Continuing along the line of this self-improvement post and inspired by reading Brene Brown’s books, I’ve been thinking a lot about the practice of gratitude recently. Brown points out that gratitude is not an attitude, but a behavior that we have to practice on a regular basis. Gratitude is the act of taking the time […]
Category: journal
Reflecting on the Talia Jane brouhaha
I’m summarizing my comments from various social media threads on Talia Jane’s letter to the Yelp CEO and the responses like this one, and reposting them here for later findability. I have complicated feelings about this letter, given that I have been that ranting employee – not doing it publicly (even back when my blog […]
2015 Year in Review
After 2013 was the Year of Yes and 2014 was the Year of More, the theme of 2015 was Pushing the Limits. 2015 was about a combination of great physical exertion but also deep introspection, and I’m in a pretty happy spot as I enter 2016. Sports: Let’s start with the most obvious focus of […]
Open Letter to MIT President Reif
Yesterday, I received an email from MIT crowing about MIT’s global entrepreneurial impact. The email from MIT President Reif included this paragraph: “Our community’s passion for doing, making, designing and building is alive and growing. As we do our part by continuing to foster our students’ natural creativity and energy, it is inspiring to see […]
Pros and cons of thinking systemically
One of the challenges I have in trying to figure out how to effect change (as discussed in my last post) is that I can’t figure out where to start. And part of the reason for that is that I tend to have a systemic top-level way of thinking about situations. So I see these […]
Updating mental software and our reality
The new Wait but Why post, purporting to understand Elon Musk’s “secret sauce” in being so innovative is a very long, but great, read. And what Tim Urban suggests is that Musk is proactive in updating his mental software to reflect reality, and the real question he gets into is: why aren’t the rest of […]
How the Prisoner’s Dilemma applies to my behavior
I have often called myself an amplifier. If I’m on a good team, I make the team better by bridging communication gaps, figuring out what everybody does well and steering that work to them, etc. If I’m in a bad situation, though, I can use those same skills to make things worse by undermining the […]
The Leadville experience
[This is a long post with my experience in riding the Leadville 100 mountain bike race. If you want to just look at pretty pictures instead, go here.] “You are better than you think you are, and you can do more than you think you can.” – Ken Chlouber, creator of the Leadville race series […]
My first Death Ride
As I mentioned a couple months ago, I have been training for the Death Ride, a 125 mile bike ride near Tahoe that does 5 mountain passes for a total of 15,000 vertical feet of climbing. Training has taken up most of my weekends doing long training rides, as well as “shorter” (2-4 hour) rides […]
Asynchronous Ask Me Anything
I just got back from the wonderful Up to All of Us conference. The introductory exercise was to write down three things about yourself in a notebook, and then pass the notebook around the room and have everybody write a comment or a question on the page. It was fascinating to get that feedback from […]
