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: thoughts
Sapiens, by Yuval Noah Harari
Amazon link This book had been making the rounds last year, and everybody who had read it recommended it (including Bill Gates), so I was happy to finally get it from the library. Subtitled A Brief History of Humankind, Sapiens traces the rise of humans from prehistoric hunter gatherers to world-dominating titans. What I like […]
Choose Action over Identity
I have just returned from the Overlap retreat and am, as always, buzzing with ideas and energy as a result. So I’m going to start writing here once again to document and explore some of those ideas. One powerful distinction that was discussed was the difference between identity (“I am”) and action (“I do”). This […]
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 […]
Be the change
“You have power over your mind — not outside events. Realize this, and you will find strength.” — Meditations by Marcus Aurelius I have been thinking about personal responsibility, and the idea of starting change with oneself. This is continuing the thinking of my recent post about updating our mental software. Some background: I started […]
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 […]
The value of forecasting
On Monday night, I attended the Long Now talk given by Philip Tetlock on the topic of Superforecasting. I was disappointed with the talk and thought it was missing the point. But when I said that to a friend afterwards, he asked me what I wished Tetlock had talked about. So I’m going to use […]
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 […]
Repurposing the college experience
I was having coffee with the always fascinating Grant McCracken last week, and we got into a digression on the function of the university in the world today (part of what I love about talking to Grant is that our conversations end up in such interesting places). It stemmed from a discussion about whether my […]
