed away last year, my mom inherited a shoebox of family photographs that had been sitting in a closet in my grandmother's apartment for somewhere between forty..

I Redesigned My Tiny Apartment Layout Three Times Before Buying Furniture

I moved into a 500 square foot apartment last spring and almost immediately made every mistake you can make with a small space. I bought a couch that was technically..

Watching My Daughter Learn Times Tables Reminded Me Why Repetition Still Works

My daughter is seven and just hit the part of school where she has to learn her multiplication tables. Watching her go through this process has been one of the..

I Started Doing a Sudoku Every Morning. Here Is What It Did to My Brain.

About eight months ago I started doing a sudoku puzzle every morning before I touched my phone. I cannot tell you exactly why I started. I think I was tired..

Why I Still Reach for Graph Paper in a Digital World

I have an iPad. I have a laptop with every drawing and diagramming tool you could imagine. I have a phone that can recognize my handwriting and convert it to..

Sending Invoices Used to Stress Me Out and Here Is What Changed

The first invoice I ever sent as a freelancer was an embarrassment. I made it in Word, eyeballed the formatting, exported a PDF that turned out to have weird margins,..

The Roth IRA Conversation I Wish Someone Had With Me at 25

If you had asked me at 25 what a Roth IRA was, I probably would have said something vague about retirement and changed the subject. Retirement felt about as relevant..

Why I Started Double-Checking Every Percentage I Read

Somewhere along the way I noticed I was getting tricked by percentages constantly. Not because anyone was lying outright, but because percentages are deceptively easy to misread. A news headline..

How I Finally Stopped Guessing My Monthly Car Payment

For the longest time, buying a car felt like walking into a fog. The sticker price was just the beginning. There were down payments, trade-in values, sales tax, interest rates,..