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Real stories and actionable frameworks from 20+ years of building, failing, and learning. Explore by topic or start with the latest.
More Productive. Less Engaged. Trouble for teams.
Activity is up, engagement is collapsing — that's the Output Paradox. AI makes the easy work easier so people switch off, and your dashboards hide it. Fix the incentives, or apathy wins.
Your Brain on ChatGPT Is Worse Than You Think
AI didn't ruin documents—bad incentives did. Organizations pressure people to produce faster, so they use AI to skip the thinking. We're losing the skill of actually sitting with information and…
Being humble is holding you back
An investor asked why I wouldn't call my company the best in the world. A wrestle with whether confidence comes before the work or after it, and whether going quiet is humility or agency you gave up.
Why 'We're At War' Means You're About to Get Screwed
When leaders call work a 'war,' they've usually run out of incentives and ideas. Why boardroom war talk is a lazy manipulation to make you work harder for less, and what to ask when you next hear it.
How to become more interesting and interested
While everyone uses AI to sound like the average, you stand out by smashing your random interests together. How curiosity, self-efficacy and high agency make you more interesting, and more successful.
Are you using ai to fix your toilet?
AI makes me more engaged with the world, not less. From fixing my shower to making sense of my health data, how I use it to feed curiosity and tinker, without letting the tool use me.
The News is killing your happiness... don't let it!
I quit the news and my anxiety dropped while the world carried on fine. Why doomscrolling breeds helplessness, what Wrexham taught me about local impact, and how to think global but act local.
Five things I did to build a killer team
How I fixed a team that couldn't ship: less process, more trust. The Dunbar number, why high-trust low-process teams win, and the five moves I made to build a team that actually delivers.
How I stopped being an asshole in conversations
I used to argue to win and catch people out. How 'give it five minutes,' Chesterton's fence and asking 'why am I talking?' moved me from winning arguments to actually understanding people.
Everything I love about being unemployed
Two weeks after leaving full-time work, a raw update: reclaiming my own hours, making meetings a choice, ditching micromanagement, and watching the confidence the job chipped away come rushing back.
Is your business idea viable AND valuable?
For 15 years we obsessed over whether an idea was viable. AI made building nearly free, so viability isn't the question anymore. The real one: is it valuable, to your user and to you?
Answer these four questions first
Before building any side project, answer four questions: what you want from it, how it fits your life, the one problem it solves, and the single person it's for. Everything else comes after.
187 posts
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