I recently listed to a great podcast interview about Alpha School, on the Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy podcast, which is a new education model focused on using AI to personalize education to each student. It was recommended by a friend of mine, and was a great listen. There were so many gems in the discussion, but the highlight for me was his point that people often…

In past years, I've done personal and professional strategic planning and goal setting with a focus on goals first at a high level based around desires like Connection (Relationship), Purpose, Impact, and Service, and created goals under those headers. This year, instead, I reflected on what I wanted to change, experience, or be in my life in 2026, and then created goals under those desires.

When I try to explain how to play Carcassonne to friends who haven't played before, or when I play and it's been a while, I'm always frustrated that the game (which is great) doesn't include a simple scoring summary, and instead I have to reread the rulebook and remind myself of all the rules. I love that modern GenAI (in this case Google Gemini 3 Pro) is good enough that I can simply prompt:

Several years ago, I had as great mentor who recommended the book The Goal, by Eliyahu Goldratt (also available as a graphic novel these days). I was chatting with someone recently about their team struggling, because their product team wasn't refining and prioritizing the backlog fast enough to keep up with developer capacity, which reminded me of this book.

This 9.5-minute Harvard Business Review video is incredible. So many people use the word "strategy" poorly, and Roger Martin does a great job in this video explaining that strategy is not when senior leaders make a list of the projects they want to work on. Instead, strategy is casting a cohesive vision of what playing field you are choosing to play on, and here's how we're going to excel on that field for your organization.

Several months back, we wanted to get a corded landline for our kids to be able to call grandparents, aunts, and uncles; and as they get older, call us if they're not quite old enough for a cell phone and we're out and about. It's been surprisingly fun to see how our kids randomly call us, often when we're at home, but also enjoy random calls with extended family.

I've been recently enjoying several episodes from IDEO's Creative Confidence Podcast, including an interview with Bob Sutton regarding this research and book "The Friction Project: How Smart Leaders Make the Right Things Easier and the Wrong Things Harder". Some highlights from that episode: Bob Sutton explains that too much efficiency can stifle creativity and innovation. He suggests that the value of friction depends on the craft.

George Mack wrote an incredible, inspiring, convicting, amazing webpage long-form article High Agency in 30 Minutes in April of 2025. Here's what I wrote about it back then. A few weeks ago he posted this great follow-up 9 fun ways to increase your agency with zero grinding required -- it's a great article, and you should read the whole thing.

I recently started using the snipd podcast app, and it offers a few compelling features (along with solid queue/backlog management, which is a must-have for me). It offers: AI transcription of podcasts, so you can easily copy and paste quotes from podcasts Allows you so "snip" moments in the podcast that are impactful, like highlighting text in a book (Note: Some other podcast apps let you bookmark a moment, but the combination of AI transcription and bookmarking is valuable to me, and I haven't seen other podcast apps do this)

I recently listened to this great Creator Science podcast interview of author Daniel Pink about how to write like a NY Times bestselling author. One great point Dan makes in the interview is being intentional with which parts of your life you should be maximizing/optimizing, and which parts you should satisfy and move on. He referenced this 2002 paper by Barry Schwartz, …

I was at a professional event recently and met an incredibly successful person who was sharing some stories of his career journey. His path included twice losing obscene amounts of money, much more than most people make in their whole lives, and yet now being successful a third time. One of the losses involved, a trusted colleague lying about something which led to the collapse of a company he was running.

I've heard of the concept of mise en place, which is French for "putting in place" or "everything in it's place." While I'm not a culinary artist, I appreciate increasingly appreciate, as a parent of three young children, the importance of investing energy in having a place for things, and carving out time to fight against the never-ending slide towards chaos #entropy.

Daniel Pink recently posted a great 10-minute video about finding your life's purpose with some great suggestions, several of which I haven't heard before:

Ethan Mollick, in his recent Using AI Right Now: A Quick Guide, made a great point that GenAI newbies often miss that after you pick a GenAI platform (e.g., ChatGPT, Anthropic Claude, Google Gemini), you should be intentional when you pick a specific model, based on your query. It's amazing how much better, as an example, ChatGPT o3 is at more detailed questions (I think of it as a step between a quick query and using a full deep-research query (which are so great when you're researching a complex topic).

I'm a big fan of listening to audiobooks and podcasts, and struggle to find the time to read the articles and PDF docs I want to prioritize that aren't available in audio format. I recently found (thanks to a sponsorship on the Daring Fireball blog) a great service called ListenLater.net, where you pay per article/document (e.g., a short article cost me 13 cents and a longform article cost me $1.04), and you email them a document or link, and they convert it to audio and feed it via RSS into your podcast feed.

I found this podcast interview with Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky (the transcript is available here) fascinating on how he considers organizational design at the enterprise level. He makes the point that if an organization wants a single, fast-moving flywheel (a cohesive set of priorities), they should have a lean, functional organization (which is his approach to Airbnb) instead of separate business units.

A few weeks ago, I attended UVA Venture Capital Conference, which was in UVA Darden's (their business school) beautiful building in Arlington, overlooking the DC skyline. The event was great, but the session that really stuck out to me was the Investing in AI session -- the panel was: Bob Creeden (Moderator) Welton Chang Kristie Han Greg Kotchick Nadia Genevieve Masri…

I recently read a longform article High Agency In 30 Minutes by George Mack, which was an incredible ride! In a world of infintite entertainment, so much of it so tempating (see Cal Newport's concept of Ultra-Processed Content), Mack's article was an emotional rollercoaster with an impactful, inspiring message! He starts with such as powerful hook: I believe high agency might be the most important idea of the 21st century.

Our family has been enjoying 3D printing as a 2025 adventure, which has been fun. I took our older kids to a 3D printing conference ( after a friend mentioned it (he runs HueForge). Our older kids were excited to see the creations people made. Santa generously brought our family a Bambu 3D printer this past year (I'm a fan of…

When you're asking for help (e.g., looking for career advice, asking for recommendations/referrals for a new job, asking to borrow something from a friend), make it as easy as you can for them to help you. For example: If you're looking for a new job, and you ask a friend for an introduction to someone at a specific company you want to get connected with, include the company's website link and a link to the company's LinkedIn page (so they can quickly see who they know).

To become better at visually communicating (e.g., creating diagrams for technical documents, facilitating a meeting with a whiteboard or digital whiteboard), you should expose yourself to many different people visually communicate. This allows you to build a mental library of visual concepts you can use. Some examples: Lucidchart has an impressive template library (free for people to browse) with hundreds of diagram type…

While we live in an era of impressive Generative AI capabilities regarding graphics (ChatGPT and other GenAIs have some capabilities here and Napkin looks impressive regarding diagram creation), my recommendation when you're trying to think through a conceptual graphic is still to use PowerPoint to explore different diagram types (as I haven't seen GenAI do this well yet). You can do this by:

Way back when Netflix would mail you DVDs (I'm sure my children have no idea what a DVD is), there was a research study (Mixing Virtue and Vice: Combining the Immediacy Effect and the Diversication Heuristic) that illustrated procrastination well -- people had to select movies to watch, and while they would choose a mix "highbrow" movies and less heavy movies, people would tend to select funny/lighter movies to watch.

I used to have a star employee, who I, and other senior leaders, kept adding more and more to his plate, but he was such a strong performer -- he ensured things were done well, and on time. I used to half-jokingly comment that he was a victim of his own competence. In some organizations, this can result in a horrible culture where a ridiculously small number of people do most of the organization's work.