If you contemplate nature you start to see a massive web of complex connections and causal chains. This organism feeds on that, which fertilizes this, which feeds that, which fertilizes this, which produces oxygen for that, etc. etc. It’s mind boggling.

It can begin to feel like every single detail in nature is finely tuned to every other. Nature can start to seem very fragile. It makes you feel like preserving every single element precisely as they are at the moment of contemplation for fear the entire thing will collapse with the introduction or subtraction of a single element. As if a sneeze could destroy the world.

On the other hand, if you contemplate nature through time – the greater the epochs the moreso – a different feeling emerges. Changes in weather are adapted to with uncanny speed and ability. New elements are constantly coming and going, and not on predictable seasonal cycles. Freak earthquakes, volcanoes, weather fluctuations, meteors, solar activity, and interruption by other species (including exploratory humans) are the norm. There is no such thing as an “invasive species”. If you look long enough, no species is really native to its current place of prominence and no ecosystem looks like it did in ages past.

Even on a smaller scale, if you’ve marveled at the way a tree will absorb a barbed-wire fence, you get the feeling that nature is the most resilient, adaptable, powerful, anti-fragile force imaginable.

The same goes for the human body. If you’ve suffered ongoing ills, undoubtedly the path to understand has led you to food allergies, posture problems, and other stressors compounding to gum up the works. It feels like your body is so preciously balanced that the slightest disruption will break it. Then you observe humans flourishing in every environment, adapting to everything from pure plant to pure meat diets, healing from broken bones, living after amputations, and bouncing back from the harshest conditions imaginable.

I think time is the trick-player here.

At any one snapshot of time, the balance is complex and apparently precarious. Big change can result from small changes. But when you unpause the scene and observe through time, the self-correcting and adaptive nature of the systems turns out to be a more powerful force than any insurgence at any single moment.

Both points of view are instructive. Yes, it’s a vast, complex, interconnected causal chain. Yes, everything that happens has the potential to alter everything else. But yes, it also has more ability to adapt and thrive than you do ability to imagine how. Yes, it is anti-fragile and harder to break or tune than you think.

Let the intricacy and the strength give you pause and induce a sense of wonder and joy. Don’t let either cause you fear or panic.

There’s so much noise on social media that people who don’t matter in a particular niche can create the appearance to those outside that niche that they do.

This results in a lot of criticisms of niches that miss the mark. The critics take the loud social media personalities at face value and rip on the niche they represent. Except that to those who know the niche, those personalities don’t represent the niche at all.

The ease of building a smallish brand around a certain milieu means faux leaders have an easier time convincing outsiders that they are leaders. This drives the knowledge of how things really work deeper to the inside. As more that doesn’t matter becomes loud and public, more things that do become secrets.

This is an interesting paradox. When you see something you know deeply as an insider being covered by outsiders, you get it. But that means all the other areas where you’re an outsider are probably not represented accurately either.

Truth seeking requires more tuning out than tuning in.

If it’s just one game, you play on a hurt ankle.

If it’s the start of a long season at the beginning of a long career, you don’t.

How much to gut it out and push through sub-optimal conditions is contingent on how long the term of the goal. Stepping back to plan, plot, get setup, get optimized, get healthy. These are needed if you’re going for the long haul. Stupid if you’re in it for a sprint.

I’ve got to remind myself of this frequently. My goals have gotten much longer in life, but my play-through-the-ankle-sprain approach is deeply embedded. I’m trying to break the tendency so I don’t break the ankle.

From a Tweet thread.

We’re drowning in information and almost all of it is terrible.

I remember a friend telling me of the coming “infocalypse” more than a decade ago. I didn’t get the problem.

Now I see the pain everywhere.

Part of what we’re doing at Crash is bucking this trend. Information is so cheap, every info problem is being solved with quantity.

We’re juveniles in the info age. We’re excited by this new low cost info so we just pump it out everywhere and apply it to everything.

Need more quality info? No problem, solve it with more quantity! Too much info?

No problem, let’s build some AI or automated data crunching to reduce it down to something manageable!

Some places this works, in others it makes the problem worse. When it’s almost free to make info, lots will get made. When all solutions focus on automatically reducing info overload, the cost goes even lower.

It’s an arms race of every greater pieces of ever weaker info AI sifting for ever rarer good bits. Costly signals are one of the most valuable communication tools known to humans.

All this weak info overload presents an opportunity.

Create something costly, hard to replicate, and you have info 100x better than the crowd. In our space of finding and winning a job, we’re making the end of the funnel (finalist interview and offer) way more efficient

By making the top of the funnel way less efficient!

You heard that right. The hiring arms race is to blast job ops to as many boards as possible for max reach. Make applying as easy as possible – click one button! – for max pool. Slap some keyword scanners or similar on your system and hope it weeds out the worst. You’re left with a (smaller) undifferentiated mass to sort through. Yuck.

Candidated respond by trying to game keyword scanners, etc. so quality of auto filters declines rapidly.

Automation can be gamed.

Costly signals can’t. Our approach at Crash is to make the first part harder.

Only if you really care about the company and role will you take the time to send them a costly signal – info that can’t be re-used or copy-pasted to a dozen other jobs.

Only the most motivated will do it. Seekers go deep (learning and becoming more valuable in the process) creating projects and pitches for a few companies.

Hirers get a handful of finalists instead of masses of noisy chaff. This is just the tip of the “Secret”.

I think raising the cost of creating and exchanging information (not necc money cost, more effort) is a better solution esp. for the most human of exchanges (dating, hiring, etc.) than ramping up quantity and slapping automation on it. To combat the Infocalypse, I don’t think labels and filters and tags generated by bots are the solution. They only escalate the arms race. More cheap info in, struggles to reduce what makes it out.

Costly signals on front end are better.

Less cheap info in = better quality out.

I hate doing health related research.

Any medical stuff that’s at all conventional is delivered as if the seeker is an idiot child. Surface level, full of prompts to go see a doctor. As if any old doctor will be knowledgeable on some super specific condition. It absurd. It’s all a bunch of bland summaries created for the blubbering masses the medical industry thinks we are. Compartmentalized, cartelized, and hidden behind walls and calls to go see the experts.

Anything outside the walls of convention is on some low-fi website or forum and ends up fixating on one hidden truth or supplement. They find something valuable the conventional approach downplays, and become obsessed with it to the point of conspiracy theory, or application of a single idea as a magic cure all.

I want better information. And I want a House-like helper! A true medical detective who is passionately curious about finding the root cause and solution to health issues unique to each patient. I don’t give a damn if they have some kind of medical license, I just want someone who’s good at it, passionate about the process, an ally, and has some experience.

I cannot think of a single government intervention in the medical industry that makes it better, and I can scarcely find a problem with it that’s not caused at least in part by government. Even patient acceptance of the paternalism of doctors is bred from years of government school factories.

If I could pick one industry to completely free from the tentacles of government power brokers and the rent seekers who feed them, it’d be medicine. We’re sicker, poorer, less-served, and more ignorant because of the meddling.

Read it here. (Subscribers only)

When supply decreases while demand remains constant, prices rise.

This is at least a partial explanation for why the older people get, the more they value close friends and family.

I was listening to a DMX song on the drive in to the office this morning, and a flood of memories came back. It triggered the sights, sounds, ideas, jokes, and stories from an entire epoch of my life. Kalamazoo Valley Community College. Trips to the beach in South Haven. Lifting weights every morning with some guys before work or classes. The smell of my buddy’s Mazda. Burning CDs.

I sent the link to my brother when I got to my desk and said, “Remember this?” He immediately acknowledged and even though we didn’t exchange any words about it, I knew that he was thinking all the same things I was.

It hit me that he’s probably the only person on earth who would share that whole bundle of memories from that phase of life, or who would feel the same things about the song.

When I was younger, I was mostly surrounded by the same people. Friends, family, etc. Pretty much anyone I knew would have the same shared experiences. As time moved, the number of different people I did different stuff with expanded. Each year, there are fewer and fewer people who share big chunks of memory with me. There are many more people who share slivers – work life for this segment of time, softball for that one year, etc. – but those get smaller all the time as a percentage of my life.

Shared memories are fun. There is a steady demand for them. But the supply decreases as life goes on. They become scarcer, and therefore more valuable. My wife and I have shared memories going back almost twenty years. My siblings and I have shared memories for the first fifteen or so years. Nobody has complete shared memory of course, but those with really big chunks are really fun, and I appreciate them more over time. It allows a kind of joyful or poignant communication without words. It’s telepathy.

Here’s a little rule of thumb I use to navigate all the trends, buzzwords, advice, and expertise in the world:

If it seems dumb or boring, ignore it.

There’s no “must read”. There’s no “consensus opinion” to imbibe. There’s no best practices you can’t live without.

There’s just stuff. A lot of stuff. Some stuff I like, some I don’t. Some that’s useful, some that’s not. Some that adds to my stock of energy, some that drains it.

So I pick what works and forget the rest.

I have no malice for it. I make no claims about its truth or applicability to others. I just don’t make space for it in my own life, and I don’t even devote enough resources to it to provide a clear repudiation or reason why. Why would I? What a burden to be forced to provide a reasoned articulation of every abstention or predilection. I can’t die on that many hills.

So I pick what matters to me, enjoy it, use it, and keep moving.

I can’t tell you if it’s a good idea for you, but I have no regrets.

Sometimes I don’t feel like writing.

I go through phases where what’s on my mind is too deep and unresolved for daily dispersion, and writing a post seems like a dumb, surface level thing.

I have tested breaks from daily blogging, and there are benefits to being more inward for periods of time. But the bigger reward have come when I take those times with not a lot of ready for consumption ideas and use them to redefine my relationship with writing. Can I explore something without resolving it? That’s the biggest question.

When an idea or even an unformed sensation gets in me, writing gets it out. It’s cathartic. But if I get it out too early, I’ll only scratch the surface and let off the steam needed to drive me to deeper stuff below. So daily blogging can feel like a penny-wise pound foolish activity. If I give me two cents on everything, I’ll never find the gold. Boy, these metaphors are clunky.

I’m in a phase where there’s some transformation going on inside me. I’m in a new phase in life, a new act. And it has new patterns I’m not accustomed to. I’ve got to figure out which parts to write about in my daily discipline, and which parts to give time to better form.

So today, writing about how to figure out how to write about it was the best I could do.

I love writing copy for websites and landing pages and marketing materials.

My favorite is starting with a design that’s done and rewriting the copy. There’s something about having a placeholder framework to work from that helps my brain connect the content to the goal.

Writing copy is one of the only activities in a professional context where I truly enter a flow state and feel completely in love with what I do. It doesn’t last long though. I tend to write fast and be done. I wish it could take longer, but I’ve learned the initial take is almost always better than followups.

One way to scratch my copy itch is to help other people and other companies improve theirs. I have no scientific method and never try to sell this as a service, but I get excited when people ask for help. I can’t prove I’m good at it. I’ve never run A/B tests on my copy vs other copy. But I know with my knower that when I really focus on it, I can put good words together.

I’d write all day if it were leveraged enough. But it almost never is. So I do a once daily blog post for fun, a few Tweets, and when needed, weigh in on the copy for the company.

Never figured out

How to get along well with

This flesh and bone shell

Daily blogging is a small thing. But missing a day of a commitment is a big thing to my psyche. Etching those tiny wins helps keep me happy with myself.

I’m sick today and forgot about blogging until right now laying in bed (in fairness I was well enough to browse Twitter).

So typing this up and hitting publish on my phone makes me feel like the day wasn’t an entire waste. That’s small but over time it’s big.

Didn’t bring much value to the reader with this one, but big value to me in keeping the streak.

I owe you one.

(Who am I kidding. I do this for me anyway.)

The latest issue and all others can be found here.

You know what’s worse than greed?

Trying to stop it with a gun.

I tend to keep my internal processes separate from my external communications.

That is, if I’m creating a product or piece of content or building a business or even drafting a fantasy football team, I have a process I use to manage to-dos, track and determine actions, etc. I also have some form of communication with others about what I’m doing and have done. Team members, customers, investors, friends, readers, etc.

I’m a pretty transparent guy and like sharing stuff as I do it. Work out loud. But it is often confusing to people because what and how I share the vision is not the same as what and how I manage the process of making it.

Pitch decks and email updates are great examples.

If I make a pitch deck for Crash, it will convey where we are, where we’re going next, and our plan to get there. To external audiences, it is (if I do it right) at the proper level of granularity. It is not inconsistent with our internal process, but it’s very different. The team who’s on the inside might see it and be confused, because it’s not exactly the same framing as what we’re working on internally.

Email updates to investors are similar. I let them know current priorities and road-map in a way that is perfectly consistent to me, but might look slightly foreign to someone deep on the inside.

I’ve never found a valuable way to make the public communication identical to the internal process. There needs to be some buffer, level of abstraction, and simplification. But I’ve also never been the type to keep things super close to the vest. I like the excitement and accountability of sharing pretty openly what’s going on. Just not the dirty napkin sketch version.