Have you paid attention to how you spent this week? How you spent today?

How many new things did you learn? What did you marvel at? Did you spend your social time with people laughing and exploring ideas or commiserating, drinking, and complaining with each other? Did you play games to avoid intimacy?

I mean this directly: did you talk about the state of each other’s hearts and dreams or did you play conversational trivia (figuratively or literally) with each other instead? …

There are a few really simple, kind-of-obvious things we’ve all heard before that I like to remind myself from time to time. Here are a few of my favorites:

You can do anything in the world, all it takes is either time or money.

Everything used to take time.
Before we had money, everyone just had to do everything themselves or tell stories to convince other people to work with them. Incentives were less clear.

Then some things started taking time and money. People started offering services, charging each other for them. Suddenly you could leverage someone else’s time for…

It’s fashionable to go to college, to get a degree. It’s easy because your parents and grandparents want you to do it, and people congratulate you left and right about it.

College is so popular people will go into thousands of dollars of debt for an education.

Chasing your dreams and building the life you want isn’t popular. No one will tell you to fight for yourself. Other people want you to do what makes them feel comfortable.

No one is going to buy the plot of land on the side of a mountain mountain and start construction on your…

There are no such things as “entrenched” systems.

There is no status quo. “The Way Things Are” is a decision people make anew every day.

This twitter post got me thinking about how infuriating the world we choose to make each day can be: https://twitter.com/samswey/status/865602050209357825

Every day all 7 billion of us wake up, and we choose what sort of day we’re going to lead.

The systems we’ve designed don’t have to work the way they do even one day longer unless we make them.

If we all decided to stop tomorrow morning, none of the systems of oppression would…

Books are the lowest cost, highest value, best return asset you can own. And now they’re cheaper and easier to access than ever in digital form.

Books are the best tool in the entire range of human experience with which to achieve personal growth.

You’ve seen me talk about the power of video. Why do books beat videos for sheer learning power?

The human brain learned to think to itself many tens of thousands of years before language and speech was formalized.

When you read a book you’re letting someone else think inside your head. You’re building out new patterns…

I want to celebrate the 26th of every month. It just seems like a good time to have a party every single month.

I had an after Christmas party in December. It was the first party I’ve ever hosted in my own space.

I think that’s a tradition I want to keep up.

People die doing that, you know?

Plenty has been written about the tragedies we don’t worry about (guns kill x number of people, cars kill x number of people, heart disease kills x number of people) and the things we worry about too much (airfare accidents and attacks have killed x people, far fewer than any of the above).

But how does that apply to our daily life? What things do we gloss over?

We choose to drive without thinking about it, even though it’s one of the most risky things a person can do.

What part of our life…

Phone calls are what email should have been.

I’ll bet business became way less fun when email took off. How crazy would it have been to run a business in the 1950s, with telephone calls and typewriters?

How amazing are our opportunities now? For video calls, online team chats, and more.

But we’ve yet to take advantage of them.

You know what would be great?

A video team chat that is searchable and randomly accessable. You record your part of the conversation, it gets instantly transcribed and tagged.

Speech and physical expression is how people naturally communicate, and have for…