On a long-enough timeline, none of this matters.

I’ll die. You’ll die. So will everyone we love and everyone we could ever dream of.

At some point, humanity as a whole will end itself. Or, best case scenario, our time will come to an end in a few …

In business, growth is a hell of a drug.

21st-century American businesses must grow at all costs.

Grow headcount.

Grow the customer base.

Grow revenues.

If you don't grow, do you even business, bro?

Growth is all that matters.

Scale at all costs.

Sure, …

Not so long ago, getting a hold of someone was hard. You had to pick up the phone and hope they were in the office. You could send a letter, but it would take days to get there. UGH! No thanks. I need an answer NOW.

Then came email. Instant, easy …

Too many of us love a good promise. We want to be certain of outcomes before we invest money, switch jobs, or marry that special someone. The result, after all, often determines whether our decisions were wise.

But if my time in the oil and gas sector …

I haven’t historically thought of myself as a visual artist. I’m a writer, not a sketcher or a painter. Or so I thought until a few months ago, when seeing my kids’ drawings inspired me to give the visual arts a try.

Now, as someone who’s added …

Curiosity is an underrated business asset.

Because curious people ask questions. And questions lead to new answers.

But businesses want to hire know-it-alls. Hiring know-it-alls is fine as long as you never run into new problems. (Old problems aren’t …

Efficiency isn’t always the goal. (Any consultant or private equity bros reading my blog just scoffed and clicked away to something else.)

Efficiency is worth pursuing, but we shouldn’t strive to be ruthlessly efficient in all things. Such emphasis is …

In American business, efficiency typically emphasizes two points:

1. Do something as cheaply as possible.
2. Do something as quickly as possible.

Quality is often an afterthought, if it’s a consideration at all.

So, I ask: Where does quality fit into the …

In the movie T2 Trainspotting, Mark Renton tells Spud:

You’re an addict! So be addicted! Be addicted to something else.

There’s something freeing about this admission. In a perfect world, we’d all be able to cure our tendencies for addiction. But for …

Why do insecure people believe things they know not to be true? Why do they listen to that nasty voice in their head telling them they’re not good enough?

These questions are just some I’m digging into as I’m on the fast track to middle age.

Recently I …

How much is any one item worth? The simple answer: It’s worth whatever someone will pay for it.

But what gives art value, whether that value be monetary or otherwise?

Uniqueness can’t be the answer, because very little in the world is truly unique. …

Details are like salt.

A dash adds flavor. But too much kills the dish.

Any time there’s confusion, the answer may seem to be more detail. But more details doesn’t guarantee clarity. In fact, more detail may lead to more confusion.

Every detail is one …

Time was on Twitter’s side back in the network’s early days.

Microblogging was novel and unestablished. And Twitter’s more ‘open’ approach in encouraging users to connect with strangers was a nice alternative to Facebook’s more closed approach of …

Business communication is broken.

We send so much time talking and writing (emails, text messages, Slack and Teams, etc.) but we don’t really communicate; we don’t transfer information.

How do we solve this?

Through tech?

We’ve kind of tried that.

First, …

What qualifies as creativity?

How much work does one need to put into something before he can consider himself creative? How much of creativity can be automated or outsourced before it becomes something else entirely?

Hiring someone on Fiverr to design …

On this blog, I recently made the case for why writers should kill more trees.

That sentiment doesn’t apply only to writers. It applies to artists too. Drawers. Sketchers. Whoever.

Art can connect. Art can heal. Art can save.

So we need more of it. And …

We’re on the fast track to THE END.

Or, so some people will tell you. Especially after the latest American presidential election.

(To be fair, we’d be hearing the same if the other candidate had won. We’d just be hearing it from the other half of the …

I recently finished listening to the audiobook version of Number Go Up: Inside Crypto’s Wild Rise and Staggering Fall by Zeke Faux. The subtitle tells it all: The book is about the craziness that was the first crypto bubble. (As Bitcoin’s price …

If I were a single-issue voter in 2024, I’d vote solely on how I felt the presidential candidates would handle antitrust cases against Big Tech, not because I think tech antitrust is America’s greatest issue but because it’s one of the few issues we …

So many of us love tech yet have fallen out of love with the companies which comprise the tech industry.

But how can that be?

Data

We’re tired of tech companies exploiting our data.

‘If you’re not paying for the product, then you’re the product’ suggests …

In a clip that starts a recent episode of the podcast Tech Won’t Save Us, Sam Altman acknowledges generative AI’s Achilles’ heel: energy. Generative AI needs a ton of energy, at a time when tech companies are supposedly pushing to curb carbon …

Economic growth is a hell of a drug. But what do you do when the well’s run dry?

The American economic system is built around the assumption of growth. Our unofficial motto regarding the economy is If it ain’t growin’, it must be dyin’! Policy makers …

21st-century living is complicated. But must it be?

When you look around you, it’s easy to feel as if complexity is a requirement of the modern world. Most workplaces run via series after series of overcomplicated processes. To ‘exist’ today requires …

Writing by hand is the best. There’s nothing like finding that perfect combination of pen and ink and paper.

That tactile feedback as your pen scratches across the page. The shimmer of the ink making your words shine. The joy of distraction-free …

Why is business so hard?

I mean, why do so many businesses struggle with basic tasks? Why do companies of smart and accomplished people seem to get bogged down on the way to success?

Here’s the simplest answer I can come up with: Employees have to wade …