There's no glory in guaranteed success

There's no glory in guaranteed success. It takes guts, belief, and personal investment to truly make something meaningful. Whether you are in any profession, the parts that hold weight are the ones you poured your heart into, the ones you risked something for.

Where are you?

When you’re reading a good historical novel, you might be there and then.  When you imagine what went wrong in that conversation, you live in yesterday. And when you’re scripting the next conversation you’re going to have, you’re in tomorrow. Time travel and teleportation have never been easier or more common. What happens when we are here and now?

Default to surrender

AI chatbots highight a challenge that is worth understanding. It applies to customer service, bureaucracies and teachers as well. If you ask an AI a question and it’s not confident in the answer, it should say, “I’m not sure.” That could be followed up with, “Do you want me to guess” or “if you could give me more context…” But proudly and confidently bluffing isn’t helpful. It’s really unusual to find this sort of humanity (even with humans), but it’s a great way to build trust.

The simplest way to clarify your thinking

The simplest way to clarify your thinking is to write a full page about whatever you are dealing with and then delete everything except the 1-2 sentences that explain it best.

You’re only as good as your worst day.

You’re only as good as your worst day. Not because what you do the rest of the time doesn’t matter. Not because you should be expected to be perfect under immense stress or to behave according to plan when everything goes awry. But because what you do on your worst day is impossible to fake. It’s honest signaling.

Finding Your Own Path

You’re young. You have a master. You want to emulate them, do what they do. But at some point in life, you have to turn around and say I have to find my own way in my own language.

Disorder is not a mistake

We cannot expect anything to stay the way we leave it. To maintain our health, relationships, careers, skills, knowledge, societies, and possessions requires never-ending effort and vigilance. Disorder is not a mistake; it is our default. Order is always artificial and temporary.