Archive of posts with tag 'Newsletter'
Where You Work Shapes How You Work →
Our levels of productivity, creativity, and inspiration have an intimate, hard-to-articulate connection to our environments. And we all have different predilections — quiet vs. noisy, calm vs. bustling, light vs. dark. Each quality creates a climate that pulls something different out of us.
Our surroundings shape how we work, yet we also have the power to choose and to mold them ourselves.
Nature's Barbell Strategy →
Evolution has generated two opposed modes for organisms to find fitness:
r-selection is about speed: rapid reproduction, fast growth, many offspring
K-selection is about carrying capacity: slow development, robust fitness, few offspring
What can we learn to harness both approaches in work and life?
Gratitude and Resilience →
Gratitude is how we maintain the fragile, critical systems of relationships that come to our rescue when things go bad. Strong institutions get that way through the effortful work of the grateful to nurture them on.
Gratitude and Resilience →
October 17, 2024 • #My latest post at Res Extensa, on the importance of gratitude and resilience for building the systems and networks we rely on in times of crisis.
The Wisdom of Restraint →
Riffing on one of my favorite quotes, from Calvin Coolidge:
Escape the Algorithm →
Wrote this week about the problems with feeds, algorithmic discovery, and passively letting the machines define your taste.
We all need a return to active participation in what we consume.
Escape the Algorithm →
August 22, 2024 • #In this latest issue of Res Extensa, I wrote about the need to escape from the passive consumption trap. We wake up, pick up the phone, and wait for algorithms to tell us what to read, watch, and listen to. Our attention is captured by things we didn’t even decide to give it to.
I’m making a conscious effort to return to engaged, active consumption as much as possible. Appreciating. Carefully reading and listening. Choosing specifically what I want to give my attention to.
The CUA Factor →
August 2, 2024 • #From the latest issue of Res Extensa: thoughts on Andy Grove’s idea of “modes of control”, from High Output Management:
Thinking about this in the context of my own work, I can map past hardships and bad business decisions to mismatches in environment and mode. As managers, what we most often don’t respect enough is the nature of the CUA factor with a given job, project, or task. This mental framework for thinking about relationships is helpful for selecting the appropriate communication or management mode.
This simple 2x2 is one of the more interesting idea from the book.
Monthly Links, May 2024 →
Last month’s interesting finds.
Book Notes: How Buildings Learn →
My latest post is a deep dive on Stewart Brand’s How Buildings Learn. If you can’t tell from the length, this book is full of gold, and one of my favorites in a long time:
Tools, the Technium, and the Importance of Agency →
On Kevin Kelly’s “Technium” and why human innovation is different than the biological variety.
The Exploration Instinct →
Latest Res Extensa , on our natural genetic wiring to explore, and its biological benefits of asymmetric bets:
Comfort with Contradiction →
April 2, 2024 • #From my latest issue of Res Extensa:
One of the most important things we can teach our children as they’re coming of age is to cultivate a comfort with contradiction. Sometimes good things come at the expense of other good things. You can’t always get your way. There’s no such thing as a free lunch.
As we grow up, we discover the contradictions of everyday life: one benefit requires giving up another.
In fact, we do teach these things as parents trying to raise well-adjusted kids: Share and help others. Tell the truth, even when there’s a benefit to not doing so. Delay gratification. What’s great for you might not be great for the group. These are all ways of preparing a human for participation in a polite, but complicated, society.
Thinking we can avoid grappling with the inevitable contradictions of everyday life lead us to bad places:
Utopian ideas of the future require one to think in radical terms, and to lose hard-won progress. Radicals want to ignore trade-offs, to start over, to rebuild, to avoid the contradiction in the first place rather than grapple with it, ignoring Chesterton’s fences. If anything, school these days fosters more of this kind of radical thinking than its opposite.
The irony is that a discomfort with contradiction doesn’t get rid of it anyway. Just because we shouldn’t have to live with imperfections doesn’t cause a bulldozed, greenfield solution to actually work. We often end up tearing things down and still have the same negative outcome we had before. It’s George Orwell’s “Where’s the omelet?” every time.
I first heard this idea from Jonah Goldberg, and it’s been bubbling around in my head ever since.
Monthly Links, March 2024 →
My most interesting links from March.
Scenes, Pattern Languages, and Nested Systems →
My latest essay. Comparing the notion of “pattern languages” across domains, like writing and architecture:
Simplicity on the Other Side of Complexity →
My latest post on Res Extensa: