A participant from a 2018 complexity workshop I ran in The Hague, reflecting on an experience. From a piece in The Walrus by Troy Jollimore, a philosophy professor, on his evolving relationship to …

This is difficult. Care requires time and effort, and we can’t care about everything, all the way, all the time. If you’re prepared to care about every element of your work, then you al…

Like the wonderful American writer Wendell Berry, Adrian Bell’s desire for a return to a more sympathetic agriculture is not born out of nostalgia

The Myth of Creation Without End

Whenever That Day Comes

It’s one thing to say that 7,000,000 people will die next year from smoking cigarettes. It’s a totally different thing to list those folks by name. When we confront risk, two things mak…

I'm not asking for superpowers. I just want emotional intelligence, to be a better writer, to grow old with grace and to increase my appreciation of other people's struggles.

Not enough time for the things you wish you could do? Here's how I find more time realistically.

If you talk to enough aspiring leaders, you’ll become familiar with the prevalent idea that they need to be promoted before they can work on strategy. It’s a truism, but I’ve also found this idea perfectly wrong: you can work on strategy from anywhere in an organization, it just requires different tactics to do so. Both Staff Engineer and The Engineering Executive’s Primer have chapters on strategy. While the chapters’ contents are quite different, both present a practical path to advancing your organization’s thinking about complex topics. This chapter explains my belief that anyone within an organization can make meaningful progress on strategy, particularly if you are honest about the tools accessible to you, and thoughtful about how to use them.

I’m now entering the sixth month of my year-long Foundations project. This month’s focus is on outreach. One of three socially-oriented foundations, outreach focuses on meeting new people and sustaining friendships with people you don’t see every day. Two related foundations, connection and service, will focus on improving close connections and finding ways to help […]

If you’ve ever tried reading an old classic written before the printing press was invented in the 15th Century, say, Homer or Milton, you may have noticed

I was sitting on the porch in the dark with a friend who had stopped by to tell me he was getting a divorce. No no no he didn’t want to come inside and disturb the kids he said. Out here is fine he said. I brought out a

For the maker looking to turn their project into a business, trying to price your widget can be a bit of a conundrum. You want to share your widget with the world without going broke in the process…

This is how we learn. An apple is a lot like an orange, but you can eat the skin and it’s not as sweet. If you know what an orange is, you’re most of the way to understanding an apple. …

Media theory pioneer Harold Innis saw it 70 years ago: Some cultures and ideas are built to spread across SPACE. And some spread across TIME. It’s the tension between space and time that lead…

Reinvention doesn’t happen in a single moment. It’s not a dramatic pivot or a sudden epiphany. It’s a process—one that demands clarity, discipline, and self-awareness. And in my experience, there’s no better tool for that than journalling.

https://startupsoup.substack.com/p/minimum-viable-startup-operations [Jean Hsu and Jen Dennard] This is a good inaugural post from two people who really have lived the startup operations life many times over: "We

Is there a purpose to midlife? Or is it just about working and buying stuff?

As AI serves up certainty like fast food, we're becoming intellectually obese—too full of answers to hunger for deep understanding.

Our instincts might not be as good as we hope. Going with your gut is thrilling. It’s personal, vulnerable and brave. And if it’s getting you what you seek, keep at it. But often, our i…

People have different styles when they cook. Some people are neat and tidy. After taking out and using an ingredient they don’t need anymore, they return it to the fridge or cabinet. After chopping up vegetables, they clean up the scraps left behind. When a dish has been dirtied, they put it in the sink. […]

This is how you can optimize system performance and ensure reliable SMS delivery during peak traffic events like Black Friday.

Getting to the conference in Santa Fe isn’t difficult. Someone will drive/fly you there. The hard part is deciding to go. And yet, it might take 8 hours to arrive. If they invented teleportat…

Failure is inevitable, but growth is optional. The leaders who thrive know how to turn mistakes into stepping stones.

“Every government is a parliament of whores. The trouble is, in a democracy, the whores are us.” -PJ O’Rourke. As you probably heard already, NYC Mayor