15 hours agoDecisions for the next decadeThe decisions we make today are not always in harmony with the outcomes we desire in the future. Sometimes the easier thing done today is just a debt incurred on your (and your team’s) future self. A half-baked solution that you cobble together today that technically works may very well…1 min read1 min read
1 day agoOf course it’s toughI was talking on the phone with my parent earlier today about some challenges I’m experiencing. They responded: “Of course it’s tough!” For whatever reason, the comment gave me pause. It prompted me to ask myself: “On what grounds was I expecting things to be easy?” I didn’t have a…1 min read1 min read
2 days agoIn strideLearning to take increasingly challenging situations in stride is an invaluable skill. I thought I’d shake things up today and ask a large language model (LLM) to define what it even means to take something “in stride” — here is a response from Anthropic’s LLM, Claude: “To take something in…2 min read2 min read
3 days agoFocus on problems bigger than youThere are several incentives that motivate us to work on a problem: we want to improve our lives, we want to make a living, we want to improve other people’s lives, etc. In general, I think the most satisfying incentive with the most driving force is the desire to improve…1 min read1 min read
5 days agoFor nowWhenever I share a new artificial intelligence tool with my peers, I urge them to distinguish between the technology’s current performance and its potential. It’s easy to hold a magnifying glass up to an odd response from a large language model or goofy-looking image from a text-to-image model and prematurely…1 min read1 min read
5 days agoSpice toleranceIt’s always amusing to eat spicy food with friends and observe our wide range of reactions: For some, it’s not spicy at all. For others, there’s just a little kick. And for the rest, the spiciness is a total shock to the body. Everyone’s eating the same food. It’s just…1 min read1 min read
6 days agoWhat are the few things?It’s possible to be invested in so many different legitimately useful ideas & projects that you are unable to pursue any of them to completion. I suspect that the reason why some people are better at getting important work done isn’t that they have fewer things to do, but more…1 min read1 min read
Sep 14AttentionThinking or lamenting about the last thing that occurred is a quick way to halve your output. If all a golf player can think about is how off their last swing felt, that’s less focus and attention they can invest in the swing they’re about to take. If all a…1 min read1 min read
Sep 13Do with convictionIn a discussion about when it makes sense to adopt new metrics, an advisor told me: “Only add them when you have conviction in it.” Conviction. The word really stuck with me. Metrics aside, I think we’d all be genuinely more satisfied with where we invest our time and energy…1 min read1 min read
Sep 12The Half-Life of A Big ProblemMost problems have a shorter half-life than we think. In many cases, what feels like a big deal at home or at work today probably won’t seem as significant a week or month from now. It’s not time itself that shrinks these problems, but what we do with the time: …1 min read1 min read
