The 10-year Japanese government bond (JGB) yield rose above 2.81% early Tuesday, the highest since 1996, after data showed Japan’s economy expanded at an annualized rate of 2.1% in the first quarter of 2026.
Economists had forecast a 1.7% expansion, and the stronger growth may put pressure on the Bank of Japan to raise interest rates at its next monetary policy meeting in June as it battles rising inflation.
Japanese yields matter to the entire world, according to Ipek Ozkardeskaya, senior analyst at Swissquote, because the country is one of the largest foreign holders of U.S. Treasuries, the global debt benchmark.
Domestic bonds start becoming attractive again for major Japanese institutions, if they can earn a decent yield at home without taking the currency risk or hedging costs of buying U.S. debt, she says.
“That matters because if large Japanese investors start shifting even part of their money back into domestic bonds, demand for U.S. Treasuries could weaken, potentially putting upward pressure on U.S. yields,” Ozkardeskaya adds.
Market Watch
5. Crypto Flows Flipped Back to $1B Negative Last Week After Seven Weeks of Inflows
Crypto asset flows. “Digital asset investment products saw US$1.07bn of outflows, the first negative week in seven and the third-largest weekly outflow of 2026.”
James Butterfill – CoinShares
6. Betting Parlays is Giving Money Away-Kalshi Stats. Howard Lindzon Letter
Howie Town
7. Drinking in 12th Grade Cut in Half…Being on Phone Replaces Drinking
Howie Town
8. Average Number of Applications Per Entry Level Job….Jumps from 100 to 300 in 4 Years
Steve Jobs believed that genuine passion is the foundation of meaningful work.
Jobs paired big, audacious vision with ruthless focus.
The visionary tech CEO understood that customers don’t buy features — they buy possibility.
Steve Jobs’ influence on modern technology, design and communication is impossible to overstate. From the iPhone and Mac to Pixar and digital music, his ideas transformed how we work, create and connect. For entrepreneurs, leaders, and creators, Jobs’ greatest contribution isn’t just what he built — it’s the principles he lived by.
After studying Jobs’ career and philosophy for years, I’ve distilled his approach into seven powerful rules anyone can adopt. These Steve Jobs success principles can help you unlock creativity, strengthen leadership and bring bold ideas to life.
1. Do what you love
Jobs believed passion was the ultimate competitive advantage. He famously said, “People with passion can change the world for the better.” When asked what advice he’d give aspiring entrepreneurs, he offered this simple guidance: “I’d get a job as a busboy or something until I figured out what I was really passionate about.”
Passion fuels resilience, endurance and innovation—especially when challenges hit. Key takeaway: Purpose-driven work leads to higher creativity and long-term success.
2. Put a dent in the universe
Jobs’ leadership was anchored in big, audacious vision. When convincing then-Pepsi President John Sculley to join Apple, he delivered one of the most famous pitches in business history: “Do you want to sell sugar water for the rest of your life, or do you want to change the world?”
Great leaders think beyond products. They pursue missions that inspire teams and attract customers. Key takeaway: Vision is a powerful driver for innovation, brand loyalty and organizational momentum.
3. Make connections
Jobs defined creativity as “connecting things.” He believed innovation flourishes when people explore diverse interests and experiences. His calligraphy class — seemingly irrelevant at the time — shaped the Macintosh’s groundbreaking typefaces. His travels through India and Asia influenced Apple’s emphasis on simplicity, intuition and beauty.
Don’t stay in your lane. Expand your inputs to expand your ideas. Key takeaway: Cross-disciplinary thinking is essential for original ideas and breakthrough products.
4. Say no to 1,000 things
Focus was one of Jobs’ greatest strengths. When he returned to Apple in 1997, he cut the company’s product line from 350 items to just 10. This allowed Apple to pour its best talent and energy into a small number of world-class products.
Jobs was proud of what Apple chose not to do. Key takeaway: Strategic prioritization builds clarity, alignment, and product excellence.
5. Create insanely different experiences
Jobs understood that true innovation goes beyond hardware and software — it extends to the customer experience. When creating the Apple Store, he insisted the goal wasn’t selling boxes. It was enriching lives.
From the layout to the lighting to Genius Bar support, every detail was designed to create a seamless emotional connection between customer and brand.
Key takeaway: Exceptional customer experiences differentiate great companies from good ones.
6. Master the message
Jobs was widely recognized as one of the greatest corporate storytellers in history. His keynotes didn’t just present information — they entertained, educated, and inspired. Every slide was intentional. Every moment was choreographed. Every message was clear.
Even the best ideas fail without powerful communication. Key takeaway: Effective storytelling amplifies your impact, influence, and brand presence.
7. Sell dreams, not products
Jobs understood something many businesses overlook: customers don’t simply buy devices — they buy possibility. This is why the iPad features a single home button. Complexity was removed so users could focus on what they could create, learn or become.
Your audience ultimately cares about their goals, not your features. Key takeaway: Brands that speak to customer aspirations build loyalty and emotional connection.
1. A Fair Amount of Charts Hitting Previously Unsustainable Levels…But They are Not Market Timing Mechanisms
A Wealth of Common Sense
2. Rule of 20 Expensive Liz Sonders—Not a Market Timing Indicator
Liz Ann Sonders
3. Forward P/E Ratio of S&P 500 Had -18% Correction
The chart
Marketwatch
Morgan Stanley strategists offer this chart showing what they say is a market that has priced in, not ignored, Iran-war risks. “Much has been made of the fact that the S&P 500 decline was less than 10% on a price basis at the March lows. However, that view overlooks the more important adjustment that took place—namely, a significant reset on valuations and breadth,” they say. The bank lifted its year-end S&P 500 target to 8,000 and set a mid-year 2027 target of 8,300.
4. Tech Stocks Getting Cheaper
Valuation correction. “Talking about an AI bubble doesn’t make sense when tech stocks are actually getting cheaper … The forward 12-month P/E for the S&P 500 tech sector now sits at 23.6, down from its peak above 30 last fall.”
Phil Rosen – Opening Bell Daily
5. SOX Sell Off Tuesday Ranking
Bespoke
6. It’s a More Secret Version of Bitcoin and It’s on a Tear
WSJ Zcash reminds some of bitcoin’s early days—but some see its privacy features as a red flag
Van Eck-Every major industry expansion has begun with falling costs. The internet scaled as computing and bandwidth became more affordable. Electric vehicles became viable as battery costs came down. Cloud software accelerated as storage and processing costs declined.Space appears to be reaching a similar inflection point.
Advances in launch technology, particularly reusability, have fundamentally changed the economics of access to orbit. Launch costs have historically been one of the biggest bottlenecks, and lowering them have reduced one of the most important barriers to entry across the entire ecosystem.
VanEck
8. Prosperity Highly Correlated to Economic Freedom
Michael A. Arouet
9. Judges Ruled Against ICE 10-1 Ratio
POLITICO
10. Lessons From Studying Over 100 Self-Help Books and 20 Therapies
Key points-Psychology Today
Many self-help techniques are recycled across therapies and traditions, often under different names.
Highly popular techniques sometimes have weaker scientific evidence than their reputation suggests.
At a fundamental level, people control only four things: body, communication, thoughts, and attention.
Nearly 500 techniques from 100+ self-help books and 23 therapies reduce to 12 core psychology strategies.
By Spencer Greenberg and Jeremy Stevenson.
A five-year review of self-help revealed a simpler pattern beneath the noise.
Key points
Many self-help techniques are recycled across therapies and traditions, often under different names.
Highly popular techniques sometimes have weaker scientific evidence than their reputation suggests.
At a fundamental level, people control only four things: body, communication, thoughts, and attention.
Nearly 500 techniques from 100+ self-help books and 23 therapies reduce to 12 core psychology strategies.
Key points
Many self-help techniques are recycled across therapies and traditions, often under different names.
Highly popular techniques sometimes have weaker scientific evidence than their reputation suggests.
At a fundamental level, people control only four things: body, communication, thoughts, and attention.
Nearly 500 techniques from 100+ self-help books and 23 therapies reduce to 12 core psychology strategies.
Key points
Many self-help techniques are recycled across therapies and traditions, often under different names.
Highly popular techniques sometimes have weaker scientific evidence than their reputation suggests.
At a fundamental level, people control only four things: body, communication, thoughts, and attention.
Nearly 500 techniques from 100+ self-help books and 23 therapies reduce to 12 core psychology strategies.
Key points
Many self-help techniques are recycled across therapies and traditions, often under different names.
Highly popular techniques sometimes have weaker scientific evidence than their reputation suggests.
At a fundamental level, people control only four things: body, communication, thoughts, and attention.
Nearly 500 techniques from 100+ self-help books and 23 therapies reduce to 12 core psychology strategies.
By Spencer Greenberg and Jeremy Stevenson.
Over the past five years, my colleague Jeremy Stevenson and I have read more than 100 self-help books, studied over 20 therapies, and extracted and categorized nearly 500 techniques from those sources.
The goal was to understand the high-level patterns across all methods of self-improvement, as part of our process of writing our book, The 12 Levers, aimed at providing a complete psychological toolkit for improving your life.
Today, we want to share five lessons that stood out from conducting all of this research.
Lesson 1: A lot of techniques are recycled or repackaged
Take mindfulness, defined by meditation teacher Jon Kabat-Zinn as “the awareness that arises by paying attention on purpose, in the present moment, and non-judgementally.” The Pali word “sati” (roughly translated as mindfulness) appears in early Buddhist teachings dating back about 2,500 years. Mindfulness is now used in multiple modern therapies, like acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT), dialectical behavior therapy (DBT), mindfulness-based cognitive therapy (MBCT), mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR), and mindful self-compassion (MSC).
Sometimes mindfulness is repackaged with a different name. For example, ACT therapists call mindfulness of thoughts “defusion” and mindfulness of body sensations “expansion.” Mindfulness also goes by “decentering,” “acceptance,” and “distancing.”
Is it bad that self-help techniques get recycled and repackaged? Well, it can contribute to that sense of overwhelm when we’re surveying the shelves of the bookstore’s self-help aisle. But it’s a good thing if it means making effective techniques more available. And it’s also good if it means making old techniques that may have been described in obscure language easier to understand.
Lesson 2: A lot of self-help techniques don’t have as much evidence as you’d think
Cold exposure is a great example. It has become incredibly popular. And from all the hype, you’d think that daily cold showers or plunges have multiple randomized controlled trials (RCTs) showing consistent benefits for all sorts of outcomes like anxiety, depression, and energy levels.
A 2025 meta-analysis did find some benefits from cold exposure, including lower physiological stress 12 hours later, better self-reported sleep, improved quality of life after 30 days, and 29% fewer sick days. But it found no stress benefits immediately — 1, 24, or 48 hours later; no quality-of-life benefits after 90 days; and no general mood improvements. At best, the evidence is mixed.
Here’s what the authors of the meta-analysis concluded: “the current evidence base is constrained by few RCTs, small sample sizes, and a lack of diversity in study populations.”
Lesson 3. Some techniques work better than others, but only on average
Some psychological techniques really are better than others. Much better. For example, if you want to reduce your anxiety, exposure therapy is the most evidence-based approach, and it’s effective for a lot of people (though not for everyone).
In terms of other questions, like who should reframe their thoughts versus be mindful of them, or who should use cognitive techniques versus behavioral techniques, or who should use CBT techniques versus DBT techniques, not much is actually known.
The reality is that, while the worst techniques are useless for everyone (beyond giving a potential placebo effect), even the best techniques don’t work for everyone.
This lack of a one-size-fits-all solution in self-improvement can be frustrating. But thankfully, this also means you have a lot of freedom in choosing which techniques to try.
4. At a fundamental level, you control surprisingly little
Focusing on what you control is an essential principle of life. There’s a reason why the ancient Stoics emphasized it so much. As Epictetus put it, “Some things are in our control and others not.” If you try to change things outside of your control, you can waste a lot of energy and potentially cause yourself a lot of unnecessary suffering. This is also a major reason why our book focused on the most useful techniques of self-help, because techniques are controllable processes.
One thing we discovered from reviewing scores of self-help books and therapies is that, at our core, there are only four things we each fundamentally control. Just four! You have control (albeit not total control) over: your body, your communication, your thoughts, and your attention. That’s not very much!
To illustrate, imagine you’re unjustly locked in a jail cell that’s completely empty except for a chair. You’re surrounded by concrete walls, and you can’t see or hear what’s happening outside. You’re completely alone.
In this situation, what do you truly have control over? You certainly can’t control what’s happening outside of the jail cell. And you can’t change much inside the cell either (concrete tends to be fairly unmalleable).
But you can do certain things. You can speak, even if no one can hear you. And you can move your body, even if you can’t escape.
What if the guard came into the cell, strapped you to the chair, and taped your mouth shut? Well, you wouldn’t be able to move or speak anymore. But you’d still control some things. You could still control your thinking, at least to some extent (e.g., you could choose to fantasize about how you could escape).
And you could still control your attention (e.g., you could focus on the voice of the guard or the feeling of the straps on your wrists). Even if you were blindfolded, this attentional control would still be available. In fact, it would still be available even if you were temporarily paralyzed.
Remembering that we have control of just four things can help us remember to focus only on what’s controllable, rather than wasting energy trying to change what we can’t.
5. Hundreds of self-help techniques exist, but they all boil down to just 12 broad strategies for improving your life
After extracting nearly 500 techniques from 106 self-help books and 23 therapies, we found that just 12 high-level psychological strategies encompass nearly every technique for improving your life.
To learn a lot more: Jeremy and I describe each of these 12 levers in detail in our forthcoming book, The 12 Levers.
