Month: June 2016

• After a bad night’s sleep and a hard-to-get-going morning writing something – anything – always makes me feel better.
• Current reading list: Be Slightly Evil, But What If We’re Wrong, Without Their Permission, The Graveyard Book, High Output Management, Notes on the Synthesis of Form, Tempo.
• There is almost nothing better than a new T-shirt that fits perfectly.
• If you want to see just how petty and enthused I can get, watch a good sporting match with me.  If you want to believe I’m a largely reasonable human being, don’t.
• Drying off after a shower is really annoying, especially in warm weather.  It takes too long and you never get totally dry.  I want a booth to step into with high-pressure air blowers like they have at car washes.  Maybe a dash of baby powder at the end to prevent any remnants of wetness?
• I often dream of days where I do nothing but read all day, but in reality I can’t read for more than 30 minutes straight without needing to break it up.
• All great stories take shape after the actual events occur.  It doesn’t look like a story while it’s happening.  The narrative arc is crafted in retrospect.  This is why what actually happens in real-time is less important than how it’s framed after the fact.
• I’m still not sure any books about how a particular person or company succeeded are worth reading.  But I still read them.
• Why do men seem to be more motivated by the idea that no one believes in them than women?  Or is this a misnomer?
• If consumers are so dumb that they buy whatever marketers sell them, wouldn’t it be much scarier to give power to elites to curb marketing messages?  Wouldn’t hapless consumers simply look for orders from those elites instead?  Isn’t it less dangerous to have easily duped people in a world where tons of companies compete to dupe them vs. a few elites duping them “for their own good”?
• Almost no one has enough faith in self-interest.
• Preaching to the choir is far superior than preaching to anyone else.  Echo chambers and bubbles are more productive than going out of your way to step outside of them.
• Reading people whose ideas you disagree with is vastly overrated.
• Your gut is probably smarter than you think, but listening to it is harder than you think.
• Steph Curry, despite looking great last night, is clearly still not himself.  I contend that his movement is still limited by the MCL sprain.
• Olympic basketball isn’t that cool anymore.
• “Entrepreneurship” is overused but there’s no going back so it might as well cease meaning someone who starts a business and take on the economic meaning of a descriptive category of action.  That still doesn’t mean you should describe yourself as one on LinkedIn if you haven’t started a business.
• Now I feel better.  Time to kick this day in the butt.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

“Why not?”
“Compared to what?”
“As if it’s true”
“Don’t do stuff you hate”
“Willing to fail“

My family and I just moved to a new house and it’s been a surprisingly hard adjustment.  TK and I discuss how to handle moving, change, grief, and heartache, as well as what a sense of space means and how humans interact with light and their built environments.

Mentioned in the episode: Christopher Alexander, Too Many Dirty Dishes, Tim Ferriss, Peter Thiel, Aslan, In Defense of Metaphor in Science Writing, Jeff Till’s Five Hundred Years, George Lakoff, Your Brain is Not a Computer, Metaphors and Magic,

Recommended: Space and Place, Landscapes of the Soul, A Timeless Way of Building

This and all episodes are available on SoundCloud, iTunes, YouTube, and Stitcher.

I can tell you right now it doesn’t matter what industry. There are tons of jobs available everywhere. Companies are hungry for talent.

But most job seekers suck. Most of them suck mostly because of years of schooling. It’s given them bad habits, fear, lack of confidence, arrogance, and monetary demands due to thoughtless debt.

Opportunity is everywhere. School is killing the ability of young people to seize it.

Screw school. Go do cool stuff. Go do hard stuff. Go do different stuff. Build things. Try things. Get good at things.