It's Nothing Personal...
Is there such a thing as personally wholesome social media? What's the limit to how many relationships you can or should reasonably try to sustain? Maybe if you need software to keep up to date and to keep folks updated then you've already hit that limit? It's already clear that there's business value in being able to get a message in front of a bunch of people; but is there actual personal value in contributing to and trying to drink from a crowdsourced feed of unfiltered content at a volume a...
Read post
Decisions decisions
Of the various bits of written content I've authored publicly, the pieces that seem to provoke the most discussion and joy are generally those that dive into how my partner and I have approached making some big personal decisions. For example, choosing a new country to live in, or deciding how to track our money, or what to do with our precious date nights. I suspect the appeal is in how there's a certain glee imagining yourself in a novel "what-if" scenario - not too dissimilar to the way a goo...
Read post
Shocker!
I think the mark of a useful discovery-writing exercise is when you end up in mental place that you couldn't foresee when you started out. It's the reward for trusting the process enough to continue even when it doesn't feel like you're travelling very far or to anywhere profound. But then you stop, and you take stock of how far you've come and it feels sublime. Who would have thought this great thing...is great?? Somehow that's still a surprising sensation even when you rationally know tha...
Read post
Finding a Nail to Hammer
There's a Venn diagram between "what I like", "what I'm good at", and "what earns money" wherein the overlap between all 3 categories should be where you qualify a career opportunity worthy of pursuit. The trouble is that you typically try to make a decision on that as a teenager, well before you have much knowledge of the kind of things that earn money (aka legitimate problems and/or value propositions). Not only have you not experienced that much of adult society yet, but the landscape of jobs...
Read post
Keeping One Eye on the Prize
Once you've gathered your tools, you need to do something with them. I feel swamped in a tech bubble moment where there's a lot of tool-building and conversations about tools and their potential for building more tools. I.e. AI and tech, and it's potential for helping folks build more platforms for AI and tech etc. etc. However, I feel like I'm missing exposure to activity where those tools are in use for an external end purpose. Everyone is so focused on the shovels for the gold rush, but wha...
Read post
Reckless Simplicity
"Start where you are, use what you have" person A: "I could have done that" person B: "yeah, but you didn't" It's much easier to improve something that exists, than something that doesn't. Rather, you can't improve what doesn't exist and getting into existence is a task that should be approached without too much scrutiny. Or without any scrutiny. I can already feel my mind fizzing with all kinds of hypothetical arguments justifying why it's good to stop a creation before its genesis. If a...
Read post
Born to Synthesise
"Produce more than you consume" ...is some advice that I came across recently. It was in the context of ways to get rich or something self-helpy like that but it spoke to me on a personal level because I've been reflecting that I don't create as much as I used to. In fact, I consume more than ever before, probably. At least it feels that way because there's certainly a lot more to consume. For example, there's the ever renewed crowdsourced content feed from the likes of Youtube and other so...
Read post