Last week, I argued that efficiency is a manufacturing concept we swallowed whole and have been choking on ever since. This week, the harder question. If that’s the wrong metric, what do we replace it with? I want to start with a word. Ripening. Not growing. Not scaling. Not optimizing. Ripening. The kind of […]
Is there someone who crossed your path and permanently altered the way you see the world? Not a mentor you sought out, but someone who found you at exactly the right moment, with exactly the right idea? I never met Bob Chapman personally. I stumbled across him the way the best discoveries happen: the right […]
Here is an uncomfortable idea to sit with. The climate crisis is not just a story about oil companies, corrupt politicians, and the occasional billionaire with a superyacht. It is also a story about you. About me. About the completely normal, socially rewarded things we do every single day without a second thought. Stay with […]
If what got us into a predicament cannot be what gets us out of it, then we need different thinking, different perspectives, and different priorities. That is the cleanest way I know to make the case for diversity without getting tangled in the vocabulary that tends to derail the conversation before it begins. Here is […]
Last week I told you about failing the GMAT and feeling like a misfit. About learning that intelligence comes in forms our education system doesn’t measure or value. This week, I want to talk about Steve Jobs. But not the Steve Jobs you think you know. In 1995, Jobs sat down for a raw, unfiltered […]
I spent decades in boardrooms where the pressure was to DO something. Make the call, launch the initiative, give the board answers we didn’t have yet. The people who cracked under that pressure weren’t less intelligent. They just couldn’t tolerate the feeling of not knowing. So they’d react, pivot, and or overcorrect. They’d do anything […]
I’m six months out from hand surgery. Most people would be completely done and at 95% of what they used to be. As a member of the 1% outlier club, I can report that after a TON of work, I am finally at 75%-85%, with little upside remaining. AND I still have another six months […]
I’m referring, of course, to that loud strike of midnight between one year and the next. Have you noticed how we’ve all bought into this fiction that January 1st possesses some kind of transformative magic? As if the arbitrary point where we flip the calendar suddenly grants us a burst of willpower we didn’t have […]
Every January, they’ll sell you the same thing with a new label. New strategies. New frameworks. New ways to scale faster, optimize harder, extract more efficiently. The world treats each calendar flip like collective amnesia — as if everything we knew last year is suddenly obsolete. I fell for it for decades; I bet you […]
Today, December 21st, the winter solstice arrives. It’s the darkest day of the year, when our ancestors had no choice but to stop. Not because they were lazy or unambitious, but because the world itself demanded it. Short days, long nights, and the simple biological truth that human beings cannot extract indefinitely without breaking. They […]