Nothing compares with the satisfaction of pouring everything you have into an important project, pushing your limits, and being able to say at the end, "This is the best I could do."

A precise baseline can leave earlier losses outside binding duties, even when nobody forgets them.

A few days out from Conference I re-read my notes. Something striking emerged. A truly remarkable number of talks were about patience in suffering, and how the trials may not end how or when we wish.…

I never saw it. Most everyone in my family and pretty much all my friends did, or at least they claim they did, but I remain convinced that they’re all...

meandering thoughts on what it means to exist awash in information

How training can produce increasingly impressive performance while producing progressively less of the learning it was designed to create. (Written for Smartermarx Magazine Sept. 2026) A Sad Tale of…

I read a short chapter of Thomas Merton's book 'thoughts in solitude' this morning and was struck by the opening words of a paragraph which stated that 'poverty is the door to freedom'. Few of us, in…

The sole purpose of our immediate reality is to consciously evolve: meaning we need to enlighten ourselves. Every truth realized, and every insight gained, luminate a step on our ascension ladder,…

Seth Godin and Daniel Yankelovich on measuring what's easy, and why time well spent never makes the dashboard.

We are talking about Tacit Knowledge: intuitive, unwritten ‘know-how’ acquired by personal experience, practice, and trial-and-error. The unwritten rules, implicit problem-solving methods, and…

Every options analysis should start at Option 0: Do Nothing. It is the baseline that every other option is measured against, and it is the option most often left out. This is a bit of a longer…

The Unexpected Harmony: Unifying Ayn Rand and the Sermon on the Mount 🔗 At first glance, attempting to unify Ayn Rand’s Objectivism with Jesus of Nazareth’s Sermon on the Mount seems like an…

Turning borrowed wisdom into understanding through curiosity and practice

Notes on reputation; A thing I learnt from dad

You can’t predict if a post, book, or any sort of creation will be a hit. Once you have one, the temptation is trying to replicate it. Same post format. Same book outline. Same type of visuals. That…

Freedom, on one view, is defensive: a space carved out against collective constraint, asserted by rejecting the norms of one’s society. This view has obvious appeal. Individual conscience has…

A personal reflection on what "enough" really means to me - and what my life taught me

There is an idea that plagues a lot of modern thought that has been bugging me recently. I often see this idea hidden in conversations that I have with other people when discussing nature, reality,…

This blogpost is adapted from a transcript of my talk given at Breakwater Festival in Gdańsk. You can find the slides here. I am an Internet plumber. I’ve been an Internet plumber in many…

Work now sits on a spectrum from Andrej Karpathy to Rick Rubin. Technical ability at one end and taste at the other

As I’ve mentioned before , when I encountered computers as a child, the first program that really grabbed me was a simple example type-in BASIC program for the TRS-80. It was included in the manual…

I’d put in my hours. 482 weeks. 3,379 days. That’s how long I’d been studying the Stoics when I sat down to write the Daily Stoic. I was 29 years old and I knew enough to write a couple-hundred-page…

People tell me that they don’t know that when they buy coffee in disposable cups that their plastic cups end up in the ocean or that when they turn on the lights or air conditioner that they…

okay purity narratives they harm you if you accept them; they harm you if you reject them what to do instead? we mentioned this topic a few weeks ago as one where we have something important to say.…

If you're a writer trying to write more, you could do a lot worse than the AC/DC method. Which is basically writing the same (kind of) song over and over again. To the naked or untrained ear, it…

whenever i read, i feel something close to what i feel when i meditate. the noise around me fades, and i’m just there with the book and my own thoughts. as i follow the words, i notice what they…

The people who can see journalism most clearly are the people who have the least time and space to solve its problems.

There is a lot going on this week: bond yields continue to rise, and OpenAI published proofs to 400 outstanding math problems. I want to focus the discussion on the debate over “strivers”. Consider…

Spend any time writing online, and you’ll inevitably run into people, at times, who seem to have an odd understanding of what you published. Some of this is down to laziness – people scan the text…

Elon Musk was widely touted as the world's "first" trillionaire. We do not want more trillionaires. Here's why I think the "only" trillionaire is a more suitable term.

Our review of my earliest and least accurate set of predictions about the future of industrial society, published twenty years ago in the first months of my old blog The Archdruid Report, has covered…

I wrote this 19 years ago as an idea of how all of us gradually learn about life and then must choose our pathway. We all face the same kinds of issues, though packaged differently: You know me…

Low trust can deepen atomization, making everyday connection feel like more effort than it’s worth and retreating into our own homes the easier choice. What causes us to want to stay inside and…

CREATIVITY Questions about creativity: To those who have written, I am very appreciative. A few of last week’s interesting ideas, edited for clarity and brevity: Eric Ahrendt: I think…

Today’s essay won’t make me popular. My friend Michael came to my house the other day. After years of effort, and tinkering, he finally has a motorcycle, a license, and the time to ride. I’m very…

I've had lots of hobbies over the years. To name a few off the top of my head, there's been fish keeping, guitar, harmonica, fountain pens, watches, motorbikes, this blog, web development, 3D…

When people use the phrase “I’ll never understand why people do X” they are usually making a claim to some sort of moral or intellectual high ground – the people who do X are…

I don’t care about traffic numbers on my website In the early days of this website I had a Google Analytics script embedded and I also sometimes analyzed the server logs to look at visitor counts and…

A few days ago, my friend and colleague, Dr. Deane Tucker, a Professor of English, Humanities, and Philosophy at Chadron State College since 1998, died at the age of 64. Deane took it upon himself to…

The September 28 issue of Westenberg, the website/newsletter of JA Westenberg, is all about the consistent and ubiquitous hill-shaped curve followed by both natural and human-produced phenomena.…

The thing about bearing witness to the past is that you can also see it in the present.

It's crazy to me that people I know will support total strangers and not their own family and friends. They watch hours of videos made by millionaires, they like, share and subscribe to total…

“Whether we like it or not, our unwanted thoughts and painful emotions determine so much of our lives—but only because we avoid them.” - Why Composure Fails Under Pressure Facing our unwanted…

Last year, as I approached forty years old, I mused about one of the things I missed most about being a kid -- enthusiasm . Not having it, but people being responsive to it. Everybody loves when a…

At the end of the conversation, everything still works. The lights are on. Messages keep coming in. There’s already something else in the calendar. Somewhere, someone is waiting for an answer that…

Planning and predicting are the same act. One gets a budget, the other gets laughed at. Here's what to do about it.

(Twenty Years Ago on FITK) … and now I know. The thing about love is that yes, I am certain I was in love before, but it was never like this. Before, I was always stressed, and panicking, and acting,…

I didn’t stop informing myself. I stopped allowing a 24-hour information cycle to decide what deserved my attention. Some of my earliest memories of news involve a bathroom, several blankets, a…

Hang around a group of engineers for any amount of time, and eventually one will tell you how hard it is to name things. This might seem obvious, even to non-engineers. Good names are tricky. Maybe…