I’ve been writing on this site for well over a decade. The work here spans entrepreneurship, travel, tech, and now systems thinking, politics and the metacrisis. I’ve curated what’s most relevant for the other pages and left the rest here for anyone interested in the longer arc.
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72 Hours in Mumbai
The first thing I noticed when stepping beyond the doors of the airport terminal in Mumbai was a potent cocktail of vehicle exhaust, human feces and burning garbage. The haze…
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The Entropy of Trust
I'm always amazed that people seem shocked when something they've trusted is usurped for commercial gain. Somehow, in a world that's incredibly dynamic and built on Darwinian evolutions at all…
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Grit is a Muscle. Train it.
"Inch towards daylight" is one of my favorite mantras from a book I read recently. It also accurately describes how to develop the oft-discussed but seldom mastered skill of Grit.…
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The Hedgehog Model for Decision Making
I'm a huge fan of any models that find applicability beyond their intended domains and there are few quite as versatile and useful as The Hedgehog Model. In his seminal…
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I am Ironman.
At 7:41:10pm On July 29th, 2017 I slowed to a halt, put up my hands and wept. I could barely breathe after the deceleration but didn't care because I'd stepped…
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Micro Resolution: Communication Patterns
A respected friend and academic was speaking about something personal. I wish I could recall what it was but the only thing I can remember about the conversation is how…
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Trump, The Long Con and the Great Con
The proper way to start a conversation in San Francisco during the past couple of weeks has been to ask "how are you holding up?" A palpable sense of pain,…
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Those who Challenge
A common saying holds that you are the sum of the five people you spend the most time with. More simply, the people you surround yourself with matter. They are…
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Startup Depression and the Search for Meaning
TLDR: I actually expected to get depressed, it still surprised me when it finally happened and I’m rather suspicious of its apparent resolution. A few weeks ago, I couldn’t focus,…
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The First Presidential Debate: Clinton / Trump
I woke up nervous about what would happen during tonight's debate between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. There were no specific details on which my dread hung but it was…
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Startup Addiction
My work/life balance sucks. I plan my weekends off like you'd normally plan vacations because they occur with roughly the same frequency. I don't get to see my family or…
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A Quick Preview of the Viking Code School
It's been some time since I had 10 minutes free to write. Well, that's not true… by my count, I've written over 800 pages of text and recorded dozens of…
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Entrepreneurial Epiphanies #4: Do Nothing Quietly
Since I struck out on my own to build a business, I've banged my head on countless metaphorical low-hanging beams, taken the proverbial rake to the face at least weekly,…
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TheOdinProject.com Redesign Part II: Turning Pretty Mockups Into Code
The Odin Project is a free online curriculum for learning web development with Ruby on Rails. It stitches together the best existing content into an opinionated and straightforward path for…
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TheOdinProject.com Redesign Part I: Goals (and Loving Thy User Experience)
The Odin Project is a free online curriculum for learning web development with Ruby on Rails. It stitches together the best existing content into an opinionated and straightforward path for…
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Reflections on 2013 and Looking Ahead to 2014
At the end of every December, I clean off the white-boards, flip to a new sheet of paper in my notepad, and sit down to reflect on the past 12…
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Sometimes You Need a Slap in the Face
When I was in college I played poker online and did well enough that it steered me towards an interest in trading on Wall Street. I liked what I learned…
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4 Steps to Initial Product Growth
This post is based on a great talk given by Jared Fliesler, formerly VP of User Acquisition at Square. How do you begin thinking about growing your startup or product?…
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Dear Jane Doe
This letter was addressed some time ago to the younger sister of a good friend, a very smart young lady who grew up without a lot of resources in a…
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From Producer to Product and Beyond
Producer As a bottom-up guy, I've always needed to see the gears working to trust that the machine will do what I say it will. More than that, I believe…
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A Simple Model of Value Creation
In the service of creating value, there are three major levels of specificity — Producer, Product, and Enterprise. Think of it like a series of concentric circles. As you move…
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Ruby Explained: Blocks, Procs, and Lambdas, aka “Closures”
This post will explain blocks and Procs, with which you’re probably at least somewhat familiar, but also some lesser known Ruby closures like Lambdas and Methods One of the most…
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Ruby Explained: Inheritance and Scope
This post will cover the basics of method and variable inheritance and scope in Ruby You’re able to break up your code into methods and classes but you’ll also need…
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Ruby Explained: Writing and Running Methods
This post will dive a bit deeper into how to write and run methods in Ruby the right way You’ve been using methods since square one and writing your own…
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Ruby Explained: Map, Select, and Other Enumerable Methods
This post will dive into map and select and all the other handy methods you get from Enumerable, Ruby’s most useful module You’ve learned about Array and Hash but only…