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Here are our most popular exclusive features of 2017.

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1. Zeigarnik Effect: How Incomplete Tasks Trigger Stress. Unresolved and interrupted tasks thieve the attention of your brain until you have a clear—if subconscious—proposal of what you’re going to deal with them. Just the simple act of capturing a task that reaches your head can achieve that sense of completion.
2. Lessons on Adversity from Charlie Munger: Be a Survivor, Not a Victim. Berkshire Hathaway’s Vice-Chairman overcame “horrible blows, unfair blows” on the road to success. Munger counsels, “Feeling like a victim is a perfectly disastrous way to go through life.” Don’t operate life on the assumption that the world ought to be fair, just, and objective. You are neither entitled nor unentitled to good treatment.
3. How to Guard Against Anger Erupting. The most effective way to deal with anger in yourself is by not disregarding or repressing it. When anger rises past a threshold, it requires a reasonable and pleasing expression—an outlet—to be diffused. The key to expelling anger in a way that must feel good and fair is to invoke your calm, wise self and put out some of the fire of the emotion before moving forward.
4. Why People to Act Immorally and Justify Their Unprincipled Behavior. People can rationalize behavior that is at odds with their own moral principles. When people feel angry, pressured, or depressed, their mental footing tends to ebb away. They are more likely to engage in self-absorbed behaviors that they would otherwise spurn, especially if the payoff for such behavior is high and the odds of getting caught and punished are low.
5. Rewards and Incentives Can Backfire. Offering rewards for motivating people to do unlikable tasks could sometimes become counterproductive. In what psychologists call “the overjustification effect,” a reward, instead of motivating, could fortify a person’s revulsion for the task. In other words, the reward could reinforce the belief that the task can’t be worth doing for itself.
6. Choose Your Role Models Carefully. The modern world has a dangerous problem with hero-worship—pop artists, rappers, film stars, sportspersons, capitalists, and so on command attention and affection as never before. While admiring, and drawing wisdom, meaning, and inspiration from heroes can be constructive, you must take “hero narratives” with a grain of salt. Don’t blindly place much faith in today’s experts and celebrities.
7. Expressive Writing Can Help You Heal. People often block out thoughts that provoke negative emotions as a way of reducing their stress and regulating their moods. By exploring your deepest thoughts and feelings with a reflective, inquiring, honest attitude, you can shift perspective. Standing back and reflecting on your suffering from different points of view can bring about an improved emotional state.
8. Twenty Reasons People Don’t Change. If you have trouble getting people to change, perhaps one—or more—of these twenty reasons are to blame. Be realistic about changing others’ hearts and minds. If you can learn to accept them for who they are and let go of your conceptions of their perfection, your relationships become richer.
9. The More You Can Manage Your Emotions, the More Effective You’ll Be. People who lack the capacity to withstand psychological distresses such as anger, fear, frustration, and sadness are at a marked disadvantage in life. When faced with life’s unceasing challenges, they engage in destructive behaviors, often with verbal and physical aggression toward themselves and others.
10. Six Powerful Reasons to Eat Slowly and Mindfully. Cultivate a healthy relationship with food. Dedicating time to eat slowly, mindfully, and intentionally—and enjoying the pleasure of food—can make an enormous difference in your diet and health.

And here are articles of yesteryear that continue to be popular:

1. How smart companies get smarter
2. Make decisions using Bill Hewlett’s “Hat-wearing Process”
3. Temper your expectations, avoid disappointments in life
4. Stop asking, “What do you do for a living?”
5. Ten rules of management success from Sam Walton

See our top 10 lists for 2016 and 2015.

Here are this year’s most popular articles based on email- and feed-subscribership:

1. How Smart Companies Get Smarter. To develop collective intelligence and build smarter organizations, discourage employees from heroically patching up recurring problems—whenever and wherever they occur. Instead, encourage them to find, report, analyze, experiment, and fix systemic problems to prevent their recurrence.
2. Stop asking “What do you do for a living?” Chatting with somebody in socializing situations should be less about discerning the details of the other’s life to size up the other’s socioeconomic status, and more about building a bit of familiarity to initiate stimulating conversations about topics of mutual interest.
3. What Will You Regret? A fascinating way of looking at life is to think about your life and your career in the context of future regret-avoidance. Regrets for the things you did are likely to be tempered by the passage of time, but regrets for the things you do not do will be upsetting in retrospect.
4. Make Decisions Using Bill Hewlett’s “Hat-Wearing Process.” Carefully consider an idea, listen to and mull over facts, collect input from others, develop some perspective that comes only with time, and make sound, thoughtful decisions.
5. Destroy Your Previous Ideas (Lessons from Charlie Munger.) An important constituent of critical thinking is taking your beliefs and opinions apart methodically, analyzing each part, assessing it for soundness by means of arguments and counterarguments, and then improving it. Challenge your convictions with contradictory evidence to fortify your beliefs.
6. Be Yourself, Everyone Else Is Taken. You can learn a lot from your heroes, but don’t blatantly pattern your lives after them. Develop your own style. Don’t become second-rate versions of people you admire; instead be a first-rate version of yourself.
7. Being Underestimated Can Be a Great Thing. Don’t sweat when others think less than you actually are. Don’t let them make you feel small. Embrace their misjudgments with equanimity. Believe in yourself with humble confidence. Then outthink, outsmart, and outperform.
8. Groupthink—The Curse of Teamwork. Many teams tend to compromise their decisions for the sake of consensus, harmony, and “esprit de corps.” They strive to minimize conflict and value conformity. The result is often a lowest-common-denominator decision upon which everybody in the team agrees.
9. Beware of Advice from the Superstars. What worked for them won’t work for you. Expose yourself to many success principles and consider what qualities, attributes, mental models, or approaches to life you may want to assimilate into who you are. Don’t expect to blatantly imitate your hero and expect the same outcomes.
10. You Can’t Know Everything. The wisest people I know are the ones who acknowledge that they don’t know everything and put strategies in place to shield themselves from their own ignorance. Make risk analysis and risk reduction one of the primary goals of your intellectual processes.

And here are articles of yesteryear that continue to be popular:

1. Reframe Your Thinking, Get Better Answers. By changing or adjusting your perception of an issue, you are likely to reevaluate your intentions and find alternative, acceptable solutions to your situations.
2. Self-Assessment Quiz: How Stressed are You? The first step to overcome the causes and effects of stress is to acknowledge stress and become aware of its symptoms. By identifying a few telltale signs of stress, you can take steps to manage them.
3. How to Email Busy People. When you ask something of somebody, make it as convenient as possible for that person to respond to your request. Avoid imposing more busy work on already busy people.
4. Coaching vs. Feedback. Coaching is about future behavior and feedback is about past (and current) behavior. Coaching is about assisting employees reach their goals for the future. Feedback is about helping employees understand what prevents them from reaching their current goals.
5. The Opportunities in Customer Pain Points. Many innovative ideas are born of a reliable formula: prudent attention to customer pain points. Customers are usually willing to pay a premium to have their frustrations with a product or a service resolved.
6. When Delegating, Acknowledge Possible Errors. When delegating, empower your employees by letting them know that they aren’t expected to make optimal decisions every time and you’re not demanding perfection.
7. How to Earn Others’ Trust. The most important component of being effective at work is earning and upholding others’ trust through our actions, not through our words. Earn trust by making and honoring commitments.
8. The Truth Can Be Bitterer than a Sweet Illusion. Delaying action and putting off unpleasant confrontations will only make things harder. Especially when dealing with difficulties involving people, there is nothing more insidious than unresolved conflict and inaction.
9. Your To-Do List Isn’t a Wish List. Most folks can’t seem to complete and cross-off more than half of their to-do lists. Their buildup of tasks is never-ending; for every task they complete, they tend to add a few more. Add to your to-do list selectively; don’t say yes to everything that people ask of you.
10. How to Write Email Subject Lines that Persuade. By writing persuasive subject lines in emails, you can help your readers identify the importance of your message and the action you’re asking.

Here are this year’s most popular articles based on email- and feed-subscribership:

1. Reframe Your Thinking, Get Better Answers. By changing or adjusting your perception of an issue, you are likely to reevaluate your intentions and find alternative, acceptable solutions to your situations.
2. How to Email Busy People. When you ask something of somebody, make it as convenient as possible for that person to respond to your request. Avoid imposing more busy work on already busy people.
3. Seek Discipline, Not Motivation. People who actually get things done are those who find a way to work at whatever they are interested in even when they do not really feel like doing it. Focus on the ends rather than the means.
4. When Delegating, Acknowledge Possible Errors. When delegating, empower your employees by letting them know that they aren’t expected to make optimal decisions every time and you’re not demanding perfection.
5. The Opportunities in Customer Pain Points. Many innovative ideas are born of a reliable formula: prudent attention to customer pain points: customers are usually willing to pay a premium to have their frustrations with a product or a service resolved.
6. Fear of Failure is an Obstacle to Growth. If you fear failure and limit your activities, you are acutely impeding the knowledge and wisdom that comes from opening yourselves up to the new and the unfamiliar.
7. What Everybody Ought to Know about Writing Better Emails. Poorly written emails are a result of weaknesses in style and structure. Poor style is characterized by improper spelling and grammar, meandering and complex sentences and abstract, technical or indirect language. Poor structure refers to disparity between logical sentence order and the reader’s comprehension of those sentences.
8. Coaching vs. Feedback. Coaching is about future behavior and feedback is about past (and current) behavior. Coaching is about assisting employees reach their goals for the future. Feedback is about helping employees understand what prevents them from reaching their current goals.
9. The Truth Can Be Bitterer than a Sweet Illusion. Delaying action and putting off unpleasant confrontations will only make things harder. Especially when dealing with difficulties involving people, there is nothing more insidious than unresolved conflict and inaction.
10. What Opportunities Are You Overlooking? What opportunities are you overlooking today that, months, years, or decades from now, you could come to regret with the perspective that comes with time or upon mature reflection?

And here are articles of yesteryear that continue to be popular:

1. 25 Ways to Instantly Become a Better Boss. Bad management is not usually a result of bosses not knowing what to do to manage better. Rather, it stems largely from bosses not putting simple, conventional managerial skills into practice.
2. How to Write Email Subject Lines that Persuade. By writing persuasive subject lines in emails, you can help your readers identify the importance of your message and the action you’re asking.
3. Self-Assessment Quiz: How Stressed are You? The first step to overcome the causes and effects of stress is to acknowledge stress and become aware of its symptoms. By identifying a few telltale signs of stress, you can take steps to manage them.
4. Maria Bartiromo’s “The 10 Laws of Enduring Success.” CNBC anchor and journalist Maria Bartiromo presents a longstanding blueprint of success as ten attitudes: self-awareness, foresight, ingenuity, audacity, integrity, flexibility, modesty, fortitude, tenacity of purpose, and resilience.
5. 7 Easy Ways to Get More Done in Less Time. Divide and conquer. Fight procrastination. Put things in their place. Create checklists for all tasks. Start planning your day on the prior day. Pick up after yourself and clean your home and workspace. Maintain a ‘On-The-Go’ folder.