Most of the amazing outcomes in my personal and professional life have come when I favor an interesting path over a sensible one and most of my regrets can be traced to times I did the opposite. Not surprisingly, the interesting things turn out to be more sensible in retrospect. This principle recently steered me […]
Category Archives: Notebook
Interview with Ecommerce Fuel
Earlier this year Zack Kanter introduced me to Andrew Youderian who is, among other things, the founder of Ecommerce Fuel. Later in the summer, at the tail end of my summer working from rural NW Montana, I drove to Bozeman to hang out with Andrew and do a podcast interview with him. We drove to […]
Social
According to Facebook a lot has happened since I last logged into Facebook. Strangely, I feel fine. On a random Sunday a few months ago I decided to break a habit loop checking Twitter and Facebook obsessively. I had some deep thinking to do that day so I wanted to stay away from distractions. The next day for the next two […]
Motivating Employees During Tough Times
One of our company managers sent a note to shareholders the other day that included an ask for advice. Several underperforming team members had recently resigned and he was considering removing a few more. In his words: Some people need to be removed from the business. With some of our recent resignations, it has been […]
The History of Time + Perception
Derek Thompson is one of my favorite writers. His work criss-crosses between economics, psychology and marketing in often wild ways. His piece on the history of the construct and perception of time came out in December and I just got around to reading it this week. And I’m mad I waited. Like most of Derek’s work […]
Clayton Christensen Profile in The New Yorker
The New Yorker has a great profile of Clayton Christensen, author of The Innovator’s Dillemma. I’m not sure when it came out, like many things it may have been sitting in my Instapaper queue for a long time. It’s long. I read it over a solo dinner recently. Christensen is a fascinating human, full of contradictions. I particularly loved […]
Going the other way
The nav said turn right. It was a dirt road. It went straight down and disappeared into trees. I checked around. There’s no other road. It had to be that one. I was taking a quick morning drive to an out of the way small town on the Amalfi Coast before a meeting in a […]
V for Wikipedia
After a great week in London working with our investment partners I decided to take a week to putz around Europe. After all, what are airline miles for? When I travel I like to explore random places and off the beaten path restaurants. Atlas Obscura once led me to a donkey refuge in Palo Alto […]
Death and the Present Moment
Note: this is a part of an email and real life conversation I am having with a friend about people living with terminal diagnoses. After sharing my thoughts on When Breath Becomes Air he suggested I watch a video about Claire Wineland and asked me what I thought. This was my response. I took some time to reflect on this. […]
Relative Luxury: My $10 Watch
I wear a $10 watch. It’s a Casio. It tells time. It doesn’t display the date. It has a scratch on it from a recent surfing crash in Ventura…the same crash almost destroyed my surf board. Somehow it didn’t destroy me. I bought the first Apple Watch the day it launched. Quickly I was overwhelmed by […]
