The Cost of Commitment
At some point, you have to trade optionality for commitment, because choosing one future necessarily means giving up all the others. On why I have struggled to pick a direction, and the one I am picking now.
Essays and shorter notes — ideas, observations, and longer pieces.
At some point, you have to trade optionality for commitment, because choosing one future necessarily means giving up all the others. On why I have struggled to pick a direction, and the one I am picking now.
Your happiness can dramatically increase as you reduce the gap between who you are and who you perform. On learning to perform a different version of myself at ten, and how I closed the gap.
Should you love the day-to-day work, or chase the end result regardless of whether you enjoy getting there? The gym taught me that love for a process can arrive. A tool I built and then abandoned taught me that it doesn't always.
When Dolly Parton passed, what struck me wasn't how many people respected her. It was how many people seemed to genuinely love her. I never met her. So I went looking for what the research says about how that happens.
I started seven YouTube channels that went nowhere. The eighth one got monetized by video eleven, and the reason had almost nothing to do with the videos themselves. Shopping intent, searchability, and a passionate community.
In Slay the Spire, losing a run is just information — you learn something and run it again. That's the pattern of success, and it works outside the game.
There are nearly infinite lives you could live, and choosing one from the outside is like pointing at a map. The clues are in your habits and your curiosity — but you only really know by walking the terrain.
When China shut down its AI companion apps, people grieved. The AI isn't the real problem — the shortage of places for real relationships to begin is.
AI writes the résumé, AI screens the résumé, and one algorithm can shut you out of an entire industry. A simple filter was given an extremely powerful solution — and nobody's measuring whether it worked.
Life is the greatest game we will ever play — and most people never realize they're playing one.
Essays, video essays, and small tools — I make everything myself and send one short email a week with the best of it. No noise.