The Element of Irreducible Rascality

This is one of my favorite phrases coined by Alan Watts, who I’ve been immersing myself in over the last few months.

The idea of the element of irreducible rascality is that there is no perfect system. There’s no ultimate stability in…

4 Kinds of Beliefs

I’m on BART right now, headed to my 4th day at Slack. 2 biggest observations: there is a strong culture of consideration which means doing things to help make your coworkers’ lives simpler, more pleasant, and more productive. Like starting meetings with an agenda, always giving a chance for…

The Wiggle Theory

I love it when I arrive at the BART station just as a train pulls up, and there are SEATS! I take it as a good omen for the day, in the sense that the omen is part of the day, and it was good.

Give me some Slack

Last Wednesday was my last day at Twitter.

As is common, I then decided to take some time off to rest, spend time with family, and think about what’s next. I did those on Thursday, Friday-Sunday, and this morning when I woke up at 4:30am and couldn’t get back to sleep…

Intentionally Unoptimized

I love the Quantified Self movement, am a product manager for Twitter Analytics, love OKRs, and tend to frame everything in terms of metrics and data.

At the same time, I’m a huge skeptic of data-driven culture, fitness trackers, A/B testing, and the…

Tracking Confidence

I’m sort of obsessed with tracking things. I’ve tracked my morale, how much coffee and alcohol I drink, how much sleep I get, and all the usuals like steps, calories, weight, etc.

The last few years I’ve been really interested in tracking quality time, which I still…

On Getting Stronger When Weakened

Which of these entities gets stronger when attacked and threatened?

• Cancer
• Bacteria

I think the answer is, strangely, bacteria. Cancer can be destroyed with chemo, and generally doesn’t get…

What Sparks Joy?

Like many people I read Marie Kondo’s book about the life-changing magic of tidying up. And like many people my house isn’t really that much tidier. But the part of the book that has really stuck with me is the activity of holding each of your possessions, waking it up from the deep sleep of…

“ — Written on BART”

I don’t have much time to write publicly anymore. I do still write privately on 750words.com fairly often. Even after 5+ years, private free-writing is still one of my favorite activities. However, for better or worse, my thoughts don’t feel fully real to me unless I have some public…

Are You Smart?

Imagine the set of all things you don’t know. We will call it 1 GigaUnknown.

What do you do with it? How do you get to know it?

The best way to deal with a GigaUnknown is to 1) name it (check), and to then divide it into 10 or so smaller, easier to…