It is impossible to make a perpetual motion machine, you’ll waste your time if you try.
It is possible to write a book of poetry that will sell 10 million copies.
It is unlikely, it probably won’t happen, but it is possible.
Science and innovation and creativity engage with the possible. Possible means “might.” It takes persistence to stick it out when we’re not sure.
Once certainty arrives, it becomes an engineering problem.
After the first fusion reactor is shown to work at any scale, we’ll know it can be done. Now the hard work is simply making it work better. Most organizations do this sort of work. Chipping, filing, refining.
Before you get to work, it’s worth deciding which hat you’re being asked to wear… pursuing the possible or optimizing the certain.
August 31, 2025
It’s been awhile…
Coconut Cult is a new sort of probiotic magic that’s actually delicious (the chocolate is great, the strawberry is magnificent). A tablespoon a day, try it for a week. You have 38 trillion gut bacteria (!) so you might as well make them happy.
This is the best gluten-free ramen I’ve ever had.
Peanut butter is more than a staple. The best I’ve had is only in the UK, the second-best is homemade. This is the third best, which is so much better than all the other options, I needed to share. You can probably find it locally, or buy a case from Zingermans.
I’m really enjoying the new botanicals and herbal teas from Rishi. And the Jimmy Nardello flakes from Burlap & Barrel. And Le Grand pesto is my favorite vegan pesto–but not easy to find.
And, by request, the homemade honey-oatmeal vodka recipe, as well as a breakthrough on my homemade dosa.
PS Two years later, this is still my favorite rice cooker.
August 30, 2025
Large organizations are purpose-built to do what they do, under prevailing conditions.
People are hired, assets are acquired, measurements are put in place–all to optimize what’s happening right here and right now.
In 1929, 200 million telegrams were sent. The wiring, technology, staffing, real estate holdings and marketing of Western Union were all optimized around delivering these telegrams profitably and with quality.
By most external measures, it was working, brilliantly. There weren’t too many things you could do to make the telegram system dramatically better.
When the change agent appears, the optimized organization stumbles. It takes heroic work to shift it for a new reality. Short-run efficiency rarely aligns with long-term resilience.
More often than not, it’s the insurgent that takes the lead. All they need to do is optimize for the new reality, they can skip the part about restructuring what they already have.
This is sort of obvious, but worth saying out loud. And while these shifts used to take decades, now they happen far more quickly. It hardly pays to be the dominant maker of fax machines in 2025.
If you’re an insurgent with a small team and fixed asset base, be on the hunt for a change agent that is going to swamp existing systems. When the change comes, you’re ready for new rules and the competition is hoping for stability.
And if you’re part of a dominant incumbent organization, perhaps it’s time to start looking for a new gig instead of hoping to wait out the shift. Because the new normal is rarely a return to the old normal.
Don’t swallow Polonium-210. You won’t last long, and it won’t be pleasant.
There are poisons all around us. The arsenic in your rice, the drain cleaner under your sink.
Alas, some poisons are impossible to avoid, and it’s not productive to live a life that’s poison-free. But it might be worth considering three questions when we think about poison:
- How fast does it act? There’s a difference between a bowl of brown rice and taking up BASE jumping.
- Who else does it harm? Poisons that we spread to others are less moral than the ones we expose ourselves to.
- How much does it cost to avoid? What do we have to do to our systems, our expectations and our methods to avoid this poison?
This analysis makes it clear that banning gas-powered leaf blowers is a no-brainer. They are instantly noisy and noxious, and they make more of an impact on our climate than just about any item in our garage, and they do so quickly. They harm others at least as much as they harm the user, and avoiding their use is convenient and saves money.
In addition to actual physical poisons, most of us wrestle with the emotional and spiritual poisons that are dumped in front of us every day.
Persistent systems are good at sticking around, and that’s true even when they’re bringing actual poison with them. As we seek to build a more resilient path forward, perhaps it pays to experience the short-term discomfort associated with fixing a dangerous system now rather than living with the poison it creates over time.
August 29, 2025
If someone snuck into my closet and switched out one brand of sneakers for a similar model from another company, it wouldn’t bother me much. Popular cars like the Camry, the Civic and the Elantra don’t have raving fans the way the Mini or the Rivian do. Go to the rental car counter and take what’s on offer.
Popular products and services succeed because they’re normal, reliable, convenient, cheap or simply incumbents. If someone expected to stay at the Hyatt but finds themselves at the Marriott, it’s probably not a big deal to them, because both brands have worked hard to find themselves in the center, sanding off idiosyncrasies and inconveniences to get there.
And thus, the fork in the road: If you’re building something remarkable, memorable and important, you’re simply not going to appeal to the masses for precisely those reasons.
This isn’t about being the most expensive. It’s a different sort of elitism–the elitism consumers choose. The decision to invest time in learning about the options, caring about the small differences and feeling confident enough to develop an opinion.
Sure, some people care about Budweiser or Coke, but that’s not what those brands stand for.
If you want to build a mass brand, invest in convenience and normalcy.
And if you want to be particular, memorable and worth what it takes for fans to be loyal and committed, don’t chase the people who don’t care that much.
Either you make something that costs more and is worth more than it costs… or you chase convenience, ubiquity and low price.
“This might not be for you,” is a fine slogan.
August 28, 2025
If 1,000 people toss a fair coin three times, 125 of them will get three heads in a row. Perfect score. And 125 will lose every time.
We probably shouldn’t give the winners too much credit.
Actually, the real work is deciding which games to play and which results are worthy of trust and respect going forward.
August 27, 2025
No one buys a hat without looking at themselves in a mirror first.
Ever.
There were hats before there were mirrors, so I’m not sure how it used to be, but that’s how it is now. Even though we may imagine we’re wearing a hat to protect ourselves from the sun, the mirror reminds us that it’s really about something more than that.
A surprisingly large number of choices we make involve actual and metaphorical mirrors.
“What will I tell my friends?”
“How does this make me look?”
Don’t open a hat store unless you install a mirror first.
August 26, 2025
Since I was born, humans have created 6 billion jobs.
All while technology relentlessly disrupts existing industries.
The pin making machine replaced the hand-crafted pin.
The ox-pulled plow replaced millions of hours of backbreaking work.
The amplification and electronic distribution of music upended the work of the live musician, and the camera replaced countless portrait artists.
The internet destroyed the travel agent industry, and Grammarly and Photoshop turned fine editing jobs into low-paid gig work.
[Claude adds: Skilled typesetters, trained in working by hand, were angry at desktop publishing, and the digital distribution of music and books ended the future of many traditional retailers. It’s easy to go on… The assembly line replaced skilled craftsmen who built entire products by hand. The printing press eliminated armies of scribes who copied books and documents manually. The calculator made human computers – people hired to perform mathematical calculations – obsolete overnight. The washing machine destroyed the livelihoods of professional laundresses and washerwomen. The automobile industry wiped out blacksmiths, stable hands, and carriage makers. Email and word processors replaced secretaries who specialized in dictation and typing. The mechanized loom put countless hand-weavers out of work during the Industrial Revolution. GPS navigation systems eliminated the need for most mapmakers and drastically reduced demand for physical atlases. Digital photography destroyed the film development industry and put countless photo lab technicians out of work. Self-checkout machines have steadily replaced cashiers across retail stores, and ATMs transformed many bank teller positions.]
When the web arrived, many of the projects I had built as a book packager–some at great cost–became obsolete. It didn’t seem to me that I could do much about this, though. Arguing that I was entitled to have people buy the Information Please Business Almanac instead of looking stuff up online wasn’t going to work.
It’s entirely possible that a magical AI will replace every single human job and then destroy the Earth. But it’s far more likely that the pattern of the last five hundred years will continue.
If this transformation was an opportunity, what would you do with it?
August 25, 2025
Pedestrian traffic in Grand Central Station is a bit of a miracle. Thousands of people, all walking quickly, in almost non-Euclidian chaos, headed toward different trains. And no one collides.
We see the same thing at a more dangerous clip when a four lane highway merges. The cars are just a few feet apart (or perhaps a few inches) driving a mile a minute (faster than a cheetah) and yet, collisions are rare.
If one person, just one, running late for a train and carrying a hot pizza, starts shouting and running through the train terminal, the crowd will part and he’s likely to make it to the other side.
It might even work if two different people do it.
It doesn’t scale.
What we’ve learned from thousands of years of practice is that the only way to avoid collisions is to find the confidence and empathy to yield… the shortest way to get to where we’re going involves cooperation and the resiliency that comes with empathy and awareness. When we exchange appropriate spacing and yield when we can, connections occur and we can flow forward.
Selfish brutality might work in the short run, but it always breaks.
August 24, 2025
Teaching is not about assignments, textbooks or authority.
It’s about the pedagogy, connection and approach that creates the conditions for a willing student to change their mind.
Everything else is simply grunt work.
Sooner or later, we are all self taught.
August 23, 2025
