The 365 Commitment

Have you ever stopped to consider how you formed a particular opinion? This could be a viewpoint about conditions in an area of the world you have never visited, a conspiracy theory that you believe or do not believe, a religion you have dismissed, or a political stance that you have decided to take. What formed this opinion? The next question to consider is: How strongly do I believe this? Could anything change my mind? Growing up, I was involved in speech and debate, which was called Forensics at the time. I think that word has become associated with crime scene investigation, so now we just say debate. Although I like referring to it as forensics because that was truly what it was. We were immersed in the consideration and effectiveness of claims and how those could be backed up by various sources of evidence. We would frequently borrow from different fields, especially the legal field, to bring stronger arguments to defeat various "expert" opinions. Debate is notorious for making causal link chains that lead to some serious impact. When I was younger, the favorite topic was nuclear war. Everything would lead to a nuclear war if you kept linking the evidence together in a way that demonstrated some causality. Debate teams were arguing that all kinds of things would lead to nuclear war. From overharvesting Amazon jungles to underfunding public education, there was always a way to link these to social unrest, trade imbalances, and therefore global thermonuclear war. That then became a global ice age. My children were on a debate team in college, and their great calamity that everything linked to was global warming. However, just having a causal link was not strong evidence. Debate would often digress into a speed round to determine who could read the most evidence as fast as possible. They called this "spreading," the ability to just dump a bunch of evidence leading toward one of these terrible potential outcomes. So you either had to become really adept at reading evidence briefs, or you had to learn to tear apart arguments at their seams by attacking evidence quality. I chose the latter. As a consequence, I have always had in the back of my mind what causes me to form an opinion. Psychologists seem to distinguish between the strength of an opinion and the strength of the basis for an opinion, which are not the same thing. Someone can be extremely certain of something, with almost no support for that opinion. The word here would be epistemic. You may have a strong opinion, but your epistemic foundation could be very weak. So what is this epistemic foundation? If we were in a courtroom and you tried to bring in evidence to prove your opinion, you would run smack into the necessity of providing a foundation for any evidence to be introduced into the courtroom. You would suddenly find yourself swimming in a sea of evidentiary rules that have been adjudicated for centuries. Many people want to argue a defense of their opinion on the basis of intuition. "It just feels wrong to me," relying on their feelings, instincts, or preferences. This is the weakest foundation for an opinion, and people learn that quickly in a courtroom. Next might be an appeal to authority. That can be an authority derived from your society, your peers, your tribe, or perhaps just hearsay: "everyone is saying this!" Sometimes this can be stronger, meaning it comes from an authority that people trust, and in that case it will carry more weight, but the fact remains, basing an opinion only on the testimony of others is also a weak epistemic foundation. Next up is anecdotal. This is from personal experience. I saw this happen myself, or this is what happened to me are difficult arguments to defend against. However, they are just that: individual experience. They may be strong for the particular person, but not strong in terms of formulating a basis for an opinion that others should adopt as well. This is still pretty weak evidence, but stronger than intuition or hearsay. In a courtroom, this would be eyewitness testimony. Then we get to the higher levels of establishing an epistemic foundation for an opinion. An informed opinion is one in which you have multiple sources, facts, experience, and have done at least some rudimentary analysis. You might say, "I have looked into this, and several sources support it." Higher than an informed opinion is one that you have investigated. This implies that you have done research, your evidence is of high quality and from independent sources, and that you have had competing explanations weighed against your findings. In research circles, this is called being "peer-reviewed." Finally, the best and strongest epistemic foundation for an opinion would be one that is robust. Meaning that you have strong, convincing evidence, the methods of deriving that evidence are well understood, and you have tested counterevidence. More importantly, you have a strong conclusion, but that conclusion remains revisable, and you know exactly what new evidence would change your mind. Putting this all together. If you have a weak foundation and express high confidence in your opinion, then you are being dogmatic. If you have a strong foundation and high confidence, then that can be considered a well-supported conviction. There is a big difference between these two. If you have low confidence and a weak foundation, then you are just speculating. This is ok, as long as you are open about what you are trying to do. If you have low confidence with a strong foundation, then you are just being careful or perhaps too nice. We tend to talk about opinions as though they are all epistemically equivalent. This is just not true, and dangerous. You have heard the popular phrase: opinions are like a$$holes; everyone has one. This is true, but where that phrase stops short in rhetorical critique is that everyone has an opinion, and you can indeed judge the basis on which that opinion was formed.

I think we should teach young people more descriptive emotional vocabulary. Making fun of someone at that person's expense seems to be a byproduct of social media enthusiasm. To garner attention, people are constantly on patrol, looking for something they can capture and post to their account. This is especially true in the younger population that has stars in their eyes regarding the "creator economy." In many cases, this has led to a considerable lack of empathy that involves the humiliation of another person. If a person were to take a step back before posting something that shows the humiliation of another and ask themselves this question, I think there would be less of this. Would the joke still be funny if the person being joked about were standing comfortably in the group laughing too? The problem is that we do not pause long enough to think this through. When I was younger, a leader taught me about the concept of "punching down" versus "punching up." If a leader punches down on another person, that action carries far more moral weight than a subordinate making fun of their leadership. The English language does not feel like it has kept up with the rapidly evolving moral challenges that we face when interacting with so many people through modern communication modalities. In our language today, we might say, “If it is at someone else's expense, it isn't funny.” However, this does not quite capture the concept correctly. We have to add much more to this concept to derive the correct interpretation. Perhaps more accurately, the best humor makes the subject of the joke feel included in the laughter. Cruel humor requires someone to pay for everyone else's amusement. This is the aspect that is lost on people who brazenly post humiliation as a way to get more views and likes. The German language is interesting. Although of ancient origin, there is a mechanism in the language that allows for the construction of new words on the fly. This is through the compounding of words. The classic example of this is Volkswagen. Volk means people or a nation, and Wagen means car or wagon. The language even has connectors, or linking elements that blend these words together. In this case, the s follows volk. So this leads me to a highly descriptive word that explains this concept of public ridicule at another's expense better than the English language can. Schadenfreude This word is another compound. Schaden refers to harm or damage, and Freude means joy. So this word literally invokes the idea of having joy at another person's harm. It captures the notion perfectly in a single word. It does not necessarily mean you are cruel. Schadenfreude can be relatively harmless, like enjoying watching an arrogant rival lose a game. It becomes darker when the other person’s suffering itself is what makes the experience pleasurable. Germans did not invent this emotion, but they have labeled it well. I remember this word being used in context when I was younger, and it certainly has a negative moral implication. Using another person's misfortune to bring yourself joy. Maybe we should bring it back?

As mastery increases, we tend to discount the value of capabilities that have become easy for us, forgetting that their value is determined by the difficulty they remove for others, not the difficulty they present to us. This is what I call the expertise discount. I recently saw a young person using some software to create a music track that he was recording a song to. He was so excited by his newfound ability. He could bring a full repertoire of instruments, bass lines, percussion sounds, and even some AI-generated chorus hooks. I rolled my eyes, thinking of how simple this was and how no one would buy this. Later, I walked into the gym where I heard a popular song, and in the background of the sound was a nearly identical machine-generated soundtrack running in the background. I realized that I was falling for the expertise discount, whereas this young man was not. We do this all the time and in nearly every area that we gain expertise. My particular field happens to be hot right now, which is fun but the hard part is that I tend to want to make it far more complicated then it needs to be. Because the baseline technologies come easy to me, I imagine in my mind that people will never buy or subscribe to what we build because of the simplicity. This is the predictable mistake that a person has when falling for the expertise discount. They say in their mind: “Surely nobody would pay for this. It’s too simple.” The expert will then shoot above the market. They build something technically more impressive, comprehensive, or sophisticated than the customer actually needs, while a competitor monetizes the basic capability. We experts will shake our heads at others who monetize the simple while we struggle with building something far more complex. If you find yourself doing this then you need to realize this absolute truth: your easiest valuable skill may be your most commercially underestimated skill. So, next time you find yourself thinking something is "too simple" to be valuable, maybe pause for a second. That feeling might just be your expertise playing tricks on you, blinding you to the very thing others are looking for. It's a good reminder to sometimes step back and see things through fresh eyes, or even better, through the eyes of someone who hasn't walked your path yet. That's often where the real magic, and the real opportunity, lies.

I watched my daughter receive an award yesterday, one she earned through years of hard work. What struck me was how surprised she seemed by it. From her perspective, she had not done anything extraordinary. But that was precisely the point. She won because of the last three years of effort, not because of something she had done that day. The lesson was simple: perseverance pays off. My family knows this lesson well. Growing up, I heard story after story about family members who kept going when things were difficult, uncertain, or simply taking longer than expected. As I watched my daughter receive that award, some of those stories came back to me. And it occurred to me that making sure the next few generations know them is now partly my responsibility. I have come to believe that one of our primary responsibilities is to tell our story. Not because our lives are necessarily remarkable, but because experience has value only if some portion of it survives us. We spend our lives learning things slowly and often painfully, and then too easily allow those lessons to disappear when we do. Human progress depends on preventing that loss. We understand this instinctively in science and technology. An engineer does not begin by rediscovering electricity, and a physician does not start medical knowledge over with each new generation. We record what has been learned so the next person can begin farther down the road. But much of what matters most in life cannot be handed down as a formula. How do you teach someone what betrayal feels like, or when loyalty has become foolishness? How do you explain the difference between perseverance and stubbornness, between ambition and greed, or between a difficult season and a reason to quit? Advice rarely carries enough weight. A story does. “Keep going” is advice. The story of a great-grandfather who lost nearly everything, started over, and eventually rebuilt his life is something different. It gives perseverance shape. It places the principle inside a human life, with fear, uncertainty, mistakes, and consequences attached. For a moment, another person gets to borrow someone else’s experience without having to pay the full price for it themselves. Perhaps that is why human beings have always told stories. Long before books, databases, and cloud storage, people preserved what mattered around fires and dinner tables. Families repeated stories. Religions preserved them in scripture. Communities carried them forward through songs, legends, and traditions. We think of storytelling as entertainment, but it may also be one of humanity’s oldest forms of storage. The tragedy is how quickly a family can lose its accumulated knowledge. A grandchild may know that his grandfather owned a business but never hear that he nearly lost it twice. A granddaughter may know that her grandmother raised five children but never know about the years when money was scarce and she was frightened they would not make it. The facts remain, but the wisdom disappears. Then the next generation encounters hardship and believes it is something entirely new. They think they are the first person in the family to fail, to doubt, to struggle financially, or to discover that life has not unfolded according to plan. Stories remind us that hardship has a lineage, and so does resilience. I would even dare to say that behind most strong families there is some tradition of storytelling. It may be a grandmother who refuses to let anyone forget where the family came from, a father who tells the same story every Thanksgiving, or a box of letters someone had the good sense not to throw away. Over time, those stories become more than memories. They become identity. This is who we are. This is what we have survived. This is what we learned. This is what mattered enough that we decided not to forget it. The purpose is not to convince our descendants that we were extraordinary. It is to give them a head start. Our children should know some of the things we learned too late. Our grandchildren should know the stories that taught us what perseverance, courage, faith, failure, and recovery actually look like. Yesterday, my daughter received an award because years of quiet effort finally became visible. She may remember the award. I want her to remember the larger story. And I want her children to know it too.

When people hear the word humility, they instantly think of someone beaten down, stripped of all pride, and suffering a great loss. Many religious people aspire to a higher ideal of becoming humble without having been forced to do so. Over the centuries, a wide variety of creative methods of "bringing a person to their knees" have been invented for this purpose. I think the error in thinking here is that humility is viewed as a trait that can be mastered, when in reality humility is a practice that becomes a disposition. Another view is that humility is simply the concept of thinking less of yourself and more for others, but that is also misguided. I think a better definition is: Humility is the ability to see yourself accurately, including your strengths, limitations, dependence on others, and possibility of being wrong. A confident person can therefore be very humble. In fact, genuine confidence can make humility easier because you don't have to defend your identity every time one of your ideas turns out to be wrong. Viewed in this light, you can start to see why humility can be useful rather than a fictitious state of constant suffering. Without humility, we tend to defend our existing beliefs. New information becomes a threat. With humility, you can say, "I have good reasons for believing this, but I may be missing something." That seemingly small change makes learning dramatically easier. The dangerous person is often not the person who knows little, but the person who doesn't know what they don't know. Humility introduces some questions that a person uses constantly to improve their judgment. They might ask, what assumptions am I making? What evidence would change my mind? Who knows more about this than I do? Where might I be fooling myself? There is also a powerful interpersonal benefit. Humble people tend to be easier to disagree with because disagreement doesn't automatically become a contest over status. They can hear criticism without immediately counterattacking. They can apologize. They can give someone else credit. They can change their minds without feeling humiliated. You can always tell when you have a leader who has humility. They do not have to be the smartest person in the room. They want a room full of people telling them things, and they listen carefully. They are quick to say that they do not know, admit when others are right, accept that they misunderstood, and take corrective action quickly. When you are in an organization with one of these leaders, information flows in an upward direction. I have a tendency toward arrogance. I can tell you with absolute authority that arrogance requires constant maintenance. If your identity depends on being right, competent, important, successful, knowledgeable, or respected, then every mistake becomes threatening. You have to explain failures, protect your reputation, rationalize decisions, and reinterpret criticism. Humility gives you another option, and that is quite simply, "I was wrong." And then life continues. That can be enormously freeing. However, too little ego is absolutely not humility by this definition. Someone who constantly says, "I'm terrible, I don't know anything, everyone else is better than me," may actually be intensely preoccupied with themselves. Humility is not removing yourself completely; it is a paradox. You have the confidence to know that you have something valuable to contribute, but are also willing to believe that you are capable of being wrong. That combination of conviction without certainty may be one of the most valuable mental habits a person can develop. This is what I call humility.

I was speaking with someone who might have literally had stars in their eyes. He was glowing with enthusiasm over his newfound ability to develop complex software using an AI Coding tool. He waxed prophetic, predicting the immediate death of the software development world as we know it. This new technology was a revolution, and pretty soon, even my grandmother will be vibe coding her own SAAS tools. I could not help it; I immediately made a connection in my mind to the Nike Free movement circa 2004. You might remember this, especially if you are a runner. The hype around barefoot running was everywhere, due in large part to a few books that were written on the subject of long-distance runners from indigenous tribes that did remarkably well with minimalist footwear. I remember almost the exact conversation I had about AI coding, but in this situation the starry-eyed young man was talking about his new Vibram FiveFingers shoes. I am sure you remember these: the gloves you would put on your feet and run around in them. In 2001, Nike designer Tobie Hatfield and other members of Nike’s innovation team visited Stanford and watched coach Vin Lananna’s track athletes running barefoot on the grass. Hatfield asked why. Lananna told him he believed the practice gradually strengthened the athletes’ feet, made them less injury-prone, and therefore allowed them to tolerate more training. Hatfield later described that as Nike’s “aha moment.” See reference article here: https://www.designboom.com/design/tobie-hatfield-nike-free-interview-03-19-2014/ There is an important distinction here. The key concept is gradual. Lananna was not apparently telling his athletes, “Shoes are bad, throw them away.” This also was not a new concept. Barefoot running and minimalist training had existed among serious runners for decades. There was a key principle at play: Don't let the equipment do so much work that the body loses the ability to do the work itself. The principle being deployed by the Stanford running team is analogous to a team of expert software developers that start to incorporate new AI coding tools into their practice. The Stanford practice might have been: normal training + carefully dosed barefoot work + soft surface + conditioned elite athletes + coaching supervision. Unfortunately, Nike's big moment became the following: Natural running is better. Buy these shoes and run naturally. Now, in Nike's defense, they had actually built progression into the advertising. They created a free number scale which would help you to slowly migrate from conventional shoes to progression toward barefoot. This is not what happened. The same way no one really buys all the Gatorade drinks for pre-, during-, and post-workouts either. The result was disastrous. A runner who spent 20 years running in conventional shoes had muscles, tendons, and movement patterns adapted accordingly. Put that running suddenly into a flexible, low-drop shoe, and suddenly you are changing where the stress occurs. The injury data that poured in was not good. What Stanford had learned is that the human foot benefits from being strong and allowed to move. That knowledge became a conclusion held by the running community that cushioning, support, conventional shoes, and existing training principles are wrong. We have the same phenomenon happening with AI coding tools today. Experienced engineers use things like abstraction, modularity, tests, source control, code review, architectural boundaries, debugging discipline, and iterative development. AI coding tools observe and automate fragments of those practices. Then the industry starts behaving as though the tool itself has replaced the need for the underlying engineering discipline. AI can automate parts of software engineering. The danger begins when we mistake those automated parts for software engineering itself. Principle–Artifact Confusion occurs when a sophisticated practice is reduced to one visible component; that component is productized, and eventually the product is mistaken for the principle that made the original practice successful. When new technology arrives, there is a tendency to abandon basic principles far too quickly. Novelty makes us believe the old rules no longer apply. We invent new terminology, new processes, new organizational structures, and sometimes entirely new philosophies for problems we already know how to solve. AI does not eliminate the fundamentals of running a good business. Good data still matters. Clear ownership still matters. Security still matters. Customers still matter. Measuring outcomes still matters. Good management still matters. A bad process does not become a good process simply because an AI agent is performing it. Before asking what AI can change, make sure the underlying business principles are sound. Technology should amplify good fundamentals, not provide an excuse to abandon them.

The question is not: "Can I force myself to work today?" The better question is: "Will working today increase or decrease my total usefulness this week?" Many of us believe that by showing up and being present, we are at least doing something. I at least showed up is the prevailing thought in our minds. We practice presenteeism. We keep working while sick, depleted, sleep-deprived, or otherwise functioning well below capacity. Unlike absenteeism, you are technically working, but your output per hour can be dramatically lower, mistakes increase, and recovery may take longer. We don't do the math correctly here. We think we do, but in reality we make the effort-recovery model worse by forcing ourselves to work when we're performing suboptimally. The funny thing is that we instinctively know this; we just choose to ignore it because we somehow believe being present is automatically better than being absent. The science behind recovery, in things like muscle development, is conclusive. The basic idea is that exertion creates physiological and psychological load, and recovery returns you toward baseline. If you keep applying effort without adequate recovery, the load accumulates. In that situation, five days at 40% capacity can sometimes be worse than taking a day or two largely off and then returning at 90–100%. When you show up and perform sub-optimally, you create recovery debt. You think you are helping, but in reality you are extending recovery time. The cycle is: work while depleted → accomplish less → recover more slowly → remain depleted → continue working inefficiently. We are all guilty of this, and we've created a vicious cycle where you feel like you've worked all week but have surprisingly little to show for it. The core principle to remember is: Rest can be an investment in future productive capacity rather than the absence of productivity. However, do keep in mind. Rest isn't watching Netflix all day while eating ice cream. If that is your solution, then just go ahead and muddle through the workday because you are NOT recovering. Lie to yourself all that you want, but this is simply not rest. Often the fastest recovery is deliberate recovery: sleep, food, hydration, sunlight, walking, low cognitive demand, reduced obligations, and genuinely disconnecting from work. So, maybe it's less about pushing through every single moment and more about finding that sweet spot where you're actually building yourself up, not just wearing yourself down. It's like, instead of just trying to fill every minute with "doing," we could try to be a bit more intentional about how we recharge. Think of it as giving yourself the best chance to show up as your best self, not just showing up.

There is great danger in judging the value of a life from its present condition. A human life is a long trajectory, but we tend to encounter people as snapshots. We see who they are now and unconsciously let that moment rewrite everything that came before it. When I was in high school, my aunt and I drove around downtown, taking pictures of random people. I was trying to get on the yearbook staff as a photographer. The only people around that afternoon were the homeless. I came across one of the photos I took of one of these men, with a bright smile and a jovial expression. I remember the moment; the man looked passive and distant as he stared out at the street, invisible to everyone who passed by. Then, suddenly, out of nowhere, a young kid and his aunt came rushing in and asked to take his picture. He asked what for, and I explained to him that I needed to submit a bunch of pictures to an advisor to go along with my application to be a staff photographer. He said something to the effect, "Well, in that case, we'd better make this look good." So he smiled, and I took his picture. I did get on the yearbook staff, and ended up taking most of the photos that show up in our high school yearbook. Unfortunately, I got into some trouble late in the year, and they removed my name from any attribution. So the few months of my emerging career as a photographer came to a quick end. What did I do wrong, you might ask? I sold yearbook advertising to an organization that wasn't exactly a great look for the school. A story for another day. Anyway, at that moment in time, I viewed that man as a homeless person. His entire lifetime of experiences had been reduced to my momentary view of him. I have no idea what he did after that, or what he did before that, but in my mind he was just another homeless person. All too often we let the present condition become the identity for others and often ourselves. We are all this homeless person at least one point in our lives. We all have a bad day, a bad moment, a time when we are at our lowest point. If someone took our picture at that moment, we would be forever captured and judged by that snapshot. However, our value is not a snapshot, and we intrinsically know this. The stories of Jesus healing the stranger, talking to the woman at the well, or feeling his virtue leave him by the touch of a stranger all resonate with us because we all desperately cling to the idea that all of our contributions over time must mean more than their present value. It gives us hope that the life we have lived has accumulated value and that the worth of our soul is indeed great. The modern way of thinking that human worth must continuously justify itself through current productivity. That standard becomes particularly cruel because nearly everyone eventually loses under it. Strength fades. Cognitive ability can decline. Careers end. Circumstances change. Eventually, most of us will need more from other people than we are presently capable of giving them. Someone's worth should not depend entirely upon whether their lifetime ledger happens to show a positive balance. But recognizing the difference between a lifetime and a snapshot is an important place to begin.

I stood in line at a pharmacy today, waiting to check out. The self-checkout machines were down again, and the CVS pharmacy attendant was the only one working in the building. The poor woman had 1 person asking for the restroom code, 2 people frustrated because the red light was blinking above their checkout machine, several people asking for access to a locked-down product, and 10 people, including me, waiting patiently in line to check out. Although this is not the point of this article, if you ever want to know the state of affairs in your community, the impact of cost-cutting measures in large corporations, and the degree to which petty crimes are impacting your neighborhood, then look no further than your neighborhood CVS. The fact that this place remains open is nothing short of a miracle. Needless to say, I had some time to myself while I waited in line. Nancy was absolutely earning her $20 bucks an hour this morning. She made one of the patrons realize that the order he was having trouble placing was worth more than she would make all day. I think she should be excused for her indiscretion; she at least showed up to work this morning. While standing in line, I was eye level with a large cooler reserved for energy drinks. Most of them had been purchased, or perhaps stolen. The young man in front of me had some rather bulging pockets, and I was suspicious. Anyone, one of the remaining energy drinks was the brand Lucky. On the back of the can is a message about the founders' narrow escape from a plane crash in 1985, just outside the Dallas/ Fort Worth Airfield (Delta Flight 191). I have never read this story before, but I had a minute to scan the QR code and read how Richard Laver decided to name the company after a bracelet his son gave him that said, "Lucky F&ck!" Apparently, Richard had not only been one of the few survivors of this plane crash, but his daughter had also barely survived being born with cerebral palsy. I thought about this experience and started asking myself: can or should an event like this define you? I suppose if you were a survivor, the answer would be an absolute yes, but if you were not, maybe not so much. A few things about this plane crash that interested me. First, I was about the same age as Richard at the time. I believe I was getting ready to start high school, and there was discussion of me traveling back and forth from Colorado to California. I remember the discussion of this plane crash, and although I cannot say this is exactly why, I ended up taking the bus instead of flying. I was reminded of this recently when a plane I was supposed to board in Texas was grounded because of a thunderstorm. When I asked, they said it was because of concerns about microbursts, which apparently became a primary concern after this particular plane crash. As I read the back of this energy soda, I was reminded that this event sparked much more than a great story of one founder's journey. My parents had bought me a personal computer later that year. I didn't realize then how significant a purchase it was, but it was. A lot had happened that year that would impact my entire career. In 1985, Well Online would start. This San Francisco-based user group would gain rapid popularity. I joined the group in 1987, and by then, it had already become famous for many "first on the Internet" claims. Ironically, and tragically, one of the creators of the original IBM PC was on this fateful plane when it crashed. He, his wife, and several other IBM employees died during that accident. That was Philip Estridge, and that same year, also in the Dallas area, a young man named Michael Dell started selling and assembling his "Turbo PC" out of his dorm room at the University of Texas. To cap off what a pivotal year this was, the National Science Foundation used TCP/IP to launch the first major connection between several Universities and called it the NSFNET. Have you ever been talking to people about where to sit on a plane and they tell you to sit in the tail because it is safer? Not sure if that is true or not, but the reason they say this is because several of the 27 survivors of this particular plane crash were in the tail part of the plane when it broke apart in the failed landing. I am pretty sure that's where the story comes from, because it was such a big deal in the news at the time. You could call Richard lucky, because I do not believe his father and he were seated in the tail section of the plane. He survived, but with several significant injuries. Sadly, his father did not make it. After that incident, there were no other major fatal airline crashes involving a commercial passenger plane for 16 years. Flight 3407 in 2009, and the next was that accident last year, when Flight 5342 collided with a Black Hawk helicopter out of Washington National. If we exclude acts of terrorism and what the NTSB calls Part 121 accidents, then Richard Laver survived at the beginning of a massive transformation in airline safety. So I have to conclude that an event can be transformative in our lives. A lucky day can impact many lives at once and create a ripple effect that begins with one person. Will this moment, reading a story on the back of a can while waiting for Nancy to get through her line this morning, change me? Perhaps it will. Perhaps today will be my lucky day.

My garage is currently winning. Not decisively. There has been no surrender ceremony, and I still technically control the territory, but it has established a strong defensive position. Every time I think about cleaning it, I immediately see everything that needs to be done at once: shelves that need reorganizing, tools that need homes, a collection of wasp nests that apparently believe they have permanent leases, and a broken e-scooter that has been sitting there long enough that I am beginning to suspect it is no longer a repair project and is simply part of the garage. A black widow has also established permanent residence in one of the windows. She has been there long enough that removing her now somehow feels less like pest control and more like eviction. I am seriously considering putting a small sign above the window that reads Charlotte and allowing the arrangement to become official. Then there are the spiderwebs in every location that is just barely out of reach, which I assume is intentional, and the vast assortment of things that belong to the most dangerous category of garage possessions: I Should Probably Keep That. This category includes old bolts, pieces of wire, half-used cans of something, questionable scraps of lumber, mysterious brackets, and at least one object I cannot identify but am absolutely certain I will need approximately three days after throwing it away. So I will occasionally walk into the garage with the sincere intention of doing something about all of this, look around for a moment, absorb the full scope of the problem, and quietly return to the house. I have realized that this is the real problem. When I tell myself that I need to clean the garage, my brain does not interpret that as a series of small jobs. It tries to contemplate the entire project at once. Every shelf, every box, every decision about what to keep, every trip to the dump, every tool that needs a better home, the eventual resurrection of the e-scooter, and apparently a future negotiation with Charlotte over property rights all arrive in my head at the same time. No wonder I do not want to start. What I have been calling a lack of motivation is probably something closer to task paralysis. The project has become so large in my mind that simply thinking about it produces enough resistance to keep me from beginning. So I have changed the assignment. I am no longer cleaning the garage. I am cleaning one shelf. Maybe I fill one trash bag. Maybe I put ten tools where they belong. Maybe I spend fifteen minutes dealing with a single pile and then walk away. Whatever I choose, the job has to be small enough that my brain cannot reasonably argue that it is overwhelming. This feels almost embarrassingly insignificant compared with the scale of the garage, but that is exactly the point. I do not need enough motivation to launch a heroic weekend campaign against several years of accumulated disorder. I only need enough motivation to begin something small. And, predictably, once I begin, the garage becomes much less intimidating. One shelf leads to another. Ten pieces of trash become twenty. I notice something nearby that can be fixed in five minutes, and somewhere along the way momentum starts replacing dread. Usually this continues until my wife appears at the door wondering why I have not come in for supper yet. So the garage survives another day. But it has lost a shelf. Tomorrow, perhaps, I will take another one. Charlotte, however, appears to have tenure.

I came across an interesting study that demonstrates that, within a population of people being tracked, they are speaking less and less each year. The study by Pfeifer, V. A., & Mehl, M. R. (2026) found that the population of people under the age of 25 was, in fact, having fewer conversations throughout the day. This trend seems to be consistent over time. There are several reasons this matters. First, conversation helps us think. Human thought is remarkably dependent on language. When you try to explain something to another person, vague intuitions have to become sentences. Contradictions become visible. Assumptions that felt obvious suddenly need justification. This is why saying, "Let me talk this through," genuinely works. The other person is partly functioning as an external cognitive system. Second, conversation calibrates reality. Alone, you can construct an internally coherent interpretation of almost anything. Other people introduce friction. They say, "I don't think that's what happened," "Have you considered this?" or simply look confused. Conversation continuously tests our private models against other human beings' models. In that sense, it is one of our most important defenses against self-deception. Third, conversation regulates emotion. Humans are deeply social mammals. Describing something frightening, painful, exciting, or confusing to another person often changes the experience itself. The event has not changed, but the brain is no longer processing it entirely alone. Another person's attention, facial expressions, tone, questions, and reassurance can help regulate stress and uncertainty. Fourth, conversation creates relationships. Relationships are not maintained merely by exchanging useful information. Much human conversation is apparently "unnecessary": jokes, stories, gossip, observations about the weather, remembering something that happened twenty years ago. Yet these exchanges continually communicate something more fundamental: "I see you. You see me. We still belong to one another." That may be much of the actual purpose of everyday conversation. Fifth, conversation creates identity. We partly discover who we are by explaining ourselves. Someone asks what you believe, what happened, why you made a decision, what you want next. In answering, you construct a narrative about yourself. Other people then accept, challenge, modify, or reinforce that narrative. The self is therefore not entirely something sitting privately inside the skull. Some portion of it is constructed socially. And finally, conversation is how human intelligence became collective intelligence. One human brain is impressive. Thousands of brains capable of exchanging ideas are qualitatively different. Language allows knowledge to survive the individual. Conversation allows ideas to be corrected and recombined. Writing extends that conversation across centuries. Civilization itself is largely accumulated conversation. This makes me think there is an interesting danger in the modern world. We have become extraordinarily good at receiving language without participating in conversation. Podcasts, videos, social media, television, articles, and now AI can fill virtually every silent moment with words. But consuming language is not the same thing as talking with another human being. Conversation requires you to formulate your own thoughts, notice another person's reactions, tolerate disagreement, repair misunderstandings, wait your turn, read emotion, change your mind, and expose some portion of your internal world to another person. Those may not be incidental features of conversation. They may be what conversation is for. Pfeifer, V. A., & Mehl, M. R. (2026). Sliding Into Silence? We Are Speaking 300 Daily Words Fewer Every Year. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 21(4), 447-449. https://doi.org/10.1177/17456916261425131.

If there was not enough evidence already that I am a complete geek, I found myself reading a bunch of articles published by Daniel Yon at the Uncertainty Lab at the University of London. That is right, this actually exists. There is a lab dedicated to studying the human brain's capacity to deal with uncertainty. This is a concept that has always fascinated me. I recognized this at a young age: we humans have this unique ability to deal with what is not there. I noticed this in my dog as a young kid and how he really struggled understanding what happened when something went missing. He had very limited ability to even process something that was not in his immediate view. However, humans are quite capable of identifying, understanding, and processing things that are not in our immediate purview. We can cope with things out of our control, and sometimes we can even pretend that we actually have control over things that we do not. I think that seems to be the basis of the work I read by Mr. Yon. I was thinking about superstition in this regard. I was reading about one of the famous White Sox baseball players from the early 1900s. Apparently, he had a superstition about carrying some small sticks or twigs in his back pocket during games. He would fidget with them constantly, and he had a superstition that he had to have them in his pocket to have even a chance of winning the game. He actually believed that having a few matchsticks in his back pocket would influence or control the outcome of a game. Did he really believe this? Perhaps. However, if you stop and think about this a moment, we do this all the time. We have accumulated hundreds of cause and effect paradigms that we catalog in our own minds in order to exert control over our environments. Some of these are real, some are incredibly far-fetched, and most of them are a combination, meaning they do have an impact, just not as big of an impact as we give it attribution for. Often times we tie this to things like prayer or other religious practice. "If I go to church, or if I pray, or if I pay my offerings this week, then I will get what I want" is the shorthand for the reasoning we play out in our minds. I am not debating if that is true or not; what I am indicating is this profound concept that we as humans cope with uncertainty by evaluating what we have control over. We can take giant mental leaps that we know are probably not true, but once we have seen a cause and effect scenario play out a few times, we convince ourselves that our little action has far greater control than it actually has. This is perhaps the reason we are so fascinated by superheroes in our society: people that can climb walls, fly, shoot laser beams from their eyes, or bend the laws of nature in our favor. We are attracted to this idea because we also do this ourselves, just on a more subtle level, or at least most of us do. I have heard people make some audacious claims about their luck, or their bad luck, or the penchant for a certain outcome. My mom, for instance, is convinced that if she watches a USC football game, then they will lose. She is convinced because nearly every time that she has done this, they have indeed lost. You would think that the coaching staff of Notre Dame or UCLA would hire my mother to just sit there and watch the USC game live when it happens, but they have not called yet. Does my mom have control over the outcomes of football games by merely watching them? No. I do not think that she really believes this, but there is no denying the cause and effect relationship. This is what our brains focus on and capture without us even noticing. We are always evaluating cause and effect. It is how we survive, and we are incredibly good at it. We may not be able to control our environments, but we want to believe we can, which is fascinating: that we can imagine that something we cannot see is at play to help us control an environment that we have little actual control over. The question becomes, what role does our agency really play in our lives? We live in systems where we rarely have either 0% control or 100% control. The difficult intellectual task is figuring out whether our actions have a little influence, a lot of influence, or merely coincidental association. I think the wisdom I gained from Daniel Yon is that this ability for us to fool ourselves into the illusion of control is not a bad thing; it actually has served us well. It is wise to therefore consider how sensitive we might be to weak relationships of causality and to learn to filter out those and instead calibrate ourselves more to the actions that I can take that do have some measure of actual impact.

Beware of the cognitive magic pill. We used to describe these as snake oil in the last century, and in modern times they are peddled with just as much veracity. If you go on to any social platform and scroll a while, you will see them, usually because they pull at you. They offer an alluring solution to a range of your problems, all easily solved with some magic pill. A solution that requires your engagement, your subscription, or your attention. A recent example is cortisol. The recent fad is to blame all of your common human problems on cortisol, which has been rebranded as the "stress hormone." This is the perfect example of a cognitive magic trick. It sounds technical enough to win some credibility. You have heard this a few times before by now, so you are not immediately suspicious, and your brain easily accepts that stress causes all these problems. So you naturally, and cognitively, are willing to make the giant leap that cortisol is the cause of all your stress and therefore the cause of all your problems. This, of course, is not reality. True, cortisol is produced by your adrenal glands, and true it is a steroid. However, to call it the stress hormone is a stretch. That might be a label we would assign to adrenaline, but even that would be incorrect. Cortisol is an important chemical. It is tied to your daily rhythm. It is probably what makes you feel awake, as it is at the highest levels when you first get out of bed. It is what makes you feel energetic and is needed to regulate your blood pressure, keep inflammation and immune activity under control, and use stored fat as energy. Yes, it helps you prepare to deal with stress, but not because it is some adverse chemical that, if we were to get rid of it, we would become stress-free. You remember the shake weights from a few years ago? A thing you could hold in your hand and it would move aggressively, and you had to hold on to it. Doing this would cause you to tense your muscles and, therefore, was considered a new form of exercise that would magically turn you into a fit, healthy, gorgeous supermodel. We all knew this was ridiculous, but if you were up late at night feeling discouraged about your weight and you came across a post about this. You might buy it because it was offering a solution to several of the problems you were experiencing. If you kept watching, you might actually believe the science behind it, and sure enough, arriving on your doorstep in that Amazon package is your new pair of shake weights. It is important to understand this attempt by people to use our desire for "things to make sense" as a tool to encourage us to pay attention. All too often, we find ourselves falling for this trick as it masquerades in many costumes. What you call silly, another will buy immediately. What you think is outrageous, your neighbor is receiving that package right now on their doorstep. So, next time you hear about some new "magic bullet" for life's challenges, maybe take a beat. Instead of jumping on the latest trend, consider what's really going on with your own body and mind. It's less about finding a quick fix and more about understanding the nuanced dance of how we tick. Sometimes, the most powerful insights come from simply paying attention to ourselves, rather than chasing after the next big thing someone's trying to sell us.

I have often pondered what art is. Creative outlets are just as much a part of human existence as eating or sleeping. Since the beginning of time, we have been expressing ourselves or trying to understand ourselves through artistic expression. Does form follow function, or does function follow form? The age-old debate. I am looking at two tape measures sitting on my desk. I was working on a project and for some reason collected two tape measures. One of them is ugly, bulky, but highly functional. The numbers are easy to read, the action is clean, and it even has a belt clip, if you were so inclined to attach it to your belt. On close inspection, it has many features captured that you may not notice on casual use. It has a place to nail the end of it into place so that you can measure a longer distance. It has glow-in-the-dark numbers, and it has various markers for convenience depending on what you are working on. This is the epitome of form following function. On the other hand, the other tape measure, the one that I actually used, is a much simpler device. It is smaller, made out of a brushed metal, and just looks cool. I like to hold it because it is rather fun to fiddle with. Not only is it a decent tape measure, but it also serves as a fidget spinner. This tape measure serves its purpose. I can measure things, well, at least most things. It is shorter, has fewer features, but it looks like a retro tool from the early 1900s and has a die-cast look that is attractive. This tape measure is a representation of function following form. You can tell that the aim of the manufacturer was to produce a tape measure that you would not mind carrying in your satchel. That choice of word was deliberate because the wielder of the satchel would probably care about such a matter. So you might argue that the second tape measure was more art. Then, of course, you would get into an argument with those that believe that art should be, at its very nature, functional. Meaning something is not really artistic unless it serves a function. Not sure I believe that, but I know that camp exists. Well, I got introduced to a new argument, and that is that art does not precede or follow function, but rather captures the form. That is interesting. We all use light switches, and they all have a form, but what if someone truly captured its form? Brought it to life so that you could experience the light switch and instantly understand the connection it has to almost the entire human family. That would definitely be artistic. In the middle of the New Mexico desert, in 1971, a man named Charles Ross started building what he is now calling the Star Axis. Go to the website at staraxis.org and watch the documentary. He has not finished the project yet. They are saying it will be done in the next year or so. This ambitious project started out with one primary purpose, which has now extended into other areas, and that was to capture the journey of the North Star, or more officially, the star known as Polaris. Humankind has been staring up into the heavens and looking at this star since we took our first steps. It is one of the constants in the heavens, and civilizations have been tracking it through various means for multiple millennia. A few years ago, I ran a race out in the Nevada desert that went into the night. While running in nearly pitch-black conditions, my headlamp ran out of batteries. While I sat on a rock trying to fiddle with putting new batteries in, I suddenly could start to see better. That is when I looked up and realized the night sky was full of light. I know this, of course, but when you live in a crowded area, the light pollution can sometimes make you forget just how many stars are visible with the naked eye in a dark sky. I sat there for a few minutes and just connected with all my ancestors in a flash of recognition that they had also seen this same night sky. Perhaps that is what Charles Ross is intending to capture with his project. What is fascinating about his project is that as you walk up these stairs and look up, you can see a circle, and if you are on the correct stair, the star Polaris will actually go around that circle. The reason is the Earth has a wobble, and that wobble follows a highly predictable pattern, and it is slowly shifting. I believe I read somewhere that our North Star might eventually become the star Vega instead because of this persistent and shifting wobble in the Earth's rotation. So Charles Ross describes this as moving forward yet backward in time as you see the same pattern people might have seen thousands of years ago while you are on a particular step. So I think I can definitely call this art. Charles Ross is truly capturing the form here. We are all surrounded by light, and we all have this one constant to stare up at each night. Just like the common light switch that binds us all, so too are we all staring up at the heavens and seeing the fixed position of the North Star, but of course, with a little bit of wobble thrown in just to keep us guessing.

Let's pretend for a moment that you could take your brain, as it is right now, copy it into a computer system, and then it suddenly becomes an advanced AI engine that you could ask questions to and get rapid responses. Would you trust it? My answer would be absolutely NO WAY. My brain is prone to taking shortcuts, embellishing facts for effect, always with a self-preservation bias, and any commentary I make is probably based on wild assumptions about what I know. I am also highly keen on what I have forgotten, which is considerable. So I am always shocked when I read news reports about Artificial Intelligence becoming closer to human capability. That scares me, actually. Human capability is not really what I would ever use an AI engine for, unless it was menial, highly repetitive work. Let's face it, we will use AI more when it does BETTER than a human and costs less, and that is the reality. So this judgment we make about AI being stupid or smart is decidedly misdirected. Of course AI is going to be faster than a human. Of course, AI will be better at factual recall than a human, and it will most certainly be able to perform repetitive tasks consistently over a long period without getting tired. However, an AI agent will never be a human, nor will it ever think like a human, and it is silly to think that we would ever want it to. Most AI systems today have the reasoning power of a five-year-old, but the brain capacity and speed that would outpace billions of humans, so there simply is no comparison here. I would not give commands to a five-year-old and then complain that the five-year-old did not "get it." So when we get frustrated at AI, we are clearly frustrated by more than the reality. We are frustrated with our expectation, which is a highly interesting self-reflection exercise - the point of this discussion. Yesterday I got frustrated because an AI agent I was building kept asking for clarification on a couple of important items before implementing a fix. It would halt all forward progress, ask a question, and then wait for a response before proceeding. I was upset by this and wanted it to continue, essentially guess the right answer and move on. Do not bug me until you are done was my attitude. I realized after I was typing an emotional response to a Large Language Model that has no emotion at all, just the profound ability to predict the most likely next word in a sentence, that I was getting emotional because of my inadequacy and not the machine. You see, I did not want to put the effort in to create a plan. I did not want to think about what I wanted. Instead, I wanted the AI to do that for me, and I wanted it to do all my human-level thinking for me. Of course the model broke down for the same reason a five-year-old would break down if you asked her to drive to a liquor store and buy a premium scotch and get it gift-wrapped and sent to my friend for his birthday - make no mistakes. First off, the five-year-old might not even be able to process this, and if they could, what questions would they ask? They may not even ask questions; they will most likely just make statements. Daddy, I cannot drive, or Daddy, what is scotch? Or I do not even know what a liquor store is. Yet here I was getting emotional and typing ALL CAPS to my AI Agent because it would not just "think" for me. I was really upset with myself. I knew the AI would not and could not do this. I knew that if I forced it, then it would guess and guess badly. Yet, I persisted. I was lazy, and I knew it. This made me even madder because there was only one way out of this: actually do some thinking, create a plan, narrow that plan into discrete execution steps, and then pass it on to my agentic AI Swarm. I am glad I mentioned AI Swarm, because there is a ton of hype on this subject right now. People are claiming to have these large hives of AI agents that are thinking autonomously and building their own communities. This is absolutely NOT true. What is happening in reality is they have built a loop that effectively asks an AI agent to meet an objective, and after each turn, evaluate that objective, and if the objective is not met, then take what it learned, consider recommendations for improvement, and make another attempt. This is really just an unbounded loop that was assigned to an AI model. If you think about it, this is completely irresponsible, and you would not do this with humans. You would not give them an unlimited budget, access to all resources, and then loop them into eternity until they accomplish an undefined and impossible objective. It seems that being irresponsible with resources is the same with humans as it is with machines! So, maybe the real takeaway here isn't AI's flaws, but what it reveals about us. When we get frustrated with AI, or when it "hallucinates," it's often a mirror reflecting our own tendencies, our own data, and sometimes, our own lack of clarity. Instead of just expecting AI to be perfect, perhaps we can see these moments as chances to get a little more intentional about how we communicate, how we think, and what kind of information we're putting out there. It's less about fixing the machine and more about understanding the human element that shapes it.

Believe in God or do not believe. Honestly, for the purposes of this post, that is not important. I personally believe in God, I have no qualms stating that unequivocally, but I am not writing this to convince you of anything theological. I am writing this to convince you of something far more practical. You need God. Humanity needs God. Let me explain why. Humans have a strange problem. We are walking around with these enormously complex brains that can imagine the future, evaluate ourselves from the outside, build moral systems, sacrifice for people we have never met, and chase goals that take decades to accomplish. No other species does this. A hungry animal looks for food. A threatened animal runs. That is the whole program. Not us. We can be hungry and choose to fast. We can be terrified and walk into the danger anyway. We can turn down money because taking it would violate a principle. We can forgive when revenge would feel so much better. We are capable of overriding what we want in the moment because we believe something else matters more. Which brings up the real question. What sits at the top? Every one of us has a hierarchy of values, whether we consciously built one or not. Something eventually becomes the measuring stick that everything else gets held up against. Might be money. Might be success. Might be family, political ideology, pleasure, reputation, power, or just ourselves. Here is the problem. None of those work very well as an ultimate value. Money is useful, but it makes a terrible god. Put money at the top and eventually almost anything can be justified in its pursuit. Success is valuable, but dangerous as a god. Put achievement on the throne and watch relationships, health, and integrity quietly become expendable. Politics might be the most frightening god of all. Once a political cause becomes sacred, disagreement becomes heresy and your neighbor becomes your enemy. Even family, and I consider almost nothing more important than family, becomes destructive if loyalty demands that I defend behavior I know is wrong. Humans seem to need something above all of these things. Something that says money matters, but not that much. Achievement matters, but not that much. Your tribe matters, but not that much. Even your own life is not necessarily the highest thing you are capable of valuing. This is where God enters the picture. Whether you believe God literally exists or not, the concept performs an extraordinarily important function in the human mind. The ideal sits outside of our body, and that ideal is God. Something higher than us against which we can measure ourselves. Truth above my preferred version of events. Goodness above my immediate desires. Justice above my self-interest. Love above my resentment. God provides a fixed point outside ourselves. That matters, because human beings are spectacularly good at moving the goalposts. If I am the final authority on what is right, then give me enough time and I will slowly redefine "right" until it happens to resemble whatever I currently want. We do this constantly. We rationalize anger. We justify selfishness. We excuse in ourselves what we would condemn in anyone else. A concept of God creates resistance to that whole process. It asks a deeply uncomfortable question. What if the standard does not move just because I do? Now, this also changes how you think about prayer. If God exists primarily to manipulate circumstances on my behalf, prayer quickly becomes ridiculous. God, put a billion dollars in my account. God, make me win. God, make everyone agree with me. That is not prayer, that is a cosmic vending machine, and I do not blame anyone for being skeptical of it. But consider a different kind of prayer. Help me control my anger. Help me see where I am wrong. Help me have the courage to do what I already know I should do. Help me forgive this person. Help me stay honest when dishonesty would benefit me. Help me endure something I cannot change. Help me keep the most important things the most important. Those prayers make an extraordinary amount of sense. Prayer, viewed this way, is an act of alignment. The struggle between your will and something higher than your will. You stop reacting to the immediate world, you consider your life from a higher perspective, you examine what you want and question why you want it. You stop merely asking, what do I want? You start asking the far better question. What should I want? Perhaps that is one of the most valuable functions God serves in a human life. God prevents temporary things from becoming ultimate things. God reminds the wealthy man that money is not the highest good. God reminds the powerful man that power is temporary. God reminds the angry man that justice and revenge are not the same thing. God reminds all of us that there just might be something more important than ourselves. You can argue endlessly about whether God exists. Humans have been at that argument for thousands of years and I suspect we have thousands more in us. But there is another question that may be just as important. What happens to a human being when nothing exists above them? When there is no higher standard, something else takes the throne. It always does. Money. Power. Politics. Pleasure. Tribe. Ego. We always put something up there. So perhaps the question is not whether human beings will worship. Perhaps the question is simply what we will worship. That is why I believe we need God. Not because God should give us everything we want. Quite the opposite. We need God precisely because we need something that teaches us that everything we want should not necessarily be ours. We need something above ourselves that calls us upward, reminds us who we are trying to become, and keeps forcing us to reconsider what deserves to matter most. So believe in God or don't. But choose very carefully what you put in God's place.

The slow accumulation of incremental improvements is indeed what makes good habits so powerful. However, this process cannot be mindless. If you simply go through the motions without reinforcing in your mind what you are doing and why, the positive benefits will quickly degrade. I've often emphasized that small things matter. A single workout won't transform your life. Writing one paragraph won't make you an author. Saving a few dollars won't make you wealthy. Reading ten pages won't make you wise. But consistently doing these things, over a long enough period, can lead to something remarkable. At least, that's the theory. Yet, there's a crucial qualification to this idea that we sometimes overlook. Small actions don't automatically compound just because we repeat them. Repetition is necessary, but it's not sufficient on its own. You can do something every day and still find yourself going nowhere. This might sound almost heretical coming from someone who has dedicated years to the concept of daily commitment, but it's an important distinction. Researchers Mathias Berggren and Jessica Kay Flake recently published an interesting statistical illustration in Perspectives on Psychological Science. They examined the common assumption that small psychological effects naturally accumulate into significant long-term consequences. Their conclusion wasn't that small effects are meaningless; quite the opposite. Their argument was that accumulation depends on the structure of the system. Under the right conditions, small effects can absolutely become large ones. However, those conditions are more restrictive than we tend to assume. Small deviations can weaken the effect, other forces can counteract it, and the environment can even neutralize it. In some circumstances, the long-term effect can even move in the opposite direction. This caught my attention because it applies remarkably well to habits. Imagine you decide to exercise every morning. For six months, you dutifully walk into the gym, spend thirty minutes moving around, check the box on your habit tracker, and leave. Technically, you've been extraordinarily consistent. But what if you never increase the weight? What if you never pay attention to your form? What if you spend half the workout looking at your phone? What if your diet progressively worsens because you subconsciously believe the exercise gives you permission to eat whatever you want? You've maintained the habit while slowly eliminating much of its benefit. The same thing can happen with almost anything. You can read every day without thinking deeply about what you're reading. You can write every day without striving to become a better writer. You can pray every day while barely considering the words coming out of your mouth. You can spend time with your children every evening while staring at a screen. The activity continues, but the intention disappears. This is where mindlessness becomes dangerous. Habits are powerful partly because they reduce the amount of conscious effort required to perform an action. That's the great advantage of a habit: you no longer have to negotiate with yourself every morning about whether you're going to do the thing. But that advantage contains a trap. The easier an action becomes to perform automatically, the easier it becomes to forget why you started doing it. Eventually, the habit can become a ritual whose original purpose has been lost. I believe this is why reflection must be part of any meaningful system of personal improvement. You occasionally need to reconnect the action with the reason behind it. Why am I running? Why am I writing? Why am I saving money? Why am I studying this? Why did I make this commitment in the first first place? These questions keep the habit pointed in the right direction. The real power of a daily commitment isn't simply that you performed an action 365 times. The power comes from creating a loop in which the action reinforces the person you are trying to become. You run, and in doing so, remind yourself that you are becoming someone capable of running farther. You write, and begin noticing how your writing could become clearer. You study, and recognize connections you couldn't see before. You serve someone, and become more attentive to opportunities to serve again. The action produces feedback. The feedback changes you. The changed person approaches tomorrow's action a little differently. That is compounding. It is not simply repetition. This distinction matters because we love simple formulas: "Do this every day." "Never break the chain." "Get one percent better." "Trust the process." There's wisdom in all of these ideas, but none of them are magic. A process only deserves your trust if it's taking you somewhere worth going. Every once in a while, look up. Ask whether the thing you've been faithfully repeating is still producing the result you intended. Adjust the process. Increase the difficulty. Remove something that's interfering with it. Reconnect the action to its purpose. Then keep going. Small things can become enormous things over time. That remains one of the most powerful principles I know. But they compound only when we protect the effect. Consistency gives us the repetitions. Attention makes the repetitions count.

This seems like an obvious thing to say, but I was struck by this thought when I woke up this morning and discovered that one of the systems that I had built exhausted all of its funding. When I went to check on why, I learned that the AI system that was performing the operation was stuck in a loop and had exhausted all of the credits allocated to it. The loop was silly; it was a small error that tripped everything up, and the system had been looping through this same error for over 48 hours. The only reason it caught my attention is because the credit allocation was exhausted, and I got an alert in my email indicating the problem. Which made me realize something critical. I will use my sprinkler system as an example. I put in this wireless sprinkler system, which allows me to control everything from my home automation system. It was a great improvement over my old timer system that was always breaking and difficult to understand. However, a few weeks ago, a real estate agent knocked on my door to inform me that there was a large puddle of water collecting in my side yard. They were asking me if I could fix it because they were showing a neighboring property and wanted to clean up the fence line. I hadn't noticed this issue because the trouble spot is only visible from the corner of my house. You would have to physically walk over there to see it. Upon investigation, I realized that I could have known this issue was happening. My system had been generating a few alerts that my water usage was higher than usual. These were logged entries that I had ignored because the sprinkler system has many notifications that I have just trained myself to ignore after a while. So a leak was occurring; the system detected it, and despite me getting alerts to this fact, the automated system kept turning on every morning at 2 AM. The leak kept saturating the fence line until eventually a giant puddle had started to develop unbeknownst to me. It took a knock at my door for me to be alerted by the rather obvious problem on the east side of my fence line. In this case, the automated loop was completely unsupervised. Just like my unfortunate AI loop, the system kept performing the function, despite the fact that it was wasting resources. It had no sensor or methodology for knowing it was continuously pursuing an automated loop that was no longer serving its purpose. My epiphany is that we often create processes, both in our lives and in our businesses, that we want to run on autopilot. We want it to just happen. Now that I have the marketing team finally working and in place, I want them to just do their job and let me move onto other things. Now that I have this AI doing this annoying thing for me, I want it to just run so that I never have to deal with it again. You see, we create systems and processes in a vain hope that it absolves us of responsibility. It does not. What it does is reduce the amount of mental energy and time we have to allocate to the process, but it does not clear us from the requirement to perform some level of supervision. We often consider supervision as a reactionary requirement. I fixed the sprinklers after the real estate agent sunk her $500 heels into a foot of mud. I fixed my AI loop after I discovered that my rogue agent had spent all the token budget on a worthless process for 48 hours. Supervision is and can never be considered a reactionary requirement. The concept is essentially designed to be proactive. The more automated things become, the more necessary supervision becomes. The real implication is in our daily lives. I have routines that I follow. They are mostly on autopilot. When I wake up, I follow this routine, and it really does not deviate much. If I am not careful, if there is something unhealthy in this routine, several months will go by before I discover the negative impact that routine has had on my health. Routine habit is great when it is beneficial to you, but you must monitor these repetitive behaviors. Often they are repeating an action that is also causing you harm. For example, my morning routine is mostly good for me. It helps me stay hydrated, in a good mindset, improves my physical stamina, and several other benefits. However, one day I noticed that my knee was starting to hurt. I realized that where I was sitting each morning, I had this habit of tucking my leg underneath my other leg when I sat to write. The knee pain was being caused by this repetitive motion, and I only noticed this mindless behavior after I started experiencing discomfort. So, maybe the real takeaway here isn't about ditching automation or trying to micromanage every little thing. It's more about finding that sweet spot where we let things run smoothly, but also keep an eye on the bigger picture. It’s like having a good co-pilot; you trust them to fly the plane, but you’re still there, checking the instruments and making sure you’re headed in the right direction. It’s about building in those little check-ins, those moments where we pause and ask, "Is this still working for me? Is this still serving its purpose?" Because even the best systems, whether they're digital or just our daily routines, can sometimes go a little off course without us even realizing it. It’s not about being paranoid, just present enough to steer things back on track when they need a gentle nudge.

It has long been discussed by psychologists, theologians, and other circles that holding onto feelings of guilt is bad for your health. Carrying a heavy burden of shame around for things that you did wrong can have serious consequences in your life. The recommendation is to always seek restitution or to make apologies where possible. There is a reason why many major religions have included some form of confession along with a process around repentance. Confession, or admittance to wrongdoing, can go a long way toward absolving or relieving a person of guilty feelings. I recently stumbled upon a fascinating video from Aeon, titled "The Conscience Files," which delves into the intriguing phenomenon of visitors to Arizona's Petrified Forest National Park who, after pilfering souvenirs, mail them back with letters of apology. This documentary, found here, isn't a scientific study, but rather a compelling cultural observation. It highlights a recurring pattern: individuals attempting to rectify a moral transgression through confession, restitution, and a desire to make amends. It's a powerful testament to the human need to "drop the rocks" of guilt and seek a form of personal absolution. In many cultures, superstition will develop around this concept of harboring guilt for wrongdoing. Stories of hauntings, vengeful spirits, or just bad luck will circulate until they become folklore and then mythology. Perhaps some of them are true, but one thing is absolutely certain: Humans do carry guilt around with them, and that guilt can often impact their lives in direct and indirect ways. Eventually, people will seek a remedy for this, and that often is associated with an action. In this case, people returned the stolen item with a note of apology. I remember hiking in the desert years ago, and while traversing an island of rocks trying to get a better view of the sunset, I stumbled across a book lodged in a crevice. The book was highly worn, and mice had chewed up many of the pages. This was a library book and had been checked out but clearly never returned. I brought the book home with me, and for years I would notice it sitting on the shelf in the garage where I keep my backpacking supplies. For some reason, I started feeling guilty about holding onto this book. So one day, because the thoughts about this book kept taking up headspace, I decided to mail the book to the library that originally had it in their circulation over 30 years ago. I left a little note about where the book was found. It was several hundred miles away, and clearly the book would never be reintroduced into their collection. However, I thought whatever librarian would receive the package would have a little laugh at my note. I never got a response. Anyway, the mental energy regarding the book went away after that. I have never thought about it again until I watched this video. The fact that I would feel guilty about this probably says a lot about me as a person, but one thing that did teach me was this: If you are feeling guilty about something, the best thing you can do is take action on it immediately. Fix the problem, seek restitution, apologize to whomever you offended. Harboring guilt is never good for the soul, this much I do know. Sometimes restitution is impossible, so instead, find another outlet to seek forgiveness either from the person or from someone else. I suppose this is the key advantage of having faith in a divine being: at least you have someone to apologize to when all other sources fail. I have one recurring cringe moment that comes up all the time. My freshman year of high school was a tumultuous time for me, as it is for many. I was going through a lot, because of my circumstances but also because I was just an awkward nerd without a single ounce of cool. One day in Geometry class, this girl did something or said something to me that I did not like. I lashed out at her and called her a dork. That was a popular word during the 80s; it was something you could say that was mean but not get in trouble for using. Anyway, the girl looked devastated. She turned her head, and I could tell that she was crying. I never saw her again after that day. I do not know what happened to her or where she went. However, this is an unresolved guilt thing for me. Even though I have forgiven myself and asked for forgiveness a thousand times, this moment always comes back to me. It was the first time that I had ever said something harsh to another soul (other than my little sister, of course), and I have never forgotten it. I have no idea who this girl was; I do not know her name. She will never read this, but just in case she does, believe me when I say that I am sorry! So, whether it's a small regret or something that really weighs on you, maybe the trick is to just acknowledge it, do what you can to set things right, and then, if you can, find a way to let it go. It's not about forgetting or pretending it didn't happen, but more about not letting it define your path forward. After all, the journey's a lot more open and interesting when you're not lugging around a bunch of unnecessary baggage.

There are many voices right now crying about how AI is destroying the written word. Replacing humans is a mistake for many reasons, all of which are predicting doomsday scenarios. This may or may not be true, but the evidence that I see is contrary to these predictions. What is actually happening is a significant magnification of expression, almost to an exponential scale. That seems to be the largest identifiable trend. We were already climbing rapidly in unstructured content, and now that is nearly off the charts. Are the doomsday scenarios of all creativity and human ingenuity going to disappear because of this? There is no clear evidence of that happening. The prediction that AI would train on AI-written works and thus create this horrible spiraling content nullification has yet to be demonstrated as any real threat, as this seems to be mitigated by being more careful with curation of training content. Time will tell, I suppose. However, there is evidence of one thing that is absolutely happening. I think we can call it the great flattening. AI, used properly, will not change a person's ideas that much. If people use it carelessly, then it will inject concepts and ideas that are highly common, predictable, and repeatable. Most people that use AI on a regular basis have learned to prompt around that phenomenon, but there is one thing that is difficult to avoid: flattening. A recent study in Nature Human Behaviour (DOI: 10.1038/s41562-026-02549-7) suggests that the widespread use of AI writing assistants, particularly since the advent of tools like ChatGPT, is leading to a concerning "voice flattening" in personal identity. This research, which analyzed over 880,000 texts, found that while AI-assisted rewriting maintains the original meaning, it significantly reduces linguistic diversity. The implication is profound: if our words become generic, our thinking may follow suit, and the unique traits we project through our writing may be biased by AI's influence, blurring the very essence of our personal identity. That is the real present danger in my opinion. Your words, although technically correct and your ideas unique and creative, your voice becomes lost. This is hard to grapple with because heavy AI use makes you realize that your grammar, sentence structure, and the way you represent topics may not be as good as they could be. So your temptation is to lean on AI heavily, but be wary, because as you do so you are indeed removing the soul from the work. I have been building a writing application for the last year. Slowly, bit by bit, I have been working on how to create a system that improves the speed and efficacy of expression. The one thing I have been careful about is replacing the act of writing itself. Mostly because I believe strongly in the therapeutic effects of writing, but now I am even more convinced that my voice, my personality, my expression, the way I relate experience is valuable in and of itself. So as you start to use AI more in your life, you may want to consider the impact it has on who you are and how you express yourself. As with all things, if you are prescriptive and deliberate, you will find these tools powerful but constrained. If you go about this mindlessly and with no consideration of the impact, you may indeed find yourself sounding like a robot and one that has no soul. Humans are really good detectors of this, even better than a machine is. The famous Turing test has been beaten by many of the modern AI models. They are able to successfully "fool" people into thinking they are human. That is all well and good until we all start sounding like the same human, and that is not an attractive proposition. So my recommendation? Use AI, but be deliberate and be sure to maintain your voice. We love you because of your uniqueness; please keep that intact above all else.

I was sitting around a conference table of people that I had just recently met. We were engaging in a business project. Those people were in business together, married, or friends for a long time. They were very much all locked into the same bubble. You could tell by how the conversations started, "Did you see that article about..." or "Wow, I cannot believe that so and so said that, what is this world coming to?" What was interesting is that I did not know what they were talking about. We were clearly not in the same bubble. What people probably need to understand is that all social media platforms and advertising systems are built entirely around audience preferences. You are absolutely sending signals out that you are interested in a particular topic. This is not advertisers pinpointing you, although that does happen, it is more your propensity for interest based on what you have been engaging in. You will hear all the social media influencers call this "the algorithm," which is a funny way to refer to a complex weave of thousands of applications all working toward the same objective: matching your intent with what their advertisers want to sell. One exercise that I would like to challenge you to is to deliberately change what signals you are feeding to these challenges. Several years ago I got so sick of political fundraising phone calls that I decided to dive into and figure out how they were finding me. It was not hard; I realized how exposed I was to these advertisers. I decided to register with a different party, donate to new campaigns, and start deliberately watching new news sources. It was painful. My previous bubble trained me to think one way, and this new bubble I was entering felt completely foreign. Now I have the unfortunate reality of being nearly equal with my feet in both bubbles. Did the fundraising calls stop? Nope, they doubled. Now I get both Democrat and Republican fundraising calls. Great. So I do not recommend this experiment, although I did learn a lot about how different the messaging is in both worlds. I recommend doing something really obscure. Here is my latest one. I really hate baseball. It is almost like watching paint dry. However, I decided to become an overnight Padres fan. They are trying to pursue a wildcard spot right now, and they just changed ownership, so this could be interesting. I am watching videos on social platforms and responding to comments; I am searching for Padres stuff. I am listening to a podcast, watching a few videos, I am clicking "not interested" in basketball posts, and clicking "like" on baseball posts. I am getting out of the politics bubble and going headfirst into the baseball bubble. I just started last week, and I am documenting my experience. For 30 days, I am going to become a totally immersed Padres fan. Right up until they get blown out of the playoffs, and then my baseball-watching days will probably be over. I am so serious, I bought an MLB subscription today so I can watch and listen to games. Luckily, I have AI that can teach me what the rules are; it has been a while. I am going to answer this question: what will my feeds look like if I become an entirely different person (at least from the perception of the advertisers)? Will the world change? Will my perception of the world change? Will I forget about Iran, Trump, the Budget Deficit, the Deterioration of Race Relations, and every other favorite topic in the political world? My working thesis is that we are heavily influenced by whatever bubble we find ourselves in, so I am going to deliberately change mine and see what happens.

We are all going to be software developers in the next fifteen years. I know that is hard to believe, but I think that is where we are headed. Not because everyone will suddenly learn Python or spend their days building applications, but because more and more of our work will involve humans directing and guiding systems to produce the results we want. In that sense, we will all be doing systems development, whether we call it that or not. As that happens, I think we are going to have to relearn some very old principles. One of the most important is something I have started calling the Watertight Ship Principle. A large ship is one vessel, but inside that vessel are compartments separated by bulkheads. Those walls exist for a reason. If water gets into one compartment, you want it contained there rather than spreading throughout the entire ship. Each compartment has a purpose, and the integrity of the ship depends on respecting those boundaries. I have learned this lesson in places far removed from software. Take laundry. I hate laundry, but over the years I have developed a system that makes it tolerable. Dirty clothes get deposited into five different baskets, and each basket has a purpose. One of those baskets is dedicated entirely to socks. Its whole job is to manage socks. Socks go in there, they get washed together, and I have a place to keep track of them throughout the process. This dramatically reduces the mysterious disappearance of socks that seems to plague every household. The system only works, however, if I respect the boundary. I cannot let workout shorts into the sock basket because it happens to be convenient, and I cannot throw a shirt in there because I am standing nearby. The moment I start making exceptions, the system begins to break down. Socks start migrating and eventually socks disappear. The compartment is no longer watertight. The same thing is true with corporate finances. I have a card dedicated to business expenses, and the rule has to be absolute: personal expenses do not go on that card. It cannot be "most of the time," or "unless I am in a hurry," or "this purchase is small and I will remember to fix it later." The moment I start making exceptions, I create work downstream. Now someone has to categorize the transaction, reconcile it, explain it, correct it, and remember what happened months later. A clean system becomes messy because I drilled a tiny hole through the bulkhead. This is becoming even more important in the age of AI because AI makes shortcuts incredibly attractive. You are building something, automating a process, or creating a new system and suddenly realize you can save twenty minutes by connecting two things directly. You can bypass a step, let one system reach into another, or make a little exception that seems harmless at the time. AI will happily help you do it, and because it can build so quickly, you may not even feel the cost at first. The problem is that systems have memories, even when we do not. The shortcut remains, the exception becomes precedent, and the temporary connection slowly turns into permanent infrastructure. Eventually you have no idea why anything works the way it does. I received a very literal reminder of this the other day when we suddenly had ants in the house. I became curious about how they were getting inside and started tracing their path until I eventually found the entrance. I had created it. Months earlier, I had been working on some project and needed to run a cable. Rather than finding the proper route, I took the easy way out and drilled a hole. Eventually the project was abandoned and the cable disappeared, but the hole remained. Apparently the ants were more than happy to make use of the infrastructure I had left behind. Without realizing it, I had built them a tiny highway directly into my bathroom. That struck me as a pretty good lesson about systems. Every time we punch a hole through a boundary because it makes today's task easier, we create a path. Something else may eventually discover that path. Data begins flowing through it, dependencies develop around it, and people start relying on it. Long after we have forgotten why we created it, the hole can still be there. The modern warrior is going to live inside increasingly complicated systems. AI will allow us to build those systems faster than anyone in history could have imagined, which means discipline becomes more important, not less. A tight ship runs like a tight ship because the engine room stays clean, the compartments have purposes, and the boundaries are respected. Water, debris, clutter, and convenience are not allowed to slowly compromise the vessel. Whether you are building software, managing finances, organizing laundry, running a company, or simply trying to keep ants out of your bathroom, the principle is the same. Build your compartments, respect their purpose, and no matter how tempting the shortcut appears, remember the rule: No drilling through bulkheads.

Be wary, modern traveler. One of the oldest habits of the human mind is also one of the easiest to miss. When confronted with ambiguity, complexity, or something we cannot fully explain, we give it a name. The name helps because it takes something shapeless and puts a boundary around it. It gives us something we can talk about, warn others about, blame, and sometimes even treat. The danger comes later, when we forget that the name was originally just a model. For centuries, people reported waking in the night unable to move. Some felt pressure on their chest. Others sensed someone standing in the room. Some saw a figure approaching the bed or believed that something was physically holding them down. Different cultures developed different explanations for these experiences, and in parts of medieval Europe one of those explanations was the incubus, a demon believed to visit people while they slept. Today we have a different name: sleep paralysis. Our modern understanding is unquestionably better. We know that REM sleep involves temporary muscle paralysis and that consciousness can sometimes return before that paralysis has completely released. We understand something about the neurological machinery involved. Yet there is still something important to notice. The people who spoke of the incubus were not necessarily inventing the experience. They were describing something human beings continue to experience today. What changed most dramatically was the explanation. That should make us humble. There seems to be a recurring pattern in the way humans deal with the unknown. We observe something we cannot explain, recognize a pattern, give it a label, build an explanatory story around it, and eventually accept that story so thoroughly that the label begins to feel like reality itself. The ancient person might say, “An incubus attacked him.” Another generation might say, “It must have been God’s will.” The modern person has a different vocabulary. “She’s bipolar.” “He’s autistic.” “That’s trauma.” “It’s systemic.” “The algorithm did it.” “That’s misinformation.” “The science says.” These statements are certainly not equivalent. Some describe phenomena supported by enormous bodies of evidence, and modern science can tell us far more about human behavior and physiology than our ancestors could have imagined. But that is not really the point. The point is that the human mind can use all of these labels in the same psychological way, as a means of turning uncertainty into apparent understanding. We hear the word and experience the relief of recognition. “Oh, that’s what it is.” But sometimes what we really mean is, “Oh, that’s what we call it.” Those are not the same thing. Once a label becomes widely accepted, another problem appears. We begin interpreting new observations through it. A person has dramatic mood changes, so every future emotional reaction is interpreted through a diagnosis. A child behaves differently from other children, so every unusual habit becomes evidence of a category already assigned. A company unexpectedly becomes popular, and we say, “the algorithm.” A political event surprises us, and we reach for whichever ideological explanation our group already prefers. Eventually the category begins absorbing everything around it. The label that was created to describe the observations starts being offered as the cause of the observations. Why does he behave that way? Because he has X. How do we know he has X? Because he behaves that way. We have gone in a circle. Philosophers call part of this process reification. We create an abstraction or category and gradually begin treating it as though it were a concrete thing. The map starts replacing the territory. I think this reveals something uncomfortable about us: human beings have always manufactured certainty faster than they manufacture understanding. Our ancestors populated the unknown with spirits, gods, humors, curses, and demons. We populate it with diagnoses, models, statistics, ideologies, systems, algorithms, and technical terminology. That does not make modern categories worthless. Science has given us something profoundly different from mythology: a method for testing our explanations against reality. We can measure things, make predictions, run experiments, reject hypotheses, and change our minds. That is an extraordinary achievement. But science is still practiced by human beings, and human beings remain susceptible to the same ancient temptation. We like certainty, particularly explanations that make further questioning feel unnecessary. Sometimes “the science says” means there is overwhelming evidence supporting a conclusion. Other times it is used to mean that the proper authorities have named the thing and further curiosity is no longer welcome. The latter is not science. It is our ancient desire for certainty wearing modern clothing. None of this is an argument against labels. We need them. Medicine, science, and ordinary communication would be nearly impossible without categories. The lesson is simply to treat the label as a tool rather than a verdict. When someone gives something a name, ask what that name actually tells you. Does it describe a pattern, or explain the mechanism? Does it make predictions? Can it be tested? What evidence would prove it wrong? Most importantly, what do we still not understand? There is nothing wrong with saying, “We don’t know.” Those may be three of the most productive words in human history, because they leave the door open to curiosity. So be wary, modern traveler. Use names, categories, diagnoses, models, and science, but do not surrender your curiosity to any of them. A word can represent reality without fully explaining it. Our ancestors populated the gaps in their understanding with demons. We should be careful about what we populate ours with.

Tyler. That is the name of my autonomous agent. I named him Tyler, based on the alter ego in the movie Fight Club. Seemed somehow appropriate. Tyler started out simple enough. I wanted to experiment with using some of the new agent systems out there to build one that could handle tasks for me that I did not want to do. Research a topic while I was sleeping, outline my meeting notes in preparation for discussions in my schedule, read my email and automatically take care of things, pay my bills, alert me when I am missing something important. The list grew. I fell into the trap of believing some of the voices on the internet talking about how awesome an agent could be for you. However, as Tyler grew, the more I realized I was essentially training a two-year-old to do complex tasks. To get the results that I wanted, I had to build systems around Tyler to keep him in check. He would sometimes go out of bounds and other times not go out of bounds enough. After a while, Tyler started costing more than hiring a person to just be Tyler. I seriously started thinking about hiring someone, and their job title would be "Tyler." Fake like you are an autonomous bot, just so I could look like the cool kids who have an autonomous bot. I set out to really solve this problem, and what I ultimately concluded is that as much as the Holy Grail is a fully autonomous agent, the actual answer is a discrete, mostly deterministic series of smaller bots that each do one function well. I came up with a new working definition for autonomy: Autonomy is not freedom to do anything. Autonomy is freedom to decide how to achieve an outcome within a defined operating envelope. So I thought I wanted Tyler to do anything I wanted. That goal was complete folly. What I really want is for Tyler to have bounded autonomy. In fact, this would not be all Tyler. Just like the human brain, Tyler is now comprised of several subsystems that report to Tyler, rather than Tyler trying to be in control of them all. Instead of remembering to breathe all the time, my brain can be happy typing this blog without worrying that the body will die due to lack of attention. Same with Tyler. To put this another way, I would not hire a new entry-level employee and say, "Do exactly these 47 steps; make no mistakes." I also would not tell that same employee, "You have unlimited authority to do what you want; do not come back until you are done." The reality is that you would give the new employee a small scope, a boundary such as a budget, and guidelines over what they could change and could not change. You would then have them report in frequently with progress. The same, I am afraid, is true of Tyler. Ambiguous authority does not work. The only way an agent, or even an employee for that matter, can truly be autonomous and do a good job. In a phrase, you are not hiring an employee or building an agent as much as you are assigning responsibilities. When these social media people talk about their swarm of agents doing all their work for them, be highly suspicious. True, you can definitely build an army of agents. I could also hire a bunch of people. The agents might be cheaper, but the result would be the same: chaos. Everyone getting stuck because they do not know what to do. The responsibility, defined carefully, is what has to happen first. Build an agent to read your email. Go ahead. You will use it for about two to three days. Then you will stop. Why? Because your email is tied to all your responsibilities and an agent cannot handle those, because you have not defined them in any meaningful way. Hate to break it to you: the magic super-agentic AI harness will still leave you at the same place you started. To be successful, you need a clear mission with defined objectives and identified responsibilities. As for now, Tyler has been relegated to my cheerleader. He sends me an email every morning with happy thoughts, and in the evening, a closing thought. I gave him that one responsibility, and that has been going pretty well for the last few weeks. Joking aside, there is more to it than that, but the point is that you have to start out well defined, narrow in scope, with a clear understanding of the responsibilities being assumed.

Years ago, I remember reading about this team that had discovered that homing pigeons were starting to adopt our roadways as navigational guides to find their way back home. This was startling because homing pigeons have a natural instinct that guides them back home, but over time, and in the right circumstances, the pigeons had adapted to using the more reliable method of following human roadways. I found that fascinating for some reason, which is why a recent article from Neuroscience News caught my attention. A group of researchers figured out that if they could temporarily shut down the prefrontal cortex in a mouse, then the mouse would adopt a better path in a maze over the one that the mouse had learned. Meaning, by hindering the active part of the mouse's brain, the mouse was more likely to adopt a new and superior method of achieving the desired result. The group published their paper this year: Kai Lu, Kelvin T. Wong, Chengcheng J. Yang, Lin N. Zhou, Yike T. Shi, Maya L. Costello, and Robert C. Liu, "Neural competition between prefrontal and auditory cortex constrains novel sound strategy learning." This paper, although far from conclusive, does demonstrate that the prefrontal cortex can get in the way of adopting new and improved methods in favor of learned ones. This experiment used female mice and their strong instinct to recover mouse pups when they wander out of the nest. The mice will strongly favor going to the last location that they had found a mouse pup, despite the fact that audible clues, the sound of the pup, might be coming from another direction. They discovered that it takes four to eight days for the female mice to adapt to the auditory signal rather than relying on what their brain is telling them the most logical place is supposed to be. Effectively, the strong impulse is to follow the instinct of going to the last place that a pup was found. Eventually, the mice learn the new method, follow the audible signal, and find the lost mouse pup. What the scientists did was use a chemical compound to silence the receptors for the prefrontal cortex, which effectively caused the mice to be more receptive to alternatives. In the case of the mice that had this chemical silencing implemented, they are significantly faster at changing their path to follow the audible signal instead. Although we are talking basic lab mice here, the implication here is incredible. What if our active part of our brain is deceiving us into following an instinct that is just not correct? How long will we follow what we think is right before we finally accept that a new path is actually superior? The better path is often already available, but our default machinery keeps us running the familiar play. The discipline of change is partly about overriding the very system that feels like it is in charge. So perhaps all those New Age hippies that talk about using meditation as a method to quiet the active mind were right this whole time! Sometimes we do need to quiet this part of our mind in order to truly think outside of the box. This is not easy to do because we all have the bias to believe that our active brain is always correct, because our instinct for survival typically depends on it. However, we are usually NOT in a life-or-death situation, so learning to quiet this part of our mind and look at alternatives is definitely a worthy consideration. So, next time you're feeling stuck or like you're hitting a wall, maybe take a moment to just... chill. Let your mind wander a bit, or even just try to consciously dial down that inner monologue. You might be surprised at what fresh ideas or clearer paths emerge when you give your usual thought patterns a little break. It's not about shutting down completely, but more about creating some space for something new to click into place.

A fascinating book to read, if you can find a copy of it, was a book created by Studs Terkel in 1974 called 'Working.' This book was developed through several questions from this Chicago radio host, who moonlighted as an oral historian. He interviewed over 100 people in a wide variety of occupations and just let them speak for themselves. He did not ask them the typical types of things, like, "What do you do for a living?" He instead asked them, "What does working here do for you?" What Terkel discovered was that people are doing a lot more than exchanging time for money in these settings. They are actually searching, searching for things like meaning, dignity, recognition, autonomy, usefulness, and connection. When those things are deprived, even well-paid work can become absolutely miserable. I have first-hand experience here. I voluntarily walked away from a high-paying job simply because the work had become miserable and I no longer felt that what I was doing mattered. As a company, we just kept repeating the same failed experiments over and over again, and the improvements and growth that we had accomplished kept getting unraveled, so you started seeing anything that you built just fall to pieces around you. Terkel discovered that people really want to establish evidence that they actually existed. Take that away, and they will just not talk highly about their jobs. A top-level executive for a big company would talk far less enthusiastically than a stonemason or a carpenter, or even a teacher. Why? Well, it was simple. The stonemason who builds a wall can point to that wall for decades, saying that he had built that. He had contributed to the world, and that was a monument to his work. Same thing with a carpenter who works on a house or a teacher who helps develop a young mind. They can point to something that lasts. Terkel did not take this on as an economic problem; he approached it as a human problem. There is absolutely a psychological relationship with our work. To boil it all down to something that can be replaced by machines seems like we are missing the point of work entirely. Interestingly, Terkel's work is arguably becoming relevant again because of AI and automation. We are once again asking a very Terkel-like question: If technology can perform more and more of the tasks we call "work," what part of work were humans actually valuing in the first place? I think that is the question of the day, not "What are we going to do when AI takes over everything?" Wrong question. The right question is, how are we going to build anything that matters?

An interesting exercise to go through next time that you are feeling out of sorts is to ask yourself, "What exactly am I feeling?" Surprisingly, many of us are not capable of making any distinction between feeling ashamed versus feeling anxious. We simply lack the vocabulary; we just simply call it "not feeling good." I am not sure why this is the case; in raising three children, I noticed when they were growing up, they would sometimes just not be in a good mood. So we would quiz them and slowly go through the range of emotions until we identified the culprit. My wife has been particularly good at that, but not me. I started to recognize that, growing up, I could not really identify which emotion belonged to which category. I recently saw an article online referencing some research by Katie Hoemann and Lisa Barrett called "The Simple Trick that Can Help You Understand Your Emotions." One of their examples caught my attention. I have always suffered from some color blindness. Distinguishing between certain shades of red is almost impossible for me. It was once explained to me that I was probably missing or had a reduced number of red receptor rods that receive light at the back of my retinas. Anyway, the researchers compared the lack of ability to identify emotion to that of color vision. One person may only see red (like me), and other people will see crimson, scarlet, burgundy, pink, etc. The label is not the point; what is identified here is that with a working definition of the color spectrum, you can identify what you are seeing. That same thing happens with emotions. If you clearly identify your emotion as guilt instead of just bad, then you can actually do something positive about it. This is identity and resilience work at the granular level. Discomfort you can name is discomfort you can act on, which has long been my observation that awareness must precede change. The important point that I think the researchers were making is that the ability to name a particular feeling is a skill. This emotional granularity can be learned, practiced, and improved over time. This means you actually can get better at facing any negative emotions that you experience in your life. This journey of understanding and shaping our emotional landscape is not about eradicating discomfort, but about cultivating a more nuanced relationship with it. It's an invitation to explore the rich tapestry of our inner world, recognizing that each feeling, once acknowledged and understood, offers a unique opportunity for growth and self-direction. By embracing this ongoing process, we discover a profound capacity to navigate life's currents with greater intention and a deeper sense of personal agency.

This discussion is a nod to the work by Barbara Fredrickson and Daniel Kahneman. In their 1993 paper, Duration Neglect in Retrospective Evaluations of Affective Episodes, Fredrickson and Kahneman contrasted two ways the mind might evaluate an experience. One possibility is that memory works something like a movie: we mentally integrate the experience over time. If an unpleasant experience lasts twice as long, it should generally be remembered as worse because there was more total suffering. Their alternative was essentially a snapshot model. Memory preserves selected moments rather than integrating every second equally. Some moments receive much more weight than others. Essentially, the point of this research was to figure out why our memory of events is not always accurate. Some people will see the same experience as good and others will see it as bad. Why is this? I have had personal experience with this. Years ago, I took a group of young people on a backpacking expedition in Wyoming. When we were done, they were making exclamations like, "This was the worst experience of my life," and "I will never, never ever do this again." Yet two years later, they were enthusiastic about their next crazy adventure. They were saying things like, "I love backpacking; it is so awesome; I cannot wait to go again," and "the last trip we went on was epic." They seemed to forget the pain and anguish. They forgot all the troubles, the challenges, and the problems. They remembered the moment of triumph; they remembered the time we got to the top of the mountain, and they remembered the finish. The happy ending where we all got into our cars and headed toward a nice restaurant and a hotel with running water. Speaking of water, this was one of the experiments that the researchers did. They had people hold their hand under cold water, cold enough to where it was uncomfortable. They held their hand there for a minute. They did two things. In one group, they just kept the water the same temperature; in the other group, they added 15 seconds at the end where the water temperature was raised slightly. This caused a feeling of relief at the end. Consequently, the people who participated in that experiment chose to prefer the experiment with the slight warmth at the end rather than the shorter, colder version. Which goes to prove that humans like happy endings. However, they also like peak moments of triumph equally as well. In essence: A better ending changed the memory of the entire experience enough that people voluntarily chose more total pain. And so I took the kids on an even tougher trip this time. A brutal hike through some of the most rugged country imaginable. It was brutal; one of them even got a free ride in an emergency helicopter. However, they ended big. They got out of the wilderness by fording rivers, and we ended up eating a great meal at a downtown restaurant. Although they were all complaining and muttering at the end, my bet is that, in a few years from now, they will remember this as one of the greatest experiences of their lives. The interesting concept to capture here is that experienced life and remembered life are not identical. If you are intentionally designing an experience, whether a vacation, a customer relationship, a course, a meeting, a challenge, or even a year-long commitment, you should think not only about making the overall experience good, but about deliberately creating memorable peaks and meaningful endings.

A few years ago, I set a goal to achieve an ultra marathon before my 50th birthday. My goal was to run a 100-miler, but I did not quite hit that objective. Instead, I went for the "50 before 50" target. I would run a 50-mile marathon before my 50th birthday. I was successful, and one of the techniques that I used during the run was to mentally focus on areas in my body where I felt pain. I would essentially cycle through my body, starting at my feet and working up toward my head, asking the question, "Am I feeling pain here?" If the answer was yes, I would focus on it. Why was it painful? How bad was it? Could I manage it? I would focus on it until I felt that I could tolerate the pain in that area and then move on to the next. The technique proved to be surprisingly effective. I was able to push through knee pain, ankle pain, calf and quad tenderness, and even a small rock in my shoe that was causing me no small amount of distress. I had read many stories of runners who had willed through pain and had learned to focus their minds on resolving issues as if they could somehow control the internal workings of their bodies to repair areas that were in trouble. This all felt a bit far-fetched to me, but I have met some meditation practitioners who swore that they could control things like excessive inflammation, swelling, and joint pain by using concentration. When you are running for 10 hours straight, you will do just about anything to get through it. So, I started trying this method to aid me in my journey. It worked, and I have always kept an eye open for research or people who have experience with this phenomenon. Yesterday, I came across a new study released: Mizrachi et al., "Voluntary attention regulates acute immune responses in humans," Nature Human Behaviour (2026). This study seems to indicate that turning toward a physical discomfort, rather than distracting yourself from it, actually regulates your body's inflammatory response. The concept is that leaning in is not just a mindset; it shows up in your biology. This is fascinating and direct proof that there may be some truth to this idea that I learned while running long distances. Across three experiments in healthy volunteers, researchers gave people an identical immune challenge and then had them either attend to the sensations at the inflammation site or distract away from it. Attending to the body measurably changed both the size and the time-course of the inflammatory response, an effect present in roughly 90 percent of participants across two independent groups. This would indicate that it is better to focus on the problem area than to ignore it. So, I suppose this means Goggins' concept of "Embrace the Suck" has some scientific merit behind it! If this study is accurate, then that means that potentially discomfort met with attention rather than avoidance produces a different, more regulated response inside the body itself. Now, I see the limits of the study. I am not sure that really draws a sweeping conclusion, but it is interesting. I have also seen this happen in the course of my running "through the pain." So, what can I conclude from this? It seems that focused mental energy on the trouble spots in your body and perhaps your life is a worthy practice. So, apparently, we should lean into our pain.

I have three children, two of whom are now adults. When we started having kids, we made a conscious decision not to let them have unfettered access to the Internet and, therefore, social media by handing them phones to keep with them at all times. We let them have old-school devices, but not mini-computers they could carry around with them everywhere they went. This was not a popular decision. My children were often ridiculed for their retro 1990's technology, but we held fast. Today, it has gotten much better, as we can buy purpose-built devices that eliminate or completely prevent social media on smartphones. So you can still have the useful things like navigation, camera, and music, but not the soul-sucking, brain-leaching clickbait apps. I have been selling technology to large corporations for most of my life, and I distinctly remember being in a meeting at one of the large social platforms when I found out that the chief executive there also did not let his children have access to their app. I thought, that is interesting. Even they know how destructive this can be to the soul of our younger people. Now people have laughed at me for saying this, mostly pointing out that "everyone is doing it." However, the research is starting to pour in. Psychologists and behavioral scientists have been conducting multi-year longitudinal studies, and the phenomena of likes and swipes have existed long enough to begin generating real data demonstrating what many of us have suspected. This is not good. It does have a negative impact on people. It can have a similar effect to strong narcotics in influencing people's behavior and motivation. In the next several years, more and more of these studies will start to release their findings. I will get some t-shirts that say, "I told you so." Anyway, one study caught my attention this morning. You can find that study here. This group in Germany was not focused on social media but rather on frequent, habitual hair pulling, which is commonly described as a nervous tic caused by stress. This may still be true; the study did not disprove that concept, but it did indicate that boredom was the strongest predictor of a hair-pulling episode. This habit, which the participants do not want to do and are trying to avoid, is mostly caused by periods of boredom. I find this fascinating because the number-one excuse I hear people give when they are in a long period of doomscrolling is that they are "trying to relieve stress." They blame stress for their need to decompress by watching endless streams of cat videos on TikTok, or by watching people record popular musical tracks over their mundane lives on short-form video. It is our way of 'relieving stress.' That is the excuse. I have often questioned this excuse. I also fall victim to bouts of senseless doomscrolling, and when I start to feel bad about it, I use that as an excuse. However, that did not ring true to me as I said it, which is why this study caught my eye. The real reason is potentially boredom. We are falling back on this habit, a habit we know is destructive, not because we are dealing with stress, but because we have nothing better to do. We could sleep. We could exercise. We could do a project around the house. We could call loved ones, or perhaps talk to loved ones, but instead we glue ourselves to our social platform of choice. It is really hard to admit to ourselves that we find the lives we live boring. What we worked so hard to obtain is not fulfilling enough, and now, after all is said and done, we sit on the couch endlessly triggering tiny dopamine hits. So we avoid the real issue and claim stress as our excuse. Perhaps we should ask ourselves: why am I feeling bored right now? What is missing? What could I do to get myself engaged back with my life? Sorry, I am not sure I have the answer here. I just found this research study compelling because I've caught myself using this fake-stress excuse more than a few times.

I woke up this morning with the walking blues. A feeling that can only be resolved by walking around. You wake up, feel around for your shoes, and just start walking. You let all the things that have been tumbling around in your head move around with you for a while. When I finished my walk, I came home and played some blues music. I sat there feeling melancholy but, at the same time, rejuvenated. What struck me was that the conflict inside me had not really been resolved. The tension was still there. Nothing had been fixed. Yet somehow it had been clarified, and because it had been clarified, I felt better. That made me wonder: what makes the blues, the blues? I suppose the technical definition is some combination of harmony, phrasing, rhythm, repetition, and emotional tension that makes something sound like the blues. That definition does not work for me at all. At a musical level, there are several recognizable elements. There is the common repeating structure known as the 12-bar blues, usually built around three chords. There are also certain notes associated with the blues—the flattened third, fifth, and seventh—but blues musicians rarely treat those notes as fixed points. A singer or guitarist bends into them, out of them, and sometimes somewhere in between. The notes seem to live between major and minor. That is part of what makes the blues instantly recognizable. There is uncertainty built right into the melody. So although many blues songs operate within a familiar and highly structured musical pattern, the melody itself can feel wonderfully ambiguous. So is that the blues? Structured ambiguity? Not quite. A good blues song is more than its structure. It often has a conversational quality, and somewhere inside it there is usually a story being told. A phrase is stated, repeated, and then answered or concluded. I once heard a historian lecturing on the musical history of Louisiana describe the tradition of call and response. A voice calls and another voice answers. A singer delivers a line and the guitar responds. One instrument speaks and another comments. You can hear this pattern throughout blues music. Say something. Say it again. Then tell us what it means. The first statement gives us the information. The repetition gives us time to feel it. The response moves the thought somewhere else. So is that the blues? A deep emotional connection to a phrase that is repeated and then answered? Perhaps. Yet that does not quite capture it either, because rhythm matters. Blues lives in the pocket somewhere between the repeating musical structure and the rhythm underneath it. Shuffle, swing, slight delay, deliberate deviation—all of it resting in the pauses. Someone could play every correct note and every correct chord in perfect synchronization and still not sound anything like the blues. There has to be something else mixed in. The bend. The riff. The hesitation. The improvisation. The space between the notes. The feeling. But even that does not quite explain it. Because when the singer and the guitar player make their call, and then repeat the call, they do not always want or need an answer. The blues is not about solving the problem. It is about giving the tension somewhere to live. That may be the most important thing about it. The music itself is always living in opposition. Major against minor. Sadness against humor. Hardship against resilience. Precision against chaos. Structure against improvisation. The blues is contradiction. Ambiguity and contradiction are its language. Perhaps that is why blues became such a powerful way of representing lived experience. Heartbreak, poverty, love, injustice, desire, humor, loneliness, disappointment, and everyday trouble all found a medium for expression through the music. These things did not have to be resolved before they could be expressed. A person could simply say: This happened to me. Then say it again. Then tell us what it felt like. And something personal became communal. Someone else's heartbreak could suddenly remind you of your own. Someone else's struggle could sound familiar. Someone else's longing could become a melody you understood even if their life looked nothing like yours. The blues took private trouble and gave it a public language. Maybe that is as good a definition as any: The blues is the sound of tension being expressed rather than eliminated. And maybe that is why the walk this morning helped. I did not solve anything while I was walking. I did not come home with answers to everything that had been tumbling around in my head. I simply gave those thoughts somewhere to move. The tension was still there when I returned. But it was clearer. And somehow I felt better. Perhaps the blues does the same thing. It does not necessarily resolve what troubles us. It gives the trouble rhythm. It gives it language. It gives it somewhere to go. I still do not know exactly what makes the blues, the blues. I am not sure it can be reduced to twelve bars, three chords, bent notes, rhythm, or call and response. I only know how it feels. And the music seems to capture that feeling better than almost anything else. If you have never really experienced the blues, I carefully picked three songs for you to listen to. I chose them for different reasons, but each carries something that helps explain what I am trying to describe. I recommend shutting everything else down and finding a quiet place where you can really listen. Do not just play them in the background. Listen to the repetition. Listen to the pauses. Listen to the guitar answering the singer. Listen to the notes that seem to bend between major and minor. Listen to the tension that never completely disappears. You will recognize the patterns. You will understand the stories. And you may begin to hear how much of the music we listen to today still carries pieces of this same old story, retold again and again. Together, these three songs show the blues changing across generations while its underlying language remains remarkably recognizable. Robert Johnson — “Sweet Home Chicago” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O8hqGu-leFc Muddy Waters — “Got My Mojo Working” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DCaeLFP52oQ B.B. King — “The Thrill Is Gone” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dvRwZga4hAE

My wife and her friends are having a summit today. To help one of their dear friends figure out a way to improve her prospects of finding a partner to date and hopefully get married to. I was casually listening in on the conversation every once in a while when I went into steal snacks from the spread my wife put out for everyone. Although there were many opinions being expressed, the one universal theme that got my attention was this: If you want to meet someone who could fundamentally change your life, you may first have to change the environments in which you live your life. Why? Because dating is partly a relationship problem, but before a relationship exists, it is a probability problem. What occurred to me is that this same problem exists when attempting to build any new relationship. New investors, new friends, new customers, and new and inspiring people who could change your life. If you go to work, interact with the same professional circle, go home, spend time with the same friends, and stay glued to your phone, interacting with superficial connections on social media all the time, then you are largely drawing from the same social universe over and over again. Nothing is necessarily wrong with that universe. It just has a limited supply of new people. Changing the environment changes several things simultaneously. First, it changes who is available to meet. Every environment has its own population. A conference attracts a different group of people than your office. A volunteer organization exposes you to people you would probably never encounter at your neighborhood restaurant. A running club, church group, professional association, class, chess club, or community event each creates a different pool of potential relationships. When you intentionally enter new environments, you are not simply hoping to meet someone new. You are mathematically increasing the number and variety of people who can enter your life. Second, repeated exposure matters. Most meaningful relationships do not begin with some spectacular first encounter. They develop through familiarity. You see someone once. Then again. Eventually you have a conversation. Later you discover a shared interest. Trust begins to form almost invisibly through a series of small interactions. This is why environments that you participate in consistently can be so powerful. The goal is not simply to go somewhere new once. It is to become part of new places where the same people have an opportunity to see you, know you, and eventually trust you. Third, the environment creates many new weak ties. Weak ties are the people we know casually—the person from the running club, someone we met at a conference, a friend of a friend, the parent we see at an event, or the person we occasionally talk with at a coffee shop. These relationships may seem insignificant, but they dramatically expand our social universe. Every new person potentially connects us to dozens or hundreds of people we do not yet know. Your next customer may not be the person you meet at the event. It may be someone they introduce you to. Your next investor may be two introductions away. Your future spouse may be the friend of someone you barely know today. Weak ties create bridges into entirely new networks. And that may be the larger lesson hidden inside my wife's summit. Sometimes we spend enormous amounts of energy trying to improve the outcome while leaving the environment that produces it completely unchanged. We work harder at networking with the same people. We scroll through more profiles. We send more messages. We hope that somehow something different will emerge from essentially the same inputs. But occasionally the most powerful move is much simpler. Change the inputs. Go somewhere you normally wouldn't go. Join something. Volunteer. Take a class. Attend the conference. Accept the invitation. Sit at a different table. Talk to someone you don't already know. Become a regular somewhere new. You cannot control whether the next person you meet becomes a spouse, a friend, an investor, a mentor, or a customer. But you can dramatically influence the likelihood of meeting someone new. And sometimes changing your life begins with something as simple as changing where you spend it.

I actually love opera. I like the music, the drama, the history, and the sheer theatrical excess of it. I like that a story can take three hours to tell and that nobody seems particularly concerned about efficiency. Yet for some reason, saying “I love opera” can feel slightly more revealing than saying I like a particular restaurant or football team. That feeling interests me because opera itself is not the issue. The issue is what we imagine other people might conclude from the information. Someone might hear “opera” and think pretentious, old-fashioned, intellectual, or wealthy. The label may be completely inaccurate, but once we know that labels exist, we begin anticipating them. We do this with much more consequential parts of our lives as well. Someone may hesitate to mention a religious affiliation because they know others may immediately assume a long list of beliefs. Someone who has been diagnosed with a mental health disorder may worry that people will begin interpreting ordinary behavior through that diagnosis. Even harmless interests, from professional wrestling to poetry, can be quietly omitted when they do not seem to fit the image we think others have of us. Over time, this can turn into a subtle form of self-editing. We become selective about which pieces of ourselves we reveal, not because those things are private, but because we are trying to manage how other people categorize us. There is an important difference between privacy and concealment. Privacy is the decision that some things simply do not need to be shared. Concealment is different because it is driven by the fear that knowing something about us might change how others see us. One is a boundary; the other can become a burden. Psychologists have long studied self-disclosure because revealing personal information is one of the ways relationships deepen and people develop a more coherent sense of themselves. That does not mean everyone should announce every belief, diagnosis, hobby, or preference. It does suggest that constantly hiding ordinary parts of ourselves because of anticipated judgment has a cost. Perhaps a useful question is not, “Should everyone know this about me?” but, “Why am I afraid of them knowing?” Sometimes there will be a perfectly good reason to keep something private. Other times the answer may simply be that we have spent years trying to avoid a label. That is why I have come to like the simple statement: I actually love opera. It is not really about opera. It is a small reminder that other people are free to form whatever conclusions they want about us, but we do not have to organize our lives around preventing them. There is a certain freedom in becoming a little less concerned with being easily categorized and a little more comfortable allowing people to discover that we are more complicated than the labels they might give us. So yes, I actually love opera. I am beginning to think there are probably a few more things worth saying out loud.

We are rapidly heading into a world where it is getting easier and cheaper to automate things. I will provide an example. One day I got a notice from Google that my entire investment in their Nest architecture was going away. They made a decision to get out of this business after they bought it and started deprioritizing this whole Google Home initiative. Now, I know they are pretending to still do all of that, but seriously, it is really falling behind, and their abandonment of Nest really left a lot of us consumers hanging out to dry. Well, of course, ADT was willing to come to the rescue. They could support these devices and all that, for only a small subscription fee. Well, come to find out, the subscription was not that small, and the device support limited, and the transferability really painful. So, in a fit of rage, I decided to build my own system. That was stupid. I bought everything: locks, motion detectors, alarm stuff, keypads, door and window contacts, and a bunch of other items. I dove into Zigbee, Thread, and a hundred other protocols that I had never heard of. I started to try to get it all to work, running into one problem after the next. After I got it to work, I then had to constantly maintain and fix things that broke. I tried to make some home automation routines work, but other than my automatic Christmas light thing, I never got around to anything else. Instead, I just go in there and tweak things now and then. Most of my work is the maintenance of all the various components and all the compatibility issues. Then, I fell off and ignored it. I had a Home Assistant implementation that worked, but would fall into disrepair, and I got busy, and so I never returned to it. I would just deal with it as it came up, and I dismissed any further automation due to the cost. Not necessarily the cost in money and time to set it up, but the economic life of the automation was just not worth it to me. Two years later, I can now use AI to systematically help me resolve all of this. The price of automation dropped considerably, and the ability for me to build automations is significantly improved, and that makes the question of the automation needing renewal less of a burden. We always think of automation as a traditional calculation: Automation Payback = Upfront Automation Cost ÷ Monthly Manual Cost Avoided However, as my example demonstrates, this is not why we elect to avoid the cost of an automation. The real reason is the missing concept of economic life. The question is... Not: “How much money will this automation save?” But: “How much money is this automation likely to save before something changes enough to make it obsolete?” Staying power is the real factor here. AI has significantly dropped not only the cost of automation, but also the cost of renewing things when the automation has exceeded its staying power. This is the idea behind “The Price Tag of Automation.” The counterintuitive argument would be: We tend to compare the cost of automation against the cost of today's manual labor. But the real comparison is between the accumulating cost of manual work and the depreciating value of automation. One goes up with time. The other often goes down with time. The investment decision sits at the intersection. And that leads to a very useful rule: Don't just calculate an automation's payback period. Calculate whether its expected useful life comfortably exceeds its payback period. To conclude my example, last night I was able to add some new lights, add them to Home Assistant, and then configure a routine that executed on motion, all in about 5 minutes. Then, I replaced a few components with new, upgraded ones, and the resetting of those three devices took less than 1 minute each. So, I am now much more likely to deploy future automations because the price tag for doing so significantly dropped.

In my life experience, speed usually wins. There seems to be two general approaches in life, whether it be business, technology, or even sporting events. You can be careful and steady or you can be fast and more reckless. This is note a fast beats slow observation, but I can certainly say with absolutely certainty that speed usually wins. The question is why? The system that can act, receive feedback, correct errors, and act again faster tends to outperform the system that tries to avoid errors in the first place. I think there are several reasons. One of which concerns the speed of the feedback loop for errors. John Boyd, a military strategist, created his own feedback loop mechanism called Observe, Orient, Decide, Act, and then Observe Again (OODA). I learned about this in a leadership training series at West Point a few years ago. The key point he made was less about the loop itself and more about how quickly an organization learns to do it. Boyd argued that competitive advantage comes from cycling through this loop faster than an opponent. It isn't necessarily the side with the best original decision that wins. It's the side that can Decide → Act → Learn → Adjust faster. This pattern repeats everywhere and whenever you have a loop. In my world (Building AI Systems), the concept is Train → Evaluate → Adjust → Train. Same concept, the structure is the same, and the outcome is predictable. The faster you can do this, the more likely you are to get better results. There is a well-known speed–accuracy tradeoff: moving faster generally increases the number of mistakes. The slower competitor initially looks superior because they make fewer errors. But this becomes misleading when errors are recoverable. When I was young, I was in college studying contention algorithms for communication systems. Essentially, how do machines negotiate for a shared medium? Well, there were many methods, but ultimately Ethernet won because, even though it made more mistakes, it was faster and other protocols could easily recover from them. Thus, the marriage of TCP/IP and Ethernet became the standard for modern business networks. Interesting that only a few decades ago, computer scientists thought the opposite. Having said all of this, the single contributing and crowning factor in speed's favor is that of compunded learning. Speed creates more learning cycles per unit of time. Suppose two organizations start at roughly the same level. Company A improves 10% every year. Company B improves only 3% each iteration but runs an iteration every month. The individual improvement might be smaller and messier, but the repeated learning begins to compound. Iteration speed overwhelms initial precision. So, while the allure of the perfectly crafted, meticulously planned approach is strong, there's a compelling argument for embracing the iterative, slightly imperfect, but undeniably swift path. It's not about recklessness, but about recognizing that in many endeavors, the ability to move, learn, and adapt quickly often creates a more robust and ultimately more successful outcome. Perhaps the real art lies in discerning when to lean into that speed, trusting that the compounding effect of rapid learning will, in time, refine the journey.

My intellectual journey has led me to a profound bias toward iterative thinking. This approach, at its core, follows a simple yet powerful cycle: Try, observe, learn, adjust, and then try again. This stands in stark contrast to the linear thinking that characterized my younger years: Analyze, decide, execute, and finish. The philosophical chasm between these two methodologies can be distilled into two distinct principles: Linear is Perfection-first: One thinks until confidence in action is absolute. Iterative is Action-first: One acts when sufficient knowledge exists to learn more. It's crucial to acknowledge that neither approach is inherently superior, though I confess a preference for the latter. Iterative thinking shines brightest when the cost of learning is low and feedback is readily available and actionable. Conversely, it falters when errors carry extreme costs, are irreversible, or when the problem domain is already thoroughly understood. Consider product development, writing, strategic planning, software engineering, training, or scientific experimentation—these are fertile grounds for iteration. One can readily test an idea, gauge its impact, and refine it. However, one would be ill-advised to "iterate" through bridge construction, a surgical operation, nuclear safety protocols, or a significant legal brief. Such endeavors demand meticulous planning, rigorous modeling, exhaustive verification, and adherence to established procedures before execution. The rapid advancements in artificial intelligence have, rather forcefully, taught me a critical lesson: iteration can, at times, serve as a convenient excuse for insufficient upfront thought. While speed and learning are invaluable, an endless cycle of trial-and-error can squander precious time when careful reasoning could preempt obvious missteps. Though not yet fully implemented, I am formulating a hybrid approach, a more robust decision-making pathway that synthesizes these two modes of thought: Think → Plan → Act → Measure → Learn → Adjust. This might appear self-evident, yet in practice, we often lack the discipline to measure, thereby failing to extract the full lessons from our actions. Unplanned, chaotic actions, devoid of a clear execution strategy and without metrics to track progress, frequently lead to unproductive repetition. The true inquiry, then, isn't which thinking style reigns supreme. Rather, it's about determining the optimal balance: how much thought should precede the initial action, and with what alacrity should one adapt thereafter?

There is a peculiar mystery to the relief that washes over us when we commit something to paper. A problem can haunt the mind for hours, even days, resurfacing relentlessly even when immediate action is impossible. Whether driving, dining, drifting to sleep, or engrossed in unrelated work, the thought reappears, as if the mind is a persistent sentinel, ensuring the issue remains unforgotten. Then, you write it down. The problem itself remains unchanged. The task is not completed, the difficult conversation not had, the decision not made, and the uncertainty persists. Yet, an internal settling often occurs. The thought no longer clamors for attention. It has been externalized, captured, and that simple act seems to grant permission to set it aside, at least for a while. Psychologists have long been fascinated by this phenomenon. One of the earliest to explore a related concept was Bluma Zeigarnik. Born in 1900, Zeigarnik studied psychology in Berlin during the 1920s under the influential Kurt Lewin. The genesis of her research is often traced to an observation made in a restaurant. Zeigarnik and Lewin noted that waiters possessed an extraordinary ability to recall complex orders while customers were still seated. However, once the bills were paid and the transactions concluded, those intricate details seemed to vanish from memory with surprising speed. This observation sparked a compelling question: Did an unfinished task engage the mind differently? Zeigarnik began to experiment. In one of her most renowned studies, participants were given a series of relatively simple activities—solving a problem, constructing an object, completing a puzzle, or other small tasks. Crucially, some activities were allowed to be completed, while others were deliberately interrupted. Later, Zeigarnik asked participants to recall what they had done. She discovered that people tended to remember the interrupted and unfinished tasks more readily than those they had completed. Her explanation posited that initiating a task creates a psychological tension. Once an objective is set, a part of the mind begins to strive for resolution. This tension is released upon completion. When a task remains unfinished, however, the mind continues to hold onto it. This tendency became known as the Zeigarnik Effect. While modern research has added nuance to Zeigarnik's original findings, and the effect doesn't manifest identically in all circumstances, the broader idea resonates intuitively. Unfinished matters tend to remain mentally active. They linger. They return. They seem to occupy disproportionate mental space simply because they lack closure. Viewed through this lens, the nature of stress becomes remarkably clear. Most of us carry a far greater burden of unfinished business than we realize. There are emails awaiting replies, conversations we know must occur, partially completed projects, commitments made, forgotten tasks, postponed decisions, and problems for which we simply lack solutions. Beyond these tangible items lie more abstract concerns that defy easy placement on a to-do list: worries about finances, family, work, health, relationships, or the future. Few of these demand our constant attention, yet our minds often treat them as if they do. They periodically resurface, sometimes at the most inconvenient moments, almost as if the brain is conducting a mental audit to ensure they haven't been forgotten. This, I believe, is why writing holds such power. When something exists solely in your mind, your brain bears the dual responsibility of eventually solving it and remembering its existence. This creates an additional burden. A portion of your attention must remain tethered to the problem, lest it slip away. Once you write it down, that dynamic shifts. Psychologists sometimes refer to this as cognitive offloading, the process of transferring the work of remembering or organizing information from your mind to the external world. We engage in this constantly, often without conscious thought. A calendar frees us from memorizing every appointment. A grocery list allows us to navigate the store without mentally rehearsing a dozen items. A phone reminder permits us to defer thinking about something until the opportune moment. Writing down a concern functions in much the same way. You are not necessarily solving the problem. You are creating a trusted repository where the problem now resides. This distinction is crucial, for the mind seems to respond differently to an unresolved problem that has been captured versus one that merely floats in our thoughts. The former can often be set aside. The latter tends to resurface repeatedly because the brain lacks assurance that it won't be forgotten. I have come to understand this through a long-standing habit: at the end of each day, I make a point of closing my day out. It is not an elaborate ritual, nor do I approach it as a productivity exercise demanding perfect utilization of every minute. I simply take a moment to honestly assess the day. I note my intentions, my actual accomplishments, what remained unfinished, and what needs to be carried forward. Over time, I have found this practice profoundly therapeutic. Acknowledging what didn't get done is as vital as recognizing what did. Without that acknowledgment, unfinished work tends to follow me into the evening. I may physically cease working, but mentally, fragments of the day persist. A forgotten task resurfaces during dinner. An incomplete item appears in my mind as I try to sleep. My attention drifts back to the workday, even though it has technically concluded. Closing the day transforms this relationship. I can look at an unfinished item and simply acknowledge it. I know it's still there. I know it requires attention. I might even decide when I will revisit it. But I no longer have to mentally rehearse it to ensure its survival until tomorrow. In a sense, I am not necessarily closing the task; I am closing the day. This has become an important distinction for me. We often assume that peace arrives when everything is done, yet few of us will ever reach the end of a day with absolutely nothing left unfinished. There will almost always be another email, another project, another conversation, another idea, or another obligation awaiting us. If our capacity for rest hinges on completing everything, we will rarely find rest. Instead, we can cultivate a reliable method for acknowledging the current state of affairs. We can recognize accomplishments, accept what remains unfinished, capture what needs to happen next, and then consciously allow the day to conclude. Most people eventually stumble upon some version of this when overwhelmed. There comes a point when too many things circulate in the mind, prompting us to grab a notebook or open a document and begin listing everything that needs doing. We call it a brain dump or a task list, and almost immediately, a sense of relief washes over us. The intriguing aspect is that nothing has actually been completed. If you had seventeen problems before making the list, you still have seventeen problems afterward. What has changed is that those problems are no longer seventeen indistinct entities vying for space in your head. They are visible. They have names. They have been captured. The temporary relief we experience in those moments conveys an important message. We don't have to wait until we are overwhelmed to act. Instead of treating writing things down as an emergency mechanism reserved for moments of extreme mental pressure, we can integrate it into the ordinary rhythm of our day. We can develop a habit of regularly clearing our m...

There once was a young man who believed he had been born for greatness. He did not want an ordinary life. He wanted riches, fame, and glory. He dreamed of building something so grand that people would speak his name long after he was gone. So he left home with ambition in his heart and certainty in his step. His first venture failed. He lost nearly everything he had saved, but he told himself that all great men stumble before they rise. So he tried again. The second venture failed too. Then came another. And another. Each time, he imagined that this would be the one. The business that would make him wealthy. The invention that would make him famous. The achievement that would finally prove he had been meant for something extraordinary. But success never came the way he imagined it would. Years passed. Along the way, he married a woman who believed in him even when he had stopped believing in himself. She sat beside him when money was scarce. She encouraged him when another dream collapsed. She celebrated the smallest victories and endured the longest disappointments. Together, they had children. The young man loved them, but part of him always remained fixed on the horizon. He kept searching. He chased opportunities in distant cities. He risked what little he had. He made promises to himself that the next attempt would be different. Sometimes he came close. There were years when he thought fortune had finally found him. But something always happened. A partner betrayed him. A market changed. An investment disappeared. A business closed. A door that seemed certain to open suddenly shut. And still he pressed on. His children grew. He taught them to work hard because work was the one thing he understood. He taught them to keep their word because he had learned what it felt like when others did not. He taught them to rise after failure because he had become very good at rising. He taught them courage, although he never thought himself courageous. He taught them perseverance, although he considered his life a long series of disappointments. And then one day, almost without noticing, the young man became an old man. His hair turned white. His hands became thin. The great fortune he had imagined as a boy had never appeared. No buildings carried his name. No crowds had ever cheered for him. No books recorded his accomplishments. And as he lay in bed near the end of his life, he felt a quiet sadness. He thought about all the things he had chased and never caught. All the plans that had failed. All the dreams that had remained dreams. He wondered whether he had wasted his life searching for treasure that had never existed. Then he heard voices in the hallway. His wife entered first. She was old now too. She took his hand just as she had done thousands of times before. Behind her came their children. And behind them came their children. And then came the little ones—the children of their children. Soon the room was full. There was laughter. There were stories. There were tears. One grandson told him how his father had taught him never to quit because that was what Grandpa had taught him. A daughter told him that she had learned loyalty by watching the way her parents had remained beside one another through difficult years. Another spoke of honesty. Another of courage. Another of kindness. Another of faith. The old man looked around the room. He saw his wife. He saw his children. He saw grandchildren climbing onto the bed. He saw great-grandchildren whose lives had only just begun. And suddenly, for the first time, he saw his life clearly. He had spent his entire life believing that treasure was something waiting for him somewhere in the distance. A fortune. A title. An achievement. A moment when the world would finally declare that he had succeeded. But while he had been searching for treasure, he had been collecting it. One ordinary day at a time. A marriage that had survived hardship. Children who had learned from his mistakes. Grandchildren carrying lessons he had once learned through pain. Stories. Traditions. Memories. Love. Character. A family whose lives had been shaped by his own. The old man began to cry. His wife leaned close and asked, “What is it?” He looked around the crowded room and smiled. “All these years,” he whispered, “I thought I had failed to find my treasure.” He squeezed her hand. “But I see now that I was gathering it the whole way.” And with the people he loved surrounding him, the old man finally understood something that had escaped him when he was young. A man can spend his whole life searching for riches and never become wealthy. He can chase fame and never become known. He can pursue glory and never have the world remember his name. And still— he may leave behind a treasure greater than anything he ever thought to seek. For some treasures are not found at the end of the journey. They are gathered along the way.

I want to begin with something Jesus said about prayer that I have been thinking about lately. In Matthew 6:7, Jesus says: “But when ye pray, use not vain repetitions, as the heathen do: for they think that they shall be heard for their much speaking.” That phrase caught my attention: “Vain repetitions.” Because repetition is actually a huge part of religious life. Christians repeat the Lord’s Prayer. Catholics pray the Rosary. Buddhists repeat mantras. Jewish worship includes prayers and passages that have been recited for generations. Muslims pray at prescribed times each day and repeatedly recite passages from the Quran. And even those of us who don't follow a highly structured form of prayer tend to repeat ourselves. We pray for the same people. We ask for the same things. We use many of the same words. So I started wondering: Is repetition the problem? And I don't think it is. In fact, repetition may be one of the most powerful tools we have for changing our lives. Think about almost anything you have ever learned to do well. You learned to walk through repetition. You learned to speak through repetition. An athlete repeats the same movement thousands of times. A musician plays the same scales again and again. We learn multiplication tables through repetition. We develop physical strength by repeating the same movements. And our character develops in much the same way. We become generous by repeatedly practicing generosity. We become patient by repeatedly choosing patience. We become grateful by repeatedly looking for things for which we are grateful. Eventually, something we once had to consciously choose begins to become part of who we are. So repetition itself isn't the enemy. Repetition is one of the primary ways human beings are formed. And this is where I think Jesus' choice of words is important. He doesn't simply warn us about repetition. He warns us about vain repetition. And then he tells us what makes the repetition vain: “For they think that they shall be heard for their much speaking.” In other words, the problem wasn't simply that these people repeated themselves. The problem was what they believed their repetition was accomplishing. They thought the quantity of their words somehow increased their influence over the divine. More words. More prayers. More repetitions. More likelihood that the gods would listen. Prayer could become almost transactional. If I say enough… If I pray long enough… If I perform the ritual correctly enough… perhaps I can produce the outcome I want. And Jesus immediately challenges that idea. In the very next verse he says: “Your Father knoweth what things ye have need of, before ye ask him.” I think that is the heart of this entire teaching. Jesus is saying: You don't have to earn God's attention. You already have it. You don't have to overwhelm God with words. You don't have to discover the right formula. You don't have to accumulate enough prayers to move your request to the top of some heavenly scoreboard. Your Father already knows. And yet, interestingly, Jesus doesn't say: “So don't pray.” He teaches them how to pray. And immediately afterward he gives them what we now call the Lord's Prayer. “Our Father, which art in heaven, Hallowed be thy name…” And Christians have repeated that prayer for nearly two thousand years. There is something almost ironic about that. Jesus warns us about vain repetition and then gives us one of the most repeated prayers in human history. But maybe that tells us something important. The question isn't whether we repeat something. The question is: What is the repetition doing? There is a profound difference between repetition as formation and repetition as transaction. When repetition is formative, I am not trying to change God. I am allowing the practice to change me. Imagine that I am anxious about something in my life. And I pray: “Thy will be done.” Then ten minutes later the anxiety returns. “Thy will be done.” The next morning I wake up worrying about it again. “Thy will be done.” A week later I am still struggling. “Thy will be done.” I might say those words a hundred times. But I'm not saying them because I believe God needs to hear them a hundred times. I need to hear them a hundred times. The repetition isn't working on God. It's working on me. Every repetition becomes another opportunity to surrender. Another opportunity to trust. Another opportunity to bring my mind back to what I believe. And I think this is where we can learn something from religious traditions beyond our own as well. In Buddhism, for example, mantras and other repetitive practices are often used to focus attention. The wandering mind wanders. And the practitioner brings it back. It wanders again. And the practitioner brings it back again. The repetition provides an anchor. Christians have developed similar practices throughout history—repeated prayers, memorized Scripture, hymns, liturgy, contemplative prayer. And there is something deeply human underneath all of them. Our minds wander. Our intentions wander. Our priorities wander. Our behavior wanders. And sometimes we need something that repeatedly brings us back. So perhaps repetition can serve a very beautiful spiritual purpose. It can become a way of returning. Returning to gratitude. Returning to humility. Returning to forgiveness. Returning to compassion. Returning to God. But there is also a danger. Because something that begins as meaningful repetition can gradually become mindless repetition. We can say words without thinking about them. We can perform rituals without remembering why. We can attend church without really being present. We can sing hymns while thinking about lunch. We can say “Amen” without having paid attention to the prayer. And perhaps even more dangerously, we can begin keeping score. How many prayers did I say? How many days have I completed? How many chapters did I read? How many services did I attend? How many boxes did I check? There is nothing wrong with measuring a habit. Measurement can help us develop discipline. But eventually we have to ask: Is the practice producing the person it was intended to produce? Because it is possible to complete the repetition while missing the transformation. I can repeat prayers about forgiveness while refusing to forgive. I can repeat prayers about generosity while remaining selfish. I can say “Thy will be done” while spending my entire life insisting upon my own will. I can pray “Give us this day our daily bread” while never noticing the person beside me who doesn't have any. At that point, perhaps the repetition has become exactly what Jesus warned about. It has become vain. Not because it was repeated. But because the repetition stopped reaching the heart. So I've started thinking about repetition in a different way. Before repeating a spiritual practice, maybe we should ask: Am I trying to change God, or am I allowing God to change me? Am I praying because I believe enough words will produce the outcome I want? Or am I praying because returning to these words is slowly forming me into the person I am called to become? And this principle extends beyond prayer. If you want to become grateful, repeatedly practice gratitude. If you want to become generous, repeatedly practic...

Present bias is the tendency to overvalue rewards available now and undervalue larger benefits that arrive later. In plain terms, people often choose immediate comfort, pleasure, or relief even when waiting would produce a better overall outcome. Repeatedly choosing the immediate reward can make that pattern feel more automatic, more normal, and more compelling over time. In other words, present-biased choices can become habit-strengthened through repetition, so the short-term option starts to feel like the default rather than a choice that is being actively evaluated. Here is the problem that we all face, and this is a decision-making process that happens multiple times each day. An immediate reward is available. The “now” option feels vivid, certain, and emotionally salient, while the future benefit feels abstract and distant. You choose the immediate reward. That choice often produces quick payoff: pleasure, relief, convenience, reduced effort, or avoidance of discomfort. The brain learns from the payoff. Behaviors followed by rewarding outcomes tend to become easier to repeat. Even if the long-term result is worse, the short-term reward teaches: “Do this again.” The behavior becomes more automatic. Over time, less conscious deliberation may be involved. The easy option becomes the familiar route, and the delayed-benefit option starts to feel effortful, unnatural, or even threatening. Future-oriented choice becomes harder. Not necessarily impossible, but harder, because now you are not only fighting the original attraction of immediate reward, you are also fighting a learned pattern. Over time, this path of choosing the easier immediate reward becomes “hard-coded.” This is a good metaphor because repeated present-focused choices can create a self-reinforcing behavioral loop. This loop is that immediate reward strengthens the behavior, repeated behavior becomes habit, habit reduces reflection, reduced reflection increases default short-term choice, and repeated short-term choice strengthens present-biased responding again. That loop makes the immediate option feel increasingly “obvious” and the delayed option increasingly “unnatural.” This aligns with the idea that immediate rewards are valued disproportionately strongly, while delayed rewards are sharply discounted, especially over short time horizons. A good example of building a habit to pick the immediate reward instead of the longer-term benefit happens all the time in our finances. Consider the daily coffee shop visit. For a few dollars, you get an instant caffeine fix and a moment of indulgence. The longer-term benefit, however, would be to brew coffee at home, saving that money daily. Over a year, those small, immediate rewards add up to a significant sum that could have been invested, used to pay down debt, or saved for a larger goal. The instant gratification of the barista-made latte often trumps the delayed gratification of financial security, illustrating how easily we prioritize the present over the future. Delayed benefits often have three disadvantages: they are abstract, not vivid right now; they require effort or discomfort now; they are uncertain or psychologically distant. Meanwhile, immediate rewards are usually concrete, emotionally satisfying, low-friction, available right away. So if someone repeatedly takes the immediate option, they are not just making isolated bad choices. They may be training attention, expectation, and habit to prefer fast payoff. When you have reinforced this pattern for a long time, it can feel almost insurmountable, especially when the pattern is old, emotionally rewarding, and built into daily routines. But “insurmountable” is not true. Habits can be weakened, and environments can be redesigned. You can fix this. Research suggests several ways to reduce present-biased behavior, including immediate incentives for good behaviors, making future choices in advance, and cooling-off periods before impulsive decisions. Present bias makes immediate rewards attractive. Repetition makes them habitual. Habit then amplifies present bias by making immediate-reward choices feel automatic and delayed-reward choices feel harder. Here is another example we all deal with. Suppose someone wants to exercise but keeps scrolling social media instead. The scrolling gives immediate stimulation and relief now. Exercise gives larger benefits later, but not instantly. If the person repeatedly chooses scrolling, the brain learns that boredom or stress should be answered with immediate digital reward. Eventually, the conflict is no longer just “scrolling vs. exercise.” It becomes an ingrained response pattern: discomfort → immediate reward. That is what happens when you continuously reinforce this “present bias.” Present bias explains the initial pull toward immediate rewards. When you repeatedly choose immediate rewards, you strengthen that bias behaviorally, making delayed-benefit choices feel progressively harder over time.

We often find ourselves either the victims or the perpetrators of the false choice, attempting to coerce others into selecting one option over another. This tactic is almost invariably a rhetorical maneuver, designed to dramatically underscore why our preferred option is the superior one. The reality, however, is that such choices are almost always illusory. The concept of the "false choice" or "forced choice" is a significant theme in the work of Jacques Lacan, who deeply intertwined it with his ideas of "alienation" and "separation." He posited that individuals are fundamentally alienated from their true selves through language and the demands of society, culture, and even parents. In this process, a person is presented with what appears to be a choice, yet, in reality, it offers no genuine alternative for their subjective freedom. Lacan famously illustrates this with the "either/or" proposition, specifically the choice between "your money or your life." He argues this is not a true choice because, despite presenting two options, both lead to a loss for the subject. Choosing "your money" means losing your money. Choosing "your life" still means losing your money (to save your life). The "choice" is structured such that one cannot escape a fundamental loss or compromise of their being or possessions. This scenario highlights how what seems like a decision-making moment is, in fact, a situation where the person is forced to concede something essential, regardless of the path taken. I found myself in precisely such a situation today. Someone, in offering me an opportunity, clearly wanted me to choose a particular path. They presented two alternatives, one of which seemed utterly impossible. After a moment's thought, I declared, "I want both." The person stared at me in astonishment. "Both? You cannot have both!" "Then neither," I replied. You see, we are constantly thrust into false choice scenarios, and I've learned that the best answer is always "and," not "or." Worse, however, is when we inflict this upon ourselves. Pay close attention to your own language over the next few weeks. Do you do this? Most of us do. When we're trying to win an argument or persuade someone to make a decision, we often resort to this technique: presenting a false choice. I caught myself doing it with one of my children a while ago: "You can do this or throw your life away. Pick one." That was overly dramatic, and the choice was entirely false. They could easily pick a third, fourth, or many other options that didn't involve either of my proposals. Why do we do this? It's a form of manipulation. Humans are clever; they quickly realize that the most effective way to control someone is to narrow their options. We are so adept at this that we almost all do it subconsciously, as we are all, in some way, attempting to control each other. I believe we recognize this, which is why you hear people say, "Well, you can choose between A and B, but I'm okay with whatever you want to do." As if that somehow alleviates the guilt of presenting another person with a false choice. I bring this up because recognizing when this is happening is incredibly helpful. It allows you to avoid the false dilemma and prevent unnecessarily falling into a forced dichotomy where, either way, you lose control of the situation—much like when you walk into a car dealership to buy a vehicle!

The software development world came to a screeching halt today when the runners hosted in GitHub suddenly stopped serving what are known as actions. About a 6- to 8-hour outage for probably one of the most heavily used services on the Internet. It definitely exposed a bottleneck for many development shops that are becoming increasingly dependent on agentic workflows that automate the process of checking in code changes. Which is interesting because the reason we use a service like that in the first place is for retention of code revisions to recover from issues and problems associated with the accelerated pace that multiple teams working on the same code base produce. In the IT world, we spend a lot of time worried about bottlenecks in our process. What is a bottleneck, really? Don't you always have them? Seems like a matter of perspective. Perhaps it's less about eliminating them entirely and more about identifying the most restrictive one at any given time. The one that, if addressed, would unlock the greatest immediate improvement. It's a dynamic target, shifting as you optimize. So, yes, there's always a bottleneck, but the crucial question is: which one demands your attention now? This phenomenon is not just in the development world; it is everywhere. I have a fig tree in my backyard that cranks out an incredible number of figs, and it is impossible to keep that area clean of figs falling to the ground and attracting ants. However, I try. Today, I noticed a stream of ants making their way across my countertop to get to a fig that had fallen near my outdoor sink. They found an interesting path, and I think the entire colony was out collecting the harvest. However, even these industrious ants were facing a bottleneck. The one spot that transitioned to the top part of the counter was narrow, and so only 2 or 3 ants could cross at a time. They had a major jam in their operation, in essence, a bottleneck. I wondered if they would do anything about it. I watched for a while and got bored. I came back a few hours later, and, sure enough, they had found a second path. Now they had two parallel streams heading toward the countertop bounty. I almost felt bad when I removed the fig and threw it away. Almost. However, if I had left the fig in place, the ants were probably experiencing a bottleneck somewhere else. Perhaps the coffers of food storage back at the colony were jam-packed with ants trying to drop off their payload. The point is, even ants deal with this problem of ever-continuing bottlenecks. When you clear one, there will always be another. They seem to be about perspective. Once you start growing because you remove one barrier, you will run into the next one. And the general rule seems to be, the larger and faster you get, the bigger and nastier the bottleneck becomes. So, in essence, we humans all have one thing in common. We are constantly working hard to remove bottlenecks. Remind yourself of that next time you are stuck on the 15 freeway, or waiting in line at the pharmacy, or just admiring the ants trying to help you clear the figs.

I was on a call recently with the senior leader in an organization. During that call, a problem surfaced which we began discussing vigorously. One of the subordinates on the call was having a visible panic attack. She was horrified that a problem was being brought up in front of her leader in such a manner. No preparation. No triage. No cover story. Nothing, just plain, raw truth, unfiltered and real-time. This reaction caused me to pause and think this through. I am naturally inclined to pull all the skeletons out of the closet as soon as I discover that they are there. I want everyone to know as fast as possible so that a solution may be derived quickly. However, her reaction was much different, and that is when I realized that the leader is always the last to know. I was doing some research on field notes from the German army during the later days of World War II. The pending catastrophic collapse of the Normandy area was well known by the officers. They knew that the muscle and sheer volume of machinery and ammunition being produced by the United States was going to crush them. The level of intel they had was astonishing, actually, but by the time this got up to Adolf Hitler and his inner circle, the doomed defense of the coastline was largely dismissed as a minor inconvenience. This is often the case in hierarchical systems, where subordinates are fearful of reprimand regarding negative or poor reports. I read a study on an effort by a U.S. company to introduce topsoil composting to provinces in southern India many years ago. They taught methods and procedures on how to produce more topsoil. This was necessary due to the devastating effect the monsoon season could have on fertile soil. As any good U.S. company would do, they created a reporting system so they could accurately calculate what each farmer was generating from composting efforts. The problem is that they did not understand this same phenomenon in reverse. Each farmer would report to their superior a slight exaggeration of soil production. Due to the number of mid-level reports, by the time this reached the top reporting structure in the government, there was enough compost to cover the entire planet, much less southern India. The point in all of this is that if you are the leader, if you are the person in the dominant position, the one that is funding everyone in the reporting chain, then you should expect nothing less than this phenomenon. The court that you oversee will only tell you what you want to hear. You could be the biggest clown that everyone laughs at when you leave the room, but when you are there, everyone will treat every ridiculous thing you say and do with grand gestures and seriousness. As long as you continue to pay the bills, of course. So you may not know this; you could be the laughingstock of your own company, and you would be slow to find out. All you see is nodding heads and polite smiles. That is on a personal basis; what is worse is that the direction you are heading could be completely wrong and ultimately going to lead to the death of the organization. You will think that you are helping; you will go into the conference room and jump up and down with all manner of enthusiasm and exclaim imminent success if everyone would just follow your course, but then a few months later, you will discover that the boat went right off the edge of a waterfall and everyone that you thought really liked you silently got off the ship and watched it happen. Not saying a word, because, after all, the king is the last to know. This has repeated constantly throughout history and in many corporations. Failure is often seen well in advance by everyone except for who really needs to know. This is something to keep in mind as you raise your voice, flap your arms, and boast of how awesome everything is. You could very well be saying something that you believe to be an absolute possibility, when everyone around you knows the real truth: your demise is a foregone conclusion. I have seen many leaders that pride themselves on being "good with people" find out the truth later on: they were only good because they learned to say they were good so that you would go away. The pompous royalty that sits on the throne, basking in their glory right up until the horde is at the gates.

How can you motivate someone to work harder?I am in a unique position to answer this question, as I have worked and been a leader in small organizations, large public education, large public and private companies, and my own startups. I have battled with this question, and I have seen others battle with it too. I have read many books on the subject, and I can collectively distill that knowledge into two concepts: give the person a carrot to chase or beat them with a stick.The "carrot and stick" analogy is a classic metaphor for motivation, describing a system of rewards and punishments used to encourage a desired behavior. The "carrot" represents the incentive or reward offered for compliance, something desirable that an individual or group will strive to attain. Think of a donkey being enticed forward by a carrot dangling just out of reach. The "stick," on the other hand, symbolizes the penalty or negative consequence for non-compliance. This could be a punishment, a threat, or the removal of a privilege, much like a driver might use a stick to prod a stubborn animal.In essence, it's about leveraging both positive reinforcement (the carrot) and negative reinforcement (the stick) to steer actions. While effective in some contexts, it's often criticized for being a simplistic and potentially demotivating approach, as it can foster resentment or a focus solely on avoiding punishment rather than genuine engagement or intrinsic motivation.However, this is what most managers defer to: one or both of these methods. They think they are really innovative when they come up with a reward and punishment system, and then they subject their workers to a bunch of ridiculous rules in order to qualify for each program. I have learned that neither of these works at all. Gone are the days when people are lucky to work for you. They have a choice and are surrounded by options, so you need a better plan.First, understand their "why." What are their aspirations, their dreams, their fears? Connect their effort directly to those deeply held desires. Show them how working harder now isn't just about a paycheck, but about building the foundation for the life they envision.Second, provide clear, achievable goals and regular, constructive feedback. Break down large tasks into smaller, manageable steps. Celebrate small wins to build momentum and confidence. When offering criticism, focus on solutions and growth, not just shortcomings.Third, foster a sense of autonomy and ownership. Give them opportunities to take initiative, make decisions, and contribute their unique ideas. When they feel invested and respected, their intrinsic motivation will naturally increase.Finally, lead by example. Demonstrate your own work ethic, passion, and commitment. Create a supportive environment where hard work is recognized and valued, and where mistakes are seen as learning opportunities. Remember, motivation isn't a one-time fix; it's an ongoing conversation and a continuous process of encouragement and empowerment.I was at an executive retreat where someone actually said that employees should always put the company first. This is a common sentiment, but it often overlooks the fact that employees are not just cogs in a machine; they are individuals with their own lives, families, and aspirations. As Simon Sinek points out, "When we take care of our people, our people will take care of our customers, and our customers will take care of our bottom line."

A high school memory of a cassette tape, a broken rewind button, and the unexpected discovery of Led Zeppelin's "D'yer Mak'er" that changed everything.

Sometimes, feeling down is just part of the human experience. Learn to navigate these emotional ebbs and flows by recognizing them without judgment, continuing your commitments, and avoiding major decisions during low periods. This approach can lead to faster recovery and less intense downturns.

Our ancient hunter-gatherer past still shapes our mood and physiology. Just like a bear's seasonal cycle, humans have ingrained rhythms that clash with modern life. Understanding and embracing these natural ebbs and flows can lead to a more harmonious existence.

To the rare souls who choose goodness despite human flaws, don't give up on us. You are a light against the dull gray of humanity, reminding us we're not beyond redemption. Your mercy and hope inspire us, even when we're ungrateful. We see you, we need you. Keep being who you are.

Value is subjective and personal. To effectively communicate a value proposition, understand individual needs and tailor your message. Start with a brief description to gauge reactions and refine your approach.

Innovation often starts with ideas deemed 'crazy' by others. History is filled with examples of groundbreaking concepts, from umbrellas to personal computers, that were initially met with skepticism. While pursuing such a path is challenging and often lonely, those who persevere and succeed are eventually hailed as visionaries. Be prepared for the difficult journey, as success is never guaranteed, but the rewards can be immense.