A newsletter for ambitious minds learning to live with more intention. Each week, you’ll get grounded reflections and practical tools to quiet your inner critic, realign with your values, and build a life that feels sustainable — not squeezed.
The Invisible Collaborators (and how to invite them to participate)
|
Your environment is always shaping your mind. Rick Rubin calls this the overstory. The unseen force of place. The coffee shop that helps you focus. The room that sparks a breakthrough. The forest path that shifts your mood. Every place carries history, energy, and intention. They join your thinking whether you want them to or not. Rubin also keeps an empty chair in his studio. It is not for a person. It is for the presence that has not arrived yet. A reminder to stay receptive. To make space for what is unspoken, for what is waiting to emerge. Together these two practices point in one direction: Practical ways to apply this:
Your work is never alone. Place is in the room. Absence is in the room. The question is whether you let them participate with you. |
The Pocket
A newsletter for ambitious minds learning to live with more intention. Each week, you’ll get grounded reflections and practical tools to quiet your inner critic, realign with your values, and build a life that feels sustainable — not squeezed.
AI is the thing we keep trying to talk around instead of about. But pretending it’s optional now is like pretending the tide might negotiate with you. It’s here. It’s powerful. It’s strange. And depending on where you’re standing, it reads as doorway, disruption, or dragon. The poet Alison Hawthorne Deming writes about the “edge effect” — those ecological borders where one habitat dissolves into another, and life explodes in variety. Marsh into pond. Forest into field. These liminal zones are...
Most of the time, we’re not short on intelligence — we’re short on visibility. These seven models won’t remove the weather, but they’ll help you drive in the rain. “We are never definitely right; we can only be sure we are definitely wrong.” — Richard Feynman A while back, I wrote about avoiding collaboration traps — the Abilene Paradox, Parkinson’s Law, and Chesterton’s Fence — with a handful of strategies for saner decisions in groups. The gist: teams drift when nobody says what they think,...
The heretical neuroscience of habit — and why rhythm beats willpower every time Everyone loves the idea of self-improvement — until they realize it’s mostly repetition in disguise. The brain doesn’t care about your goals, your affirmations, or your color-coded planner. It only cares what you do, again and again, in the same context. That’s not motivation. That’s wiring. Heresy #1: Willpower is overrated. The prefrontal cortex — your decision-making muscle — burns out fast. Every “should I?”...