I didn’t start this year trying to extract lessons. Most of what I wrote in 2025 came from being in the middle of things — mid-effort, mid-confusion, mid-adjustment. The writing was less about declaring truths and more about staying honest while tools, habits, and inner weather kept shifting underfoot. Only in hindsight do patterns become visible. Certain ideas didn’t just appear once; they returned. Sometimes as reassurance, sometimes as friction. What follows are twenty-five of those...
2 months ago • 3 min read
"If the Angel decides to come it will be because you have convinced her, not by tears, but by your humble resolve to be always beginning; to be a beginner." - Rainer Maria Rilke Toward the end of the year – stretched thin by overwhelm, geopolitical gravity, and personal fatigue – the word joy can feel like a taunt. Not light. Not gentle. Not spacious. And Mariah Carey everywhere this time of year. Joy: it can feel a bit heavy, maybe impossible, like a sunbeam trying to break through dark...
2 months ago • 3 min read
Hi friends, Most of us are carrying an aspiration that’s a little bigger than our current capacity. (And if you read last week's post, you know I am.) The aspiration could be a project we’re making our way through. A decision that keeps circling back. A feeling that we’re meant to build something—or become someone—that requires more clarity, more challenge, or simply more companionship than life naturally provides. And while I love the solitude of deep work, I’ve learned that meaningful work...
3 months ago • 1 min read
My wife and I have decided to start a new business together. It's something we're both super excited about, though I can't share details just yet. But as we've been researching and modeling it, and generally preparing ourselves for the endeavor and all the life changes that will surely come from it, something new has arisen in me. It comes up any time there's another step towards "yes, let's go." It's a feeling that doesn't quite have a name. Something like fear, but not exactly. Something...
3 months ago • 3 min read
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...
4 months ago • 4 min read
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,...
4 months ago • 4 min read
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?”...
4 months ago • 1 min read
Paris woke to a hole in its crown. Seven minutes. A silent alarm. Empty glass where the Louvre’s jewels once burned under lights. The thieves vanished into the city’s bloodstream before sunrise. Across the Atlantic, bulldozers gnawed at the East Wing of the White House — marble cracking, dust swirling, history traded for a ballroom. You can almost hear the champagne glasses clink while the Republic coughs in the rubble. Hunter S. Thompson might’ve called it a duel between decay and delusion —...
4 months ago • 2 min read
The world feels like it’s on a gnarly bender right now—hungover on outrage, mainlining doomscrolls, and picking fistfights with its own reflection. In moments like these, the most sane, the most rebellious thing you can do isn’t to scream louder. It’s to stay adult. Not in the “pay your taxes and buy beige chinos” sense, but in the “hold your ground while the circus burns” sense. These eight principles are about keeping your nervous system from joining the mosh pit. They’re about showing up...
6 months ago • 4 min read