Salman Ansari

Favorite Books of 2025

Jan 16, 2026

Every year, I publish a post sharing the best books I read. You can read my past posts from 2024, 2023, 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, and 2017.

Onto this year’s favorites!

The Pearl and Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck

Steinbeck is an absolute master. I think I read Of Mice and Men a long time ago when I was a kid, but I certainly didn’t remember its impact because it really hit me this time. Both of these novels kept me captivated throughout—powerful, emotional, and heart-wrenching stories. Steinbeck does not waste a word. I love his writing. I’ve just started reading East of Eden, which is his masterpiece. I’m loving it so far. Every chapter is like a wonderful short story. I’m going to take it slow with this one, and cherish it.

What We Fed to the Manticore by Talia Lakshmi Kolluri

A stunning collection of short stories, each written from the perspective of an animal in the wild. Each story is so touching. It gives us the perspective of animals in a way that I didn’t even really know was possible. It’s inspiring to me with my own stories. I think everyone should read this book. We really all need to understand the perspective of animals, and the way she does this is just incredible.

Raising Hare by Chloe Dalton

This is the true story of a woman who fell in love with a baby hare who showed up in her backyard, and how she reimagined her life to take care of it. The way she talks about each stage, every step, every moment, every look, is so touching and so moving. As I spend time taking care of birds and animals, and think about how each tiny interaction can mean so much, her book really helped reinforce that belief, reminding me to slow down. Read more in my past newsletter on the book: Raising Hare

Interpreter of Maladies and The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri

Interpreter of Maladies is a set of wonderful short stories that puts you into the perspective of a South Asian immigrant coming into the United States. The Namesake is a novel that does the same on a larger scale (you might know this tale from the film adaptation.) There are many aspects to these stories that I could personally relate to, but even without that, her writing and character development make the journey more than worthwhile.

A Grief Observed by C.S. Lewis

There are a lot of books on grief I read, and I’m not sure any of them really impacted me, other than this one. I suppose it’s because he’s just so authentic and raw in his portrayal of what grief is like. There are many moments where he articulates the weird, strange, and disturbing thought processes that we go through when we are suffering from grief.

The Metamorphosis and A Hunger Artist and Other Stories by Franz Kafka

I’ve heard about Kafka all my life, but somehow never read any of his works. Interestingly, it was my own writing that led me to him: In an effort to rekindle my creative writing efforts, I had sent a couple of my short stories to an editor for feedback. One of them, he said, reminded him of Kafka, and that one of Kafka’s stories, A Hunger Artist, could be a great model to work off of for the story. It was really encouraging, and gave me a bit of a boost. After that, I read everything by Kafka I could find. I love his stories. He really is a master of the short story form—he puts you deep into the thoughts of his charcaters. I have much to learn from him, and I plan to read them in more detail as I reread and revisit some of these stories over the coming months.

I hope you find a spark somewhere in this list! Oh, and do let me know: What was your favorite book of 2025?

P.S. If you’re looking for more of my book lists, you can find them all on my website bookshelf, or jump directly to each year: 2024, 2023, 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, and 2017.

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Birdtober

Nov 16, 2025

I went on a bird drawing binge in October. Lately, drawing feels a lot easier than writing. In the throes of grief, where I often cannot find the words, drawing is an outlet I’m grateful to have.

I took a short online course on watercolor bird sketching led by Sofia Garzaran. I was tempted by Sofia’s invitation to approach sketches with the goal of letting go of perfection, keeping the sketch time short (15-30 mins), and using only a pen and water brush. I really liked that last constraint, because for a while I’ve felt overwhelmed by my own art supplies. This course was liberating.

Today I’ll share some of my favorite watercolor sketches I did for the course. In my next newsletter, I’ll share sketches with a different medium, which I did as part in the online Birdtober sketch-a-day challenge. If you enjoy these sketches, stay tuned for more!

I began with this pigeon, and was happily surprised with how well it turned out. I don’t normally like the look of pen outlines with watercolor—they can detract from the loose fade of the water effects. But for sketches like this, if you leave gaps in the lines and whitespace in the colors, it can have a really nice effect. Whitespace (or negative space) is such a simple yet powerful tool that can totally change the impact of drawings.

Here’s a little process video too! (I’ve been sharing a lot of behind the scenes on drawing process lately on my Instagram @salmanscribbles.)

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Next up: A song sparrow, singin his heart out. While taking a photo of my sketch, I loved the little rainbow and strong shadow the sunlight was casting on it. I thought it was so neat how I could use the light as part of the composition itself. This is the kind of fun stuff you can do with traditional media, playing with the physicality of the piece itself:

When I drew this crow, at first I didn’t love how loose I got with my pen lines, but once it was done, it really added to the ‘sketchy’ feel along with the watercolor. I think this one’s my favorite of the bunch:

A very serious woodpecker (irritated by his extremely loud cousin, Woody.)

A barn swallow: (Or, perhaps, Batman in disguise?)

Last but most certainly not least, a pheasant. This bird is the life of every party, they have all the audacity, and yes, they did that.

By the end of the course, I had finished my first watercolor sketchbook! I’m really proud of this milestone, and hope to slowly use up all the sketchbooks I have lying around (a man can dream.)

There’s something really special about a physical sketchbook (or journal, diary, planner, etc.) I really like looking at it, holding it, flipping through it. It’s something I never did with my art on Procreate, despite having drawing hundreds of sketches on my iPad. I’m really glad I tried traditional art after starting with digital—it’s been a real game-changer for me in terms of enjoying my art.

I made a little sketchbook tour video, alongside some views of my backyard birds, which I take care of in memory of my mom:

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Squirrels' magic beans

Oct 26, 2025

The squirrels are busy these days.

I watch them scamper back and forth along the fence. Racing to the right, then tiptoeing back, their mouths stretched open to the limit, stuffed with a nut treasure, determined to bury it as soon as possible.

I admire their dedication to choosing the perfect spot. They sometimes choose my backyard to bury a nut, and I’ll watch them spend up to an hour sampling the soil in different places. Pawing this, gnawing that. It must be the perfect place, fit for this perfect nut.

Once I saw a squirrel stand over his chosen spot, nut in hand. He rolled it round and round with his little claws, gnawing it for unknown reasons.¹ It seemed he was whispering to it, reciting a prayer to keep his treasure safe.

Have you ever wondered what happens to all the nuts squirrels bury? I have.

Turns out, they forget about more than half of them. Yes, really! It’s no wonder too, given how many they’d need to remember—gray squirrels, for example, bury anywhere from three to ten thousand nuts per season. They practice what is called ‘scatter hoarding,’ distributing their treasures in various spots throughout their territory.

Now comes the interesting part: These forgotten nuts do not just disappear. They grow into oak trees. And so the distribution of oak trees, the spreading of their seed, and in turn, the flourishing of forests, is all thanks to the forgetfulness of a squirrel!²

Who knew such a tiny creature could create such a giant?

Photo by Dulcey Lima on Unsplash

So the next time you see a squirrel, do not wrinkle your eyebrows in annoyance, for they are the very reason you are shaded where you stand.

Remember them, and consider returning the favor. Offer some water in a bowl, or if like me you happen to have a bird bath, put something next to it so squirrels can get a drink.

It’s the least we can do to honor these little wizards that wander our fields.

Apparently they are gnawing off the tops where the embryo of the nut is located—this delays germination and keeps it fresh and tasty for longer. ↩︎
It’s not just squirrels. Blue jays and other birds also play a similar role! ↩︎

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Raising Hare

Sep 9, 2025

This is the touching story of a woman whose life had no room for anything besides work, until a baby hare in distress halted her life and changed how she saw the world.

In her memoir Raising Hare, Chloe Dalton tells the tale of her encounter with a leveret (a baby hare) she found outside her home, and the journey she went through to save it, raise it, love it.

Before the hare, Chloe was barely ever home, focusing all her energies on her high stakes role as a political advisor. After it settled into her home, she never left the house.

Chloe was told by wildlife experts that the leveret would not survive in her care. It did. She was told it could never return to the wild. It did. In fact, the hare lived a double life—resting in Chloe’s home and garden by day, wandering the wild woods by night.

Chloe’s descriptions of the rabbits touched me deeply. Her writing is an act of love for hares, for wildlife, for nature as a whole.

I visited my local park and did some watercolor sketching to capture some of my favorite imagined moments of her book.

The little leveret’s white tuft:

But its winter pelt came on rapidly, including a generous ruff of fur below its throat that swelled like a mane as the weeks passed, and that it would sink its neck into while resting.

The nibbler:

It developed a fascination with seams—such as the one on the side of my trouser leg—and would nibble its way down, like a crimping iron, its teeth never biting but its grip firm, leaving a raised ridge as if the cloth had been ironed. It would do this with the edges of pillowcases, duvets, the trimming on a cushion, the end of a shoelace, the tassel on a rug. Dangling objects would receive the same attention—not in play, like a cat, but chewed with a quiet purposefulness. Likewise papers on the ground. I grew to love the gnawed edges, the leveret leaving its mark.

A hopping gymnast:

One day I unrolled a rug on the grass, with the intention of lounging on it and reading my book in the sun. By the time I returned with the book and a cushion, the hare had already laid claim to the carpet. It leapt and spun in circles upon it at high speed, staying within its borders; like a gymnast practising floor exercises.

There was a moment when Chloe first let the hare out, when she wondered if it would ever come back (it did, thankfully.) The hare turned to look at her, and that glance meant everything.

I fell so in love with her hare that I was afraid to finish the book. I am extra sensitive these days, after losing my mom. I knew this tale couldn’t last forever. I knew eventually the mother hare had to die, given their lifespans are only four years, typically.

In the final chapters, I slowed down my reading to a crawl’s pace. Then came the part in the story where one of the hare’s baby leverets died. And then some tractors came for harvest on the farms next door, and afterwards, to her horror, Chloe found a trail of tiny leveret corpses. At this, she turned around and left, noting:

I couldn’t go any further, afraid of what I might find.

I decided to do the same, and shut the book right then and there.

You can grab a copy of Raising Hare on Bookshop.org, at your local library, or on Amazon. You might also enjoy listening to this NPR interview with Chloe: What Has a Wild Animal Taught You?

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Grief is a Room

Aug 19, 2025

People you know come knocking on the door. They bring candles. The light of their little fires blinds you; your eyes are used to darkness.

They ask you questions with no answer. Some know better, and sit with you in silence. Others give you food you can’t taste.

As they each take their leave, they turn and give you a brief look, hoping you’ll join them. They shut the door gently behind them.

Their gifted candles wilt away. The darkness returns.

You sense that everyone outside is waiting on you. You hear the tapping of impatient feet, the ticking of a clock building up to alarm.

Tick tock.

“How are you?”

Tick tock.

“Are you feeling better yet?”

Tick tock.

“You’ve been in here for a while now. Isn’t it time to move on?”

Part of you wishes they’d all just leave you alone. Maybe then, the one you lost will come back. You ache for a miracle to return the missing piece to your broken puzzle, to fill the black hole in your soul, to thaw the frozen limb your brain knows is gone but your heart refuses to let go.

You wonder, more and more each day, where we go when we disappear, and whether they’ll be there waiting, if you followed them into the unknown.

All you know is, you cannot leave the room.

Not yet. Not today.

Maybe tomorrow.

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Mom

Aug 7, 2025

Six weeks ago, my mother died suddenly.

I am in shock, devastated, numb, broken, empty, lost, weak. It is hard to speak to anyone. I miss her so much.

Her name was Fauzia.

(Was. The most painful word I’ve ever typed.)

My mother was an incredible woman. She was a doctor, painter, chef, philanthropist, and much more. She was my mother. She was always, always there for me. She gave me the strength and example to become the man I am today.

I flew to India in a rush, my siblings and I somehow making it through Middle East airspaces that were closed mid-flight (there just happened to be a war breaking out in the region) in time for her funeral.

I buried my mother. I cried. I stayed on to settle what I could.

When I returned home, everything was as I left it, yet nothing was the same. I think of the poet Ocean Vuong’s words on losing his own mother:

Ever since I lost her, I felt that my life has been lived in only two days. There’s the today, where she is not here, and then the vast and endless yesterday where she was, even though it’s been three years since. How many months and days? I only see it with one demarcation. Two days—today without my mother, and yesterday, when she was alive. That’s all I see. That’s how I see my life now.

I am doing my best to honor her memory in as many ways as I can. For one, I’m taking extra special care of the birds in my backyard. She always loved that I fed them, she used to say it is a special and honorable thing to take care of the birds. Now I take care of them in her name.

The very day I returned from India, I saw a bluebird visit the backyard for the first time.

It flew down to the chair in front of me and looked right at me, as if trying to speak to me.

Then it stood on this stone and tilted its head as it held my gaze.

That wasn’t just any stone. It’s the gravestone we made for my cat Scooby, who passed away a year and a half ago. To see this bluebird sit there, of all places, I could hear Mom telling me she’s okay, and Scooby’s okay too. At least, that’s what I wanted to hear.

My mother has always been blessed with good health, until the last few years. When things got really bad, I went to her, stayed with her, took care of her. I got closer to her during those days than ever before.

I’m grateful I had the chance to take care of her. Knowing I showed up for her when it mattered is the only thing that gives me peace right now.

If your mother is alive, call her, visit her, hug her if you can. Now.

Do what you can today, for it may the only thing giving you peace tomorrow.

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I looked a wolf in the eyes

May 13, 2025

I was eye to eye with a wolf named Keyni. I surrendered to the moment, sensing the kindness in his eyes, which made his immense paws look playful rather than powerful.

I had the chance to meet this majestic wolf when I visited the Colorado Wolf and Wildlife Center, a wonderful sanctuary for wolves who cannot return to the wild. The minute I entered his enclosure, Keyni approached without hesitation or fear. Immediately, I felt overwhelmed with emotion. I couldn’t stop smiling.

That wasn’t the only warm welcome I received—as I entered the sanctuary, I was greeted by the mesmerizing sound of their howls:

When I showed these to some friends, a few of them were taken aback. “That’s scary! Aren’t wolves dangerous?” one asked. I smiled, and assured them it was perfectly safe.

If there’s one thing you take from this post, let it be this: Wolves pose no threat to humans. A wolf attacking a human is about as rare as a shooting star:

“In Europe and North America we only found evidence for 12 attacks (with 14 victims) of which two (both in North America) were fatal, across a period of 18 years. Considering that there are close to 60,000 wolves in North America and 15,000 in Europe, all sharing space with hundreds of millions of people, it is apparent that the risks associated with a wolf attack are above zero, but far too low to calculate.” —Are wolves dangerous to humans?

The myth that wolves attack people is a blatant lie, perpetrated by the colonists who first came to the Americas. It was then echoed and reinforced in stories, films, and cartoons.

The reality is that humans are a threat to wolves.

In the United States, wolves have been relentlessly killed almost to extermination. Thanks to the anti-wolf messaging that permeated through society, there was little protest to their killing.

Wild wolves are back in America today, thanks to a project that began in the 1990s. The Yellowstone wolf reintroduction project has been written about at length, so I won’t go into it too much, other than to say it was an incredibly successful effort. (You can read a quick timeline of the progress on this page from Greater Yellowstone.) The removal of the top predator (wolves in this case) caused elk to overgraze, causing a ripple effect on the ecosystem. By restoring wolves, the ecosystem was brought back into balance.

The Yellowstone reintroduction project has definitively proven the positive value of restoring wolves into our ecosystems.

In hopes of following the successful model of Yellowstone, there are now reintroduction efforts going on in Washington, Oregon, Colorado, and California.

During my visit to the Colorado Wolf and Wildlife Center, I was able to learn a lot more about the reintroduction efforts in Colorado and beyond. I really appreciated how transparent they were not just about the current state of things, but the ugly history of America’s assault on wolves.

I noticed there were young children present at the educational tour, and yet the guides did not hesitate to tell the truth about wolf killings, traps, and even torture incidents. They didn’t hold back. I really liked that—when we lie to our children about the failures of our past, we prevent them from learning, and enable them to repeat the same mistakes.

Wolves are beautiful, intelligent, and surprisingly human-like in nature. They live in packs similar to families, with an alpha male and female leading the group. Wolves mate for life, typically staying together for their entire lives.

They deserve our love and respect. At a bare minimum, they deserve to be safe from our destruction.

If you’d like to learn more about wolves, check out my note on wolves, where I share tons of books and documentaries on wolf history and reintroductions. Start with The Snow Wolf (available for free on YouTube), a beautiful and moving fictional documentary following the journey of a female wolf who loses her mate, and must find a way to raise her family.

And if these magnificent creatures move you as they moved me, please consider taking action to help them. Wolves in America need our help now more than ever. On top of the current government’s catastrophic assault on the National Parks, representatives are trying to pass legislation that mirrors wolf exterminations of the past.

A few actions you can take to save the wolves:

Support Colorado Wolf and Wildlife Center — Hopefully from this post, you got a taste of the magic of their wildlife sanctuary. But their work goes much further—they advocate for wildlife, educate the public, and help push forward crucial conservation efforts.
Tell Congress to vote NO on HR-845 which aims to delist gray wolves. Rep. Lauren Boebart’s misleadingly named “Pets and Livestock Protection Act” would remove wolves from the endangered species list – a move that would be catastrophic to their survival.
Support efforts to veto Montana’s HB-554. Representatives in Montana are attempting to introduce several bills that could cut wolf populations in half, or worse.

At times like this, with so many efforts to destroy what is good about our world, things can seem totally hopeless. But there is always hope, as long as those who care are willing to preserve what matters.

Let us take inspiration from this LA Times article published back on October 11th, 1992, Gray Wolf May Again Roam Yellowstone. In it, we hear from Renee Askins, who created a Wolf Fund to try and restore wolves to Yellowstone:

Asked how she will feel when she lets loose a howl in Yellowstone–a place she fell in love with at first sight–and a wolf answers, the normally articulate, lively Askins grew pensive. “I’ll feel like this place I love is right and whole,” she said after a long pause. “What could be a greater gift than a place like that?”

Thank you Renee, for fighting for the wolves. They went on to howl free, for many years, thanks to folks like you.

Now, it’s our turn. We must do the work to keep our wolves howling, our bison roaming, our flowers blooming.

Let us speak up, and let us be loud.

We must speak not only for ourselves, but also for those creatures who have no voice of their own.

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Bison in My Backyard

Apr 5, 2025

It was the summer of 2019. I was driving through Yellowstone National Park when I spotted something through the windshield that got my heart racing.

A lone bison.

I’d never seen one before. I pulled over immediately. When I stepped out of my car, the air felt heavy.

I stared, stunned.

I knew not to come any closer. Not because of a posted sign, but because of the energy in the air. It was eerily quiet. I could feel the bison’s gaze resting upon me. A gentle warning to stay away.

I had always known that wild animals own their territory. But now I felt it, deep within my bones.

This was their territory. I was an intruder.

Fast forward to a month ago. I learned that there is a herd of bison living in my own city’s backyard—San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park bison paddock. I was embarrassed that in all the years I’d lived here, I had never known about them.

I couldn’t wait to see them, and made a plan to visit. But the trip kept getting delayed or postponed for one reason or another.

In the meantime, I researched bison. I wanted to learn more about the animal I was going to meet. The most impactful resource I found was Ken Burns’ PBS documentary about the bison, The American Buffalo. It is a difficult watch, but so important and informative.

Once upon a time, there were around 30-40 million bison roaming the open fields of North America. But in the late 19th century, during what is known as “The Great Buffalo Slaughter,” European colonists slaughtered every bison they could find. The plains became a mass graveyard. By the time they were done, there were less than a thousand bison left.

Today, there are estimated to be just thirty thousand wild bison. (If you include private herds, there are about a half million.) Although the bison were saved from total extinction, they are considered “functionally extinct” in most of their historical territory. Deprived of their free-roaming existence, they cannot fulfill their natural ecological role across the vast plains of America. Instead, they are confined to semi-domesticated lives in small, scattered plots of land.

The story of the bison is tragic, and infuriating.

Bison were killed by colonists, not for their plentiful meat, but for their hides. Often, they were killed intentionally to hurt Native Americans, by taking away their primary means of survival.

Native Americans revered and cherished the bison.

They saw them not as prey, but as benevolent creatures whom they owed their lives to. After killing a bison, they’d pray to give thanks for its sacrifice. They used every iota of the bison’s body, not wasting anything. A single bison’s meat would feed a Native American family for a month. Bones became tools for farming. Tendons became threads for sewing. Stomach linings became cooking containers.

They risked their lives to protect the bison, and would sneak across territory lines to visit carcasses and say a prayer to honor their spirit, and ease their passage.

Native Americans showed us how to honor, care for, and enrich the land one lives on. They died for it.

By contrast, colonists would kill a hundred bison in a single day, skin their hides, and leave the bodies to rot. Everywhere you looked there were bison carcasses. The stench of death filled the air. You could smell it more than twenty miles away.

The colonists would take their hides and sell them for bounty, after which they’d be sent by train to the East Coast for processing. However, the majority of the hide would be unusable by the time it reached its destination. An unimaginable waste.

Tens of millions of bison dead, all for a few measly belts. This is the equation of colonization.

The decimation of the bison is even more harrowing when you consider the millions of Indigenous tribes that starved and collapsed as a result of it.

The more I studied the tragic history of bison in America, the more I dreaded visiting the bison paddock in San Francisco.

How could I face the bison, knowing the depth of man’s cruelty to them?

I decided to go anyway. I didn’t know how I’d feel, or what I’d say. But I knew I had to go.

The day finally came. I was nervous. As I drove up and parked, my heart raced higher and higher, matching my car’s elevation as I climbed up San Francisco’s hills.

And there they were. Mighty bison, roaming in my city’s backyard! I stood still, taking in their immense figures.

I noticed a sign posted by the gate. It said that the San Francisco Bison Paddock was established in 1891, when a small group of bison was brought in during the bison’s near-extinction. These bison, their parents, their grandparents, and many generations beyond, had all lived their lives between these few fences.

Unlike their wild ancestors of distant past, these bison were saved from slaughter. The price of their safety was their freedom.

As I stood there, all I could think to say was, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry…”

I knew my words wouldn’t change anything. I just wanted the bison to know they’re not alone.

I’m here, dear bison.

I’m listening.

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Favorite Books of 2024

Dec 30, 2024

Every year, I publish a post sharing the best books I read. You can read my past posts from 2023, 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, and 2017.

Onto this year’s favorites!

Wild Animals I Have Known by Ernest Thompson Seton — A book I won’t soon forget. Each story offers an intimate portrait of the author’s close encounters with wild animals. The animals are the main characters in these tales, and you quickly find yourself empathizing with their struggles. The stories are heartbreaking, as the outcomes are often their demise, thanks to the cruelty of humans. Ironically, the author is a tracker people hire to hunt the animals, but he finds himself sympathizing and even helping them. Published in 1898, I think this is one of the first books that really told stories of animals as beings like us, rather than background of nature.

To honor this story and the book, I did my own sketch of Lobo, based on the book’s lovely cover:

The Mysterion by Kabir Helminski — A beautiful introduction to the Sufi lens on spirituality, exploring how to find connection with our inner selves and those around us in an increasingly disconnected world. What stands out most about Kabir’s writing is his practical approach to understanding the nature of Self and managing our inner world. His perspective resonates with the philosophical clarity of Alan Watts, making complex spiritual concepts accessible. For those curious about the wisdom behind Rumi’s poetry or seeking to learn more about Sufism, this book serves as an excellent entry point. I wrote about my experience reading the physical edition of this book in my post, Pencil’s Purpose.

Cathedral by Raymond Carver — There are short stories, and then there are Carver short stories. He’s just a level above the rest, and this collection is no exception. Every story is a treat.

Wilderness by Rockwell Kent — A story of a man who moves to Alaska to build a new life at the turn of the century. He takes his young son with him, and they learn to connect with nature, build for themselves, and appreciate a life of beautiful simplicity despite isolation. It inspired me to plan more solitary trips among nature in the future. For more on the book, read Maria Popova’s lovely post on it.

Short Shorts: An Anthology of the Shortest Stories by Irving Howe and Ilana Wiener Howe — What sets this anthology apart is its consistently exceptional quality. Unlike many short story collections that mix brilliant pieces with mediocre ones, this collection captivated me from the very first story. The anthology features literary giants like Tolstoy, Chekhov, Guy de Maupassant, and Augusto Monterroso, maintaining a high standard throughout that keeps readers engaged.

Make Something Wonderful by Steve Jobs Archive — A refreshingly direct window into Steve Jobs’s mind through his own words, curated by the Steve Jobs Archive. Rather than another biographical interpretation, this collection presents Jobs’s actual speeches and talks, allowing his authentic voice to shine through. The book pairs beautifully with The Lost Interview, filmed after his departure from Apple, where Jobs shows a particularly reflective and candid side. Both resources provide invaluable insights into his thinking and perspective, unfiltered by intermediaries.

A Short Stay in Hell by Steven L. Peck — A fascinating and provocative short novel that explores the question of what happens after we die, the existence of God and how different religions, the nature of the infinite, and more. It gripped me from start to finish.

Foster by Claire Keegan — I read this through a recommendation from Eliot Peper’s 2024 books list. I finished it in a few hours in a single sitting. It’s a beautiful portrait of a child with many siblings, in a house where she does not get the love she deserves. She is dropped off at her aunt’s house and the story explores her journey of discovering what it means to be loved and appreciated.

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Little Farm

Oct 28, 2024

I visited a place called Little Farm at Tilden Nature Reserve, up in the hills of Berkeley, California. It’s a working farm with all kinds of animals—sheep, goats, geese, chickens, rabbits, turkeys, cows, and more. I noticed I was the only adult there who wasn’t attending as a child’s accompaniment. But then I reminded myself I was chaperoning my inner child, and I continued on my merry way to meet the animals.

Everywhere I looked, children were stuffing the animals’ faces with little pieces of lettuce they had purchased at the entrance. I decided right away that, rather than feeding them, I would spend time with the animals, pet them, and sketch them. Given the time it takes to sketch, I was only able to be with the goats and sheep before several hours had passed, and I needed to go home. It was a good tradeoff—I got to spend quality time being present with the animals, rather than checking them off as if the farm were a list. I plan on going back soon. Hopefully this post will have a part two.

I hope you enjoy the tales of these fine creatures, and my drawings that accompany them! The pencil sketches were done while at the farm, as I struggled to capture their constantly moving figures. The watercolors I did later at home, for the special characters that spoke to me.

Goats

Billy goats have a reputation of being stubborn or thorny, but they were the sweetest animals I saw. I was touched by their gentleness. My favorite was this little fellow:

I named him Charlie. I hope, when I return, he remembers me. See you soon, bud.

Charlie kept coming up to me for pets, sometimes pushing away others to secure his spot in the petting order. I did manage to pet the others, but no matter how many times I came and went, this one would always come up to me. He would lean his head against the fence, remaining utterly still as I gently stroked the back of his neck. Sufficed to say, he stole my heart.

I also enjoyed watching the goats eat out of the hands of little children. Sometimes, the goats stick their heads out through the fences to ease the feeding process. It frightens children, but in the case of any hesitation, the goats quickly yank the lettuce right out of a child’s tiny hands.

Goats do not waste time when it comes to food. They might be chewing food, peeing in place, and grasping for more food all at the same time. Remarkable.

Sheep

I didn’t get as close to the sheep. They had a much bigger area to wander in, and generally stayed in the center of it, far away from the people.

I don’t blame them. Many children would come and throw food at them, at which point their parents would drag them away. I found myself taking on a protective role at the fence, glaring at people as they came, telling them with my eyes (and sometimes my words), “Don’t you dare throw that. Don’t. You. Dare!”

A black sheep that mostly kept to itself caught my interest. There was this broken part of the fence with the pole leaning inward, and this sheep would not leave its side. It kept pushing up against the fence with all its might.

(I know this sketch makes it look like the sheep is being attacked by the fence, but I assure you it was the opposite.)

One man commented that the sheep was scratching itself. I disagree. I believe the sheep was trying to mend the fence. It was their personal mission to repair it. And I suspect the sheep was frustrated by the utter lack of effort on the part of the rest of the herd.

If upon my return, that fence is fixed, I will assume it was the black sheep’s handiwork. For its efforts, I named the sheep Boxer, after the hard-working cart-horse from Orwell’s Animal Farm.

The other sheep mostly spent their time lying around. Now you’d think that would be boring to watch, but actually… well, yes, it is. But there was one peculiar thing that caught my attention:

Sheep have a very specific way of laying down. It’s a multi-step see-saw motion with three phases. First, they tentatively lean their front half forward, bending their front legs onto the ground. Then, the rear is lowered. Finally, the head makes its way down until they resemble a cat’s loaf.

Also, before even attempting a kneel, the sheep scratch the ground in front of them for quite a while before committing to a spot. Sometimes they spend fifteen minutes poking and prodding at different spots until they are satisfied, likely to avoid past embarrassing mistakes, when they may have slipped and hurt their pride. The sheep are proud of their sitting process, it seems.

Rams

Next to the sheep’s area, there were two rams held in their own enclosure. Two brothers. The lighter one kept jumping on his brother pushing and fighting trying to get him to play, but the other brother refused.

I have decided to name this pair the Rambros.

They were both hesitant to approach. I think they were confused as to why I was there, since I was not trying to feed them. I looked at them and sat still for a while, sketching them. They still did not trust me. They wanted to pass to the other side of their enclosure, but would not go unless I moved away. I stepped back and watched them trot across. Perhaps if I come back to visit enough times, eventually they will pass even in my presence.

Just before I left, I saw a ram sitting in its own separate pen. I went up to him, and boy was he friendly! He let me pet him a lot, his floof was SO SOFT, you wouldn’t believe it. It felt software than any wool I have ever touched. Perhaps it was his warmth, or his life, running through the strands. My hand seemed to melt into him.

On my way out, I spoke to Stanley, the farmer who runs Little Farm. I learned this particular ram has a name: Gordon Ramsay.

Perfect.

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A Pencil's Purpose

Oct 8, 2024

I just finished reading a beautiful book called The Mysterion by Kabir Helminski. The book is a wonderful introduction to the Sufi lens on spirituality, and how to find connection with our inner selves and those around us in an increasingly disconnected world.

What I liked most about Kabir’s writing is that he offers a practical mindset to the nature of Self, and how to manage our inner world. In this way, his writing reminded me of Alan Watts, and I was surprised at how much it resonated with me. If you’ve been curious about the lessons behind Rumi’s poetry, or wanted to learn more about Sufism, this is a great book to dive into.

I’ve been reading this book with my friend Fahd for more than six months now. It’s been quite a journey. We’ve met whenever we can, usually once a month, to discuss a few chapters together. As a result, I have given more of myself to this book than most books I’ve read. I really like this way of devoting myself to something. It gives the book a chance to live its purpose.

I read this book in physical paperback format. This is a little unusual for me—these days I read everything on my Kindle or iPad. But I find that when I read on paperback, it’s much more appropriate for spiritual readings. It gives me a chance to slow down and really immerse myself in what the book is trying to tell me. This is especially true if I gift myself with the luxury of reading outside, away from devices and distractions.

As I reflected on my journey with the book, I noticed the little pencil I had kept with it throughout:

When I began reading the book, this pencil was not so little. It was a brand new, full-sized Blackwing Matte pencil.

As I read the book, I took copious notes in the margins. And then after each session, I’d have to do this funny thing: sharpen it. Compared to the conveniences of digital note-taking (or even the technology of a pen), sharpening a pencil seems like such a laborious task.

But as I looked at the pencil, its body used and infused into the book, I understood something greater had happened. I could sense a kind of satisfaction in it.

The pencil wants to be written with. The book wants to be read. I had done justice to them. I helped them fulfill their purpose. This is no small feat.

To be useful, to be helpful, to be a good partner—these are things we all desperately desire. And the other members of this universe are no different. (Look around you, now, and you’ll see all the things that are waiting for you…)

The pencil and the paper are just as important (if not more so) than what is written on it. But only because they were mine, and we had that special connection. (This is what makes used books so wonderful—they are windows into the connections of strangers from the past.)

I think while there are many lessons in the book this is probably the biggest one: is to recognize the beauty that is present, waiting to be discovered, in everything that we touch.

I’ve decided to keep this pencil tucked into the book. They have forged a partnership and a friendship, and I dare not break it.

Thank you to this pencil, this book of paper, the ideas from Kabir, and to my friend Fahd for cherishing them with me.

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Back to Blogging

Aug 21, 2024

I miss blogging.

I’ve been publishing a newsletter on Substack for years, since it was a simple platform to publish a letter. These days, it feels like so much more. So many things going on, so much noise. It feels like a social media platform now.

It’s not necessarily a bad thing. I know lots of writers (and celebrities, content creators, podcasters, etc.) that are thriving in this environment. Substack has given them a way to make a living off their writing that they couldn’t before.

Substack’s incessant focus on monetization discourages me to write. Their messaging repeatedly reminds me that perhaps that place is not for me.¹ The platform also seems to be driving everyone to use Notes, which is primarily composed of Substackers talking about how to use Substack. It’s boring. Suffocating. It clouds my mind into thinking about the platform rather than my own thoughts on…anything else.

I used to blog first, with my newsletter being a way to share things I put up on my site. That allowed me to share more essays, notes in my digital garden, all kinds of things that I could publish at lightning speed and then slowly curate into my newsletter.

For years now though, it’s all been about my Substack. That adds more pressure and feels limiting. And my site has become an afterthought I’ll occasionally back-post to, rather than a hub of my work.

I think I want to go back to blogging first, with newsletter second. I may even switch to a simpler platform for newsletters, but I don’t think that’s a requirement. It’s more of a mindset shift.

I miss the open web. I want to be one of the bloggers, again. I like the idea of still working to keep the open web alive.²

Lately, I’ve been reading a lot more from my RSS reader than my newsletter inbox. I just discovered Anh’s site through Robin Sloan’s lovely newsletter, and was so inspired I had to send her a note about how much I loved it. Her site has given me lots of ideas—one in particular is taking some of my sketches and infusing them into my site’s design. There’s so much creative possibility!

There is hope! There’s still so many wonderful personal sites out there, and so many folks still blogging.

I should probably make a list.³

I still love this little website of mine. I want to tend to it, help it thrive and grow.

I feel like I’ve been relatively silent with my writing here, and I’m trying to find my voice again.

More to come!

The whole Polymarket embed thing, in particular, really was a wtf moment for me. Honestly, who is that feature for? Not me, that’s for sure. ↩︎
Twitter’s demise and Google’s decline have hurt the open web a lot. It’s depressing, but that doesn’t mean one should give up on it. That’s a rant for another day, I suppose. ↩︎
I made a list. That’s the beauty of having my site! I can just make a page in a few seconds. ↩︎

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Still Mourning

Jul 24, 2024

In December of last year, my cat Scooby passed away.

I am still not over his loss. Maybe I never will be.

I watched the beginning of a documentary on Netflix about Fungi. There was a time-lapse of a mouse decomposing. I had to turn it off. It looked too much like his body. I remembered brushing Scooby’s fur with a toothbrush, to prepare it for burial. I wanted him to look his best. It was a difficult task, but it was my job. It was my duty to him.

I am still raw.

I don’t think getting over him is even something I want. Getting over him sounds like I’m leaving him behind. I want the exact opposite of that. I want to hang on to him. To hold him. I want to keep him with me, in whatever way I can, forever.

There are still lingering questions, “what ifs” left behind.

One thing that keeps rattling in my mind is whether we should have forced him to be inside. (He was killed in an attack by some animal outside.)

We tried, several times, to bring him inside. But he clearly didn’t want to be indoors. Whenever we’d bring him in, he really didn’t like it. Screaming. Shedding. Shivering. He made himself clear.

Unlike our indoor cats, who were born and raised inside, Scooby was an outdoor cat. He loved the outdoors. He went on little adventures. I started to go for short walks where he’d accompany me. But he’d always come back home. He loved to sleep on our front porch in the little cat house we got for him, or in the backyard in my outdoor chair.

Would he have adjusted to being trapped inside, eventually? I don’t know. It really seemed to me that he wouldn’t. He never got more used to it, he always hated being put inside. He always reacted the same way. I can still feel his little heart beating extra fast when I held him inside. His eyes begged me to take him back out. So I did.

Even if he was still alive, trapped indoors, would he have been happy?

Is two years of a happy life better than ten while locked inside?

I don’t know.

When I see videos of depressed animals in zoos, the answer seems clear. But when I walk by Scooby’s burial site on our front yard, everything becomes fuzzy again.

I just want him back. All the logic and reason in me fades away. I just want him back.

I read this line in a book recently:

“I almost never wept for him, I just stopped looking at the sky the way I used to.” —Kamel Daoud, The Meursault Investigation

That is how I feel. The world takes a different quality now. There are moments of light, and they can be bright. But I always remember, eventually, that he is gone. Then everything becomes gray.

This is the part where I’m supposed to wrap this up with a bow, and give you some lovely parting advice about how to deal with grief, with loss.

I’m not sure I have anything to give you. But here goes:

Firstly, I reflect a lot on how lucky we were to have spent time with him. He could go whoever he wanted, but he chose to live with us, to sleep in our yard. I still feel so honored and loved by that choice. And so it felt even more important to respect his wishes to stay outside. If you love them, set them free, as they say…

I am forever changed because his of his choice, because of his expression of love towards me. I am so grateful for that.

Since his passing, I have been talking to Scooby. I close my eyes and imagine myself with him, where he is now. And then we talk. And I write down our conversations in my journal. I talk to him about what he’s up to in his life now. I ask him questions, I learn interesting surprises. Last month, he ran into an old friend he had not seen in years. He said he was feeling a bit shy, and wondered if his friend had forgotten about him. But he’s determined to say hello. Next time we speak, I’ll ask him how it went.

He is dealing with all of this better than I am. He helps me cope. Even after death, he still heals me.

When you lose a pet (I hesitate to use that word, he was so much more than that), you do not just lose them. You lose a part of yourself. Remember that and do not try to pretend otherwise. Do not try to force yourself to forget or get over it. Instead, look deeper at the time you had, look closer at the memories, and you may find even more than you knew you had.

Part of the process of grief, I think, is acceptance not just of the loss, but of my new self. This new version of myself that cannot watch a timelapse of animal decay without being triggered. This version of me that journals conversations with a dead cat. This version of me that feels compelled to tell the world that yes, I am still talking to you about my dead cat.

We think getting over something means to move past it, to let it go and move on with our lives. But for me it means talking about him even more than I ever did before.

When I talk about him, when I share his memories with you, I keep his memory alive. But more than that, I grow it. I grow his aura by telling you about him. Now, you, who maybe never knew of Scooby, now know. There is some guy somewhere who had a cat named Scooby, and his cat is gone. And his cat was like this, or that.

If you have lost someone but haven’t shared anything about them with others, maybe you could give it a try. I certainly feel better talking about him than not talking about him.

You don’t have to write poetic tributes to those you lose. Just talk about them. I think it is the little, specific memories that are most important of all.

Like the specific way Scooby would sit with his butt raised high to the sky. He was a Sphinx in the front, Eiffel Tower in the back. One would think that petting his butt would satiate his desire, and it would eventually lower. That was not the case. If I started petting his rump, he’d raise his butt even further up. Eventually, I learned that if you pet his head, then his butt would lower until he fell into a comfortable loaf. It was like his head was a little remote control for his behind. These little formulas I slowly built up with Scooby.

It is these little things that made him mine, and made me his.

He also had big claws, which we did not cut, out of fear that he will need them someday. As I type this, I am thinking about the moment he was attacked. I wish I could have been there. I would have been a feral human protecting him. I don’t think any amount of injury would have stopped me. I would do anything to be thrown back in time into that moment. God, how I wish I could have been there.

He liked to knead directly on the flesh of my thighs. I let him do whatever he wanted. It was worth the pain to be close to him. Thankfully, I knew that then, even before he was gone.

These were our little games. He was my little partner. He still is. He always will be. Play in peace, my sweet baby Scooby.

If you have animals of your own, maybe you’ll hug them a little more today. Maybe you’ll play with them a little longer. (Please play with them. They wait all day for you.)

And if you have lost an animal, maybe you’ll leave a comment and tell us about them.

And maybe the aura of this post will shine with the energy of all the little animal souls puttering about, like a Northern Lights constellation filled with the stars that brought light into our lives.

And we’ll remember them.

We’ll mourn them, not to get over them, but to get more of them.

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Do Pointless Things

Jun 5, 2024

Years ago, after a bout with burnout, I was taking extended time off to recover. I had written down a “freedom list” of things I wanted to do. One of them was to get back into drawing. I used to draw as a kid, and I was pretty good at it, but I never pursued it because… well… my parents didn’t really encourage that kind of thing. All that really mattered was my grades. So, I dropped it.

When I picked up drawing again as an adult, I decided that not only was I going to draw, but I was going to get great at drawing. This led me to buy a ton of instructional books—figure drawing, perspective, light and shading, posing. The stack was quite tall.

Before long, I hated drawing. I hated everything I made. I felt they were not good enough, and that the human figures I drew were never accurate. (This is a common outcome with adults—we push ourselves and judge ourselves way too harshly, even with our hobbies.)

I complained to my friend about how I hated my art. He offered a suggestion. He said my problem was I was trying to draw people , and we tend to have a really strong idea of how people look. It’s in our genes to see even the most subtle things that are “off” with a drawing of a person. Instead, he said, I should draw made-up animals. That way, I can’t draw them wrong, because there’s no “right” way to draw a made-up animal.

I wasn’t sure if it was the best or the dumbest idea I had ever heard. I tried it anyway.

I started sketching random animals. I let my hand do the thinking for me. One by one, wacky and colorful animals appeared before me.

I was having fun! I loved drawing again.

There was no goal to it. I didn’t know if drawing these silly animals would ever lead to anything. But I did it anyway, because it was fun.

Fast forward to a few years later: I had been writing online for several years, had grown my newsletter, but I wanted to work on a bigger, meatier project.

I decided to write a book.

I signed up for a program called Writing in Community, in which you’re supposed to write every single day, share a bit of writing in the forums, and then publish a book after six months. It seemed wild and ambitious, but I signed up anyway.

On the first day of the program, you had to write down the goal of your book. I had this idea of expanding upon my Polymath Playbook article (about the virtues of being a generalist), to share a set of tips on how to be multi-disciplinary without losing your mind.

I wrote out a few sentences describing the book. But I found myself struggling to get excited about it. I thought, “Man, if even I’m not excited about this, how will I get readers to be?”

I looked over at the corner of my desk where my iPad sat. I opened it and looked at some of the sketches of silly animals I had made. I smiled. I thought, “I wonder what their story is? What’s their life like?”

Exploring the stories of the silly animals felt like a far more interesting adventure than the polymath book idea. So I deleted the polymath summary, and replaced it with a short bit about making up animal stories for adults, inspired by The Little Prince. That’s all I had to go on, but turns out it was enough.

Day by day, the fables were born. A year later, I had finished the stories. A year after that, I was done editing. And then, after six months of illustration work, Wandering Spirits was published.

There’s no way I could have known that drawing silly animals would lead me to write that book.

The point of doing pointless things is that you don’t know the point.

You can’t predict it. It might pay off right away, or years from now, or never at all. But you do it anyway, because it’s fun, or because it’s satisfying some tiny curiosity in you, or just because you can.

I’ve been taking some watercolor painting classes, and one of the lessons is about using salt. Normally, I would have researched salt, understood the chemistry behind it, and planned techniques around how to best use it. I tend to overthink these things. So it was great that in the class, she just gave us some salt, and basically said, “Go nuts.”

And so I did. I painted a fox, threw some salt on it, and sat there giggling as I saw the results. I love the way it sparkles against the light. I kept the playful energy going and turned it into a silly video. Don’t be afraid to get salty, friends!

It’s hard to let yourself do things without a reason. There’s always a voice asking, “What it will lead to?” (Usually, that voice is our parents.)

But we need to silence that criticism in order to let our creativity flow. We need to give ourselves permission to play.

The capitalist pressure of purpose is all-pervasive. Escaping it is an act of rebellion.

Give yourself permission…
To write words no one will read,
To draw pictures no one will see,
To make things no one will touch.

Creativity has many goals. Consumption is only one of them.

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Desk Distress

Apr 9, 2024

You see, there was the small matter of my desk.

I refused to use it.

I would hide on my couch and avoid it as much as possible. I couldn’t get myself to sit at that damn desk and write.

I thought about it for a long while, and decided the problem was the desk itself.

It was one of those fancy adjustable desks. It could lift itself up quite high, but it wouldn’t go down low enough for my liking. That put upward pressure on my arms, which pushed on my shoulders, which I believe to be the cause of all my issues.

Yes. Of course! It was the desk’s fault all along.

Luckily, I had an older desk which adjusted to a much lower height. I had given that one to my wife. I asked her if we could swap, explaining the matter in great detail. It was a complex issue, so I had to give her the full state of affairs.

“Sure,” she said. She seemed unconcerned. I walked away hiding my sheepish smile, knowing I had won a great victory. Only truly gifted people, such as myself, could know the significance of this decision!

With great effort, I swapped the desk. (Alright, that is a lie: I hired a TaskRabbit to do it. I have no interest in falling prey to the perils of a pivot.)

I had my old desk back. My setup was finally complete. It was a furniture masterpiece, ready for me to dive in and create my immaculate gifts to the world.

There was only one problem: I still wouldn’t sit at my desk.

Despite the invitation of its beauty and ergonomic comfort, I wouldn’t set foot in my office.

I had lied to myself. My desk was never the problem.

There were other hindrances that kept me from writing. I made up the problem of the desk to distract myself from the truth.

I must admit: It was a pretty good lie. I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised—I am a storyteller, after all.

I’m happy to report that my self-delusions are now firmly behind me.

All is well.

The future is bright.

Except, there is the small matter of my chair…

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Capitalism Killed the Salmon

Feb 22, 2024

I went into the woods in search of solace. There, after many nights looking down at my phone, I stretched my neck and looked up at those tall trees, those magnificent giants, the redwoods. I kept walking until I reached the fast-flowing stream that cut through the woods.

There was a sign. It said that the salmon were dying, and the park people were working hard to save them.

Save the salmon? Why do they need saving? I wondered. It’s been raining nonstop for months. I assumed at least the fish were enjoying it.

Let me tell you how we killed the salmon.

This tale is part of a long line of repeating history, of humanity’s hubris hurting rather than helping.

You see, years ago, man came along and saw the salmon swimming upstream. “Wow, look at them go!” we said with wonder. “They keep swimming, even against the current. Our workers could learn a thing or two from them.”

“In fact,” we went on to say, “let’s clear the river so they’ll swim even further! Faster, and faster they’ll go! What an example they’ll be for our people.”

And so we “helped” them. We cleared away all the fallen logs. The rocks. The debris. The weeds. The nature.

We did it so the salmon could swim faster.

And then they died.

A great mystery!

It turns out that nature’s fallen pieces served a purpose. Those dead logs and debris slow down the current. The salmon used those calmer spots to rest and recuperate. Without the breaks, they swim themselves to death. To stay alive, they need rest.

Rest! Who knew?

Well, for one, Native tribes knew. They were here before us. They understand the land. They know how to protect it. They tried to teach us. “We are all salmon people,” they said. We chose not to listen.

We projected our capitalist mindset of endless work onto the salmon.

We forced the salmon to swim, and swim, and swim, until they couldn’t.

Don’t worry though, we’re helping the salmon again! But actually helping this time. (Maybe.)

If you visit Muir Woods in California, you’ll see a messy stream. Logs and rocks abound. You’ll also see signs apologizing for the mess, as though you are a guest coming to dinner in a dirty house. We’ve learned to let nature be, but we still apologize for it.

Thank God it is only the salmon that need rest.

Can you imagine what would happen if humans needed rest, too? We’d be in quite a bind!

After all, our society is built around work. We all need to work, and there’s always more work to do. (And our healthcare is only for workers, so if you’re not working, you might as well be dead!)

Even seasons, which all animals obey, don’t apply to us. Did you know we can work the same way every single day, month after month, year after year?

Yes, oh yes, we humans, you and I, we’re built different.

So let us keep clearing away those silly logs of joy, that ugly debris of rest, and preserve the holy river of infinite work, against which we shall swim, and swim, and swim, until . . .

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Level Up Your Audio

Nov 14, 2023

Recently, I finished narrating an audiobook edition of my upcoming book of fables. I thought it’d be worth collecting all the knowledge I’ve gained on audio production through the recording process.

Even if you’re not doing any audio recording, these tips can help you elevate your microphone audio in online meetings and presentations.

The way we show up online is heavily affected by our audio quality (even more than video!) I’ve gotten lots of compliments on the clarity of my audio—I’m convinced investing in my audio setup has elevated my ability to express myself clearly and get my point across. I hope it can help you do the same.

Let’s get into it!

Before I began recording, I did a consultation with an audio engineer to make sure my home office setup was good to go for recording. Luckily, I had already invested a fair bit of time getting a good setup for recording YouTube videos, running live teaching sessions, and so on. The audio engineer confirmed that my setup was far ahead of most first-time narrators, so I didn’t need to change much. Still, I learned a few more lessons on recording process through our discussions. (I share some links to equipments here, but have no affiliations—just sharing based on my personal experience.)

With all that said, here are my best tips to level up your audio recording:

Get An External Microphone: If you can afford it, a great USB microphone is the simplest way to dramatically improve your audio. Laptop microphones are simply too limiting. In our modern world of remote work, I think you need to (and deserve to) show up sounding great. I can personally recommend the Blue Yeti or Elgato Wave 3. I used the Blue Yeti for many years, then switched to the Elgato Wave because I like its smaller form factor and compatibility with the excellent Elgato mic arm. (I also use the Elgato Key Light, and generally find Elgato products to be rugged and high quality. I spoke about it more in my video on Leveling Up Your Video Setup.)

Position & Angle Your Microphone: I’d recommend getting microphone stand/arm to position the mic close to you. Keep it away from any speakers if possible, and try to keep it in the same place. Make sure to find out the ideal position and angle for your specific microphone—each one is slightly different. For example with the Blue Yeti, you should ideally be speaking directly into the part just above the “Blue” logo.

Adjust Input Levels: The biggest struggle with audio is ensuring you don’t hit “peaks,” which result in distorted sound. Whichever software you use to record, you want to avoid hitting “peaks” at any point, so dial down then input volume until it’s just right. Ensure the input levels for your microphone are not too high. You can manually adjust the gain on most microphones, but also make sure to check the Input Volume for your operating system. (In macOS for example, this can be found in Sound Settings -> Input -> Select your microphone -> Input volume.) One thing I love about the Elgato Wave 3 is that its physical volume knob maps to the OS input level, so I don’t have to worry about a separate Gain level. Most audio recording software will show you a live preview of your input, with green being A-OK and red being too loud. Test it out with a few ranges where you’re talking loudly to ensure you’re within the ideal range.

Remove Room Echo: Walk around your room and clap. If the clap is a flat sound, you’re good. If you hear an echo, something in that area needs to be covered up to prevent it. This might mean putting a blanket on a hardwood floor or the bottom of a door frame. Or it cold mean putting up cushions against a mirror.

Soothe Your Vocal Chords: What you eat and drink can affect your voice significantly. Drinking tea and water helps a lot, as does avoiding fatty foods to avoid phlegm buildups.

Don’t Record Bored: Your excitement and energy will be present in the audio, and consequently will be absent if you’re feeling down. Amp yourself up with music, movement, or stretching. If you’re feeling anxious, try deep breathing.

Warm-up First: Practice the material for a few minutes while recording, and listen to it back. Do any adjustments needed before you start the final recording. It’ll give your voice a chance to warm up, and identify and lingering audio issues.

I hope these tips help you in your own audio recording journey! For my own setup, I did a bunch of these modifications back in 2020, and haven’t really had to change it since. I still get compliments on my video and audio pretty much every time I join a Zoom call 😅 A little work goes a long way.

P.S. You might also enjoy my breakdown on improving your video setup: Leveling Up Your Video Setup: Lighting + DSLR Camera Tips.

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Repetition as Ritual

Nov 9, 2023

Last week, I wrote about my experience at a meditation retreat, in which a man fainted and reminded me of the preciousness of life.

Another lesson I learned that day came from observing the leader of the retreat, Marc Lesser. He was sharing wisdom from the classic book Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind. As he spoke, I was reminded of a retreat of his I had attended more than four years ago, in which he was quoting from the very same book.

I sat there, amazed that after so many years, he is still talking about the same passages, the same lessons. He was able to quote lines by heart, and find passages with a few flips of the page. It was inspiring to see how deeply connected he was to the text.

What does it mean to pursue a single work so deeply, with such passion and love?

Most of us, I suspect, would scoff at the idea of repeating ourselves that much. Reposting the same content more than once is considered a societal sin.

We are trained to keep moving to the next thing, to constantly be finding and sharing new ideas. Next, next, next!

Marc reminded me of the power of slowing down to savor the gems of wisdom I’ve already found. The goal is not to collect them all, but to cherish the ones that touch our soul.

As someone who pursues many interests, revisiting books feels like a luxury. Within a given week, I’ll switch between writing and drawing, programming and public speaking, and more. Each practice has its own track of books I want to explore. So many books, so little time!

But there is much to learn from what we think we already know. Each time we revisit material, we discover new meaning in it. We are not the same person who first encountered it, so we see it from a new lens.

By repeating the same actions, we switch into autopilot mode. The experience becomes less about the specific movements or words, and more about the sensory and spiritual experience.

Through repetition, we unlock new dimensions of experience. This is the power of ritual.

Ritual holds great power and potential. Community rituals like song and dance once held a crucial place in everyone’s life, but have taken a backseat in modern society. Perhaps the reduced emphasis on societal rituals has led to a reduced reverence even for solitary rituals. The philosopher Joseph Campbell greatly emphasized the importance of ritual in society:

“A ritual is the enactment of a myth. And, by participating in the ritual, you are participating in the myth. And since myth is a projection of the depth wisdom of the psyche, by participating in a ritual, participating in the myth, you are being, as it were, put in accord with that wisdom, which is the wisdom that is inherent within you anyhow. Your consciousness is being reminded of the wisdom of your own life. I think ritual is terribly important.”

One obstacle that held me back from re-reading old books is that I usually wanted to revisit a single chapter, or even a small section. That seemed like a lazy desire (“I should read the book in full!”), so I would avoid picking up the book entirely. I’ve realized that is a pretty silly mindset.

Lately, I’ve been giving myself permission to “partially revisit” things. As an example, I have begun to reread my favorite story in the fable collection Zen Inklings by Donald Richie. The story is called Holy Demon. I love that story to death. I often recite my own version of it to friends on the phone, or to people I just met at parties.

Since telling myself I don’t have to re-read the whole book, I have already re-read the story three times this week. I see new aspects of the telling, little bits and pieces I never noticed before. I’m learning a lot, but most importantly, I’m having a ton of fun.

Next, I want to revisit some short classics I love, like Animal Farm by George Orwell and Candide by Voltaire. I’ve also been revisiting my favorite films—I’ve been rewatching Hayao Miyazaki’s Studio Ghibli animated films, as well as my diehard favorites like The Little Prince and Whiplash.

Dear reader: If you’ve been wanting to revisit a chapter, a story, a snippet from something and avoided it because of the burden of the whole thing, then consider this post your permission!

Dust it off and give it another go.

We deserve to enjoy the things we love, again and again.

In tough times, it may be the only thing that gives us joy.

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Life is Precious

Nov 1, 2023

Last weekend, I attended a meditation retreat. After an hour of sitting, a loud thump broke the silence. A man had just collapsed onto the floor.

At first I thought he just fell asleep. Then he began shaking. I quickly got up and tried to help him. Another man, who just happened to be a doctor, knelt next to me. I helped straighten the man’s legs and put a pillow under his head while the doctor tried to wake him.

The man woke up. Thank God, I thought. His first words were, “Fine. I’m fine.” He said it in a strikingly casual tone, as if he had just stubbed his toe. “Did I shake?” he asked. I nodded, and another man nearby confirmed. “Damnit,” he said. “I guess it was an episode. I have epilepsy.” The man immediately tried to stand up and said, “I’ll leave. Sorry, sorry.” We kept telling him he didn’t need to apologize. He kept trying to rush out to his car and drive home. We convinced him to take it slow, to sit down, to relax. After resting a while, the man packed his things, and left.

Somehow, we continued the meditation retreat. It felt odd. All I could think about was the fainting man. Not just that he had fainted, but the way he kept apologizing. (It reminded me of a homeless man I encountered the other day. He was lying on the sidewalk, frighteningly close to the busy road. I woke him up to check on him, then bought him some food. As he took the bag from me, he kept apologizing for his appearance. He was lying on the floor without any belongings, yet his only concern was if his ragged appearance offended me. I thought of all the cruel insults strangers must have hurled his way for him to become so apologetic of himself, even under such difficult circumstances. It broke me.)

At the end of the meditation retreat, we had a few minutes to share our experience with the person sitting next to us. I spoke with an elder woman who was attending with her husband. She told me how the fainting incident really triggered her because her husband sometimes faints during meditation too. She noted, with a hint of guilt, that she was relieved when she saw it wasn’t her husband who had fallen.

I shared with her how surreal it was to watch the man faint. Following a nudge from our meditation leader, I had been meditating with my eyes open, so I saw the whole thing unfold. Those few seconds seemed to last forever. My body felt overtaken by a sense of frozen helplessness. Only once I stood up did time resume its rapid pace. I told her about family members of mine who had suffered close calls with health issues this year, and how all this reminded me of how quickly it can all end. Just like that.

“Life is precious,” I said to her. She looked into my eyes and nodded slowly. I knew we both deeply understood each other.

When I went home, I thought about how I might write about what happened at the retreat. The feelings of helplessness as I looked upon the fainting man, the stoppage of time, the preciousness of life, and the connection of understanding I shared when I looked into the eyes of the elder woman.

How would I describe all that? It seemed impossible.

But in the midst of all the violence and suffering right now, I really wanted to share that powerful insight with the world:

Life is precious.

I wanted to inject this nugget of human experience into the chaotic feeds of atrocities and statistics. Yet I knew that if I went into any of my social media accounts and wrote “Life is precious,” the meaning would never get across.

When someone reads “Life is precious,” they will have seen that phrase a million times in a million tweets, articles, and stories. It loses meaning, like a word that you stare at long enough for its structure to collapse, until it becomes nothing more than a mumbled jumble of letters.

We have infinite access to information, and no time to process it.

We used to spend days or weeks digesting tragic news. Now we’re expected to move on in minutes. Hours, if we’re lucky.

Sigh, cry, and keep scrolling.

We do our best to engage quickly with what we see in the little time we have. The algorithms notice our behavior and respond by promoting the quick thoughts and fast reactions even more. And so the cycle continues.

By embracing rapid communication, we have chosen to sacrifice deep understanding.

Yet it is precisely in moments like this, when emotions are hot and stakes are high, that we need to be deeply understood.

What’s the solution? The only thing I know for sure is that ignorance is not the answer—we cannot simply disconnect and turn a blind eye to what is happening. Instead, we must find a way to adapt how we communicate to match the speed of a digitally connected world.

We must learn to slow down, craft our words carefully, and listen patiently. We must defy the mindless mode imposed by our digital systems, and elevate our discourse to better understand one another.

We have to turn the information tide. Only then can we begin to bridge the understanding divide.

It won’t be easy. But we have to try.

In the end, all we have is each other.

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The Feeling

Aug 1, 2023

I’m working on a fable about a fish. I’ve probably rewritten it ten times by now. At first I felt frustrated by this endless cycle of iteration. But then I remembered: This is how it goes. This is the process.

The task is to keep iterating until that “feeling” is reflected back to me in the work. It’s that pestering creature in my head that made me start writing in the first place, the indescribable essence that I must strive to describe.

I know it when I see it, because it activates something in me. Sometimes, it’s just a single sentence. It flickers in my eye like a glimmer of sunlight peeking through the leaves.

I’ve seen enough of these glimmers now to know when I haven’t found it yet. That’s how I know I have to keep going, that the search is not over, and that there is still method to the endless meddling madness. (Or so I tell myself.)

There’s no way to be sure that one iteration will be better received than any of its predecessors. I cannot predict the outcome. I can only follow the feeling.

Sometimes the creative craft feels like wading into the water on a beach, searching for the perfect spot by feeling with my feet. I couldn’t tell even if I found it—the sensation in my toes underwater is a muddy signal. The only thing I know is when I’ve gone too far out into the deep, or when I’ve fled too far backward into the shallow sands. All I can do is keep swimming to stay in that sweet spot, toeing the line between surveying the unknown and getting lost.

I don’t always trust my instinct, but each act of sharing my work helps me grow a little more trust in my own judgement. Piece by piece, I grow in confidence.

Yet I know I’ll never feel fully content. I’ll never look at a piece and think, “Ah, this is perfect.” And that’s okay, because there is no such thing as perfect.

There is no “right” in creative work. There is only the work to get it right.

I chase and chase, until I cannot chase anymore. Then, it is ready. It is ready because it must be, because I force a deadline, because otherwise this would go on forever.

At some point, I must lift the pen and let it go. Life is short, and there are many more feelings to find.

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Finish It

Apr 5, 2023

“Finish something. Anything. Stop researching, planning, and preparing to do the work and just do the work. It doesn’t matter how good or how bad it is. You don’t need to set the world on fire with your first try. You just need to prove to yourself that you have what it takes to produce something.” —James Clear

Procrastination is often perfectionism in disguise.

And perfectionism is a misguided attempt to secure an impossible guarantee.

That terrified part of you wants to know how your work is going to be received. It wants to know, even though you can’t know.

Once your share your work, it’s out of your hands. There’s no guarantee of how it’ll go.

Uncertainty is unsettling. So, out of desperation, you scramble to secure an outcome the only way you know how:

If you never share your work, it can’t fail, because no one will ever see it.

But silence comes with its own guarantee: You’ll disappoint yourself.

Don’t let misguided fear hold you back from engaging with the world. Isolation is safe, but connection keeps us alive.

Give yourself permission to finish. Do what it takes to find the confidence to put your work out there.

As Robin Sloan reminds us, unfinished work comes at a heavy cost, and finished work comes with compounding benefits:

When you start a creative project but don’t finish, the experience drags you down. Worst of all is when you never decisively abandon the project, instead allowing it to fade into forgetfulness. The fades add up; they become a gloomy haze that whispers, you’re not the kind of person who DOES things.

When you start and finish, by contrast — and it can be a project of any scope: a 24-hour comic, a one-page short story, truly anything — it is powerful fuel that goes straight back into the tank … It’s the pump of a piston, preparing the engine for the next one.

Unfinished work drags and depresses; finished work redoubles and accelerates.

Finish the thing.

Do it well, but get it done.

Liberate yourself by letting it go.

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Keeping the Creative Faith

Mar 1, 2023

“You’re writing a book?” they ask.

“Yeah, it’s a book of fables,” I say. “I’ve been working on it for almost two years. I just finished the final rounds of editing, and now I’m doing the illustrations.”

“Wow, that sounds like a ton of work. I’m sure it’ll sell lots of copies and pay off in the end!”

I smile and nod, appreciating the kindness of their intent, all while thinking to myself, You don’t know that. We can’t predict how it’ll do when it’s out.

Despite all my extra efforts and ruthless revisions, there’s no guarantee that those efforts will translate to book sales. The book’s success as a product depends on many other factors beyond the quality of the work, like how niche it is (a short story collection is niche, a book of fables is really niche), how much effort I put into marketing, and, of course, luck.

So, without any guarantee of an external reward, why do it?

There is a force within me that compels me to make this book.

You might call it creative faith: A sustained belief that something is worth making, even if I can’t predict its outcome.

I believe in the mission behind my book of fables. I believe adults deserve to learn from whimsical illustrated stories, not just nonfiction books. I believe children comprehend far more than we give them credit for. Society has used the power of fables and folklore to guide countless generations, but their impact has lessened in recent times, and I believe it’s worth trying to revive their role.

I can’t know who my stories might help, or how it might help them. But if there’s a chance it can offer a perspective that eases their struggle, then it’s worth it. In that sense, I agree with all the kind friends and family who tell me it’ll pay off—we’re just thinking in different currencies.

Sometimes, I have a nightmare in a daydream: The whole project vanishes into thin air. No one is making me do it, after all. I am the ultimate driver and decider. So if, all of a sudden, I were to lose heart and stop showing up entirely, then poof the book could suddenly cease to exist. It seems like a silly fear (especially at this late stage of its development), but just because it is improbable doesn’t mean it’s impossible. The shiver from that faint fear keeps me devoted, and I always run back to light its flame again, eager to escort it home to that ever-so-close finish line.

Whenever the nightmare gets too real, I remind myself of these powerful words from Seth Godin:

“We’re not entitled to an audience, to applause or to make a living. The work we most want to do, the thing that pushes us to be show up — it might not resonate with the audience we bring it to.

There’s no guarantee, none at all.

But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t show up. The lack of a guarantee is precisely why the work is worth doing, because it’s the guarantee that we’ve been brainwashed to require, and without it, few people have the guts enough to show up anyway.” —Seth Godin, The promise of a practice

And so I show up, day after day. As long as I stay in creative motion, I continue to perform my acts of devotion.

With every word, sentence and paragraph I write, I keep the creative faith.

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Reviving My Childhood Artist

Feb 1, 2023

“All children are born artists, the problem is to remain an artist as we grow up.” —Pablo Picasso

As a child, I was good at drawing, but I never kept up with it. That little artist died in grade school.

He was buried under the burdens of doing well in “real” subjects like mathematics and science, getting into a good university, and pursuing a successful career.

My parents didn’t explicitly stop me from pursuing art. I just never tried to pursue it. It didn’t even occur to me as a thing I could pursue. I thought of art as just another subject I needed to get good grades in, hopefully one that would lift up my overall average.

In South Asian culture there is (still) an assumption of a certain kind of career—doctor, lawyer, engineer—being the only acceptable path of success. Anything else is somewhat of a disappointment. The weight of expectation leaves little room for kids to dream about creative paths. I wonder how many childhood artists die at the kitchen table, buried by overwhelming academic pressure.

Still, I’m still grateful for the career I chose. I fell in love with programming in high school and chose to study Computer Science. I’ve built some really cool software and enjoyed many parts of my journey. Also, my career in the tech industry has given me enough financial stability to explore other things as an adult. I don’t take that for granted.

I’m lucky that art found its way back into my life. That little artist has found a second life.

Drawing came to like a savior to me, when my body and mind was depleted. After a bout with burnout, I went on a sabbatical, and I finally had time to explore the different sides of me I had silenced for so long. I made a little “life list”. One of the things on the list was drawing.

But when I revisited drawing as an adult, I approached it as if I was still that little boy. I wanted to be good at it. I went to an art class and drew this image from reference. The teacher complimented me on having good proportions. It made me feel good. I was an adult, yet in some ways I was still a child, looking for the teacher’s validation.

But I wasn’t in school anymore, so the natural force function that would normally push me wasn’t there. I was learning for the sake of learning, and the novelty started to wear off.

I got bored. With studying art being the only goal, drawing became a chore.

Boredom led to frustration. I started to hate my own drawings. I was never satisfied with how the human figures turned out. There was always something wrong with the figure, the proportion, the gesture.

One day, my friend Dave offered a solution. He said I should stop trying to draw humans, because I have such a specific idea of how people should look. There’s always room to criticize. Instead, he suggested I draw made-up animals. It was a brilliant idea.

I started drawing all kinds of creatures. I loved it. I would do a drawing and, no matter how the animal looked, I could say it was “correct” because I made them up. My inner critic had no room to critique.

For once, I could draw no wrong. One after the other came the characters.

One day, I looked at the fox and the elephant. I imagined they would be friends. I wondered, “What’s their story?”

So I drew a comic to tell their story. And then another, and another. I started sharing them in newsletters and essays. My artistic expression had finally found a medium.

The practice of sharing, not studying, kept me drawing.

The more animals I drew, the more they wandered around in my mind. Little scenes of animals would show up as I went for a walk. My daydreams became a jungle of creatures.

One day, I had a vision about a little bird that couldn’t fly. I could see it in my mind, the whole scene played out. It felt like there was something to learn from this bird’s story. So, I wrote it. It was the first short story I had written.

The story of the little bird turned into my first fable. A little under two years ago, I started writing a book of fables. A week ago, I finished editing them. Now, I’m in a sprint to illustrate my book with a wolf, a dog, a fox, a goose, a turtle, a cat, a horse, and of course, that little bird.

This progression of practice—from drawing humans to sketching animals to writing fables—was totally unplanned. You never know where your creativity will lead. It’s impossible to predict, and if you allow yourself to wander, it’s fun to follow.

My drawing journey has been wayward, like a windswept willow. It’s taken me from loving drawing, to not caring at all about it, to being overly serious with it, and back again.

I want to believe there is still a bit of that little Salman artist in me. I can’t say I remember what he wanted to draw, but I just hope he’s happy to see me drawing.

I like to think that in certain moments when I’m giggling at a funny nose I doodled, he’s giggling too.

I’ll leave you with a parting prompt: Close your eyes and think of the little you. The childhood version of you. Do you see them?

What’s in their hand? What are they itching to do?

It’s not too late to grant that child’s wish. Give their dream a try, even if you just play with it. Perhaps you’ll find yourself smiling as you toy with their task, know that they’re probably smiling too.

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Bumps Are the Road

Dec 17, 2022

I’ve had a pit in my stomach since winter began.

It’s been an intense sprint to finish a bunch of projects I’m juggling at once. Since my bout with burnout, I’ve been pretty careful about keeping my workload reasonable, but sometimes projects line up for a perfect storm.

I’m trying to finish line edits for my book before the end of year. I’ve also been working with a friend to build a new self-paced drawing course. And I’ve been sprinting to finish some features for a software project in my part-time startup job. On top of all that, I’ve been publishing my newsletter on a weekly cadence.

I’m enjoying all of these projects, and I’m really proud of all my progress, but it’s a lot to handle all at once. It’s taking all of my time management tricks to stay afloat, and all my inner growth work to stay sane.

I keep telling myself, When this project is done, I’ll finally be able to breathe.

I keep waiting to get to the other side.

But another part of me, a deeper intuition built on wisdom rather than knowledge, tells me that the other side will not bring long-lasting relief.

One project will finish, then another will begin.

One milestone will pass, then another will appear.

There’s always another thing. If we wait for life to become perfectly still, we spend our whole lives waiting.

And who wants a life of perfect stillness, anyway? We’re human beings, not idle stones. We thrive on activity, motion, and movement. Variety is the spice that reminds us we’re alive.

The problem is not our desire to do things. It’s our need to control everything that gets us into trouble.

We want to know exactly how it’s all going to go. But the more we try to control our lives, the more we suffer.

We try to domesticate ourselves. We delude ourselves into thinking that we are meant to be caged, controlled and perfectly predictable.

“We can try to control the uncontrollable by looking for security and predictability, always hoping to be comfortable and safe. But the truth is that we can never avoid uncertainty. This not-knowing is part of the adventure. It’s also what makes us afraid.” —Pema Chödrön

We cannot control the chaos of life. But we can learn to embrace uncertainty.

As I write this, my mind drifts to Bodah the boulder, who appeared to me in the form of a short story. Bodah reminds me to embrace the bumps like a rolling boulder, rather than waiting to be still like a stone.

Life isn’t meant to be spent waiting for a smooth ride.

What if we looked at life, not as a mission to avoid the bumps, but a challenge to embrace them? What if we followed the turbulent paths rather than evaded them?

In the end, we may look back and realize those weren’t bumps on the road.

The bumps are the road.

May we all find a way to smile and enjoy this rolling ride of life. We never know which bump will be our last.

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Creative Leftovers

Nov 16, 2022

It’s the end of the day, but you just got into some productive flow. You’re on a roll, so you tell yourself, “Let’s just keep going. It’s almost done.” You’re almost at the finish line, so why stop now?

Unless you’re on a deadline, there’s value in leaving a little for tomorrow. The obvious reason to avoid overworking yourself. But there are a few other benefits to leaving creative leftovers.

I first learned this lesson years ago during a pair programming session, where I worked on a problem together with my coworker. We’d both sit at the same desk, each with a keyboard connected to the same computer, alternating roles of typing and talking along the way.

We were writing tests for our code using a technique called TDD, or test-driven development. With that approach, we write tests for code that doesn’t exist yet. We would run the newly written tests, expecting them to fail. Then we would implement the code needed to make them pass.

The failing tests serve as a handy guide for what to do next.

By the end of the day, we got most of the tests passing, but a few red failures remained. I suggested we stay a little later to finish them off, but my coworker shook his head. “It’s better to start the day with broken tests,” he said.

I was surprised. Why would we want to start the day with failure?

After thinking about it, I realized the value: The next morning, we’d sit down at our desks and re-run the tests. The red tests from the night before would fail, and serve as a clear guide of what to start with.

Thanks to the reminders of the night before, we’d skip the morning lull of figuring out what we need to do, and jump straight into action.

The value of leftovers isn’t limited to programming. You can apply the same idea to writing and other creative endeavors. Take it from Hemingway:

Stop in the middle. Never stop working at the natural barriers. They next time you start working, the barrier will be the first thing you encounter, and you won’t have the momentum to overcome it. Try to stop writing mid-chapter, or mid-sentence (or mid function). Know how to finish, but stop working. The next time you start, you know exactly what needs to be done.

The same way you’d leave failing tests in programming, you can leave notes for yourself in writing or any other creative endeavor.

I often leave notes at the end of writing sessions working on my book of fables. I usually just write a few bullets in-place, thinking about two things:

What happens next in the story?

What open questions remain?

When I come back, that context is invaluable. It still takes me time to start writing, but thanks to the notes, I start thinking about the right problems immediately. David Perell shared some similar advice for leaving yourself a summary, advising that you write down where you’re stuck and what to work on next.

I don’t always go in the same direction the notes suggest. They’re generous gifts from my past self—I can use them or ignore them. Notes to my future self are a guide, not a goal.

There’s another benefit to stopping mid-problem: It gives our subconscious a chance to work on it. Hemingway spoke on this, too:

Don’t think about it or worry about it until you start to write the next day. That way your subconscious will work on it all the time. If you think about it consciously or worry about it you will kill it and your brain will be tired before you start.

When I first read this quote, I flinched at the idea of having my brain ‘work on it all the time.’ But after reading the book Rest by Alex Pang, I learned that our directed cognition (active mind) gets valuable rest even when our subconscious continues to work on problems.

In a note on deliberate rest, I wrote: “It turns out that your best creative work is likely to come when you spend less time working.” Give yourself a break, and you’ll likely get more done.

Leave a little work unfinished, and write a note before you go. You’ll get some rest tonight, and hit the ground running tomorrow.

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Don't Wait for Motivation, Act for Momentum

Nov 7, 2022

Waiting for motivation is a losing game.

Too often, I’ve sabotaged my goals by telling myself I’ll do the thing when I’m “in the mood,” or when I have “the space to do it properly.” Lately, I’ve been trying a different tact:

Start with a tiny task. Then ride its momentum.

Instead of trying to motivate myself to do the big thing, I’ll ask myself to do the smallest thing, anything, just to get me moving.

If I’m lying on the couch, it’s pretty difficult to motivate myself to get up and go for a walk. So, instead of telling myself, “Go for a walk,” I say, “Stand up.”

Standing requires effort, but I’m far more open to it than going for a walk. It’s a tiny task, which means it has a bunch of benefits:

A tiny task is low commitment. I could stand up and then still do nothing. I could sit down again. I could stare at my cats. The freedom of choice I retain with standing pleases me.

A tiny task is predictable. I can envision the specific actions I’ll need to take to get it done. I can envision the outcome in my mind. There’s little risk of running into anything unexpected along the way.

A tiny task lets me focus. It liberates me from having to think about all the things I could be doing. I can sweep all that away and just focus on doing the thing.

Tiny tasks offer us a moment of mindfulness to be fully present with our actions. On the power of the present moment, the philosopher Alan Watts noted, “Take each step as if it were the only one to be taken.”

Once I’m standing, I’m a different person. I’m not the same Salman that was lying on the couch. That was Lazing Salman. Now, I’m Standing Salman, and I’m willing to do stuff.

The idea of walking over to the kitchen doesn’t seem so bad, since I’m already standing. Putting on my socks and shoes is a reasonable request. Like a lighter that’s been sparked, I now carry a flame. It’s small, but if I use it with care, it can go quite far.

I shift from doing a tiny thing onto a medium thing. Next thing I know, I’m doing the big thing.

I sparked the start, but momentum took me the rest of the way. Once I was in the act, motivation magically appeared. “I’m already doing it,” I thought. “Might as well keep going.”

Any action, no matter how small, can spark momentum. Once we’re moving, we find the motivation to keep going.

Don’t wait for motivation. Act for momentum.

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Where Does It Lead?

Nov 2, 2022

Most of us are insecure. We look at others and think, “Wow. I want that.”

In an algorithmically-optimized feed-scrolling world, we face a constant barrage of these seductions. Tweet after tweet, video after video tells us, “Your life could be like this! Just do what I do.”

It works for them. But that doesn’t mean it’ll work for us. We have to determine that for ourselves.

Our first thought is often, “Even if I tried that, I’d fail.” But failure is the least of our worries. The risk of ruin is low, and the potential for learning is high. Trying is a good bet.

Don’t worry about failure. Instead ask yourself, “What if I succeed?”

What if you succeeded, and found a way to live their life? Is that where you want to be?

We only see the Instagram-filtered, TikTok-edited, Twitter-trimmed version of people’s lives. The process behind the picture is invisible to us: A giant blue tarp blanketing the room with an artificial sky. A ring light shining bright as the sun. A pile of clutter on the ground, hiding just out of frame.

We can only see their destination, not their path. We have to try and imagine their reality. Ask yourself what you know about them:

What’s their day-to-day like?

How much effort does it take to make enough money to live that life?

What personal and professional sacrifices are needed to make it all work?

How does a massive audience affect what they can say, and how they can say it?

What happens when there’s no line between personal expression and content production?

Your answer to these questions is likely, “I don’t know.”

Does it make sense to model yourself after a life you don’t know much about?

It might shock you to realize how little you know about them. That’s because the illusion of social media makes us feel like we know people just because we’ve followed their posts for a while. (The extreme version of this is a parasocial relationship—fans will think of a major celebrity as their friend, despite having never interacted with them.)

As children, we were taught to never get into a car with a stranger. As adults, a few words from a stranger can send us scrambling to re-evaluate our entire lives.

Don’t get in the car. Keep walking. Avoid the distractions.

Limit encounters with screaming strangers by curating your social media feed. Use the mute, unfollow and unsubscribe buttons liberally. They’re there for a reason. It might feel weird to mute a friend, but it’s not about them. It’s about your mental health, and curating an environment that inspires rather than distracts you.

“Half the battle in life is just focusing on playing your own game and blocking out what everyone else is doing / saying / thinking.” —Elizabeth Yin

It’s tough to persist with your own path. It requires consistent self-belief, patience, and resilience.

You get bored of walking the same path day after day. Someone runs past and you think, “Maybe I should follow them?”

What we really need is someone running just a little ahead of us saying, “Come on. Keep up. Stop looking over there, you’ll trip yourself.”

Maybe you have a friend or family member that can play that reminder role for you. Most of the time, you’ll have to play it for yourself.

Be confident in your intuition. It led you to where you are today.

Keep going. You’re doing fine.

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Rewards of Routine

Sep 9, 2022

When I left my full-time job to pursue a life of creative independence, the thing I valued most was my freedom. I wanted to stay loose with my schedule and embrace serendipity. The unpredictability of each day was a welcome break from years of rigid work-enforced schedules.

But, to my surprise, I discovered that too much freedom is draining. The burden of having to choose each and every activity quickly weighs me down. I easily become overwhelmed with decision fatigue, and too drained to do anything at all.

I’ve come to appreciate the value of simple routines in my day. When life feels overwhelming, routine comes to my rescue. A simple, every day task can allow me to immerse myself and feel accomplished. When Danielle Binks shared her story of launching a book in lockdown, she talked about how important it was to have a simple daily tasks she could orient her day around. Small, quick wins are vastly underrated.

Chaos is alluring, but routine is rewarding.

The words of Gustave Flaubert describe this creative balance perfectly:

“Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work.”

Routine gives me structure in my day, so I can spend my energy on creative decisions, instead of decisions on when and how to engage in creative work. My chaotic energy can be channeled into my creativity. Flaubert’s words inspired me to draw a comic to visualize these contrasting modes:

Despite its benefits, we don’t want to go overboard with routine. After all, variety is the spice of life. I go out of my way to leave as much empty space as possible within each day, so I can embrace serendipity and explore things on a whim.

Balancing that openness with my own schedule is key. I try to think of it as a little game I’m playing with myself, rather than a battle I’m fighting.

So, how much routine do we need in order to reap its rewards?

I’ve found that even a little routine goes a long way. My creative routine doesn’t enforce that every day is the same, with every single hour scheduled. Instead, it means that I try to put some level of predictability into my life, which helps me make the most of each day. It’s like making a little sandbox for yourself, so you can jump in and play around with complete freedom without worry of getting lost.

Within each day, I apply little routines like this:

Mornings: When I wake up, I make some coffee and read a book that will make me think. This gives me a solid 30 minutes of relaxing-but-inspiring activity before I jump into the work I want to get done that day.
Evenings: I always try read a book before bed (Kindle only, and I keep my phone out of bedroom).

I also try to give each day in the week a loose “theme.” This helps me know what kinds of things I should focus on when I wake up and start that day. A few examples:

Dedicated writing day — No meetings allowed on these days. (I don’t spend the entire day writing. If I do a solid 3-4 hours of focused writing, that’s a lot, and enough for me.)
Social day — I try to schedule all my calls on this day. At first, these days would get packed and overwhelm me. Now I try to schedule calls further out to keep these days reasonable in terms of the number of calls in a single day. I also use this day for catching up on emails.
Part-time work day — I work on my part-time startup engagement on these days, and don’t log on to it at all the rest of the week. It took some discipline to make this work, but it has worked great for almost two years now.

None of these routines are rigid. I think of routines as templates: When I pick one, I’m relieved of the burden of choosing every single activity. But at the same time, I’m not obligated to follow it to the letter. I can use it as a map, but still wander off the path at times.

For every person, the little routines that serve them most will vary. It’s worth taking some time to experiment and find your own.

A little structure goes a long way.

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Write It While It's Hot

Aug 7, 2022

Ideas are like candles. We must make the most of their light while it lasts.

When an idea strikes, it’s tempting to write ourselves a private note to come back to later. This is a great first step, but it’s risky to stop there. When you abandon an idea so early, it leaves the idea in a vulnerable state. If you don’t come back soon, what you return to might be unrecognizable.

Every writer has seen this scenario before: You have an idea. You excitedly write some outlines, using wording that makes sense to you in that moment. You go on with your life, and plan to come back to it. You don’t. Weeks or months later, you look at the note and wonder, “What is this about? And who cares about it?” The answer to the latter question is not you, but a past version of you.

If you’re lucky, a future spark may revive it. But in all likelihood, once you wait, it becomes too late. Your interests shift quickly. It’s almost impossible to write a great piece about something you don’t care about. (If you try to force it, readers will notice. A writer’s energy—or lack thereof—is revealed in every word.)

Not every idea needs to be shared. But when I’m gripped by an idea, I do my best to write something about it quickly, before its energy fades.

To play devil’s advocate: What about the ideas that need time to simmer? Sometimes we can put an idea aside and come back to it with a new lens—a refreshed perspective that we didn’t have before. Even in those cases, I’d argue that a short published piece is far more useful than an unpublished outline.

The clarifying work of early expression eases the task of future connection.

As often as possible, write it while it’s hot.

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Manage Your Energy, Not Your Time

Jul 29, 2022

“Work-life balance” boils down to a simple idea: Don’t work for too many hours, and make sure you rest for enough hours. While this approach can reduce the likelihood of overwork, it doesn’t cater to our individual experience of work. It assumes that we all experience an hour of work exactly the same way, for every activity we do.

Sometimes we feel exhausted after just ten minutes of a task. Other times, we’re immersed for hours before we even check the time. Given this drastic variance in our “experience” of time, does it really make sense to schedule our lives purely based on hours and minutes?

Time can be a terrible manager. Instead of planning our lives by the hour, we must learn to notice and manage our energy.

Balancing our lives using time alone will always fall short, because time is only one part of the equation. Different activities energize each of us in different ways. What I find energizing might be draining for you. (I’m referring to the mental and emotional energy that fuels motivation, not the physical energy our body gets from nutrients.)

Our personal “activity-to-energy” ratio has a much greater impact on us than how many minutes we spend on a given activity. And yet, most of us are trained to pay attention only to the minutes, never to our energy. Building an energy mindset can help us navigate our lives with greater internal alignment. We can unlock the mysteries of how different parts of our day affect us, and adjust our activities to better align with our energy.

In this essay, I’ll share some of the tactics I’ve found most helpful in managing my own energy. First, we’ll look at how we can use practices like mindfulness and journaling to notice our energy patterns. Then, we’ll explore how we can re-align our own expectations based on those patterns, and avoid self-sabotaging. Finally, we’ll consider how we might follow our own energy, and use it as a compass to inform how we structure our life.

Drain or Gain?

Our body is constantly sending us signals about how the activities we engage in affect us. Once we start listening to them, we can learn a lot about ourselves.

The first task is noticing. Signals are strongest in the moment of the activity itself, or just after it. Through mindfulness and self-awareness, we can step out of the moment and take a look at it. Did that conversation energize you, or drain you? How about that chunk of work? We can use each activity as a self-learning opportunity.

If you’ve never stopped to notice how you’re feeling in the moment, a good training ground for this muscle is meditation. (If you’re new to it, check out my playlist on getting started with meditation. In particular, you might find value in the video on building self-awareness through reflection. )

Once you begin to notice these signals throughout the day, it can be useful to start (lightly) tracking them. By doing so, you begin to notice the patterns within your own energy levels. The most effective practice I’ve found for this is journaling. I recently published a video on my journaling practice, including my favorite prompts. One of the prompts asks this pair of questions:

What fueled your energy? What drained your energy?

Bit by bit, you’ll learn your personal patterns.

You might also find, as I have, that your energy patterns change over time. When I’ve been in a mode of isolation (working heads down) for several months, a video call with a friend can be refreshing, encouraging and energizing. But if I’m buried in calls every week, yet-another-call can drain the last bits of energy I have left, leaving no room for deep work.

Adjust with Awareness

Once we gain a basic understanding of our own energy patterns, there is an immediate temptation to act. We want to use this newfound knowledge to reshuffle our whole lives.

I suggest you resist that temptation. Take it slow. Working on yourself can become an all-consuming project, one which has no end. Growth is a marathon, and you do not need to change everything overnight. Give yourself credit for noticing and becoming more aware of yourself. Self-awareness is a major step forward in and of itself.

The simplest first step is to stop self-sabotaging.

Here’s a scenario that’s probably familiar: You make a plan for the day. You don’t meet it. You feel bad. You beat yourself up. You criticize and judge yourself. You pile onto the initial dissatisfaction by adding disappointment into the mix. You rub salt onto your own wounds.

But if we re-evaluate our “disappointing” days with our energy patterns in mind, we can discover the root of the problem and reset our expectations of ourselves.

Instead of beating yourself up, recognize the reason behind your struggle. With your energy patterns in mind, it becomes much easier to forgive yourself, and work around those patterns. Self-awareness is the first step towards self-compassion.

You can go further, and make adjustments based on the patterns.

For example: I used to schedule calls in the morning. Afterwards, I would struggle to write, and then feel bad about myself. I thought it was because I didn’t have enough self-discipline. But once I started paying attention to my energy, I realized that a single video call can drain my energy and make deep work incredibly difficult. Even a fun, “energizing” call takes a significant amount of energy (mostly because I have to sit in front of a video camera for an extended period of time.)

So, I reversed the order: Writing first. Calls second.

Since then, I’ve been able to get into deep work in the morning, and still feel energized for calls afterwards. Writing actually gives me an energy boost, so I now show up more energized for calls than when I took them first thing in the morning.

When informed by our own energy patterns, even small changes can have a massive positive impact.

Follow Your Energy

In the first stages of energy-driven change, we can experiment by changing things that are in our control, such as our personal schedule.

But what happens when our external work schedules conflict with our energy patterns? Often, our work schedule is simply out of our control. In those situations, instead of trying to fight it, our best bet may be to begin with building awareness of the severity of misalignment. We can build an energy profile for ourselves, and include it as a factor in our life decision-making.

Our energy patterns can guide our future by serving as a factor in our decisions for our next project, job, or career direction.

If you find activities that you are uniquely energized by (which the majority of people find draining), you may have hit upon a personal superpower. By doubling down on those, you can build personal leverage, while maximizing enjoyment of your work at the same time.

Our energy patterns can serve as a compass to help us navigate our lives. We can learn to limit self-sabotage, and seek environments and activities in which we naturally prosper.

Think of energy patterns as a sense, not an exact science. If energy level was a temperature, sensing patterns is like putting up a finger to gauge the wind. We mustn’t over-index on any given signal, but long-term patterns are worth respecting. All in all, these signals should serve as another input into the broader equation of how we understand ourselves.

Lastly, remember that no matter what you do, modern life is always going to include things that drain your energy.

The goal is not to get rid of all your energy drains overnight, but to slowly shift your life toward energy gains.

With an energy mindset, we can learn to manage ourselves, not just our time.

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Showing Up

Jul 1, 2022

A year ago, I read a blog post by Seth Godin about a writing program called Akimbo Writing in Community, led by Kristin Hatcher. Seth had helped launch the program after seeing the success of another program he ran, altMBA. The idea behind Writing in Community was simple, but bold:

‘Show up’ to write every day for six months, then publish a book on Kindle. In the program’s parlance, ‘showing up’ meant writing a snippet in a communty forum, tagging others, and then engaging on their posts as well. The core idea was that one did not need to write alone. Instead, you could write together everyday, and publish books together too.

It sounded too good to be true. But the program’s website touted case after case of authors publishing their books. I was looking to take on a bigger creative project, but had always been intimidated by the idea of writing a book. This program seemed like it was designed specifically to disarm that fear. It did so by offering something unique: A chance to write a book alongside others, instead of alone.

My curiosity was piqued, but I was still hesitant. Then I came upon another blog post from Seth, in which he shared the program’s mantra:

“We’re not entitled to an audience, to applause or to make a living. The work we most want to do, the thing that pushes us to show up — it might not resonate with the audience we bring it to.

There’s no guarantee, none at all.

But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t show up. The lack of a guarantee is precisely why the work is worth doing, because it’s the guarantee that we’ve been brainwashed to require, and without it, few people have the guts enough to show up anyway.”

His words gave me the nudge I needed. In March of 2021, I signed up.

Fast forward to a few weeks ago. I published a video sharing lessons from a year of writing a book. Seth was right. Showing up was the practice that brought my book to life, one day at a time.

Rather than publish to Kindle after six months, I decided to engage with an editor to revise my stories further. I returned to the program a second time to edit in community. I’m really glad I did. I’ve grown my skills as a storyteller through revisions with my editor, and I’ve gotten regular feedback on my fables from fellow writers. Some of my peers have been writing alongside me for the past year, and they’ve seen my stories evolve since their first drafts. It’s been wonderful to hear feedback on how the stories have evolved and gotten stronger.

As I was writing this newsletter, I looked at my Writing in Community profile stats:

452 days and 784 posts of showing up.

It wasn’t every single day, but that’s not important. What’s important is that I didn’t let a missed day stop me from coming back. Regardless of how this book turns out, I’ll always be proud of my commitment to the practice in showing up for myself and my fellow writers.

When I showed up, I didn’t have to make a big impact each time. I just had to show up. And that changed everything.

Over the past year, showing up for my book took many forms:

Writing a few sentences
Lightly editing stuff I wrote yesterday
Looking at the last entry and writing notes for the next session
Taking a walk and dictating a few thoughts into my phone
Interacting with peers’ posts, sharing and absorbing energy
Writing nothing, but thinking deeply

If you’re tilting your head at that last example, then let me assure you: Yes, even sitting at your desk and thinking is showing up. Consider this exchange from acclaimed writer and director Taika Waititi, who reminds us that writing takes many forms.

Interviewer: “So, have you started writing (the next film)?”

Waititi: “Yeah…but what’s writing, you know? What does writing actually mean? Sometimes writing is opening up your laptop and looking at a blank page of a final draft for about eight hours and then feeling sad, and then closing it. That’s still classified as writing.”

We often talk ourselves out of working on the things we want to create. We tell ourselves all the reasons why it’s difficult. We look up at the mountain in our minds and say, “That’s way too high. Don’t bother.”

But if we ask ourselves to take just one step, the mountain becomes manageable. When we’re standing still, a single step is a giant leap.

I write these words to you, but they’re aimed at myself, too. Lately, I’ve struggled to keep my regular cadence with this newsletter. It’s been difficult to juggle alongside everything else. There’s a lot going on. I’d delay and deflect, until my inspiration would deflate. With a larger gap between editions, I’d raise expectations even higher—a perfect recipe for inaction.

I’m reminding myself today: There will always be distractions. I will always want to do more. Show up anyway.

The reception of our work is out of our hands. The only thing we can control is whether or not we show up.

So here I am. And there you are.

Additional reading:

How do I find joy in big writing projects? - The Reading by Yanyi

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Peeling the Onion

Apr 16, 2022

I like to think of writing as peeling layers from the onion of my mind. Each layer is meaningful, but it is just one layer of many.

This framing suggests not taking any single layer too seriously, for there are so many others to come. When I look at writing in this way, it fills me with the energy of curiosity. I become genuinely interested to unveil the mystery of myself.

If what I’m writing now is just the outer layers, what lies hidden beneath?

What will I be writing about twenty layers from now? How about a hundred, or a thousand? When I think of writing this way, it becomes a fun game of mystery, where publishing is more of a side effect than a goal, like beating a level to reveal the next world.

Curiosity is a powerful driving force. It’s deeply personal, and so when we follow it, there is an intrinsic joy and satisfaction that makes the journey worth it. It is a mode of being that is conducive to joy. Seth Godin once shared that “You can’t be curious and angry at the same time.” When we choose curiosity, we choose a mode of being that is conducive to joy, and averse to anger. I try to choose it as often as possible, and center my creativity around it.

Introspective Writing

This ‘peeling process’ does not happen automatically. One has to intentionally approach writing from a personal lens—reflecting, exploring, and revealing the truths of ourselves. This doesn’t mean only writing about ourselves and our experiences. It is the lens that matters, not what the lens is looking at.

When you share your view of the world, you reveal yourself through the things you notice (and the things you don’t.)

When I wrote The Courage to be Disliked (an essay about the book The Courage to be Disliked), instead of just writing a book review or summary, I wrote about my own personal struggles, and shared only the specific ideas within the book that strongly influenced me. I ended up learning about myself in the process of writing it, and it made for more engaging reading.

I’ve been taking an introspective approach to my writing for several years now, and it’s become an incredible part of my own personal growth. At first, it felt challenging to share personal stories—I was tempted to stick to the safety of sharing abstract ideas. But over time it became easier, like exercising a muscle. And the more I did it, the more interesting places my writing took me.

I want to focus on two key benefits to this approach: making space in the mind to invite the unknown, and building self-awareness to fuel self-improvement.

Making Space for What’s Next

There is gold to be found in the hills of the unknown. The problem is most of us don’t have the the space let it in. We’re too busy carrying around all of our existing thoughts, worries, and work. The backpack of our mind is too full—we simply don’t have the space for anything new.

But what if we could lighten our load? What if we could lose some of the rattling junk that is always tied to us, hanging on to us, haunting us?

Writing is the ultimate mental spring cleaning. The deeper we dive into ourselves, the heavier the incision we can make, the fatter the load we can shed. We can write to let go of the weights we carry around.

There’s a catch, though: We don’t know what our writing might reveal. We can’t predict where it will take us. And yet, it’s the mystery that makes it fun.

Looking back, I now see connections in the chaos of my own writing journey. What seemed like a bunch of random things I explored for fun are now points in a long thread that lead to where I am today. Life is funny like that. It’s tempting to look back now, and say, “See? That is why I did all the random stuff.” But that would be rewriting history. I had no idea where these things would go.

The key was to keep publishing. Even when I wasn’t sure where I was going, I kept walking. I had to learn to trust the unknown.

Back when I first started my blog, I figured I’d be writing about startups, because I’ve spent most of my life building them. I wrote a couple of posts on leadership and hiring, but quickly found that I didn’t really want to be writing about that. And so, a period of emptiness formed. Through that emptiness, something else started to appear—I began writing about self-awareness, creativity, and philosophy. I had let go of the ideas I thought I “should” be writing, and made space for what I really wanted to write.

The emptiness made my mind feel comfortable enough to wander, to roam the empty fields like a dog let loose.

One day, I was on a walk, and a story about a bird appeared in my mind. I hadn’t written stories before, so it was quite unexpected. But there it was, clear as day. I realized that it wasn’t just any story, there was a special lesson in it—it was related to an idea I wanted to write about, but couldn’t quite express. Unlike my essays, this story expressed the idea in an abstract form. I had found a new form factor for ideas—fiction. I sat down later that week, and wrote a draft of the story. It would end up being the first of many fables I would write. Many months later, I would begin writing and illustrating a book of fables. I’m now a year in, deep into the editing process. I can’t wait for you to read it!

If you asked me a couple of years ago what kinds of things I’d be writing, fiction would not have appeared on the list. Such is the mystery of the mind, when we let it run free.

Sometimes we need to write about things simply to get them out of our system, to prevent them from rattling in our minds for eternity. We need to make space for what’s next.

Self-Awareness is Public Service

Beyond the friendships and the opportunities, introspective writing is a superpower for self-awareness. It’s like an attentive friend that asks me interesting questions, listens carefully, and helps me grow as a person. The more I write, the more I learn about myself. In doing so, I become increasingly self-aware.

But the benefits of self-awareness are not limited to the self. When I change my understanding of myself, I change the way I view my own actions, and (usually) I change my behavior as a result. By altering myself, I alter the person I present to others. When I see myself more clearly, I am in stronger alignment with reality, and present to others more authentically.

Self-improvement seems like it’s focused on the self, but it is also a service to others.

When we improve ourselves, everyone around us reaps the rewards.

As I look back on my writing journey, I’m reminded of an essay I wrote years ago on the value of working in public, Why Bother, in which I wrote about following my curiosity:

Sometimes I feel like I’m walking in a desert clouded with dust. I want to know what’s on the horizon, but I can’t see how I’ll get there. This is my challenge, and in it lies my opportunity.

For now, all I can do is keep walking.

So here I am, years later, still walking, peeling another layer of my onion, trying not to cry.

If you liked this post, you might also enjoy:

Versioning Myself — We contain multitudes, and by embracing them we become fully alive. But instead of doing everything all at once, we can let some parts ourselves hibernate, while others blossom into their springs.
Listen to Yourself — We notice the most subtle cues from the world around us. Yet we miss the signals that come from within. With a little courage and a lot of practice, we can learn to follow the guidance of our inner North Star.

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Low Stakes, Strong Takes

Mar 16, 2022

Do you remember the day you killed one of your own?

There you were, scrolling your phone, lying in a fetal position on your bed, when suddenly an idea appeared to you. You knew right away that it had to be shared, and that only you were uniquely qualified to share it. Its electric energy jolted you out of bed and onto the chair at your desk, where you began pouring its essence onto a new page, leaning so far forward in possessed concentration that you gave the hunchback of Notre Dame an identity crisis.

An hour later, you sat up—flinching at the crack of your back—and gazed at the creative newborn before you. Its sparkle reminded you of the giant star which birthed it, the idea that still wandered the galaxy of your mind. It was tiny as a speck of stardust, but it was yours. It was beautiful.

Your satisfied smile faded when you remembered what must happen next. You imagined the inevitable moment when you would dip the toes of your little creation into the vast ocean of the internet, helplessly watching its struggling strokes under the critical gaze of the world’s eye as you completed the obligatory rituals, trumpeting its arrival on the channels of social media.

Would it sink at once, dying an invisible death, mourned only in your memories?

Would it swim far enough to surpass the thrashing waves of algorithmic entry, and onto the judging jaws of trolling piranhas?

You were too terrified to find out. You hated the uncertainty, and refused to let the cruel waters drown your idea’s light. You would do the dirty deed yourself. “Better me than them,” you whispered.

You dragged it back inside. You cut. You sliced. You hacked. You tossed aside anything that drew too much attention, anything that shone too brightly, anything that too closely resembled you.

Lights out.

When you finally let it go, the sparkle of its essence was long gone. It caused no ripple with its neutral hues, swimming unseen in the infinite ocean.

If this is your story, know you’re not alone. It is the story of thousands of writers who clip the wings of their creations before they even get a chance to fly.

Crippled by the fear of “everyone on the internet” seeing their work, they hold back and hesitate, hiding what they really want to say. The result is a wishy-washy piece that aims for everyone but connects with no one.

Not all stories have to end this way. The internet can be a scary place to share these days, but there are ways to give life to our creations without exposing them to everyone, everywhere, all at once.

There’s a middle ground to be found between screaming in silence and sharing with terror.

Instead of dumping all of our work into the ocean of public social media, we can share it in controlled environments. We can let it swim in friendly waters. There is an entire spectrum of sharing between private and public—you might call it semi-public sharing.

To share your work semi-publicly, start by ensuring it’s accessible with a URL. You can use your own website or tools like Google Docs or Notion to host it.

Instead of posting on social media, share links to your work freely with trusted peers through text messages, emails, DMs, and so on. You’ll get private feedback without having to face the fear of public scrutiny.

When you share with a trusted group, it elevates your willingness to express what you really want to say. By controlling visibility, you unlock vulnerability.

You might be thinking: “But it’s public now! Won’t everyone see it?” No. Given the overwhelming volume of stuff on the internet, an obscure page isn’t going to start ranking with SEO just by sharing a link with a few peers. It’s extremely difficult to rank with SEO even when you’re actively working on it—if you don’t link to it or post it anywhere, the page is effectively invisible.

It’s understandable to feel shy at first when sharing links to your own work. But remember: You put in all the time and effort to process your thoughts into a cohesive expression. When you contrast it to improvised conversation, your creative eloquence is a gift you’re giving to others. Don’t waste it!

Pick Your Peers

Building a trusted community of peers is vital to sharing freely. They are the people whose feedback you really want, the people you feel safe with, the people who can truly help you grow. They’re also the people that won’t hold back—it’s not helpful when peers tell you something is good, even though they know it isn’t. You want to share the truth with them, and you want them to do the same.

It takes dedication and patience to build the right group, but it’s worth the effort. There are two major components to a building great peer group, both equally important: making friends and building squads.

Friends — In my recent essay, Friends over Followers, I explored how to use online writing as a vehicle for attracting friends: “With every word, every tweet, and every essay, we send a signal to others about what matters to us, what’s meaningful to us, and how we’d like to connect.” It’s not just about improving your work, it’s about using your work as a beacon to attract the people you want to know. We write to share our ideas, but the real reward is often the friends we make along the way.

Squads — It’s incredibly fulfilling to have your work seen by those who you respect. When you create a circle of mutual respect with others, you can form a powerful squad that yields compounding benefits for all who contribute to it. Sam Hart, Toby Shorin, and Laura Lotti wrote about the benefits of Squad Wealth, noting that squads can create “opportunities and group resiliency that would have been impossible to achieve alone.”

These two groups may overlap, but it’s important to treat them as distinct needs of friendship and collaboration. We shouldn’t expect all of our friends to give great feedback, and we shouldn’t expect all of our peers to be great friends.

Vulnerability in Practice

The best way to share is organically, in conversation with others. This means you’re adding to the conversation, unlike in social media, where you are trying to supplant the chaotic stream-driven conversations with whatever you happened to just create.

With large audience visibility, the climb of vulnerability is often too steep, so writers fall victim to the common story of creative self-censorship. With a smaller and focused audience, you can leap farther in the path of vulnerability.

There are many cases where semi-public sharing has helped me get a very rough, unpolished idea out into the world. One instance came through a question I often get: “Should I post on a blog, or a newsletter?” It’s a good question with a nuanced answer. I would always answer this question in depth over a call, DM, or group message, but I hesitated to write a full-on blog post about it. I didn’t want to alienate anyone who advocated for a specific approach.

It was just a tiny worry. Perhaps even a silly one (there are far more contentious issues than this one.) But that hint of hesitation was enough to kill my motivation to publish.

Years later, after answering the question in a forum for the umpteenth time, I decided to copy+paste my answer into a new, unlinked page in notes section on my website. It felt a bit weird to do all this just to share it with a single person—but I knew it would likely come up again. It was rough, unpolished, and exactly the kind of thing I would never share in a blog or newsletter. The post remains in the same state to this day (you can read it here: Blog vs Newsletter), but people find value in it every time I share it.

I realized I can share ideas even when I’m unsure of them. I don’t always have to have all the answers.

Another example comes from my friend Michael Dean, who maintains a Notion log of his thoughts. Like my notes, his log is separate from his essays and other public-focused writing. His log is a journal that he uses to capture and archive his thoughts throughout the day. Every now and then, he might share an entry with a peer. Because the log has very low visibility, he’s able to be that much more vulnerable in each post.

Being vulnerable doesn’t require sharing your deepest, darkest secrets—it can simply be sharing things you hesitate to share. When you engage with those you trust, you discover the courage to say what you really mean. You show up as yourself, so you feel seen. And others feel seen through you.

Reduce visibility to elevate vulnerability. By lowering the stakes, you can liberate your strongest takes.

Once you’ve shared enough semi-publicly, you can share more publicly. But maybe you don’t want to follow that path. Maybe you decide that you’ll never fully share in public, and that being vulnerable, feeling seen, and connecting with others is enough. Maybe that’s all you ever needed. Maybe that’s all you ever wanted from the wild west we call the internet.

I’ll leave you with a question to ask yourself which might help surface the ideas that lie in wait:

“What do you keep saying privately that you could start sharing semi-publicly?”

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How to Ask for Feedback

Feb 10, 2022

Great feedback is a gift, but most feedback isn’t great. It takes a lot of intention, practice, and self-awareness to master the art of giving feedback. It treads on treacherous territory—the Ego—making it tough to toe the line and easy to take the wrong turns. As a result, most of the feedback we get is all over the place.

Occasionally, we get feedback that sparks us with a life-changing boost, rocketing us to a higher plane of confidence. Yet too often, we’re forced to settle for feedback that’s misaligned to our needs, poorly delivered, or both. This is a dangerous problem, because the wrong feedback can be destructive to our work and debilitating to our confidence. The stakes are sky high. Getting feedback can feel like plucking from a mixed bag of delightful, decent and devastating.

How do we escape this gambling game of pain or gain?

Thankfully, the feedback we get is not determined entirely by those who give it. With a little planning and care, we can greatly improve incoming feedback. When we seek out feedback pro-actively, we control two crucial parts of the process: what kind of feedback we ask for, and how we receive it. It’s in our best interests to take advantage of these levers to improve the impact of feedback that comes our way. Our growth (and sanity) depends on it.

In this essay, we’ll explore tactics we can use to elevate our clarity when asking for feedback, and ways to manage our mindsets while receiving it. With a few adjustments to our approach, we can dramatically improve the effectiveness of the feedback we get, and protect our peace in the process.

Be Specific

The worst mistake we can make is to ask for feedback without clarifying what we’re looking for. Unless we’re working with a trusted peer who also happens to be a mind-reader, this is a recipe for disaster.

There are two main kinds of feedback:

Tactical: “I see your goal. You could try this other route to get there—it might be shorter, simpler, or more fruitful.”
Strategic: “I see your goal. You should pursue this other goal instead.”

Decide which one you want, and make sure to ask for it specifically. Most people are looking for tactical feedback—tips on how to better achieve their goals. But when they seek feedback, if they don’t specify what they want, they often get dumped with advice on how to change their strategy. They’re left even more confused than when they started.

I’ve had this happen to me many times before. One time, I was talking to a fellow writer about my approach for publishing my book of fables. I told them that I wanted to spend at least some effort (six months or so) exploring publishing options, and if I didn’t get any bites, I would fall back to self-publishing. I asked them what they thought about my approach. Instead of sharing tactics, they told me a story about a friend of theirs who had spent four years querying publishers before they finally got a deal to publish their book. “So, just keep trying, and never give up!”

I nodded, thanked them for sharing, but came away disappointed. I wanted tactics on my strategy, and instead got advice to change my strategy. I was frustrated in the moment, but later realized the fault was my own. I should have been more clear about the kind of feedback I was looking for. This is what I asked:

“My approach for publishing my book is to spend X months on outreach, then fall back to self-publishing. What do you think?”

Do you see the problem? “What do you think?” is far too ambiguous and open-ended. I should have asked something like this:

“If I only have X months for publishing outreach, what are the most impactful things I could do in that time?”

Much better. With tactics in hand, I am well prepared to execute on my strategy. If all I had was another strategy, I’d be unprepared for both, and back in a pit of questioning, still trying to figure out which strategy is right for me. Note that I can still adjust my strategy as I see fit. Just because I asked for tactics on this strategy, doesn’t mean I’m tied to it forever. I can change my mind. I’m in control.

Even with clear asks, we still don’t always get what we asked for. If I framed the question to focus on tactics, and they still wanted to advise on strategy, they might respond with something like, “Well, I know you asked about how to X, but I really think you should Y instead…” That exposes their belief that they think they know better about what’s right for me. There are some cases (for example, a trusted mentor) where you might want to be open to this kind of feedback. Most of the time, I suggest that you be wary of it. In some cases, when someone makes a certain decision, they are threatened by the idea of you making a different one. If you ask them what to do, they’ll do their best to guide you along their own path, rather than what’s best for you. (I wrote more about this in my essay on Status Police.)

This tendency for folks to try and advise-by-default is not necessarily rooted in bad intentions. It’s far easier for people to give advice (strategic feedback on what they would do) than it is for them to give feedback (tactical tips on how you might do what you’re doing differently.) The former relies on memory of their past, the latter depends on empathy and expertise.

Most people default to giving advice, which is dangerous, because the advice we give to others is often meant for ourselves. We can’t help it. (This phenomenon can be a very useful internal signal—if you find yourself repeatedly giving out the same advice, consider if you yourself need to take it!)

Adjust your asks to be as clear as impossible. Try to remove any ambiguity as to what you’re really looking for. Otherwise, the miscommunication will lead to misalignment. Implementing misaligned feedback is an impossible task, because it requires that you transform the work to align with their goals, rather than your own. It’s a burden no one should have to bear.

You Are Not Your Work

After reading the prior section, you might be wondering: What happens if I don’t know what I want? How do I ask for feedback when I’m unsure of what I need?

Short answer: Don’t.

Feedback is a way to get answers to your questions. If you’re unsure of what your questions are, you should ask yourself why you’re seeking feedback at all. You might be surprised by the answer. Maybe you’re struggling to clarify your questions because you don’t have any. What you really have is a request—you want someone to look at your work and tell you it’s good, which will tell you that you are good. A friend once shared something that struck me:

“I wonder if I’m really seeking feedback on my work, or just seeking validation of myself.”

It’s in our nature to desire validation, but feedback is a risky way to seek it. If you ask for feedback to validate yourself, and the feedback isn’t good, then you will internalize that feedback to be about you. Don’t let that happen.

There are far healthier (and safer) ways to attain validation than seeking feedback. It can come from friends and family, but the most powerful source of validation is yourself. Practicing self-love and self-validation can build an internal foundation of confidence.

You don’t need to be validated by others. You are valid just the way you are, with or without your work. You are you, and that’s enough. Always.

Once your internal validation is strong, you won’t need to rely as much on external validation. You can separate yourself from the work, and internalize that feedback on your work is about the work, not about you. When you look at feedback objectively, it’s much easier to find the wisdom within it.

Focus feedback onto your work. Keep it away from you.

Manage Your Energy

If I pay attention to my mood as I read feedback, I notice that it can vary by the day. Sometimes, I view feedback with a light heart and open mind, smiling and nodding as I process the guidance. Other times, feedback feels like a heavy anvil dropping onto my head, and I dread opening the email that shared it.

This fluctuation of feeling is natural—it’s an indication of varied energy levels. Feedback can be heart-wrenching, but it might be exactly what we need to hear. When that heavy gift arrives, we need to be ready for it. We cannot waste that precious opportunity for growth. We have to pay attention to where we are in terms of energy reserves before we open any piece of feedback.

To build resilience in receiving feedback, we must learn to manage our energy.

Next time you’re about to open a piece of feedback that you suspect might be particularly heavy, take a breath first. Check in with yourself first. If you can’t take some time beforehand, then be sure to do so after reading the feedback (but before you respond.) Take a long walk, sit on it for a day, and give yourself time to refresh the energy needed to handle, process, and respond to the heaviness.

The internet is a wonderful thing, it connects us to so many places and people. But our emotional bandwidth doesn’t scale as fast as our internet speeds. We have to manage ourselves accordingly.

Enough is Enough

I write a lot, and I try to get feedback on every piece of writing before I publish it. But it can get overwhelming if I seek out too much of it. 2-3 pieces of feedback from each category is usually sufficient. After that, I hit diminishing returns on the nature of feedback I get. I usually seek out at least one person from each of these categories:

Peers in the Trade: Ideally, I want to share this with other folks who are working on / building the same kinds of things I am, or at least have similar goals as creators. If they are a little further down the experience path than me, even better. (Too far in either direction of experience can make it challenging, as their goals might be quite different than mine.)
Potential Audience: I also try to get feedback from people who would be interested in what I’m making as consumers. It’s best when they are not in the trade at all (e.g. someone who doesn’t write, but reads / is interested in the topic at hand).

These categories aren’t a hard-and-fast rule, they are just the ones I’ve found most useful. Once I’ve gotten 1-2 from each of these, I stop seeking further feedback. It’s crucial to avoid overwhelming myself with too much feedback. More feedback is just another excuse to keep editing, keep revising, and keep tweaking the work until it’s “perfect.” I can’t ask everyone on the planet for their feedback, and if I did, I’d never be able to make anything that satisfied them all.

Seeking too much feedback can be a sign that we’re afraid to release our work out into the world.

We think it’s not ready, but the truth is that the work will never feel like it’s ready. Still, we have to release it at some point. As Liz Gilbert noted, “Any talent, wisdom or insight you have that you don’t share becomes pain.” Don’t hold onto it for too long. Get a little feedback, and let the work breathe out in the world, so you can do it all over again.

Embrace the mantra of progress. Forego the illusion of perfect.

Listen to Yourself

The elephant in this essay is the assumption that feedback is necessary in the first place. In many ways, it is, because we cannot truly look at our work (and ourselves) from the outside without the help of our peers. But the reality is that no one understands our own desires, goals, experiences, and work better than we do. We have an inside perspective that cannot be matched.

Listening to yourself is one of the most important skills you can build. (I believe this so strongly that I wrote an essay on it—Listen to Yourself—on building self-awareness and discovering your inner truths.) Our instincts can guide our most important decisions, but only if we let them.

If you know, you know.

Trusting your instincts doesn’t mean you ignore all feedback. To the contrary, it lowers the burden on feedback, allowing you to solicit it more freely. Then, you can combine all the different inputs together to make a well-informed decision.

“Ideally, asking advice should be like echolocation. Bounce ideas off of all of your surroundings, and listen to all the echoes to get the whole picture. Ultimately, only you know what to do, based on all the feedback you’ve received and all your personal nuances that no one else knows.”

—Derek Sivers, Hell Yeah or No

In the journey of our work, our instinct offers a bird’s-eye-view map. Feedback adds a layer of turn-by-turn directions. We know the general direction we’re trying to go, but need a little help finding our way.

Trust your internal map, but listen to the external guides.

With these tactics in mind, I hope you’ll be better equipped handle the feedback that comes your way. By adjusting your asks and managing your mindset, you can influence feedback to fuel your growth and serve your goals. Most importantly, you’ll be able to put up the boundaries to protect your peace.

Feedback is a heavy gift. Seek with caution. Handle with care.

Thanks to Catherine, Ana, Cassie, Michael and Florian for their feedback on a draft of this essay.

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A Plea to Publish

Nov 23, 2021

You’ve been meaning to start writing online, but you’re afraid.

You’re afraid of what people might say when they read it. You’re also afraid that no one will read it.

You worry that your work isn’t good enough. That no one gives a damn about what you think.

But the fact that you worry is precisely why your work will be genuine, interesting, and unique. Because you care, your perspectives are invaluable to the world.

And yet, you hold back. “Why bother adding to the noise?” you say.

The reason you need to put your words out there is because there is so much noise.

While you fret about how it might be received, countless others who seek to manipulate and divide are publishing with abandon. They don’t stop to think. They don’t hesitate. They pollute the discourse of our world with no thought to the long term impacts. They fill the void with noise.

We can’t always control polluters, but we can counter them with genuine, thoughtful work. We can be the trees that breathe clean air into our polluted atmosphere. We can tip the scales in favor of genuine creators.

In a world of information overload, we need your signal to survive the noise.

If you don’t do it for us, do it for yourself.

Instead of complaining that the vibe is off, change the vibe. With every word and every post, you influence the culture and fabric of the spaces you enter. Your bell rings in someone else’s ear, and in turn, their own bell echoes to their friends. As Steve Jobs once said, “Everything around you was made up by people no smarter than you. And you can change it. You can influence it.”

So what are you waiting for?

Ah yes, the fear.

Listen. I know it’s scary to publish, especially when you’re starting out. I still get nervous hitting publish on each and every newsletter, and I’m almost at my hundredth edition.

But you don’t have to go from zero to a hundred. You can ease into it.

By controlling visibility of your work, you can mitigate the risk, as I shared in Low Stakes, Strong Takes:

To share your work semi-publicly, start by ensuring it’s accessible with a URL. You can use your own website or tools like Google Docs or Notion to host it.

When you share with a trusted group, it elevates your willingness to express what you really want to say. By controlling visibility, you unlock vulnerability.

If you have something to say, say it.

Be like the bird whose chirps rise above the blaring horns of city traffic, gifting strangers with a smile.

Sing your song.

P.S. I first shared this plea in a video, which you can watch on YouTube if you prefer. I was delighted to see that it inspired several folks to take their first step into publishing. I hope it helps you too!

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Listen to Yourself

Sep 26, 2021

Signals are everywhere. We notice the most subtle cues from the world around us. If we see a red light while driving, we instinctively hit the brakes. If we notice a cat’s hind legs shimmying, we know a pounce is coming. If a trusted friend gives us that look with their eyes, we know something’s up.

We process most signals immediately, effortlessly, and often subconsciously.

And yet, we fail to notice even the strongest signals that come from within. Despite the efforts of our inner beacons — whether you call them our intuition or gut, our spirit or soul — we pay them little attention.

We notice external signs, but ignore internal signals.

We pay a heavy cost by missing out on these invaluable cues. Our intuition can guide us to better understand how we experience the world, and more importantly, how we want to experience it in the future.

Without this wisdom from within, we live our lives like zombies. We wander from place to place, mindlessly passing the time, playing the part in a script we never read.

We don’t pause, so we can’t reflect.

We don’t learn, so we can’t grow.

We don’t look, so we can’t see.

But it’s never too late to start paying attention. One of our greatest strengths as humans is our capacity for change. A new version of ourselves awaits us, but we must follow the guidance of our inner North Star to find it.

With a little courage and a lot of practice, we can learn to listen to the signals that come from within.

Power of Practice

The world is a noisy place, and our minds are even noisier. It is no wonder that whispers are inaudible in the cacophony of our lives.

“Your instincts, your human personal intuition — always whispers; it never shouts. So you have to, every day of your lives, be ready to hear what whispers in your ear.” —Steven Spielberg

If we want to be able to hear our signals, we have to work for it. Like most things in life worth attaining, there are no shortcuts in this journey. We must make a habit out of listening to ourselves. Only then can we begin to see reality with clarity.

It all comes down to practice. It’s simple, but not easy.

The good news is that there is no single practice or approach that is required to achieve self-awareness. You can choose from a plethora of practices, whichever one jives with you most. After all, this is a practice of understanding you. The practice will be as unique as you are.

Meditation & Mindfulness — Meditation is one of the most transformative practices I’ve added to my life. More than anything, I find its value is in the training it provides you. With each sit, you learn to observe your thoughts without judgement. This can be an invaluable technique to utilize throughout the day, not just while you’re meditating (this “noticing” of your experience as you live it is what is often referred to as mindfulness). These techniques will help ensure that the next time you get a signal, you’ll be more likely to notice it. (P.S. You might enjoy my YouTube playlist on getting started with meditation.)

Journaling — I’ve been journaling for many years now, and I never cease to be amazed at the volume of thoughts that come through in each session. We often underestimate how “intimate” a private journaling session can be, and how much we reveal about ourselves when we create a safe practice to do so. We can also extend journaling practices to include other healthy habits, such as positive affirmations or gratitude exercises.

Talk Therapy — There are many proven benefits to psychotherapy, and not just for serious mental health issues. Even if you put aside their proven effectiveness, think of the value of having a person that prompts you on a regular basis to share what’s on your mind. Could you do this for yourself? Sure. Will you? Probably not. Regardless of the particular mode or direction of the questioning, just giving yourself a chance to talk out loud about what’s on your mind. You’ll discover much more than you think.

Long Walks — I’ve had many of my most important realizations while taking a walk. The openness of the outdoors seems to transcend into the mind, making room for thoughts to come out. It’s worth noting that we often sabotage these benefits by listening to a podcast or taking a phone call. It’s fine to do those every so often, but I’d strongly recommend taking a walk with no agenda other than taking a walk.

The goal is not to perfect all of these habits, but to pick one or two that you can really stick with for a while. When you pursue any of these habits for long enough, you’ll gain a new perspective on yourself.

Regardless of what channel you use to find signals, it’s important to go deeper to understand why they appear before you. What is hiding inside them? Is there something from the past that might be trying to make its way back into view?

Take a closer look. You’ll never see yourself the same way again.

Look, Then Leap

Listening to our signals is only the first step toward transformation. The real challenge is not seeing, but acting. It is at this crucial stage that many of us falter:

Deep down, we know what to do. Yet we fail to do it. We stand, frozen in fear, staring at the entrance of our cave of darkness. It is haunted by our own fears, filled with terrors unknown. Instead of stepping forward, we close our eyes. We cover our ears. We run, hoping to escape it, instead of facing it. Eventually, we realize there is no escaping it — the signal lives within us, and goes wherever we go. But we keep avoiding it anyway, because we can’t find the will to act.

I’ve been guilty of this in the past. I recall a time when I felt overwhelmed, exhausted, and utterly burned out by my job. I remembering feeling physically in pain — I had embodied my mental and emotional distress. My friends could see it too, as if I carried it around on a giant neon sign, hung around my neck.

I knew I had to leave. But I stayed anyway. I told myself grand stories, convincing myself of the need to persevere until some point in the future. Once so-and-so happens, things will finally be different, I would tell myself. But milestones came and went, and my inner siren kept blaring.

I kept delaying, deflecting, denying. I’d hide under the umbrella of busyness, safe from the terror of my own reflection. Just as we amplify our inner fears, we can silence our inner pain. I had convinced myself that things weren’t really that bad, the pain wasn’t really that severe, things could be much worse…

I was gaslighting myself.

At some point, the pain became too much. I started to expend less energy thinking about work, mostly because I had no energy left to give it. Somehow, this tipping point led to me taking better care of myself. I started meditating, journaling and taking long walks. Soon, I began to see reality more clearly.

I could no longer manipulate the narrative, because reality was staring right back at me. A mountain of evidence piled up in my journals. Staring at my own words made my experience feel more real. It gave me the confidence to finally take the steps I needed to take.

Finally, I moved on. Eventually, I healed.

Half of the battle is finding the signal. The other half is acting on it.

Mourn The Past, Welcome The Future

It’s a wonderful feeling to finally hear yourself with clarity. But that dish is often served with a troubling side of sadness. Once you see what life can be like, guided by your own signals, you begin to question your life up to that point. You look back upon your life, and wonder what could have been.

You think about all the things you’ve done, serving only external signals. And all the things you haven’t, ignoring your internal ones. You imagine all the lives you could have lived, if only you had found this lens sooner.

If you’re feeling this now, or you find yourself sinking in it some day in the future, I want you to know that you’re not alone. This feeling is akin to what is known as Ego death — when you stop pretending and live for yourself, you regret the life you had been living for others. It feels like mourning, because part of you is dying. A former version of you is fading.

But remember that it is also the pain of positive progress. A slipping of the skin, to unveil new beginnings. A one-time charge for a lifelong lens. Our inner signals gift us with sight — to see all the enriching, exciting, exhilarating lives that await us.

I’ve followed so many signals that have completely transformed my life for the better. Any pain of regret is far outweighed by the joys they have granted me.

Earlier this year, I was sitting down to write my introductory post in a new writing program. I had planned to write a book on fostering creativity and living a polymath life. But as I started to write it, I felt a strange sensation, as if I was sitting at the wrong desk. A signal appeared, and it told me I didn’t want to write this book. It was confusing, because for many months leading up to that moment, I really thought I did. But the message was loud and clear: I wanted to write a book of fables (short stories infused with lessons), not a book about creativity. It was a somewhat scary idea, as I had written only a single story at that point. How could I write a whole book of them?

The logic behind it didn’t matter. I had learned to trust those signals, especially ones that appear with such ferocity. The signal had the brilliance of a shooting star, and I couldn’t look away.

I’m so glad I listened. A few days of writing stories turned into many months, and just last week I submitted a draft manuscript for my book of fables to an editor. Writing longer stories for the book gave me a spark to write shorter fables too (I just shared one of them, The Boat of Stillness, in my last newsletter). I’ve discovered that I really love writing stories. Who knew? (I did, of course… It just took me a while to know that I knew.) When I imagine a life spent writing stories, I smile. It’s astonishing that just a year ago, I hadn’t written a single story. Now, they’re the most exciting creative expression in my life.

This is just one story of many I could share, where my life changed in a moment of listening. I believe yours can too. If you follow the path lit by your inner North Star, you might just fall in love with who you become.

Listen closely, just for a moment.

Do you hear the whispers from within?

What do they say?

Additional resources that might help you in your journey:

Video: Building Self-Awareness Through Perception and Reflection
Podcast: What is Self Love? — Learning to trust yourself, and give yourself the space you need to hear your signals.

If you liked this essay, you might also enjoy these:

The Courage to be Disliked — How to stop worrying about what others think using the teachings of Adlerian psychology.
Status Police — Some people seek to control us, but we don’t have to live by their rules. We can empower ourselves to live life on our own terms.
Magic of Boredom — How I turned a dead-end internship into a career-launching experience by trusting my instincts.

Thanks to Florian, Sally and Lyssa for their feedback on an early draft of this essay.

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Save Your Breath

Aug 28, 2021

When I was a child, I didn’t really know how to swim properly. I hadn’t learned how to do breaststroke, and so I would get exhausted after swimming a few laps. I had taken some swimming lessons, but they never stuck. (I had some pretty bad childhood swim coaches, some of whom would simply dunk me underwater to “resolve” my fear of swimming.)

As an adult, I decided I wanted to learn to swim. For real this time. I was lucky to find an excellent coach at a gym. He started by hearing out my complaints about running out of energy. He watched me swim a few laps, and that was enough for him to see the problem.

He told me I was trying too hard to breathe. I thought this was an absurd thing to say, since my problem was clearly that I was running out of breath. Surely I needed more breath, not less.

He gently guided me to understand the folly of my ways. My panic around having enough breath was, in fact, the very thing that used up most of my breath.

Anxiety takes up energy. Mine took it all. Effectively, I was suffocating myself out of oxygen.

Once he taught me to breathe, I could cross to the other end without taking a single breath. It took a lot of practice in staying calm and relaxed, but to my surprise, I did it within a few days. It taught me that I didn’t need to breathe constantly. I could relax.

When I relaxed, I had more breath. When I had more breath, I swam farther, faster, freer. Months later, I was swimming with speeds I could never have imagined.

Panic, fear, worry and overthinking sucks up your energy like a vacuum. If you spend all your energy thinking about doing, you’ll have none left to actually do anything.

A simple mantra I try to tell myself when I get stuck in overthinking loops:

Save your breath. You’ll need it.

In the end, the thing that stops us is rarely the task itself. It is our own self sabotage.

—Wind, Sand & Stars, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

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Magic of Boredom

Jul 18, 2021

Back in the early 2000s, I was an IT intern at an agricultural engineering facility. I literally worked on a farm. The company did scientific research and engineering on different kinds of corn oil. I was hired by an IT manager who had thus far ran the IT department by himself. I was the first hire he had ever made. As I would soon learn, his expectations for my role were quite limited.

My job was simple: Once a day, take out the current backup tape for our company servers. Then, put in a new one.

That’s it. That was the entirety of my formal responsibilities.

Why the backup tapes, you ask? Let’s just say the company’s IT practices were a tad dated. All company data was kept on the internal network, which was backed up daily. The data backups did not magically disperse to “the cloud”. Instead they were kept on an on-site physical server, which stored the data on larger-than-VHS-cassette sized backup tapes. These tapes would fill up, and I’d swap them.

It took me about 1 minute to swap the tapes.

After that was done, technically I was done for the day. Of course, I ended up doing other things, some of which I’ll talk about in this post. But I wasn’t hired to do those things. The only thing the IT manager had in mind for me was ensuring these backup tapes were swapped. Everything else was bonus.

Needless to say, this wasn’t the type of job I had in mind when I enrolled in a Computer Science degree at one of the most reputable Universities on the continent. I thought I would be doing complicated things, and working at fancy tech companies. Alas, the tech industry had just crashed in dramatic fashion, and was still in recovery. My classmates and I had all struggled to get any internships at all. It had gotten bad enough that any job was considered an achievement for us.

I was thankful for the opportunity, and eager to make the most of it. At the same time, I was kind of depressed about the whole thing. My hour-long commute every day ensured I got there by the mandated time of 8AM. Then, I had the entire day to fill, and nothing to fill it with.

The first lesson I learned was that doing nothing is incredibly difficult.

As a young university student, I had initially giggled to myself at the luxury of being paid without many responsibilities. But the thing is, when you work in an office, you can’t really do much in terms of goofing off. You still have to pretend to work, even if you’ve been given nothing to do.

I found the experience tortuous. To my surprise, sitting and pretending to work was far harder than actually doing work.

Every day, I would report in to my boss, telling him I finished the simple task he gave me earlier. He’d give me a confused look, wondering why on Earth someone would ask for more work to do. Eventually, he came up with a few spreadsheet projects that were supposed to last me a few weeks. I finished them that day. I don’t say this as a claim to my genius — though I am quite good at what I do — these were quite straightforward projects. This manager had never had anyone with strong technical competence work for them before. As a young intern, I enjoyed this dynamic, as it gave me a chance to try and impress him more with each project.

Still, I was bored. Really bored. I started to experiment taking longer breaks, or spending time just sitting in my car listening to music. When that got old, I started to take walks around the large, science-lab-meets-warehouse facility, curious to see what other departments were up to. The place was massive. Bit by bit, I tried to explore its every corner.

One day, I ran into the guy who ran the Purchasing department. I had met him a few times during breaks in the lunch room. He was one of the friendliest people I’d ever met, always eager to strike up a conversation. He started to tell me about his job, and how orders were made in the company. Every day, he would tear out a new sheet from his binder, full of rows and columns to be filled out. For reference, it looked like a Google spreadsheet, except it was on paper. (Wild, right?) He’d pass this sheet around to every single employee who made orders in each department. First the research lab team, then the engineering team, and so forth. They would each add their orders by hand, until the sheet finally made its way back to him at the end of the day. He’d then go and make calls to every single vendor to place each and every order in the sheet, marking it by hand. At the end of the day, he’d file that sheet in a binder.

After telling me all this, he stood up and gestured to the high cupboards lining his entire office. It was a wall of binders. I said nothing, gave a curt smile, and walked back to my desk. I couldn’t believe it. I knew the place was behind on technology, but this seemed far too manual of a process even for them.

I wondered to myself: What the hell am I doing here? This place is a dead end…

That day, I felt embarrassed to work at my job. I felt embarrassed that I didn’t hear back from more companies during my internship applications, that I didn’t nail more interviews, that I didn’t get a better job. I felt disappointed in myself. I felt stuck.

I moped and groaned quietly to myself for weeks. I had resigned to my situation.

One morning, I took a walk outside the facility. It was a sunny day, with a slight breeze that shifted the leaves just so. In the solitude and silence, I wondered to myself: What if I tried to change how things were done? Could I improve it?

My brain quickly responded with a resounding No, obviously not.

But it was soon followed by a whisper of Maybe…?

Until then, the only software I had built was for school assignments. I lacked confidence that I could solve real problems. Yet somehow, thanks to a combination of boredom and curiosity, I found the gumption to try anyway.

I built a simple web-based internal ordering system. The initial goal was to allow people to select their orders from a drop-down menu, which would be powered by a simple database. Instead of writing out orders by hand each time, they could open a web page, and make a few clicks. This would cut out the repetitive nature of filling out forms by hand, and significantly reduce errors at the same time.

I had never built any kind of web application before. But no one else at the company had either, and so I had no reason to feel unqualified. I did some research, and settled on using ASP and Microsoft Access. They were perfect for the task — a simple database I could manage with an administrative interface, and a simple templating language that let me create the order form web pages without much fuss.

It worked wonderfully. I kept expecting it to fail miserably, or explode in some unknown way, but it never did. There were bugs, but those required simple tweaks. Because the tool was only used internally, I could update it immediately. I was also helped by the fact that its user base was comprised of scientists and hardware engineers — they gave excellent feedback. Further, they enjoyed participating in the live development of this tool as they used it. None of them had taken part in a process where software was designed, implemented and updated on-the-fly to suit their needs.

I had fun building it, and they had fun using it. It gifted them with time, and it gifted me with purpose. As far as software development goes, that’s pretty much as good as it gets.

My manager was very supportive, happy to have someone that helped prove the “value” of his under-appreciated IT department. Other departments saw the success of my internal tool and wanted in on it too. I slowly extended it to three other departments in the company, expanding its reach and with it, my own influence as an employee.

I had gained internal infamy. Indoors, I was a celebrity. Outdoors, still a nobody.

And yet, any pride I had from my accomplishments was tempered because the technology I had used was simple. The features it demanded were straightforward, without the need for complex algorithms. I remember almost feeling guilty for how smooth the development process was. My rigorous computer science education had ingrained the idea in my mind that I needed to solve complex problems in order to be useful. This project had shaken the roots of the idea that complexity was necessary to deliver value.

My success came through curiosity and initiative, not brilliant innovation.

I would later return to the company for a second internship. My accomplishments in both would serve me well, and provide crucial stepping stones in my career. Time and time again, I would hear that what was most impressive was the initiative I showed and the positive outcomes I influenced, not the specific technological incantations I had perfected.

I look back on the internship fondly. Having worked at several big tech companies since then, I can say that it was a rare treat in being able to build simple solutions to serve user needs. When you have a tight feedback loop with real users, the process is remnant of a baker handing a customer a fresh loaf. There is joy to be found in the cycle of makers serving and users smiling.

As technologists, we often want to work at the best tech companies around, but the reality is that those big companies often don’t need us. Many brilliant engineers working at big tech companies end up doing mundane work. Meanwhile, there are thousands of not-so-tech companies that could be completely transformed with a few months of their time.

Am I suggesting all technologists should find companies who operate with outdated tech? Or that complex innovation doesn’t matter? No. But you already knew that. It’s never that cut and dry.

Opportunities for impact are there for those who look for them. (Plus, we can’t let interns have all the fun, can we?)

There are many lessons from that internship I’ve carried along with me to this day, as I write this to you. I hope there’s something you take from it too, to carry alongside you. If you only take one thing away from this, let it be this:

There is magic to be found in boredom.

You might be working in a place that feels barren, empty and without hope. But perhaps somewhere, hidden in the depths of its soil, there is a budding seed of opportunity. Let yourself be bored enough to search for it, curious enough to water it, and patient enough to tend to it. You might be amazed by what bears fruit.

These days, the biggest challenge to embracing boredom is social media. Research has shown that the distraction of social media sucks up the time that we normally would have spent discovering new passions. I’m not suggesting we abandon social media entirely, but that we at least be fully aware of the price we are paying.

By granting our attention to the infinite streams of online media, we deprive ourselves of the luxury of boredom.

Boredom grants us the space to see, the breath to be, the time to try, and the fuel to fly.

Let us not waste its gift.

May we give ourselves the permission to be bored. May it guide us through the corridors of curiosity and into the open plains of opportunity.

“A person can learn all manner of things, no matter where he finds himself, provided his spirit is determined.”

—Hiromi Kawakami, Strange Weather in Tokyo

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Status Police

Jun 25, 2021

Do you remember the freedom of childhood play? You tasted every object, crossed every line, pushed every envelope. You did it without hesitation. The world was your playground.

As you grew up, you were taught to respect the rules. You stopped frolicking and started following. You were told that rewards were waiting for you, as long as you stayed in your lane. After all, you’d come so far on the current path. Why would you throw all of that away? You couldn’t think of an answer, so you just kept going.

One day, you hit a bump in the road. Or two. Or three. You wondered if it was time to alter your course, to veer off the path, to try something new. The curious cat in you daydreamed about what lied in the forest beyond the trail. The questions rumbled in your mind, echoing and building into a cacophony that couldn’t be silenced.

But change is scary, so you did nothing. You resisted and rationalized, deluded and delayed.

Finally, after years of internal struggle and endless overthinking, you mustered the courage to make a change. You took a tiny step towards a new beginning.

And that’s when you ran into the status police.

Status police wander our communities, waiting for opportunities to perform an intervention. The minute you try to step out of your assigned box, they show up out of thin air and shove you back in. They serve as a constant reminder of your position and place, and how important it is to them that you stay directly in it.

The status police are a force among us that no one hired, let alone desired.

Consider, for a moment, the cost of status enforcement. What do you lose when you stand still? The answer is (almost) everything. You preserve your present self, but kill all but one of your potential futures. You deny yourself even a taste or tease of all that you could become.

Like the freezing curse of a wicked witch, the words of status police can turn people into prisoners. In South Asian culture, the tyranny of status police runs rampant. This phenomenon is known as Log Kya Kahenge, which translates to “What will people say?” Log Kya Kahenge is often used as a tool by parents to enforce their children’s behavior, in search of approval of the opinions of others in the community. Out of fear of the status police patrolling outside the home, parents turn into enforcers inside the home.

You might be wondering: Why do people become status police? Why can’t they simply live and let live?

If you explored their motivations and incentives, you might discover that they are threatened by you. Without saying a word, your mere appearance tells a tale of growth. Seeing you forces them to reconcile the questions and desires that already plague them. As you know, change is scary. People tend to resist it. In order to avoid the hard work of changing themselves, they try to prevent you from changing instead.

Regardless, you can’t afford to spend your life investigating the motives behind every person that tries to regulate you. Just like it takes energy to police others people’s lives, it takes significant energy to worry about the others who try to police you.

So how do you stop worrying about what others think?

In a prior essay, I wrote about the book Courage to be Disliked, which explores the ideas found in Adlerian psychology. Adler’s teachings offer a powerful framework to stop worrying about the approval of others: separation of tasks. The idea is that you need to go through an exercise of separating which tasks you truly own, versus ones that are in the control of others. Keep the tasks that are truly yours, and forget the rest.

It is not your task to determine whether or not other people like you. That is their task. If they try to enforce the rules of their approval upon you, it’s an effort to transfer their task onto you. Don’t let it happen. When you take on the tasks of others, they dictate your life.

“Half of life is lost in charming others. The other half is lost in going through anxieties caused by others.

Leave this play. You have played enough.” —Rumi

Resisting the enforcers is no easy task. They are often quite good at what they do — persuasion and manipulation are among the many powerful tools they wield with abandon. Even if they’re not physically present in your life, their words can still haunt you. They live on as ghosts in your mind, questioning and doubting you wherever you go.

In those moments, you must remind yourself that you are not defined by your thoughts.

Thoughts are nothing more than suggestions, chosen by an algorithm in your brain, trained on the harsh environments of your life. You can dismiss these suggestions. You can choose to let the words, thoughts and ghosts of status police pass you by. You can curate your life’s environment.

When you empower yourself, you disarm the status police.

Find a way to instill belief in yourself at the root of your being. Plant these seeds of self-belief, and tend to them with care. Your harsh environment will throw many storms and droughts upon your budding garden, but you must protect it at all costs. If you do, you might finally be able to live within the gardens of your inner growth.

Take a moment to imagine your inner garden…

Do you hear the orchestra of birds singing with abandon? Or the gentle gusts sweeping the leaves?

Do you see the towering trees swaying with sunlight? Or the blooming flowers waiting to shine?

Do you feel the soft dirt massaging your feet? Or the fresh air filling your lungs?

You deserve to live in the garden of your dreams.

Your life is yours to live. Don’t let others live it for you.

If you liked this post, you might also enjoy:

The Polymath Playbook — In a world built for specialization, the polymath approach can help us build unique mental models to differentiate ourselves and discover meaningful work. I share the story of my life, and how I learned to embrace my inner polymath.
Versioning Myself — After I went through a phase of burnout, I took a sabbatical. It led to an awakening of sorts, intellectually and spiritually. Afterwards, friends said I was a new person, they called me ‘Salman 2.0’. It made me reflect on the idea of ‘versioning’ myself, and embracing the multitude of paths within the web of me.

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Versioning Myself

Jun 13, 2021

After I went through a phase of burnout, I took a sabbatical. It led to an awakening of sorts, both intellectually and spiritually. Afterwards, friends told me I seemed like a new person. They called me ‘Salman 2.0’. This made me wonder: When, exactly, did I change ‘versions’? And what will ‘Salman 3.0’ be like?

It’s fascinating to reflect upon my life in terms of versions. The major milestones society tends to focus on are things like birthdays, graduations, and new jobs. But in my experience, those transitions never yielded new versions of me. My life changed, but I didn’t. The real agents of change come through transformative experiences, rather than societal milestones.

To fuel drastic change, you need a strong catalyst. Personal transformations are often sparked by pain, struggle, or near-death experiences. For me, the trigger was burnout. The sheer weight of the pain and numbness forced me to stop and ask a lot of hard questions about what I really want. I firmly believe that if I hadn’t experienced burnout, I would have just kept running on my proverbial treadmill.

I’m not sure where I’d be now (perhaps founding another startup), but I definitely would not be here writing to you. I likely wouldn’t have the freedom and space to talk to friends for hours on end, draw comics and animations for no reason beyond having fun, or write a book of fables. When I look back at that period of my life, I’m thankful for it. The pain was part of the journey. I needed it, as a rock needs the harsh storms of wind and water to smooth it. My gray hairs remind me of the life I lived, the dues I paid to be the person I am today.

Even once I reached ‘2.0’, my life was still full of struggle. The problems didn’t go away, they just evolved into different problems. I had to figure out how to build a new life that served my new outlook..

I’m still working on it. It hasn’t been easy, and I’m starting to think it might be a lifelong process. At times, I’m tempted by the simplicity of following a path curated by others (e.g. a career path dictated by your company). But then I remember the freedoms I enjoy — a reward of my hard efforts to carve my own path, along with the privilege to be able to do so.

Personal pathfinding is a lifetime journey with no destination.

Part of hiking through this rocky path is accepting that I will have to put in the work. Self-actualization is not an automatic process. Even though I’ve made major breakthroughs, I have to keep working on myself in order to keep growing. Otherwise, I let ‘2.0’ become yet another meaningless milestone. My urge to keep growing is what must drive me to move forward and unlock entirely new sides of myself.

The idea of versioning ourselves is a powerful one — but it has its limits. For one thing, our concept of versioning assumes an entity that has a single version number at any given time. The idea of having one true version of ourselves doesn’t fit the reality of our varied personalities.

As they say: We contain multitudes.

Our personal progress is multi-pronged — we lag in some areas, and move forward in others. Perhaps then, instead of asking myself what version I’m on right now, I should be asking myself what versions I’m on. Each of these different parts of me has their own progression, and could be versioned separately:

Assigning numbers loosely, I could describe myself as a list of versions:

Salman the founder, v1.0 (inactive)
Salman the engineer, v3.1 (active)
Salman the writer, v2.1 (active)
Salman the book author, v0.4 (beta)
Salman the teacher, v1.5 (inactive)
Salman the illustrator, v1.2 (active)
…

I could draw myself as a web:

One of the key principles of my life is embracing my inner polymath, which means that I run toward the many sides of myself, rather than seeking to simplify them into a singular line. But as I shared in my essay, The Polymath Playbook, this has to be done with pragmatism and intentionality.

I cannot move forward on all axes at once. So how do I grow my multitudes, without spreading myself too thin? One approach is to simply take turns. Robin Sloan’s excellent advice for newsletter writers is relevant for the parts of our lives:

Divide them into seasons, just like a TV show. Instead of trying to do everything in perpetuity, we can hibernate some parts of us, while others blossom into their springs. Each season becomes like a life on its own. How many lives can we weave within the singular one we are given?

Our personal growth is not limited only to expansion alone. Sometimes, in order to grow, we must liberate ourselves from the parts of us that no longer give us life. Some parts may never get a second season. And that’s okay. The winding paths we walk in life will inevitably lead to new replacing old, a process as natural as leaves falling to make room for spring growth.

Let us stay open-minded to the future paths we haven’t met yet. We may not be able to imagine what they look like today. But some day, we might not be able to imagine life without them.

If you liked this post, you might also enjoy these:

The Polymath Playbook — I share the story of my life and how I learned to embrace my inner polymath. In a world built for specialization, the polymath approach can help us differentiate ourselves and discover meaningful work.
Echoes of Reflection — Reflections on my struggles dealing with burnout. I learned to find comfort in the deep questions of my life, rather than chasing simple answers.
Embracing Uncertainty — I struggled to cope with life during a pandemic. As much as I wanted stability in my life, I had to learn to embrace uncertainty.

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Friends Over Followers

Mar 28, 2021

I wasn’t sure how it would feel to have 2,000 followers on Twitter, but I expected to feel something. When it finally happened, I felt nothing. I was surprised by this — when accounts hit a milestone like that, they often share a celebratory tweet (or use it as cause to do an Ask Me Anything.) I thought I’d feel the same way, but I didn’t feel motivated to do any of those things. It felt utterly insignificant.

There’s a strange emptiness in reaching a milestone you expected to matter, only to find that it doesn’t. It gave me pause. I slowed my pace in the marathon, and wondered why the hell I’m still running.

I know there’s a reason I was doing this — but it was no longer clear to me. Maybe the prolonged brain fog of a life in lockdown has blurred my vision. Perhaps my motivations have changed.

I needed a reason to stay in the race.

The ambiguous hope of algorithmically-determined attention wasn’t enough. I wanted a stronger why. I thought about the moments I enjoyed most on Twitter. What gave me joy?

I closed my eyes and imagined the meaning hidden within the metrics. Embedded within all those followers was a (much smaller) collection of wonderful human beings that I have tweeted with, conversed with, emailed with, hopped on video calls with, and in some cases gone on to hang out with in person.

Some of my best friends in real life are people I met on Twitter.

Building a following serves us best when used as a means to an end (e.g. making friends), rather being the end goal itself.

We can’t escape the race, but perhaps we can run by our own rules. The way I want to run this race is to prioritize friends over followers.

You might be wondering: “Why does any of this matter? Either way, I’m building followers…”

Your intent matters because your intent is visible to others. How you think about growth will affect the kind of content you create and share, which will impact the kind of followers you get, and the friends you make from them.

The friends we attract will be determined by the signals we broadcast, and the vibe we curate. With every word, every tweet, and every essay, we send a signal to others about what matters to us, what’s meaningful to us, and how we’d like to connect. As @visakanv explains, “Every ‘utterance’ (status, tweet, whatever) is a bit of an invitation, a bit of a proposal.”

Choose your signals wisely.

Ultimately, we have to make trade-offs. If we optimize for friends, it will likely come at the cost of followers. The other day, I was tweeting a thread about the frustrations I feel playing the comparison game on social media. As much as I wanted to feel inspired when others shared their sales numbers and growth statistics, it often threw me into a comparison spiral. I spoke honestly about my struggles with it, and how I was working on it. Afterwards, I noticed I lost a bunch of followers, but also got this message from a new friend:

For me, gaining a new friend is more than worth the expense of losing followers. I’ll happily make that tradeoff, because I’m building followers in order to make friends. Keeping our intent in mind helps us interpret events with a sound mind (rather than simply being discouraged by seeing a metric go down.)

Once we focus our attention on building friendships, the question then becomes: How do we attract friends? What can we do to increase the chance that our interactions foster friendships, rather than just grow followers?

The short answer is vulnerability. When people see a consistent flavor of your authentic self, you gain their trust. They see you being vulnerable, and that makes them more comfortable doing the same. This is the spark needed to create deeper connections.

Michael Ashcroft speaks well to the power of letting others find us through our vulnerability (as well as the risk it brings):

In any situation there could be others who could become close friends. How? By being vulnerable and by going first. To be vulnerable is to show others the deeper parts of ourselves. We have no control over what happens next – that’s why it can be so scary. We can only hope that we won’t get hurt, but we might, and the more we do it, the more likely we are to get hurt. But there’s no other way to turn that vicious circle into a virtuous one.

If we seek the rewards of friendship, we must risk the pain of rejection.

It’s no wonder then, that so many don’t bother. It’s in our nature to avoid pain. We’d rather not play the game at all.

But we cannot avoid pain entirely. The idea that we can escape pain is only an illusion. The psychologist Joseph Adler said, “To get rid of one’s problems, all one can do is live in the universe all alone.”

A life alone may be free of pain from others, but it lacks of life’s greatest gift: the joy of relationships. The contagious laughter of friends, the creative spark of collaboration, the natural comfort of human connection. One of life’s greatest treasures is found in the friends we make along the way.

Let us play this online game of life, not alone, but with our friends.

Thanks to Alex, Anshul, Cullin, and Edmar for their feedback on an early draft of this post.

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Stop Waiting for the Ripe Idea

Mar 10, 2021

Deciding when to share an idea is a lot like picking fruit.

A farmer can never know for certain how a fruit will taste. They look for any signals they can find of its ripeness — its color, smell, shape, and texture. Their success depends on their ability to do the seemingly impossible: predict how a fruit will taste, without ever tasting it.

How do they do it? They taste and experiment, they try and fail. With each harvest, they cut the growth of crops and feed the growth of skills. The seasons turn in a cycle of learning.

As creators, we try to follow the example of farmers. We tend to our digital garden of ideas, waiting for them to ripen. We nurture, feed, and protect them. Over time, we learn to judge the readiness of ideas the same way we might the ripeness of fruit.

But our judgement grows faster than our taste. We measure the first fruits we produce with the ruler of a farmer who has harvested a thousand crops. When left to run its course, our quickness to judge ourselves leads to our creative demise.

We haven’t tasted enough to know what tastes good, but we police ourselves as though we do. With gritted teeth and anxious anticipation, we brace for the perfect idea: a flawless fruit that will be delivered to us. Some day, somehow, it will appear before us like a revelation.

We stand still, perpetually waiting for the perfectly ripe idea.

But an idea doesn’t need to be perfect in order to be ready.

We often eat fruit that isn’t perfectly ripe. The fruit in the hand today is more filling than the promise of perfection tomorrow. As creators, we mustn’t be so picky that our consumers are left hungry. Let the people eat.

An idea lives to be shared, yet it does not die when we share it. Like fruit, an idea scatters its seeds in the garden of our collective minds. It lives on, enriching the soil and multiplying into the fruits of tomorrow’s ideas.

Stop waiting for the ripe idea. With every moment that passes, the ready ones grow stale.

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Missing the Trees for the Forest

Jan 12, 2021

Everything changed when I looked at a bird.

I was in my back yard. A myriad of chirps echoed their way through the trees. They blended with the instrumentals of the wind, coalescing into nature’s white noise. Within this chaotic blur of birds, a single chirp called out to me. I scanned the branches until I found its origin — a gray little bird with a squarish head, standing tall like an army general. Its straight-as-an-arrow tail feathers stretched out like a surfboard. It hopped about with authority.

It occurred to me that this bird has lived here all along, and yet I never noticed it. I wondered what kind of bird it was, and got excited when I remembered the smartphone app I downloaded — it can identify birds with a photo alone. But as soon as I pulled out my phone, the bird flew away. It knew what I was doing, and was having none of it.

I heeded the bird’s message, and put my phone away.

With the bird out of sight, I closed my eyes and tried to recall its image. I didn’t want to forget. I drew a loose sketch from memory:

Forgive the low fidelity of this picture — as much as I enjoy drawing detailed illustrations of birds, this was a different exercise entirely. This wasn’t a drawing of a bird. It was a drawing of my bird. It was the bird I saw, the bird I met, the bird I kept in my heart and mind. There is none other like it.

When we notice a bird, behold it, remember it… we give it meaning.

But birds aren’t the only things we can infuse with meaning. These opportunities lie everywhere, like seeds waiting to be watered. In my old neighborhood, there was a towering tree I always noticed on my daily walks. I named it Phil. I visited the tree every day, and we became great friends. Phil turned my mundane walks into meaningful moments.

In Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s masterpiece The Little Prince, a fox teaches the prince the same lesson. The prince finds himself far from home and full of sorrow, when he encounters a fox. He asks the fox to play with him, in hopes it will cheer him up.

The fox replies that he cannot play with him, as he is not tamed:

“What does that mean—‘tame’?” asked the little prince.

“It is an act too often neglected,” said the fox. “It means to establish ties. To me, you are still nothing more than a little boy who is just like a hundred thousand other little boys. And I have no need of you. And you, on your part, have no need of me. To you, I am nothing more than a fox like a hundred thousand other foxes. But if you tame me, then we shall need each other. To me, you will be unique in all the world. To you, I shall be unique in all the world…”

The fox helps the prince see that there may be a million other foxes, but his fox is one in a million.

Too often we look at the world with fuzzy eyes. We never see the budding blade of grass, only the vast green field. All becomes one in the knitted blanket of our environment.

We see the forest, but miss the trees.

By noticing and naming, loving and taming, we can light stars in the darkness of our night sky. It is up to us to give meaning to every bird whose song serenades us, every tree whose branch shades us, and every rose whose scent seduces us.

As the wise little prince tells us, ”It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.”

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Last Minute Circus

Jan 10, 2021

It’s midnight. Instead of sleeping, I’m writing.

I have no one to blame but myself — I put this off all week long.

I hate this.

It’s always the same routine. I take shelter behind my shield of excuses. I dread and deflate, whine and cry, obsess and protest, moan and groan…

I want to do it. But I won’t let myself.

Until, finally, exhausted by my own resistance, I relent.

I lift the weight.
I write the word.
I draw the picture.
I do the thing.

I do it again. And again. It seems so easy now.

I surf the wave of my momentum. My hair dances in the wind. I’m riding high.

I love this.

Looking down from my palace of flow, I wonder: “Why would I ever resist coming here?”

I realize that a part of me enjoys the drama of procrastination. I revel in the thrill of pulling it off at the last minute. The longer the delay, the greater the reward.

I am the villain, the hero, and the audience in my own Last Minute Circus.

The next evening, I’m in the ring again.

New day, same old play. I’m booked for life.

I hear the bells for curtain call. Like clockwork, he appears beside me. My longtime friend, my lifetime foe: Me.

And the show goes on.

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The Body Knows When It's Alone

Dec 4, 2020

I drift between rooms like a spirit with unfinished business. After almost a year of lockdown, every corner of my home is etched into my subconscious. I can traverse my halls in total darkness with feline ease, my face lit by tiny bodily appendages known as screens. I stubbornly strive to recreate the before times, feebly sticking life’s puzzle pieces together with duct tape.

Riding the endless merry-go-round of instant messages and video calls, I’m always immersed in conversations. I feel like a social butterfly, flapping my digital wings with abandon.

And yet, all the digital calls in the world fail to stave off a nagging sense of discomfort. Something’s wrong, but I don’t know what.

Thankfully, my body knows.

When I see the virtual faces of friends and family throughout the week, it’s easy to forget the reality: I spent that week alone. Today’s technology offers only a crude approximation to human interaction. A video call is a far cry from the experience of being with others.

My body knows this. It always knows. It cannot be fooled by a video call.

A myriad of signals are dispatched by my body, hoping to warn me of my own loneliness. They span the full monty of fatigue — headaches, drowsiness, exhaustion. I am not listening. I hear nothing. I fumble along, blind to its warnings.

One day, my body sends me a signal I cannot ignore. It shuts down.

I wake up with chills and a sore throat, my bones announcing themselves all at once in an orchestra of stiffness. As I mope around the house, I experience the oddity that is a ‘sick day’ under lockdown. Normally, the day would be marked by staying home and avoiding everyone you know. Instead, it’s just like any other day.

Every day in lockdown is a sick day.

I can barely recall the last time I saw a friend in person. I’ve been extremely conservative with self-quarantine, and the cost of my self-isolation becomes brutally clear in that moment. Something has to change.

I reach out to a couple friends to meet up (socially distanced and outdoors). We eat food. We drink coffee. We break bread. Immediately, I feel better. Sometimes, the simplest solution is the most effective.

The mind complicates. The body simplifies.

In a past life, I took in-person social interactions for granted. I would see people at birthdays, weddings, and more events than I wished to attend. Ah, to be blessed once again with the privilege of too much human contact.

It’s a different world now. If I want to stay healthy, I need to see people. And if I want to see people, I need to take the initiative to make it happen. I need to think of in-person interactions like diet and exercise: crucial parts of my mental and physical health.

Luckily, I’ll always have my body to remind me. All I have to do is listen.

P.S. Dear body, if you’re reading this: I’m sorry it took so long to listen. You deserve better. Know that I’m listening now. I hear you. I love you.

—

Special thanks to Shelby for the insightful discussions on the wisdom of the body, for planting the wonderful phrase “the body knows when it’s alone” in my head, and for sharing an excellent article filled with research on the price of isolation.

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Bout with Burnout

Oct 19, 2020

Amidst the lockdowns of a global pandemic, the sounds of life have changed. For the first time in a century, the hustle and bustle that fills our streets has gone quiet. In this eerie silence, the song of the birds echoes louder than ever before.

Even our deepest thoughts have amplified their volume. These existential provocations used to be drowned out by the busyness of our lives. Now, they relentlessly bang their drums in the chambers of our minds.

Listen for a moment. Can you hear them?

Are these the people I want to see?

Is this where I want to live?

Is this what I want to do?

…Is this it?

These questions terrify us, but we can’t seem to evade them. Our lives have become confined to one block, one room, one screen. It’s impossible to escape ourselves.

Like it or not, we need to face our own music.

Here We Go, Again

The discomfort of deep reflection feels familiar to me. As I follow the path of my inner questions, I see the faint outlines of my own footprints.

I’ve been here before.

Once upon a time, I was a startup founder struggling with burnout. It felt like I was an asteroid, crashing and burning into the atmosphere. I was lost, confused, and utterly exhausted. I took some time off to travel and see family. Upon my return, I went to meet a good friend. He asked me what I wanted to work on next. Until that moment, I hadn’t thought too much about it. My answer shocked both of us.

“Honestly, I have no idea what I want to do. My last run wasn’t pleasant. I’m not exactly chomping at the bit to do it all over again. Frankly, I’m not even sure I want to work at all.”

My friend was taken aback. Both of us learned something that day — I was clearly not ‘rested and recuperated’. If anything, I came back from my break far less ready to work than when I left.

This wasn’t how I thought this would play out. After all, I had diligently followed the tried-and-true recipe for burnout recovery. I traveled. I visited family. I relaxed. After some weeks had passed, I was ready to come home. I figured I’d jump right back into the swing of things.

I was wrong. The recipe didn’t work.

But if a break didn’t solve the problem, what would? I was in uncharted territory. I knew I needed to work eventually to survive, but thankfully I still had a little buffer to figure it out. More than a decade of working my ass off in startup-mode had afforded me that privilege.

So I made a “freedom list”. If I had this period of time to myself, I wasn’t going to waste it. I would do all the things I had always dreamed of doing. That could be my work, at least for a little while.

Weeks turned into months. I stopped traveling on planes, and instead explored the far reaches of the galaxy with my mind. I dove into the world of meditation and developed a daily hour-long practice. I learned a ton about illustration, animation, character design and drawing comics. I read more than sixty books. I dove into technical subjects at a depth I had never done before.

Despite having no structure to my day and few commitments to keep, I found myself more productive than ever. I was driven purely by the search for wisdom, and the pursuit of my curiosities.

For a brief moment, I felt truly happy.

Finding Balance

Soon, I was ready to dip my toes back into work. I tried doing some independent consulting on a part-time basis. I wanted to create a structure for myself where I had some income while still having space to explore curiosities.

It was a struggle. Finding clients and marketing myself was difficult, especially since at the time I had virtually no online presence. It was also quite a lonely pursuit, and I missed working with others. I had greatly underestimated how much I cherished collaborating with a team.

Eventually, I went back to work full-time at a big company. I was tired of the uncertainty of a solitary pursuit. I wanted structure. I got it in spades. Throughout my time there, not a day went by where I wasn’t plagued by the same questions. I had tasted the freedom of independent pursuit, and I missed it.

I decided to try an independent route again, but with a twist. I secured a part-time job at a friend’s startup. I structured my work so that I’d be putting in a fixed amount of time for a fixed income. I’d get the structure I needed, along with the opportunity to collaborate with a team. The rest of the time would be free to explore creative pursuits.

I’ve been working with this setup for about six months now. It’s still early, but so far I’m really enjoying it. I feel well supported by the part-time job, and my creative work has been flourishing. I just published the 35th edition of my weekly newsletter. I’ve been regularly publishing essays like this one on my blog (one of which went viral on Twitter and HN). My Twitter following and engagement has been steadily growing. My drawing skills continue to improve, allowing me to draw comics like the one in this post. I’ve started a YouTube channel publishing monologue-style videos. I’ve been growing a digital garden of notes. Most importantly, I’ve built so many wonderful relationships with folks who’ve engaged with my work (this includes you — thank you!) It’s an incredible feeling to know my creativity has inspired and helped others.

All of this has happened in less than a year, which makes me really excited for what’s to come. I’m just getting started!

Embracing Questions

I’m privileged to be able to make a setup like this work financially, but I’ve also had to make my share of sacrifices. I’m really glad I pushed myself through all the questions to get me to this point. I’ve realized this period of self-exploration was a form of Awakening. It changed me forever. I look back now at the burnout that triggered this whole journey, and I’m thankful for it. Without it, I would never be where I am now.

Friends who met me after a long while joked that I’m now “Salman 2.0”, as though I’ve become a different person entirely. Perhaps there’s some truth to that. I’ve discovered a new source of contentment and happiness: myself. I’ve developed a new lens through which I view the world, my life, and my purpose on this planet. Most of all, I’m grateful for having developed resilience in embracing life’s deepest questions.

There’s more to life than finding answers. What we really need is to develop comfort with questions.

The more questions we ask ourselves, the more we allow ourselves to grow.

Thanks to Alex, Ayomide, John, Julia and Nikita for their feedback on an early draft of this essay.

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The Burden of Expectation

Sep 24, 2020

The biggest obstacle in creative work is the burden of expectation.

We build an idea in our minds of what it should look like, and compare against it at every step. Our imagination is simply too vivid, too crisp for our own good. With every stroke we make, we see all too clear the gap between what lies before us and what floats in our minds.

In the ruthless game of self-criticism, our judgements are binary: everything we make is either perfect or garbage.

Our expectations are often informed by others, but we alone implement them. We are the security guards in our own mental jails.

It doesn’t have to be this way.

At the root of expectation lies a desire for perfection.

We are human — imperfect by nature. Yet we still expect perfection from our creations.

At first, these critical instincts serve us well. They help us leverage our taste in order to do our best work. But they never know when to stop. No matter how much time and energy we put into something, we always find room for more. The journey of self-critique is an endless loop.

We turn these critiques into excuses not to release our work. We keep telling ourselves it’s not ready.

It’s a terrible thing, I think, in life to wait until you’re ready. I have this feeling now that actually no one is ever ready to do anything. There is almost no such thing as ready. There is only now. And you may as well do it now. Generally speaking, now is as good a time as any. —Hugh Laurie

The truth is that our work is always ready. We are the ones who aren’t. We have to decide that now is the right time to let go.

I had many aspirations and ideas of what this post should be. If I pursued every one of them, I’d never have published it. You wouldn’t be here with me reading these words.

I’ll glady take the pleasure of your company in this imperfect work over the solitude of perfection in my imagination.

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A Life Cut Short

Sep 12, 2020

I woke up in alarm at the sight of my window,
Instead of morning light, an ominous orange glow

Yet we go on working, pretending all is well,
Doing our best to ignore the warning bell

Falling ash that looks like snow,
Fire and ice together, it’s one hell of a show

In a single spec of dust there is so much to see,
A history of a million lives, a rich tapestry

The past is past, but the future now burns,
With every day we don’t act, another life churns

Everywhere we look, the horizons glisten
What will it take for us to finally listen?

The world sits idle in a seat of fantasy,
Another story cut short, never to b—

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Once a New Yorker

Aug 16, 2020

I miss wandering the streets of Manhattan.

I’d walk by five different groups of people and hear five different languages. The scale of its racial and ethnic diversity was a wonderful thing to experience. I could walk down any street and feel like I belonged.

I remember getting an impromptu text from a friend. I hopped on the subway and was standing next to them fifteen minutes later. There came a sense of liberation through that kind of mobility — movement is at the very core of the city’s DNA. Everything and everyone felt like a subway ride away. I only lived there for a couple of years, but its imprint on my soul will last a lifetime.

These memories feel distant and fuzzy now. They’re no longer grounded in reality. After the devastation from the first wave of COVID hit New York, its urban freedom became a necessary sacrifice for survival. The city that never sleeps finally went to bed. But how does one sleep with the weight of a pandemic on their mind? Instead of an exuberant city full of life, New Yorkers are sheltering in a ghost town.

Like many of its global counterparts, New York is a city that thrives on density. Its greatest strength has become its noose. COVID has set its foundation on fire.

I’m grieving for New York’s present.

I’m worried about its future.

Since the pandemic shutdowns began, we’ve seen an exodus of people moving out of cities and into suburbs all across America. I’m watching it happen in the Bay Area. Once the main benefits of city life disappear, the high rents became harder to justify. Drew Austin put it best in his latest piece on Manhattanism, noting “It’s not that the suburbs suddenly got better, it’s that cities sank to the suburbs’ level momentarily, while remaining more expensive.”

Drew also draws attention to another key factor: the proliferation of remote work.

We now possess much better tools to make a post-spatial, post-urban world tolerable, if not quite desirable, this time around. Digital infrastructure for remote work, shopping, education, and even social life is more viable than ever, drastically improved versus even ten years ago.

With increased flexibility comes greater tolerance for life outside the urban jungle. For those with the privilege of being able to work remotely, moving to get more space or greater proximity to nature is a tempting option. Many are choosing it. That said, remote work lacks the in-person interactions that help us communicate better and build stronger relationships. Remote work comes at a cost of social isolation. This pandemic has shown us the true psychological cost of prolonged isolation, so I wouldn’t be surprised if we see people flocking back to offices the minute they get a chance. Either way, the adoption of remote work is high enough to significantly change the dynamic of cities, even after it becomes optional.

Meanwhile, thanks to America’s utter failure to respond to the crisis, the pandemic is still nowhere near under control. Shelter-in-place enforcements have continued far longer than expected. It has been utterly devastating to local business. Because of their dependence on foot traffic, many New York establishments have lost their entire source of income.

Many New York businesses will not survive the shutdowns. The economic impacts will ripple long after stores re-open. A recent survey reported that 80 percent of establishments were unable to pay their full rent in June, with 36 percent unable to pay any rent at all (NYPost).

It’s going to be a long and uphill road to recovery.

Is there any room for optimism on New York’s future? I believe so.

Above all, New York’s culture is what drives so many to make the sacrifices necessary to survive it. As a city, it has persevered through many periods of devastation and is sure to find its way through this one. It’s likely that the struggle of the pandemic, and the path it takes to emerge out of it, will become part of the fabric of the city. If anyone can survive this, it’s New Yorkers. They’re tough as nails.

Beyond the resilience of its cultural draw, the city has a chance to use this moment to redesign itself for the better. As Einstein said, in the middle of difficulty lies opportunity. Perhaps New York can learn from the Slow Streets movement taking shape in Oakland. The city is implementing changes to create more safe and socially distant outdoor spaces (e.g. restaurants with outdoor seating) and safer modes of transport (e.g. bike lanes). These address the needs of safety during a pandemic while improving quality of life for pedestrians and bikers in the process.

New York is following suit, but they can go much further. The city is no stranger to urban revolutions. Under the leadership of Janette Sadik-Khan, New York’s Department of Transportation led from the front in implementing a variety of initiatives to completely transform its streets. Janette recently spoke out on why she believes the pandemic presents a historic opportunity for New York’s streets:

New York’s transportation recovery strategy—its vision—must be equal to the immense scale of our challenges, and now is the historic moment to act, not with half measures, but with decisive action to adapt New York City’s streets not just for the pandemic response, but for the new New York that awaits in the recovery.

This generation of New York residents has both the burden and the opportunity to rebuild the city. The fruits of tomorrow will grow from the seeds they plant today.

As I write this, I’m perusing through old photos of my escapades around the city. All the wonderful memories are pushing me on the verge of tears. Despite the circumstances, I find myself wishing I could move back to New York. It’s like an old friend who needs my help now more than ever.

Suddenly, I hear a little voice in my head. It’s the voice of New York — the few remnants still imprinted in me. I listen closely and hear it say:

Oh shut the fuck up already! We’ll be fine.

I’ll always love you, New York.

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The Art of Persuasion

Jul 27, 2020

Communication is hard. It’s tough to get right, and easy to get wrong. We have to make sure our message is clear, well-grounded, and delivered in such a way that it resonates with our audience.

It’s no use spending our energies on well-researched ideas if we don’t package them in a way that lands with others. We want our work to be seen, understood, and appreciated.

Thankfully, we have a great guide: Aristotle defined the three appeals of persuasion (Ethos, Pathos and Logos) as a framework for effective communication.

As valuable as they are, it can be tricky to remember a bunch of Greek terms. If we interpret each appeal’s intent, we can translate them into simpler terms. I think of them as the 3 Ps: Personality, Poetry and Proof:

Ethos (Personality) is an appeal to the authority or credibility of the presenter. It is how well the presenter convinces the audience that the presenter is qualified to speak on the subject.
Pathos (Poetry) is an appeal to the audience’s emotions. The terms sympathy, pathetic, and empathy are derived from it. It can be in the form of metaphor, simile, a passionate delivery, or even a simple claim that a matter is unjust.
Logos (Proof) is logical appeal or the simulation of it, and the term logic is derived from it. It is normally used to describe facts and figures that support the speaker’s claims or thesis.

In this essay, I’ll describe how Aristotle’s appeals of persuasion can be simplified and applied to our writing process. These techniques can be used for any form of communcation, but I’m going to focus on writing here.

I’ll be using an existing piece of writing as an example to analyze—an essay I wrote which went viral, Polymath Playbook. When the essay took off, I was humbled by the response, and curious to understand exactly what made the essay resonate so strongly.

Using Aristotle’s appeal as a framework, we can analyze different aspects of the essay to see how they were applied.

Ready? Set? Let’s get started!

Personality

My essay was about the polymath approach to life, but it was also a story of my own attempts to embrace that life. It wasn’t just a story, it was my story. Hearing my personal story made the essay more relatable to readers:

Early this year I read the book Range and realized that maybe being so wide-ranging wasn’t a bad thing after all. It could even be an advantage. It was eye-opening. But the stories felt very distant, you know? They were about people I would never meet. When I finally read your content, I felt relieved because you were very close - just a DM away.

—Daniel Bustamente

I went on to describe the obstacles I faced exploring different pursuits. For example, I talked about how I struggled to fit into social groups with other ‘specialists’ — my experience with multiple pursuits made it more difficult to relate to my peers. This anecdote resonated with a lot of readers, many of whom noted that they never even realized the impact of their pursuits on their social lives.

For readers, the personalization effect changed the essay from just being my words into a description of their lives.

Writing about my own experiences proved to be quite challenging. I ran into a lot of personal resistance against talking so much about myself. My inner critic became especially prevalent when I was sharing how a polymath approach had helped me succeed by building mental models and differentiating myself.

At one point, I was tempted to take out the personal stories entirely. But I reminded myself of my intention to be authentic with my writing, and left them in. I’m really glad I did, as the personal components of the essay were by far the most resonant.

Poetry

I like to think of essays as art. I give myself a bit of artistic license with each essay. I’m no poet, but I’ve found that a little bit of effort in this department can go a long way.

In the conclusion of my polymath essay, I used phrases like “Fluidity is the essence of humanity” and “Follow the rivers that flow within you”. I also included a beautiful quote from R. Buckminster Fuller:

Even a few of these phrases seemed to really resonate with readers. I believe it gave them a language to express not just what they learned, but how it made them feel.

Proof

I provided historical background on the industrial revolution, and how it led to the proliferation of division of labor and specialization in society. In particular, many had not recognized how closely fundamental programs like healthcare were tied to employment.

This foundation provided readers with an understanding of the structures and incentives that discourage polymath lifestyles in modern society. Many had not made this connection before, or hadn’t considered the historical factors that led to the current situation. By recognizing these systemic factors, readers gained context for the problem grounded in the reality of their daily lives.

I believe the most impactful way to use this framework is to observe your own writing and recognize which appeal you’re trying to leverage. Once you identify it, you’ll be able to double down and ensure every word supports its appeal more effectively.

Each appeal is valuable on its own, but I believe they are most powerful when combined together. If you’re credible but boring, no one listens to you. If you’re inspiring but illogical, no one believes you.

Serve a balanced diet of all three appeals. You’ll convince your audience and inspire them along the way.

Thanks to all the readers who shared their feedback on the polymath essay, and special thanks to Patrick for helping me connect them to Aristotle’s ideas. Also, thank you to Juan David, Adam, Avthar and Rishi for their feedback on a draft of this essay.

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The Polymath Playbook

Jul 5, 2020

You’ve likely heard the saying: “A jack of all trades is a master of none.” It warns against the futility of pursuing too many disciplines. Be a specialist, or you’ll be nothing.

But there’s more to the story. An extended version of the saying tells a different tale: “A jack of all trades is a master of none, but oftentimes better than a master of one.” With a subtle addition, its meaning becomes inverted. It touts the benefits of being a polymath (a.k.a. generalist), rather than admonishing them.

Why is the former so common, and the latter unknown?

The answer lies in modern society’s preference for specialization. We’ll explore its origin, the limits it places on workers’ freedoms, and how the polymath approach can offer a reprieve. Finally, I’ll share my own experiences and learnings exploring a multitude of pursuits.

Cost of Specialization

Following unprecedented growth during the industrial revolution, businesses faced more competition than ever before. In order to thrive, they sought new ways to operate more efficiently and productively. Division of labor was the solution they were looking for. By dividing the tasks needed to produce goods and services, individual workers could focus on specific tasks rather than developing a variety of expertise.

One important criteria to optimize for specialization is ensuring that workers stay in the same role for prolonged periods of time. This facilitates increased efficiency by reducing the need for training and allowing individuals to iteratively improve their ability to perform similar tasks. In exchange for their loyalty, the company offers its employees the security of long-term employment, along with additional incentives including tax-sheltered retirement accounts and access to healthcare.

In some parts of the world, these benefits come at a heavy cost to an individual’s freedom. In the United States for example, if you’re employed with a company, you get healthcare. Otherwise, you’re out of luck. Workers are often hesitant to switch jobs (let alone spend extended time without one) out of fear of losing their healthcare benefits. Another part of the problem is that the cost of healthcare in the U.S. is so high. A few days without healthcare and a single accident can push someone into financial ruin. As a result, many people stay at the same job year after year even if they’re unhappy.

The lack of freedom might be a worthy sacrifice in exchange for job security. But therein lies the problem: few companies can actually guarantee long-term stability. Many workers already face ambiguity with their job security due to the impending effects of automation. Now, with the tornado of change brought about by the COVID pandemic, the brittleness of even large corporations’ stability has become apparent.

“In order to keep up with the world of 2050, you will need not merely to invent new ideas and products – you will above all need to reinvent yourself again and again.” —Yuval Noah Harari

The key to surviving these waves of change is adaptability. Workers need to embrace a life of learning and self-evolution in order to thrive.

Luckily, we have a template for how to do just that: the polymath.

Polymath Advantage

What is a Polymath?

Despite the fact that the word has “math” in it, the term “polymath” has nothing to do with mathematics. A polymath is a person of wide-ranging knowledge and skills. Polymaths engage in extended learning across disparate fields, and apply their skills to connect ideas and solve problems in unique ways.

The key advantage that polymaths hold is their ability to thrive in a constantly changing environment. They develop mental models from different fields and apply them to solve problems in a unique way. This enables them to differentiate from their competition. Further, it creates opportunities for them to find truly meaningful work by pursuing their passions.

Differentiation

One of the challenges with specialization is that it can become more difficult over time to thrive in the workplace. This is a bit counter-intuitive. At first you might think the more ‘specialized’ you become, the more ‘rare’ your skillset is and thus, the better you are in terms of competition. There are two issues that arise as you continue down the path of linear specialization:

1. Over-specialization: Many PhD students spend years toiling to build highly specialized knowledge and expertise. But when they try to enter the workplace, they struggle to find work that meets their level of specialization, and are often forced to fall back to a career in academia.

2. Diminishing returns: The larger your team is, the more difficult it becomes to be the absolute best in a particular area. For example, it’s quite challenging to be the most technically proficient engineer in a given team. Even if you achieve this feat, it takes serious dedication to stay the most technically proficient in every technical area. Over time, the bar only grows higher, and competition only gets tougher.

Instead of trying to out-specialize your peers, you can build a unique combination of skills beyond your core expertise. Depending on your interests, you could focus on building great communication skills, design sensibilities, or leadership skills that help you elevate your impact and stand out from the crowd. By combining your unique interests and skills, you can unlock your highest leverage work.

Once you hit the diminishing returns of specialization (the limits of depth), it makes sense to explore other pursuits to differentiate yourself (the opportunities of breadth).

Mental Models

When you work in an industry for a while, you develop mental models based on its structures and dynamics. These ‘insider models’ are well-known within the industry, but invisible to those outside of it.

As you explore new areas, you can combine mental models in creative ways. Combinatory thinking allows you to solve problems in ways that few others can.

“In the 17th century, Johannes Kepler didn’t have a wealth of existing knowledge or technology to work with. There was no concept of gravity as a force, and he had no notion of momentum that keeps the planets in motion.

Analogies were all he had.

From research on magnets, Kepler began to understand why planets moved toward and away from the sun. By picturing how boats might move in a whirlpool, Kepler began to understand the elliptical orbit patterns of planets.”

—David Epstein, Range

The more pursuits you expose yourself to, the more models you have to work from, and the more you stand out from the competition.

Purpose

I believe the strongest reason polymaths become polymaths is that they simply don’t have a choice. The urge to pursue one’s inner passions is strong, and those blessed with a variety of them often find them difficult to ignore.

The polymath’s search for meaning and purpose through different pursuits can be related to the Japanese concept of Ikigai (“a reason for being”):

It can take many years or even decades before one sees any intersection between different circles. Yet a single taste can be intoxicating, and motivate a lifetime of pursuit.

What purpose could be greater than discovering purpose itself?

My Inner Fox

When I first began to study polymaths, I was excited to see a template for a life I didn’t know I was living. But when I started to embrace the polymath identity, my inner critics appeared. I wondered whether I’m even qualified to write about polymaths, let alone call myself one. After all, the the definition of a polymath is somewhat murky. I’ve spoken to a lot of peers who feel this same hesitation, and it’s been refreshing to connect with others who are taking a similar approach to life.

I also got a boost of confidence from a book called Hedgehog and the Fox by Isaiah Berlin. The book is a major source of inspiration for the generalist approach, and contrasts two proverbial animals: the specialist hedgehog versus the generalist fox.

I’ve always loved foxes, tracing back to the fox in my favorite book The Little Prince, and my favorite character to use in Nintendo’s Super Smash Brothers: Melee, Star Fox. I even designed my own fox character for my Quick Brown Fox newsletter:

And recently, another fox appeared in my life, this time in the fable Fox’s Tails in my book of modern fables, Wandering Spirits:

It seems my destiny as a polymath fox was written long ago…

I’ve been lucky to have held a lot of different roles and explored a lot of varied interests in my life. I’ve been a startup founder, software engineer, manager, teacher, public speaker, advisor, DJ and writer. Some of these are roles I’ve explored for decades, while others for just a year. Beyond that, I’ve also spent a lot of time on artistic hobbies like illustration and animation. In hindsight, there were a number of benefits I enjoyed as a result of combining different pursuits.

As a DJ, I had to learn to not just play my playlist, but to pay close attention to the audience and cater to them. Looking back, I think each one of my sets was a live lesson on how to find product-market fit.

Thanks to my obsession with animation, I learned to incorporate the principles of animation into the software I built. Later, when I was building digital healthcare experiences, I was able to use animation to bring the patients’ user experience to life. I brought a different perspective to the healthcare world (specifically: the idea that filling out a form could be fun).

Through extended teaching stints at software development schools, I built strong communication skills that paid dividends in future public speaking engagements as well as all my daily interactions with coworkers. As it turns out, explaining our ideas is crucial to our effectiveness, and teaching provides excellent practice for this skill.

The list goes on.

I didn’t do any of these things with a goal of being a polymath. I did them because I was drawn to them. It took many years before I started to see any benefits from mixing these pursuits.

Now that I’m intentionally embracing a polymath life, I hope to see the benefits compound even more. I’m excited to see how this plays out!

Freedom Isn’t Free

We’ve talked a lot about the benefits of the polymath lifestyle. I’d be remiss if I didn’t leave you with a few warnings about the obstacles.

One of the strange things about having multiple pursuits is that you never quite fit into social groups. I remember joining an iOS developers group where most of the members had been doing iOS development for more than a decade. Meanwhile, I had worked on countless platforms, in different roles across a variety of industries. We may have been in the same group, but we had lived completely different lives. It was hard to relate.

Ironically, the moment I started to feel like I was finally getting settled in a group, I’d get bored! I’d feel an urge to explore something new, or try a different angle. That’s the blessing and the curse of the polymath lifestyle. You’re always exploring, and rarely settling.

I believe it’s important to have at least one strong foundational pursuit (in my case it’s engineering). That way you can explore other areas while always having something to fall back on. You need to work at something for many years before you really start to hit the meaningful learnings. Make sure you’ve refined your mental models before moving on to try and combine them with new ones.

Another thing to watch out for: whenever you make a “life shift”, you’ll inevitably get some social pushback from the status police: “The minute you try to step out of your assigned box, they show up out of thin air and shove you back in. They serve as a constant reminder of your position and place, and how important it is to them that you stay directly in it.”

Society wants you to stay in your lane.

When we’re unsure if we’re ‘allowed’ to do something, we seek permission from others before we even try. We wait for the world to tell us it’s okay. I can tell you from experience that you’ll probably never get that permission.

In order to defy the social norms and unspoken rules, you’ll need to dig deep within yourself. As Emerson teaches, you’ll need to build self reliance, and give yourself permission.

The best place to start?

That thing you secretly want to do.

(What just came to mind? That might be a signal…)

The world seeks to label us, categorize us and pack us neatly into boxes.

But we are humans, not objects. We are viscous. We dance around the lines between solid and liquid.

We change and evolve. We ebb and flow. We shrink and grow.

Fluidity is the essence of our humanity.

“I live on Earth at present, and I don’t know what I am.

I know that I am not a category.

I am not a thing — a noun.

I seem to be a verb, an evolutionary process – an integral function of the universe.”

—R. Buckminster Fuller

Follow the rivers that flow within you.

Update: This essay really took off, reaching the top of HackerNews. Later, Tobi Lutke (CEO of Shopify) tweeted it, noting that “having range is really undervalued and underrated”, which sent it a bit viral on Twitter. It’s been touching to read so many kind messages from readers, and it warms my heart to know my words resonated so strongly. Thank you for reading and sharing my work, and thanks to Mae, Howard, Hrvoje and Ben for their feedback on a draft of this essay.

If you liked this essay, you might also enjoy my essay on Versioning Myself. After I went through a phase of burnout, I took a sabbatical. It led to an awakening of sorts, both intellectually and spiritually. Afterwards, friends told me I seemed like a new person. They called me ‘Salman 2.0’. This made me wonder: When, exactly, did I change ‘versions’? And what will ‘Salman 3.0’ be like?

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Embracing Uncertainty

Jun 22, 2020

There are so many challenges to living through this pandemic. One of the biggest for me is the ambiguity about the future. I just wish I could know when this will all be over. I want to have a sense of predictability.

I want to feel like I’m walking on stable ground again.

Wait. Is stable ground even stable?

When we look at the ground, it sure looks stable… until it shifts all of a sudden (we call that an earthquake). When these quakes happen, we go from being completely ignorant of the ground’s movement to being utterly terrified of it.

We realize the ground was never stable to begin with. The ground is a giant land mass drifting on an ocean, resting on the surface of a rotating planet, orbiting the Sun. It’s constantly in motion in every direction.

In the same way, my life was never really stable, even before the pandemic. I was still bouncing from one uncertainty to another. Change was the only constant.

Try as I might, I cannot get rid of uncertainty. Not now, not ever. I’m still struggling to accept this realization. It’s scary to think about, but it’s an inevitable reality that has become more apparent through this pandemic.

In her book Comfortable with Uncertainty, Pema Chödrön highlights this difficult truth:

We fear losing our illusion of security—that’s what makes us anxious. We fear being confused and not knowing which way to turn. We want to know what’s happening. The mind is always seeking zones of safety, and these zones of safety are continually falling apart. Then we scramble to get another zone of safety back together again. We spend all our energy and waste our lives trying to re-create these zones of safety, which are always falling apart.

We can never know what will happen to us next. We can try to control the uncontrollable by looking for security and predictability, always hoping to be comfortable and safe. But the truth is that we can never avoid uncertainty. This not-knowing is part of the adventure. It’s also what makes us afraid.

If we cannot avoid uncertainty, we must embrace it.

We must stop trying to control and predict every aspect of our lives, and instead develop the skills to handle what comes our way.

Sitting with Discomfort

The biggest lesson I’ve learned from Pema is the importance of sitting with discomfort. For me, it has meant giving up on trying to just talk things out with a friend. Yes, those conversations are helpful, but I can’t expect to solve the pandemic from a conversation.

Instead, I need to accept the fact that this pain will persist, and I can’t immediately resolve it. I must accept that it’s out of my control.

Staying is how we get the hang of gently catching ourselves when we’re about to let resentment harden into blame, righteousness, or alienation. It’s also how we keep from smoothing things over by talking ourselves into a sense of relief or inspiration. This is easier said than done.

With practice, we learn to stay with a broken heart, with a nameless fear, with the desire for revenge. Sticking with uncertainty is how we learn to relax in the midst of chaos, how we learn to be cool when the ground beneath us suddenly disappears.

Somehow, I’ve found that the mere acceptance of discomfort provides comfort. Since I can’t solve it, at least it’s one less thing to worry about!

Self Compassion

Another important tactic around tackling uncertainty is practicing self-compassion. I’ve been meditating for a couple of years (and find it incredibly beneficial), but still struggle to fully “buy into” self-compassion.

One action I did take was giving myself permission to take a break. In practice, this meant taking some space for myself and playing a video game.

It may seem like a small thing, but it went surprisingly far. It gave me permission to play again. It gave me room to breathe. It gave me the space to just be for a while, with no expectations. It gave me time to recover. A week later, I finally found the energy to be creative again. I made a little sketch. I wrote a couple of tweets.

And now, here I am, writing this essay. I doubt I would have the mental strength to tackle this topic without taking care of myself first.

Anti-Fragility

One of the best resources I’ve found on handling uncertainty is Leo Babauta’s blog, Zen Habits. Recently, Leo wrote about an idea to improve our ability to handle stressors that come into our life by making ourselves more anti-fragile. There is a wealth of tactics discussed in his post, and I’m curious to explore how to implement them in my own life.

One idea that stood out to me was the practice of intentionally injecting stress into your life. At first, this may sound like a terrible idea (why would you purposely stress yourself?), but it’s actually a practice we are already quite familiar with. Exercise is an intentional act designed to stress our bodies. By design it is required to be somewhat painful (‘no pain, no gain’).

We do it anyway because we know that it’s good for us, and because we know the pain is temporary. We rest, recover, and our muscles grow back stronger.

In a recent commencement speech, Brené Brown shared how she learned to stop being afraid of falling. She recognized that falling is an opportunity to learn, and get back up stronger than before. Through her own trials and tribulations, Brené embraced this mantra: Nothing Wasted, Muscles Built.

We never had to learn how to grow muscles. This knowledge came built-in with our bodies. In the same way, emotional resilience is an innate human capacity.

Sometimes it’s buried deep, but it’s there nonetheless. We need to venture within ourselves to find it, and often that process is a painful one.

Just as it is in our nature to fall, it is in our nature to get back up.

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The Power of Feedback

May 25, 2020

O Captain! My Captain! our fearful trip is done;
The ship has weather’d every rack, the prize we sought is won;
The port is near, the bells I hear, the people all exulting,
While follow eyes the steady keel, the vessel grim and daring:
  But O heart! heart! heart!
    O the bleeding drops of red,
      Where on the deck my Captain lies,
        Fallen cold and dead.

—Walt Whitman

The year was 1855. Walt Whitman had just published his masterpiece.

No one cared.

His first collection of poems, Leaves of Grass, was greeted with deafening silence. Eventually, some of his peers engaged with it only to criticize and dismiss it. The young poet’s first attempt at publication had failed.

Whitman was devastated.

In the depths of his despair, he received a letter from none other than Ralph Waldo Emerson.

I find incomparable things said incomparably well, as they must be. I find the courage of treatment which so delights us, and which large perception only can inspire.

I greet you at the beginning of a great career, which yet must have had a long foreground somewhere, for such a start. I rubbed my eyes a little, to see if this sunbeam were no illusion; but the solid sense of the book is a sober certainty.

Like a gentle blow of wind igniting a budding fire, the letter revived Whitman’s creative soul. From that day forward, he kept the letter tucked in his shirt pocket, right next to his heart. It would carry his spirit for decades.

A single letter overpowered the criticism of an entire community.

That, my friends, is the power of feedback.

Upon reading this, you might be thinking: “That’s a nice story, but we can’t all get letters from Emerson. How do you know which feedback to trust?”

Firstly, remember that accepting feedback is a choice. Even if you accept it, you are under no obligation to act upon it. If someone is offended when you ignore their feedback, it reveals the true intent of their feedback. They may be looking to change you rather than guide you.

The best feedback helps you achieve your existing goals, rather than trying to dictate new ones.

Embrace feedback that guides your methods, but never let it distort your message. Stay true to your essence — it’s what makes your work yours! Once you start changing your direction to suit others, you’ll forget the unique motives that drove you in the first place.

You too can look to Emerson for guidance:

Learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across your mind from within, more than the lustre of the firmament of bards and sages.
—Self Reliance, R.W. Emerson

Trust yourself first and foremost.

Don’t let feedback stop you from being you.

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Why Bother?

May 17, 2020

I was up late writing one night, when my wife walked over to my desk and asked: Why are you building a ‘digital garden’?

These days, I spend the majority of my time writing. I’m publishing a weekly newsletter, writing essays, and tweeting daily. Last Sunday, I took it a step further and launched a digital garden to share even more of my writing publicly.

I confidently articulated all the benefits of learning in public to my wife: sharing my process, getting early feedback, and teaching others along the way. She seemed convinced, and went to bed.

But her question still lingered on my mind. Before I knew it, I was in a quicksand of questioning myself:

Why was I spending all this energy on a digital garden?

What am I even trying to achieve with my newsletter?

Is sharing what I learn really worth the effort?

I tried to remind myself of everything I just told my wife, but it didn’t work. Those reasons made sense when I was trying to convince her. Convincing myself was a different matter.

Then, it hit me: I was trying to emulate others.

People I respect were sharing everything they did, so I figured I should do the same. The more I thought about it, the more I realized that line of reasoning just wasn’t good enough. If I was going to keep juggling all these writing projects, I needed a stronger reason why it made sense for me.

In search of answers, I went back to a video I shared in my last newsletter, summarizing Elizabeth Gilbert’s thoughts on learning in public:

It felt like I was seeing it for the first time. I went on to listen to the full interview — I was totally captivated by her words. The timing was just right for me to resonate with them.

Most of all, she gave me a framework for why I need to keep going.

The Pain of Silence

The first idea from Gilbert that really struck me was the cost of not sharing:

Any talent, wisdom or insight you have that you don’t share becomes pain.

When I first heard this, I thought of projects that never saw the light of day. I’d been thinking about some of these ideas for years.

I never considered the cost of carrying them around all this time.

It’s not just about lettings things go — we’re also freeing space for what comes next.

Aligning With Reality

The best part of creativity, Gilbert says, is the “dreaming process” in our imagination. She likens it to building a tourmaline butterfly (a butterfly made of gems) in our imagination. It’s beautiful, adorned with gems, and shimmering in the light.

In our imagination, our ideas are perfect. But when you try to bring them into reality, they can turn into a nightmare. This is true of all creative endeavors.

The first time you try to make it, it will probably look nothing like a butterfly. So, you tell yourself it’s not the right time. You keep it to yourself. Some day, you decide, you’ll let it free. But not today.

We’ve all been caught in this cycle. No matter how far along we are, we still convince ourselves we’re not ready. Hugh Laurie put it best:

It’s a terrible thing, I think, in life to wait until you’re ready. I have this feeling now that actually no one is ever ready to do anything. There is almost no such thing as ready. There is only now. And you may as well do it now. Generally speaking, now is as good a time as any.

The longer we wait to share our work, the more disconnected we become from reality. We hide in our creative cave, sheltering our work from the very feedback it needs to improve.

We need to share in order to connect with others and realign with reality. Otherwise, we risk getting lost in our own web of delusion.

Pursuing Curiosity

I have a lot of different interests, and have been exploring a wide range of topics in my writing. This gives me a lot of different ideas of what to write about, but it also keeps it fun.

My approach runs counter to popular advice for growth. It’s often suggested to pick a single niche, so that it’s clear to your audience the one thing you’re all about. I don’t think this approach is right for me, but a part of me is still worried I’m “doing it wrong”.

The best way to overcome our fear, Gilbert argues, is to embrace our curiosity. It can take years for your true creative path to emerge, but it is the most sustainable and meaningful work you will ever do.

As it turns out, the best way to assuage my fears about being curious, is to keep being curious!

Sometimes I feel like I’m walking in a desert clouded with dust. I want to know what’s on the horizon, but I can’t see how I’ll get there. This is my challenge, and in it lies my opportunity.

For now, all I can do is keep walking.

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The Resonance of Writing

Apr 24, 2020

I’ve been thinking a lot about books lately.

Sometimes, I’ll be reading an incredibly popular and well-rated book, but find myself bored by it. It just doesn’t click. Other times, I’ll stumble upon an obscure book and find its words smack me the face, like a splash of water.

I wondered: What makes a book resonate?

We often focus on the author, the genre, and the subject of a book to decide whether or not it’s right for us. But there’s another factor which plays a major role:

Timing.

You need to be in a place in your life where you are ready to receive the message being presented by the author.

If you’re not, it doesn’t matter how good the book is or how many weeks it’s been on the best seller list. The book won’t connect.

The right book for the right person is not enough. It needs to be the right book, for the right person at the right time. —Johnny Uzan

Another perspective I found on this question comes from Bret Victor’s Worrydream (truly one of the hidden gems of the internet). In a comment on his 2013 links page, he describes this resonance as a transaction of energy exchange, which is maximized when there is a “phase-match” between the reader and author:

Carver Mead describes a physical theory in which atoms exchange energy by resonating with each other. Before the energy transaction can happen, the two atoms must be phase-matched, oscillating in almost perfect synchrony with each other:

Before the material can resonate, before energy can be exchanged between the author and reader, the reader must already have available a mode of vibration at the author’s frequency.

The author and reader must share a close-enough worldview, viewpoint, vocabulary, set of mental models, sense of aesthetics, and set of goals. For any particular concept in the material, if not enough of these are sufficiently matched, no resonance will occur and no energy will be exchanged.

I’m in love with this analogy.

It perfectly describes the phenomenon you experience when something you read lights a spark within you. The last book that did this for me was The Courage to be Disliked — it came at exactly the right time in my life, and impacted me so strongly I wrote an essay about it.

Ideally, our range of inputs is as diverse as possible, to maximize the chance of experience this kind of resonance.

The next time you think of starting a new book, take a moment to consider if it’s the right time to read it. There may be another book you put aside long ago, whose time has finally come.

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Lights in the Tunnel

Apr 12, 2020

The ship of my life may or may not be sailing on calm and amiable seas. The challenging days of my existence may or may not be bright and promising. Stormy or sunny days, glorious or lonely nights, I maintain an attitude of gratitude. If I insist on being pessimistic, there is always tomorrow. Today I am blessed. —Maya Angelou

This week, I decided to spend some time searching for gratitude. I tried to find some kind of silver lining to focus on during this time of crisis.

At first, I hesitated to do so. It felt wrong. There are so many people suffering right now – shouldn’t we be focusing on their plight? We should keep the severity in mind, and take whatever actions we can to support each other as best we can.

At the same time, it’s impossible to hold this crisis in our minds at all times. We all need a break. We need to breathe.

In particular, we have to make a conscious effort to try and restore some balance in our awareness. Just as negative thoughts compound in our minds, negative news compounds in our conversations.

My intention here is not to underplay the toll of this crisis. I believe its severity is overwhelmingly evident to all of us, regardless of my words. Further, I recognize the privilege I have to even be able to shelter in place, and to have the space and time to contemplate.

I’m writing this to share a few flickers of light I have glimpsed inside this seemingly endless tunnel. I hope it makes your journey a little less dark.

Resurgence of Nature

I’ve started going on walks around the neighborhood more often. On these walks, I find myself re-discovering familiar places as if they are brand new. The sidewalks and lawns are lined with the lush beauty of Spring bloom. The trees are filled with the the melody of birdsong. Without the cacophony of cars driving by at rapid pace, I felt like this was the first time I had ever truly heard them.

This effect is being seen around the world too. The canals of Venice are crystal clear for the first time in ages. The air quality in Los Angeles and other cities has gone from among the worst to the best in the world. These are of course a result of an extreme situation amid lockdowns and sheltering, but it does give us a glimpse of what’s possible when we limit our footprint on this planet.

Global Community

There is a surprising comfort that arises from having this crisis be global, rather than regional. It gives us a sense of community, knowing that everyone around the world is struggling with this with us. For many, there has never been an event in our lifetimes that has united the global population in this way. Somewhere, hidden in the depths of cruelty in the scale of this crisis, there is beauty in the realization that we are all connected in this.

The more we pull on that thread, the more we come to realize we were always connected.

Remote Work

I think an important output is the general awareness of what remote work is all about. Many companies are now being thrust into it, and are figuring out how to adapt. I believe this is a long-term positive outcome, for a number of reasons.

Firstly, it’s worth noting that the lifestyles many are struggling with now are ones that working mothers have already been dealing with for a very long time. There is a kind of humble recognition of their struggles that will hopefully come out of this. I don’t expect their lives will suddenly get easier, but at the very minimum, I hope they are given more respect for their sacrifices (the same way we are now seeing “essential workers” receive), which may lead to more understanding and better support.

More broadly, I believe remote work allows for a number of lifestyle improvements. I won’t go into all the reasons why remote work is great (there are countless other resources on that) – instead I will simply say that it is good to know more people will have a choice. Companies can choose what balance of remote and in-person work makes sense, and individuals can do the same. Lastly, I am hopeful that by being forced to manage remote teams, managers will finally move on from the approach of measuring their teams based on how many hours they sit at a desk.

In general, rather than triggering major new changes, it’s likely that this crisis will accelerate trends that were already happening.

Reflection

For many, life tends to be lived on automatic mode: The jobs we work, the food we eat, the shows we watch, the people we spend time with. It’s not uncommon for people to find themselves living a life they never chose.

In every crisis lies an opportunity, and this is no exception. The extra time at home comes with a chance to re-evaluate these decisions.

It may well be that after some contemplation, you still end up choosing the life you have today. Alternatively, you may decide you need to make some changes, but not right now.

Regardless of what the output of your reflection is, the key is intentionality. It’s not about what you do, it’s making sure you choose to do it.

If you made it this far, perhaps you’re motivated for a brief gratitude exercise of your own:

Close your eyes, and think about one thing you’re truly grateful for right now.

Take a few deep breaths.

Breathe in…

Breathe out…

In…

Out…

The more you breathe, the more you’ll see.

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Return of the GIF

Apr 2, 2020

I’ve been thinking a lot about GIFs lately (as one does).

GIFs were invented in the age of dial-up internet. People wanted to be able to exchange images quickly, even on a slow connection. GIFs served that need perfectly. However, as network speeds grew over the years, GIFs became less popular, and were looked at as low-quality, antiquated forms of media.

For a brief number of years, GIFs were on the brink of extinction.

Fast forward to today: Every day, on virtually every social media platform, millions of people are watching and sharing GIFs. Their popularity is unquestionable, and they enable people to express feelings, stories, memes, and cultural belonging, all with a single animated image.

So, if GIFs were designed for dial-up internet, why are they still so popular today?

There are a few contributors to their return to fame, but I believe the biggest factor is our shorter attention spans. Since the smartphone era began, emojis have exploded in usage, primarily due to their ability to convey so much information in a single character. For the same reason, people use GIFs to quickly convey feelings, memes, cultural associations, and more –– all in a few seconds.

GIFs originally were popular for addressing a scarcity of network bandwidth. Today, they have grown even more popular by addressing a scarcity of attention bandwidth.

Let’s take a stroll down memory lane: It’s 1987, the internet has just begun to take off, and CompuServe is one of the leading internet providers bringing millions of American homes online. One of the biggest limitations to the internet’s appeal, at this stage, is that most of it is entirely text-based. Videos are simply too rich a media to transfer efficiently over slow modem connections. Steve Wilhite, one of CompuServe’s engineers, was working on solving this problem.

Wilhite would go on to invent the Graphical Interchange Format (GIF), which utilized image compression to enable faster data transfer on slow connections. The first GIF ever uploaded turned out to be a perfect symbol of the achievement – a plane soaring through the skies:

When you look at this image, you might see a low quality image of a plane.

But try to look at it from the view point of someone living in the 80s –– their concept of a webpage on the internet was based on text and links. The few images they did see were often in formats such as RLE, which were black-and-white only.

Not only did the GIF format support color, but also would quickly support animated images, without the heavy bandwidth needed by video formats. All of these features combined to created a new kind of dynamic media that was rich, portable and universally accessible.

GIFs changed the landscape of digital media.

Of course, with great innovation comes great controversy, and GIFs are no exception. To this day, society is still plagued by the great divisive question:

Is it pronounced GIF like jiffy (soft G), or GIF like gift (hard G)?

Luckily, the creator of the GIF chimed in on the matter:

“The Oxford English Dictionary accepts both pronunciations…” Mr. Wilhite said. “They are wrong. It is a soft ‘G,’ pronounced ‘jif.’ End of story.” –NYTimes

In 2013, as he accepted his Webby Lifetime Achievement Award, Wilhite once again spoke out on the matter and made his stance incredibly clear.

For what it’s worth, I’m squarely in the jiffy camp.

Since the GIF was introduced, internet speeds have increased globally. As network speeds increased, the pressure for low-bandwidth images eased, and GIFs became less relevant. It seemed like the GIF format was headed for an inevitable sunset.

In true Darwinian style, however, the GIF evolved and found a new way to stay relevant. As its mastery over network constraints became irrelevant, it found a new constraint to serve: Attention.

Much like emojis, GIFs are a form of fast, expressive media used in everyday conversations. People want to consume smaller and shorter forms of content, and GIFs are an excellent candidate to address this need.

GIFs cater to low attention spans on both sides of the equation. The sender and the viewer only have to invest a few seconds to get value.

With the growing popularity of GIFs, technology platforms have built tools to make it easier than ever to find and share GIFs. Services like Giphy and their widespread integration (e.g. Google’s smartphone keyboard and Slack) have made it easier than ever to find and share GIFs. Social media platforms like TikTok and Instagram have integrated them into their short-form video products in the form of stickers. Twitter recently added more support for GIFs, including the ability to share multiple GIFs in a single tweet.

All of these features send a signal that technology companies recognize the inherent value in the GIF format, despite its age. As platforms continue to provide new and improved capabilities, we can expect to see even more creative forms of expression leveraging GIFs.

Even as its technical format changes, the looping animated image is likely to persist.

GIFs are one of the great storytelling mediums of our time. They weave together rich tapestries of history, community, and emotion –– all in the span of a few seconds.

The next time you see a GIF, be sure to appreciate the magic in every looping moment!

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Principles

Mar 29, 2020

I have some news to share: I just left my full-time job.

With everything going on with the world right now, I would be lying if I said I didn’t pause before pulling the trigger. Even so, I moved forward with confidence in my decision, because the underlying principles I was basing it on still held true. In this newsletter, I will share a few of them.

Going forward, I’ll be spending the majority of my time working on creative projects! You’ll be seeing a lot more writing, drawing, coding, and general creative play from me. I’ll also be spending part of my week working remotely with a startup led by some of my best friends, which will provide additional outlets for creativity and collaboration, as well as injecting some structure into my week. It’s an overwhelming time right now, but I’m excited for this new phase.

As I embark on this adventure, here are five key principles I’m doubling down on:

1) Embracing My Inner Polymath

Our societies and industries tend to direct us toward specialization. Over time, we focus more and more on specific skill-sets and industries, and are rewarded for doing so. By contrast, someone who tries to dip their toes in many different fields will find it difficult to “fit in” with a typical career template. There’s a quote on this which often makes the rounds:

“A jack of all trades is a master of none.”

But that isn’t the whole story. Here’s the original full quote:

“A jack of all trades is a master of none, but oftentimes better than a master of one.”

The difference in meaning is night and day.

Once I discovered this, I suddenly felt validated. Perhaps my tendency to constantly pursue different arenas was actually a fruitful endeavor after all? While the terminologies have changed over time (e.g. “renaissance men”, polymaths, generalists etc.), the fundamentals all prescribe the following:

Embrace your diverse passions, interests, and skills.
Combine them to form a unique combination that differentiates you from everyone else.
Leverage your niche to identify and pursue new opportunities for yourself.

On the surface, it’s a simple idea. Yet, following it goes against much of the typical career advice we get. It also goes directly against the “10,000 hours rule” made famous by Malcolm Gladwell (thankfully, that theory has been soundly debunked). There are certainly challenges and downsides to this approach — you are not going to have a clear path to follow, and you will have more difficulties relating to others / fitting into communities since you are not easily categorized into a simple archetype.

But should humans really be categorized so easily? Isn’t it our diversity and uniqueness that truly makes us human?

For more on embracing a polymath lifestyle, check out my essay The Polymath Playbook.

2) Making Space for Serendipity

I tend to be a hyper-productive animal. I love building plans and to-do lists, and powering through them. There’s certainly a lot of benefit to doing this — organization, goal-setting, feeling of accomplishment, and so on.

But when it comes to creativity, we often need to allocate some empty space. We can’t plan everything, and we definitely can’t plan creativity. The most impactful things we make often emerge from unexpected places, and we often don’t even know how we got there.

As a good reference point, I often think about a bunny I drew a while back. I did not plan to draw the bunny. I just sat down, took out my iPad, and started drawing. An hour later, there was a bunny. Someone might look at it and ask me: “How did you decide on that nose? Why are the ears down and not up?” I have no idea what I’d tell them. If you asked me to draw it right now, sight unseen, I’m sure it would turn out completely differently.

So, one thing I definitely plan to do (ha!) is ensure I don’t fill up every waking hour with plans. I’ll always be tempted to do so, but I must resist. I must embrace emptiness.

Boredom always precedes a period of great creativity. —Robert M. Pirsig

3) Conversational Energy

Nobody likes meetings, and it’s a particularly stressful time right now with the overwhelming impact of so many video calls in our day. That said, I have come to believe that one-to-one conversations are one of the most powerful sources of energy.

The right conversation, with the right person, at the right time, can completely change your life.

I wrote some thoughts on this topic as part of a thread summarizing an ebook I read called Friendly Ambitious Nerd. The book includes the best lessons from Visakan Veerasamy, with a lot of great suggestions on embracing conversations, your inner passions, and much more. In this tweet, I talk about how it’s important to develop some kind of filter to find the right kinds of energy in your conversations. You can also check out my full thread about the book.

4) Self-Awareness

If you’ve been following my newsletter for a while, you’ll know I’m a strong believer in the power of tools like meditation. They help sharpen our lens into our own minds, and reflection enables us to make much better decisions about how to move forward.

Of course, simply becoming self-aware isn’t enough. You also need to act. To do so, you’ll need to overcome your inner fears, and give yourself permission to make change. In a sense, this becomes a negotiation between you and yourself.

Ask yourself: What specifically am I afraid of?

In my case, one major thing I realized was the importance of having some form of part-time work alongside my creative projects. Yes, the financial piece is key, but more than that, I realized I felt strong anxiety with the idea of not earning. It’s just something I’ve been so used to doing my whole life — I knew it would affect me mentally, even if it was something I could manage financially.

In particular, I knew that if I had a massive weight/burden/anxiety on me, it would affect my creativity. So even if I had all the time and space in the world, I would have a much harder time actually producing anything while was carrying that weight.

5) Working In Public

I’ve been very lucky in my career. I’ve had the privilege of playing many different roles across a number of industries, seeing startups from foundation to acquisition, building coding bootcamps in South Africa… However, most of the knowledge, stories, and lessons from all those experiences lives solely in my mind. Undoubtedly, much of it has faded from my memory.

I don’t have many regrets, but not sharing more during my career so far is definitely one of them. Even if you ignore the benefits of feedback, writing helps you improve your own thinking in so many ways – I wrote a thread on this recently.

If you write entirely for yourself, it’s still worth it.

That’s all for the principles! Now that you think about it, are there any principles of your own that come to mind? Let me know, I’d love to hear from you!

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Overcoming Negativity

Feb 9, 2020

Back in 2015, I was writing a newsletter called Laugh & Learn. I was doing a bunch of teaching at the time, and for each newsletter I’d collect and share curated links that I hoped would be useful to students. The feedback I’d gotten so far was overwhelmingly positive. There was a problem, though — each edition would take ages for me to compile. I spent way too much time editing, tweaking, and polishing each and every word. I found the process really overwhelming, and just couldn’t keep it up.

The third edition was the last one I ever sent.

Fast forward to a few months ago, when I started writing Quick Brown Fox — I promised myself that this time, I would write more freely, and not stress about being perfect.

Although I had good momentum, I also had this irrational fear that somehow I’d never make it past the third newsletter. The inner critic in my head came alive, and taunted me that I’m probably going to give up again, just like I did with my last newsletter. The longer I waited to publish, the louder this voice got…

Yet, here we are — the fourth edition went live last week. I made it! 🎉💪🏽🦊 Quick Brown Fox has officially jumped over the scary dog.

I’m happy I overcame this obstacle, but it made me wonder about the power of that ‘inner critic’. You may have had run-ins with an inner critic of your own, lingering on your mind from time to time. Sometimes, it may even be someone else’s voice (family, friend, or arch nemesis, perhaps?) playing in your head.

Why does this kind of negativity hold so much power? It’s worth taking a moment to consider the heightened influence even a single one of these negative thoughts can have on our lives.

Negative thoughts have significantly more power, weight, and longevity than positive ones

When a negative thought penetrates our mind, it can linger for days, weeks or more. Often, it can become a constant distraction. Worse, it can be debilitating, compromising our ability to function.

By contrast, positive thoughts are fleeting. We typically enjoy a compliment, happy moment, or joyful exchange briefly… and then quickly move on. So, even if we have the same count of positive/negative thoughts, the imbalance of weight causes negativity to hold far more staying power. For some, this effect is so powerful that they start to believe they’re a negative person. In reality, their perception of their own thoughts is distorted due to the magnified impact of negativity.

So how do you counteract negative thoughts?

Pay closer attention to yourself via regular check-ins. Ideally, this is a daily activity, such as journaling. To begin with, just notice and log — don’t judge or analyze too much.
Once you have a significant amount of “data”, take a moment analyze it and notice any trends. Are you in a “down period” right now? How often do these happen in a month? In a year? Start to make correlations between these periods and events in your life — this can help you identify the sources of negativity in your life.
Celebrate the positives. A regular gratefulness practice is an excellent way to highlight moments and feelings of positivity in your life. Sit with these, and absorb them to their fullest. Give them the time to take up space in your mind.
Make time for emptiness. Take some time to just sit, watch the leaves in the wind, and get bored. When your mind is constantly overwhelmed with inputs (social media, TV, etc.), you have no time to process anything. Every single thought that comes in gets the same (lack of) attention — there’s no prioritization whatsoever. It’s like having a CEO meet with anyone and everyone that walks through the company doors. The time and energy of your mind is a precious resource. Protect it!

Processing is the step that allows you to filter and apply weights to your thoughts, before they capture your full attention (and then linger). We need a layer that allows us to look at thoughts as they happen, and then choose which ones hold power over us. It takes time and effort to build this layer.

Meditation is the most effective tool I know of to create a mindful processing layer for your thoughts. With regular practice, you’ll be able to give more power to the contextual side of your brain, and less to the reactive (often emotionally-driven) side.

But this isn’t just about processing thoughts. Once you start observing your thoughts, processing them, and thinking contextually rather than emotionally… your behavior will change drastically. Your interactions with others will benefit from these changes, and you’ll naturally attract more positivity.

Change your thoughts, and you’ll change your life.

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The Courage to be Disliked

Dec 18, 2019

So many hours of our lives are wasted worrying about what other people think.

How many times have you had an interaction with someone and immediately wondered, “Did I do something wrong? Are they upset at me? If I do this thing for this person, will it bother this other person?” These worry cycles are counter-productive. Still, our brains can’t resist. They’re happy to keep us awake at night spinning on these thoughts.

About a year ago, I discovered the power of regular meditation. It really helped me change my mindset, react more thoughtfully, and generally be more calm. Yet, even regular meditation did not disrupt these all-powerful worry cycles for me. Eventually, I realized this was a problem I couldn’t simply meditate away.

The answer finally came to me in a book called The Courage To Be Disliked, by Ichiro Kishimi and Fumitake Koga. The authors wrote this book to share the ideas of a psychotherapist named Alfred Adler. The foundational idea in Adlerian psychology is that interpersonal relationships are the root of all problems. Adler teaches that our conflicts in life and work are simply conflicts of expectations with others. He prescribes that we should adjust expectations to free ourselves from the chains of each other’s plans.

Although it seemed like an oversimplification, I was immediately attracted to the concept. I knew relationships were a major source of my worries. I’ve read the book several times over, and it has had a profound effect on my life.

Let’s explore a few of the core ideas that really stuck with me.

Separation Of Tasks

If you look at the majority of conflicts within relationships, they come down to one person expecting the other to do something, and being upset when they don’t do it. This causes pain on both sides, whether it be disappointment or guilt.

Adlerian psychology states that each of us is responsible for our own tasks, and these conflicts are a result of us being confused about who owns which task. To solve this, one must go about a ‘separation of tasks’ to recognize which task they actually own and need to work on. The rest, they let go.

Example: You are worried someone doesn’t like you. You keep doing things in hopes that they like you, but even then you can’t actually be sure they’ll like you. Still, you keep doing them anyway, because you are afraid of what might happen if they dislike you (disappointment, anger, confrontation, etc.).

This is problematic for a number of reasons. Firstly, you keep doing things you don’t want to do, living a life you don’t want to live, solely to try and please someone but with no guarantee of results. Secondly, this doesn’t scale. Add a few other people who you want to please, and you can be guaranteed that eventually you will have multiple people who want different things. Thus, disappointing people is inevitable.

In this example, the separation of tasks would result in you realizing that liking or not liking you is their task, not yours. It is out of your control, and thus is not something you should be actively working on and worrying about. Discard it, and move on.

Putting aside the expectations and goals others have for us for a second — what about our own goals? We often forget to even think about them, let alone prioritize them. How can we have space to do any of the things we expect for ourselves, if we are constantly chasing approval of others? Discarding others’ tasks is the first step, but spending time on our own tasks is the crucial follow-up.

If you don’t live for yourself, who will?

You Control Your Reality

One of the most powerful tenets of Adlerian psychology is the power to change our interpretations of reality. Although we cannot change the past, Adler notes we can change what meaning we assign to past events. This story from the book really drove the point home for me:

PHILOSOPHER: Have you ever drunk well water that has just been drawn?

YOUTH: Well water? Um, it was a long time ago, but there was a well at my grandmother’s house in the countryside. I remember enjoying the fresh, cold water drawn from that well on a hot summer’s day.

PHILOSOPHER: You may know this, but well water stays at pretty much the same temperature all year round, at about sixty degrees. That is an objective number—it stays the same to everyone who measures it. But when you drink the water in the summer it seems cool and when you drink the same water in the winter it seems warm. Even though it’s the same water, at the same sixty degrees according to the thermometer, the way it seems depends on whether it’s summer or winter.

YOUTH: So, it’s an illusion caused by the change in the environment.

PHILOSOPHER: No, it’s not an illusion. You see, to you, in that moment, the coolness or warmth of the well water is an undeniable fact. That’s what it means to live in your subjective world.

Our subjective perception of the world not only influences how we see the world, it is our world.

We can influence the present (and future) by changing how we view the past. This is a superpower that is vastly underestimated. I was able to apply this lesson to my life almost immediately, and to my surprise, it had a dramatically positive impact.

A while ago, I found myself feeling stuck at work, and increasingly overwhelmed and upset with the situation. I decided to try and apply the learnings I just had from the book around altering subjective realities. Initially, I was quite skeptical. I wondered if this was simply an act of self-delusion, and wasn’t sure what good it would do. I gave it a try anyway.

I ran an experiment on myself. Instead of my usual internal dialogue discussing the woes of my workplace, I would assign a positive meaning to events going on at work.

I quickly discovered it exposed a lot of positive attributes of my past and surroundings I had overlooked. I realized I had been enjoying great work/life balance, working with people I respected, and had unique learning opportunities. Even though I had been aware of these before, my intention around focusing on them made them much more… real.

I found myself feeling lighter, more energized, and breathing easier. I was spending far less time and energy ruminating. Even though nothing in my work environment had changed, my viewpoint of it had shifted and thus my subjective reality changed. In turn, I was able to spend this extra energy on more enjoyable and positive endeavors, which yielded even more joy, and the effect was cyclic.

Changing your mindset can change your world.

Anger Is A Tool

You’ve probably heard someone use the phrase “Sorry, I was just overwhelmed by emotion” while apologizing for an outburst. If you consider this phrase, it’s suggesting that anger itself can sometimes take control of your actions. In essence, emotions would override your ‘rational thought’ control center. Is this true?

We still don’t know a lot about the brain, and there are many theories that could argue different perspectives on this question. That said, consider this story:

One day, a mother and daughter were quarreling loudly. Then, suddenly, the telephone rang. “Hello?” The mother picked up the receiver hurriedly, her voice still thick with anger. The caller was her daughter’s homeroom teacher. As soon as the mother realized who was phoning, the tone of her voice changed and she became very polite. Then, for the next five minutes or so, she carried on a conversation in her best telephone voice. Once she hung up, in a moment, her expression changed again and she went straight back to yelling at her daughter.

What just happened? If anger was an emotion that took over the mother, how was she able to control it so elegantly to handle the call? Further, how was she able to “re-generate” the anger and resuming shouting within an instant? Adler argues this is an example proving anger is a tool the mother is using (to try and achieve the goal of overpowering her daughter).

Many of us can recall times where we were hurt, and resorted to anger as our default tool of choice, only to find that anger made the situation worse. My personal experience is that almost every time anger is used, it fails to achieve the desired effect, and inadvertently creates new problems. So, not only is anger a tool of manipulation, it is also incredibly ineffective. Adler argues we should discard this tool, just as we discard others’ tasks.

When I first considered what would happen if I simply stopped “using anger”, I immediately worried about the consequences. How would people know that something wasn’t right? How would we express our frustrations about social or political injustices? This nuance is touched on briefly in the book:

There is a difference between personal anger (personal grudge) and indignation with regard to society’s contradictions and injustices (righteous indignation). Personal anger soon cools. Righteous indignation, on the other hand, lasts for a long time. Anger as an expression of a personal grudge is nothing but a tool for making others submit to you.

Still, it can still be infuriating to be told “stop being angry”. Our natural response is, of course, to immediately become angry. But that reaction, too, is a trained response to use anger as a tool to respond to the remark. A lifetime of conditioning has perhaps led many of us to default to using anger in times of stress.

The key is to pause and reflect on what goal we are actually trying to achieve in the moment. By giving ourselves space to think about it, we finally have a chance to make a choice rather than letting acting on our instincts. When we do that, the right choice becomes obvious.

Anger is never the best tool for the job.

It’s clear that many of Adler’s ideas are centered around focusing on forward-focused goals, rather than looking deep into the past to find meaning. This belief runs in direct contradiction to the Freudian school of thought, which looks to an individual’s past to define their personality.

Adler notes, “The important thing is not what one is born with but what use one makes of that equipment.” While I don’t agree with every idea in the book, Adler gives us tools for hope. Even if we have encountered hardships, experienced trauma, the value of power to define our own world cannot be understated.

Further, I believe there is value in studying these ideas as an exercise in self-understanding. By understanding and liberating yourself, you heal the person you present to the world. In turn, you contribute to the work of healing the world.

Inevitably, making changes to adopt these techniques will encounter resistance. It can be a difficult path to tread, but can lead to liberation from the burden of infinite expectations. With this newfound freedom and space, we can finally live life on our own terms.

Freedom is hard to win, but it’s worth the fight.

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American Traffic Crisis: The Cost of Cars

Dec 4, 2019

What do guns and cars have in common? They’re both privileges that are available to almost every American who can afford one. They’re also tools of murder. Every year, for the past three years, more than 40,000 Americans died in traffic fatalities.

For the individual benefit of feeling secure in one’s mobile metal fortress, we pay an incredibly heavy cost as a society. The pattern we see across both gun violence and vehicle related deaths is that American policies value individual freedoms over the safety of its collective people. Sadly, the tragic loss of lives is not the only cost we pay for this policy.

Time & Productivity: A recent study by INRIX showed that “Americans lost an average of 97 hours a year due to congestion, costing them nearly $87 billion in 2018, an average of $1,348 per driver.” In an era of increasing pressure on our time and attention, this is an enormous price to pay. With more congested regions such as the Bay Area, it is considered a good thing to have a commute of only 30 minutes each way. We have come to accept this cost as normal, and as a consequence have normalized spending less time with our friends, our families, and getting enough sleep.

Cognitive Impact: The term “road rage” was coined purely to recognize the emotional impact of being stuck in congested traffic. People have to release this anxiety somewhere, and it often ends up being projected onto coworkers, friends, and family. Additionally, there is evidence supporting the theory that air pollution causes negative impacts to our cognitive functions.

Wasted Space: To facilitate people being able to drive everywhere, we have to build parking lots at every single destination. Given that most parking lots are never full, this is an incredible waste. By reducing the need for parking, cities would immediately benefit from a surplus of space that could be used for a variety of purposes (housing, parks, pedestrian and bike pathways just to name a few).

Highways: A big part of owning and driving cars is having access to highways. The cost of building and maintaining them is placed upon all residents (through their tax dollars), regardless of whether they use them. This creates an imbalanced comparison of how much we have to pay for other forms of transportation (such as public transit). Often, we only look at the new costs of a public transit measure, without considering all the existing costs we already pay for the plethora of roads and highways we have today.

We’re not just paying for routine maintenance, either. Many of the roads and highways were built more than 50 years ago, and their planned lifetime is coming to end. The debt of our road investments is now due, and it is quite a doozy.

How much will it cost to rebuild these highways, and to expand them to accommodate increases in traffic? Robert W. Poole Jr., a transportation expert at the Reason Foundation, estimates that it will take roughly $1 trillion. Others have estimated that reconstruction and modernization could cost as much as $3 trillion. —Slate

Beyond the enormous financial burden, highways literally split cities in two and tear communities apart in the process. Not all residents are impacted equally – highways were historically used to deliberately splice and disempower communities of color (see the Atlantic piece on the role of highways in American poverty for more).

Population loss wasn’t the only result of highways running through the cores of cities. Entire neighborhoods were razed to make room for highways, destroying homes, businesses, and urban amenities. The pictures below show portions of downtown Cincinnati before (left) and after I-75. The homes and businesses on the left were largely replaced by the highway and parking lots. –Forbes

Ultimately, the biggest challenge with highways is not just their cost, but that they simply do not scale. They were never designed to meet the needs we have for them today. In fact, when the Interstate Highway was first introduced in the 1950s, the only goal it had was to ensure we had sufficient “military readiness”. Effectively, we traded healthy urban communities so that tanks could quickly get around the country.

President Dwight Eisenhower, fresh off his time as supreme commander of the Allied Forces during World War II, had seen firsthand how the German autobahns enabled the German military to move quickly over land. This experience, coupled with his participation in a 1919 military convoy that crossed the United States by land from Washington, D.C. to San Francisco, convinced him that a system of high-speed roads was necessary for military readiness. He supported federal funding for the highway system and in 1956 he signed the Federal Aid Highway Act, which secured 90% federal funding for the interstate highway system. States were responsible for the other 10%. —Forbes

The irony of it all is that if there really was an emergency that required a military vehicle to quickly cross the states using highways, it’s almost certain they would fail their mission. What happens when a soldier has to radio their general to let them know they can’t make it to the front because of a traffic jam?

Climate Change: The greatest consequence of all is the long term impact of carbon emissions to our global climate. It’s no secret that transportation is the biggest contributor to the problem:

Even as the United States has reduced carbon dioxide emissions from its electric grid, largely by switching from coal power to less-polluting natural gas , emissions from transportation have remained stubbornly high. The bulk of those emissions, nearly 60 percent, come from the country’s 250 million passenger cars, S.U.V.s and pickup trucks, according to the EPA. Freight trucks contribute an additional 23 percent. —NY Times

The latest report on climate change was incredibly bleak, and reiterated a fact most of us know, but not all of us have accepted: We are already out of time. The only battle left to fight, at this stage, is one of mitigation.

Looking at all the evidence, the case for action seems clear. This begs the question: What are our transportation planners doing to address this crisis? Unfortunately, while I’m sure their intentions are good, most are either maintaining the status quo or making things worse. There are two main reasons for this:

An Empty Road Is Not Success: A foundational problem today is that highways (and the transportation planners that design them) are measured based on congestion, but in the opposite scale than what is actually needed. If a highway is found to have very little volume, it is given an excellent grade. By contrast, if it is used constantly and is highly congested, it is given a poor grade. Intuitively, this may make sense at first, but ultimately the measurement system incentivizes us to build and maintain highways that are never used, which don’t pay for themselves. This further exacerbates the financial tax burden on the population, while preventing investments in more scalable transportation solutions.
Adding Lanes Eventually Increases Traffic: There is a long-standing belief that in order to cure a congested highway, we need to add additional lanes. This continues to be the case, despite evidence proving that adding lanes only increases traffic congestion in the long term. A recent paper published by the Transportation Research Record found that for every 1% increase in highway capacity, traffic increases up 1.1% in the long term. At this point, it’s become a running joke.

I realize I’ve painted a pretty dark picture of transportation and its impact on our climate. Still, there is room for optimism. Some agencies have begun to recognize their failure to measure and respond to congestion correctly, and are taking action. Regardless of how we address the cost of cars, ultimately we must accept that a problem of this magnitude warrants significant action.

In a future post, I’m planning to explore some potential solutions to this problem such as public mass transit, as well as some of the alternative transportation solutions that have come into play in the past decade (such as ride sharing, scooters, and electric cars).

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The Mountain of Transition

Nov 12, 2019

I’ve worn a lot of different hats over the years — engineer, manager, teacher, founder, coach, and others in between. I’m often asked why I don’t just settle into a role and stick with it. It’s a good question. Switching roles can be overwhelming, challenging, and even depressing at times. Still, it is a practice I can’t recommend highly enough.

Throughout my childhood, I moved a lot. Not only did I have to switch to new schools multiple times, but also to new countries, and even new continents. While I struggled with the many challenges such a journey comes with, I later came to appreciate the benefits. More than anything, growing up in different places and integrating in different communities gives you incredibly valuable perspective. It affords you the ability to look at people and problems from across the globe with a much greater sense of empathy and understanding.

Work communities offer similar characteristics. The more you expose yourself to different roles and teams, the more you’re able to understand others, and work effectively with them. You become not just a member of one team, but a connector, collaborator and communicator across many different teams and organizations. By scaling the diversity of your experiences, you scale the breadth of your opportunities. The value of this skill cannot be overstated.

Early on in my career, I used to think there would be a single role I’d finally settle into some day. I assumed I’d come upon the proverbial just right porridge, and my professional stomach would be warm and full forever.

Turns out it really is just a fairy tale.

The more I thought about it, the more I realized how silly it is to assume that such a thing could even exist. We all change. We grow. We evolve. Our careers need to evolve with us, lest we find ourselves stagnant. You already know what it feels like when your current role begins to get stale. Every day has a tinge of monotony to it. You feel trapped, but aren’t sure what the cage is.

Then it happens. Suddenly, you find yourself startled. Something feels different, and the sensation feels almost alien because you’ve become so used to the regularity of it all. You just spent hours on something, yet you are somehow more energized afterward. What was that?

It is precisely in this moment, when you sense the wind behind your sails, that you are most alive. Remember it. Cherish it. It will be your guide as you begin your relentless pursuit to seek out more of it. It is this very pursuit that drives me to new pastures so soon after finding a cozy spot in the grass.

There are many, many (many) reasons why you should not switch roles. Your boss might tell you about them. Your friends will definitely tell you about them. Your mind will echo them infinitely, time and time and time again. I know them too well. These reasons pile up so high, they eventually become a mountain in our minds. This is your mountain of transition, and you must climb it.

You may feel intimidated by the mountain’s sheer size, majesty, and might. Don’t worry — I’m right here with you. Let’s fight through these reasons together, one step at a time.

“You’re lucky to even be where you are. It is ungrateful and selfish to give that up.”

I am thankful for what I have, and I am grateful for where I am, but neither of those defines who I am. I deserve the freedom to follow who I want to be, wherever that may take me.

“You’ll be starting from scratch all over again. It’s such a waste.”

It is never a waste to work towards what I want (after all, that’s how I got here in the first place!). The real waste would be spending so many years of effort to reach a place, only to discover I can never leave it.

“You’re really good at what you do. You should keep doing it.”

It is not sufficient to simply be good at what I do. It must also give me energy as I am doing it. Without being activated by my work, I am simply a slave to my skills.

“You’re successful. Don’t throw that away.”

What is the point of a successful career, if it means I am confined to serve it forever? That is a lifetime obligation, not a worthy occupation. I must define success on my own terms.

“Your coworkers are your friends. When you leave, you’ll be all alone.”

If they really are my friends, I will always have them.

…Phew! I think we’ve fought off the worst of them. I hope you feel at least a fraction more emboldened to take that first step in your own pursuit. We all need to keep climbing our mountains, or risk freezing in the bitter cold of stillness.

I should warn you though — once we reach the peak, the weather will surely change.

Eventually, we’ll need to find another mountain.

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Tokyo

Sep 26, 2019

As I write this, I’m on a plane flying over the Pacific Ocean, contemplating the trip I just had. I’ve always wanted to visit Japan (Tokyo in particular), and it finally came to fruition this past week. I left feeling more inspired than even my (already high) expectations predicted, and felt compelled to share a few thoughts on the city and the culture.

For those of you simply looking for recommendations on things to do in Tokyo — you can skip to the Neighborhood Guide section at the bottom. That said, I feel I should warn you that simply following a list would do a disservice to your experience. While I did receive some recommendations beforehand (far too many, in fact, as so many peers had recently visited), I found the best experiences I had were entirely unplanned.

Follow The Alleys

When you first visit a neighborhood in Tokyo, you will take in the sights visible from whichever station you arrived at. Most likely, these are main roads, filled with big and flashy offerings to get your attention. I quickly learned to avoid these areas — instead, you must find the small alleys within them, and explore those to discover what the neighborhood truly has to offer. This may seem like a stereotypical thing, to walk “off the main path”, but I’ve never seen as high a contrast between the two as is the case in Tokyo. I often imagined I was entering an artery and discovering magic in a capillary.

As I explored the neighborhood of Daikanamya (my favorite in Tokyo), I passed countless furniture and department stores my eyes had become trained to ignore. I saw a crooked path branching off to my right, barely inviting strangers to enter. Following it, I felt the air change, and was drawn to the curiously minimal shops within it. Suddenly, to my great surprise, I saw a sign for a Yemeni coffee shop. This was particularly shocking, as earlier that day I had lamented to my friends how coffee shops such as Blue Bottle had made it all the way to Tokyo, but the inventors of coffee itself had no footprint here. Yet, here I was. I was utterly delighted to be proven wrong.

The humble sign was pasted on the wall in a small gap between two stores. I was confused. Where was the store? As I soon realized, I needed to squeeze into this little gap, and as I did so I felt like Alice crawling down the rabbit hole. What awaited me on the other side immediately put a smile on my face.

I sat down on one of two empty stools at the coffee bar. I expected to try the nostalgic and appealing Kadak Chai on offer, mostly for novelty’s sake, and then head back on my way. Just as I was about to leave, a man walked in and took the seat next to me. He seemed to be a regular, and struck up a conversation with me. Before I knew it, we had been chatting for two hours about public transit over many cups of Turkish coffee. As it turns out, he runs one of the largest transit companies in the world. I had so many questions, and he was patient enough to answer them all. It was an incredibly inspirational conversation. I gained a lot of knowledge and a new friend that night.

Life happens in the empty space between our plans.

The Freedom of Trains

The best piece of advice I can give you about visiting Japan is this: if you are planning to be there for any length of time, you should get a J.R. Pass. This little piece of paper is a thing of magic — it will enable you to freely travel the bullet trains between cities, as well as countless local trains within each of them. In the week that we were there, it surely paid for itself at least three times over.

Additionally, you’ll get the chance to ride on Japan’s various bullet trains (starting with the one that takes you from the airport to Tokyo). They truly are a marvel. I recommend getting the ‘green’ pass which lets you sit in upgraded cars for only slightly more fee. They’re almost completely silent, incredibly fast, smooth as silk, and always on time. What more could you want in a train (or any form of transport, for that matter)?

Sometimes I think about the scale of the system that operates so many of these different rail systems all at once… I can barely fathom it. Bullet trains, local trains, subways, light rail… all operating at such a high frequency and reliability. Every single time I got to the tracks, my train arrived within minutes, if it wasn’t pulling up already.

I have been thinking and studying about public transit of late. Its urgency in my thoughts has accelerated due to the impending impacts of climate change. A well designed, highly available and accessible mass transportation system can truly change the fate of our planet. Beyond avoiding catastrophic damage to our planet, I believe there is another (possibly more important) motive for us to build these kinds of networks: our happiness. When we can leave our rooms and walk out knowing there will be a transport within minutes to take us wherever we need to go, we feel truly free.

The Culture of Performance

One of the reasons I’ve always been enamored with Japanese films (any Ghibli fans out there?) and products is their attention to detail. We all know the value of this — our experiences improve when thoughtfulness is instilled into the design process of the products we use. So, I wasn’t surprised to see this kind of attention paid during all my interactions with Japanese service workers, staff, and shop owners. The manifestation of this can include phrases of welcome upon entering a store, amenities such as hot towels being offered, or most often a ritual of someone spending 3-5 minutes carefully packing what you just bought.

I expected to love all this, but somehow I didn’t. It ranged from being mildly amusing at best, to frustrating or awkward at worst. The packaging methods in particular are difficult to accept. I once purchased three little macaroons, and even though I clarified I was going to eat it right away, it was still packed inside a plastic box within paper wrapping within another plastic bag, with lots of other paper inserts included. In particular, I couldn’t get past how wasteful it was to use so many unnecessary plastic materials.

In another instance, a waitress was bringing a piping hot latte in a large mug for my friend. It was filled to the brim. As she slowly carried it toward our table, I could literally sense the tension. There were a lot of barriers in her way, and it was evident she was terrified of dropping it.

At some point, a tiny drop spilled into the saucer, and with many apologies she turned around, returned to the kitchen to wipe it, and came back to do it all over again. Many more apologies. As I looked at her expression, I could sense this utter helplessness on her part as she felt obligated to go to these lengths. It felt more like a forced performance rather than a ritual of kindness.

While I can understand the value of the tradition and the importance of the ritual in many cases, a lot of times my sympathy for the struggles of these service workers made the experience a definitively negative one. It was then, however, that I recalled a wonderful quote I saw in Pico Iyer’s book about Japan:

“…as the woman in the tiny patisserie flashes you a beautiful smile and spends many long minutes placing your $ 1.50 éclair in a pink box, enclosing a bag of ice so the pastry won’t melt on the long way home, wrapping the box in seasonal paper and appending a bow (pick any color) under a badge to keep the box shut, you’re really in the realm of the transpersonal. Everything is deeply personal; it just has nothing to do with you.”

I suppose then, that an important step in embracing these rituals is to recognize the value gained by those performing them – acts of kindness to others can give one a deep sense of satisfaction and purpose. So, rather than perceiving them as being just for us, we must recognize their mutual value.

(Lack Of) Language Barriers

I came to Japan embarrassed that I had not spent the effort needed to learn how to speak Japanese at a basic level (beyond the minimal “hello”, “thank you” and so on). I was surprised to discover, however, that everyone I spoke to was able to converse in English (to varying degrees). Even in the towns of Osaka and Kyoto, we never found ourselves in a situation where we needed to use a translator app (I had the Google Translate app ready, but alas it was never called upon).

I later learned, after speaking with one of my friend’s past schoolmates (who is a Tokyo resident), that Japan’s government (and its society as a result) has invested significantly in tourism. This was done primarily to try and counteract the economic losses being felt due to the decline of the Japanese electronics industry.

This investment is clearly evident in the shopping experience as a tourist — you simply don’t pay any tax at all. The shop will charge you the tax-free price, and hand you a customs receipt. Upon leaving Japan, you submit all the customs receipts so that the shops can get paid back by the government. This is a policy that is clearly optimizing for tourist experience rather than local businesses. One might assume that some percentage of tourists (anywhere from 25% or more) will simply forget to submit these receipts, so local businesses surely lose revenue with this policy.

Assuming the increase in tourism helps sustain local businesses and grow the economy, one could perceive this as a win-win. On the flip side, however, this removed a bit of the ‘mystery’ of visiting a foreign country for me. It was clear that even remote areas were expecting a tourist like myself and had accommodated me, in more places than I expected.

I wonder, during these transformations to help foreigners feel more at home, what is being lost in the process?

Neighborhood Guide

Alright, let’s get to the recommendations! I found the best way to navigate Tokyo is to figure out some neighborhoods you want to explore, take the train(s) there, and then spend a few hours to a half day in that area. It will give you the best chance of finding what that place actually has to offer you, based on your individual tastes.

TOKYO FISH MARKET

The fish market is famous for being filled with trading chaos, and delicious food. They actually had to move the trading floors over to a new location in Shijo-Mae. If you want to see a massive tuna, and lots of people shouting over fish prices, go here as early as possible (5AM).

If, like me, you’re more interested in the food… the old market location in Tsukiji still has all the restaurants and stalls you could ask for. Find the man with the outstretched arms, get a seat at the sushi bar, and go to town. I’d also recommend finding one of the stalls with Wagyu beef — you can buy it on a stick, and it’s so buttery smooth that you can bite it right off without even needing a knife.

We visited the fish market multiple times. It’s. The. Best.

DAIKANAMYA

This was my favorite area in all of Tokyo. If you read my story about alleys above, you know this is where I discovered the Yemeni Mocha Coffee spot. I also loved the clothing stores here — lots of unique options that you won’t find by just wandering department stores. Overall though, it’s just a really amazing atmosphere, with cute brick roads and lots of different paths to explore.

SHIMOKITAZAWA

Known as the “Brooklyn of Tokyo”, this is a bit outside the main areas of Tokyo, but worth a visit. Hit up the main station and then explore the market nearby. Note that there’s stuff on either side of the station — the North has the main market, but the South has some gems too.

Also make a stop at Yeti Coffee: I loved this spot. If you go, see if Amit is there and tell him I said hi! He made the tastiest coffee I had in all of Japan (they use a special Himalayan blend).

EBISU

We stayed in Ebisu, and didn’t realize how much it had to offer until near the end of the trip. If you get off at the station, head toward the Ebisu-Jinja shrine, and you’ll discovery many alleys to explore. There are lots of great places to grab a bite, many with nice outdoor seating.

I’d highly recommend finding a place with Yakiniku style BBQ — it’s truly an incredibly dining experience. I should note that the best Yakiniku I had in Japan was actually in Kyoto, so if you are going through there I’d highly recommend stopping at one of the Yakiniku Hiro locations.

SHIBUYA

Go to the Starbucks by the main Shibuya station, order something, and then go upstairs to the deck level to get a view. There, you’ll get a good vantage point to see the Shibuya Crossing. It’s a pretty cool sight to see that many people crossing at once, and gives you a true sense of the scale of Tokyo. Take some photos, and then leave immediately and don’t come back. There’s really no other reason for you to be there.

SHIN-OKUBU

This area has great Nepalese restaurants (Angan is a good pick), but otherwise it’s mostly a haven for K-Pop, and is apparently where all the kids hang out. If you’re into that, make your way there, otherwise I’d avoid this area entirely. I found it way too crowded and couldn’t handle being there for any longer than it took to walk between Angan and the station.

HARAJUKU

This place can feel a bit like LA’s Rodeo Drive (another neighborhood similar to this in Tokyo is Ginza, if you’re into that). It’s worth walking around just to get some glimpses, but as I mentioned earlier, there’s gold in them thar alleys! One coffee place I found was called Imperfect Coffee, and it has a program where you get a token for each purchase enabling you to vote for things like education or the environment. The company devotes a percentage of their revenue toward the winning causes. I voted for education.

That’s all, folks! There are, of course, so many more neighborhoods to discuss, not to mention all the parks and gardens, or other cities in Japan… but we’re landing soon, so I’ll stop here. Besides, you’ll enjoy it more if you find it yourself! Did you notice I didn’t include any spoiler photos here? Have fun, and remember to follow the alleys :)

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Staying Technically Sharp

Jun 13, 2018

You were once an engineer, and now you’re an engineering leader. Suddenly, you realize that management is not the next step in a development career, it’s actually a totally different path. You’re challenged in completely new ways, and often feel unprepared. You need to learn an entirely new set of skills – empathy building, effective communication, expectation setting, performance tracking, and so on. That’s a lot to learn all at once, which is why management is so challenging when you first get started (check out my posts on effective 1-on-1s and hiring for diversity and inclusion for some helpful tips).

It’s almost as if you’re starting from scratch. Almost. The truth is that your past as an individual contributor helps you tremendously as an engineering leader. It’s crucial to understand why, so that you can do what’s necessary to maintain your technical edge. Ultimately, your technical skills are a critical part of your engineering leadership effectiveness.

Why It Matters

Here are just a few reasons why it’s still worth it to keep your technical skills active:

Unblocking Your Team: In many cases, developers will not ask for your help even when they need it. They worry about being perceived as needing help, or are unsure of your own ability to help in a given domain. So, it’s up to you to be forward and offer your help. That said, if you are rusty (or simply believe you are rusty, which is equivalent in this case), your ability to help will be compromised. Remember that you were trusted with leadership due to your own past achievements as an individual contributor. Your technical skills and experience are a valuable asset, and it’s likely there will be lots of problems that could be solved much faster with your input. Do whatever it takes to maintain them.
Respect: The most powerful authority is earned, not given. Your title may serve to clarify expectations of your role relative to your team, but ultimately when difficulties arise, people follow those they trust. This is especially the case with engineers — even if you’re not discussing a code problem, they are more likely to take your advice / follow your lead if they respect you. The best way to earn and maintain the respect of your team is to demonstrate your technical capacity through solving technical challenges. Your past history can help, but its value erodes quickly over time, so it’s important to keep contributing.
Scaled Learning: One of the things I sometimes hear from developers is that they worry about a management role limiting their learning. In my experience, I actually find that I can learn more as a manager (albeit a different kind of learning). At one stage, engineers were coming to me with only the most difficult problems they ran into. We would talk about it, design a solution, they’d try it, and come back to me with the results. I would learn from this, but I’d also be learning from 5-8 other engineers at once. So in essence, my learning potential had multiplied significantly when it came to software design & architecture.
Personal Productivity: With management, we don’t often see the ‘fruits of our labor’ for months or years, if ever. Even when we do see them, good leadership ethics encourages us not to take credit and instead to congratulate our team. This can leave us with precious few opportunities to feel like we’re actually accomplishing anything. Writing (and shipping) code is one of the most direct and satisfying ways to feel productive. We can build something, push it out, and see the result of our work immediately. Yes, it’s okay to do something for yourself — your own motivation levels must be taken care of if you intend to motivate others.

With these motivations in mind, let’s go over some of the best ways to sharpen our technical skills, given the limitations on time and bandwidth as leaders.

1. Low Priority Features

If you’re working in a small team, you likely never quite have the bandwidth you need to deliver everything on your roadmap. This is actually a good thing as it forces ruthless prioritization, but there’s no such thing as a perfect roadmap, and so the more bandwidth the better. This is where you come in — if there are small / low priority features that could have high value, you should take the opportunity to just go and get them done. Often, these can be tasks that would almost take as long to explain + write up a task to assign + prioritize with a developer than it would for you to just do it.

The low priority modifier here is key. What you absolutely want to avoid is being a blocker for a critical task. This will only serve to frustrate you, your team, and eventually deteriorate their trust in your ability to deliver. In short: help the marathon runners, but don’t get in the way.

2. Bug Squashing

While investigations can often seem hopeless, and production resolution plans can be tedious, I find few things in life are more satisfying than finding answers to challenging mysteries. Often, there are issues that have been plaguing a team or product for a while, but no one wants to invest the extra time to figure it out.

If you’re able to tackle one of them, your team will be incredibly grateful to you, and you’ll save them some bandwidth that they can then use to work on critical features. Again, like with features, do not take on a mission critical production downtime issue — instead, choose long-standing low-impact bugs that only come with a positive if you resolve them, and no real negative impact if you don’t (i.e. in the worst case, things stay the same).

3. Internal Tools

As a leader, you’ll have a much better perspective of how the team is performing from a high level. You’ll be able to see process bottlenecks much faster than anyone inside the process. As such, you’re in the best position to not just recommend and document changes, but to implement and improve tools to automate and optimize the process. This can be a very rewarding exercise, as you’ll feel the productivity boost of putting this change in place, and then see the results in a more high-functioning team (thus, making your job as a leader much easier).

If the changes you’re working on succeed and grow significantly in impact, be wary of the potential for you to become a bottleneck on a critical path. Ultimately, if it becomes important enough to be considered a “high priority” task, then you should now be thinking about allocating your team resources onto it. Remind yourself that the goal here was to provide some value and exercise technically, not to own the component forever.

4. Pair Programming

If your team doesn’t practice pair programming already, doing a few pair sessions with them could be a great way to start. While I’m not an advocate of pair programming 100% of the time, I do believe it can be a valuable way to decrease errors and increase speed for certain tasks. Generally, I find that if it’s a really complex new feature or a sensitive refactor, having two engineers work together for a few hours / days can be a great way to power through it and come out with a higher degree of confidence in the solution.

As a manager, you can ask to simply join in on whatever an engineer is working on for a day. It’s an easy ask, as it doesn’t really burden them too much (it’s up to you to provide value though), and can be a great way to improve your rapport with the engineer. Be warned — the real challenge will likely be your own schedule, which is not designed to allow you a full day of focus. You will have to be a bit ruthless about ensuring you’re not interrupted while pairing. Otherwise, it will just annoy both you and the engineer, and you likely won’t get that much out of it.

Personally, I found this difficult to do successfully at first, but over time it became easier. Eventually, it helped me get a lot closer to my engineers, contribute value, and stay updated with the code.

5. Newsletters & Blogs

Sometimes it can seem like there’s no point in subscribing to all those technical blogs and newsletters if we’re not writing code day-to-day. However, I find them to be fantastic ways to stay up to date with the fast-moving pace of web and mobile development. It’s critical that you maintain perspective on the latest tools and frameworks: you need to ensure that new projects consider all options (and that you can have an informed conversation about them with your team), and you need to occasionally re-evaluate whether certain technologies you’re using are no longer being maintained.

6. Books & Online Courses

Sometimes new technologies will come along that may change the fundamental paradigm of how you approach certain software problems. Even if they don’t necessarily fulfill their lofty visions, it can be valuable to understand them so that you are prepared for the future (whether this means using it in products you’re working on, or doing early preparation for future job opportunities). Some examples of resources I leveraged recently while operating as a CTO:

Taking an online course on data science to truly understand the fundamental mechanics of machine learning and models, as I was working with a data scientist we had hired to build out new features
Reading a book on Elixir, as it is an interesting new language that solves certain types of scale problems unlike any other (e.g. WhatsApp leverages it to handle its incredibly high scale messaging platform)
Taking an online class about React Native, even though I’ve been fully immersed in native iOS development, because I wanted to understand what the value proposition really is and whether I should consider it for future projects

7. Side Projects

With all the work on our plates, it’s rare to have free time to engage in a coding side project. Still, if there’s an idea you’d like to build, this can be a really wonderful way to feel productive, build something useful, sharpen your skills, and have fun. Remember not to look at it as something you’re doing in order to launch a successful business - look at it as a means to play, with the other benefits being a bonus.

Side Note: If you understand how hard it is to find time outside your primary work to build side projects, hopefully you can see why it is just as hard for full-time developers to do so. Keep this in mind when interviewing.

As you can see, there are so many different ways you can keep learning technically as a leader. Hopefully it’s also clear how doing so can maximize not just your own potential but that of your team. Ultimately, your ability to find time for these activities really depends on how you are prioritizing work at your company.

What are your favorite techniques? Let me know in the comments!

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Effective 1-on-1s

May 20, 2018

You’re in yet another boring 1-on-1 meeting. It seems like all you do is go over random updates, or just chat about life. You could be using this time to do real work instead!

It doesn’t have to be this way.

The 1-on-1 meeting, when done right, can be the most powerful tool for building alignment and clarity in teams. If you’re a manager, you need to be using them to their full potential, otherwise you are flying blind. You might still make it to your destination, but you’ll smash into a lot of obstacles on the way. Even if you’re not a manager, you should understand the support you should be getting (it’s up to you whether you want to ask for it).

Luckily, doing them well is pretty straightforward. Focus on building better habits, and then practice, practice, practice.

Let’s dive in.

Keep regular meetings

You should be meeting once every 2 weeks. Monthly meetings tend to only work when you already have a high level of trust / communication. Never meet less than once a month.
If you must cancel a meeting, reschedule it immediately rather than skipping it.
DO NOT ask them if they are “okay with skipping”. They will almost always say yes, not because they don’t need one, but because they don’t want to appear needy.
Remember that this meeting is your commitment to show that you care, and that they are a priority. Every cancellation sends a message. What kind of signal do you want to give?

Listen more, talk less

Let your team member set some agenda items beforehand (tools can help with this, see below). This will make it far easier for you to jump to any pressing concerns or challenges they’re working on.
If you don’t have an agenda from them, ask them at the beginning of the meeting. This can be as simple as asking, “What’s on your mind?”.
Embrace awkward silences. Your goal is to try and flush out what is worrying them. It’s your job to force the conversation into sometimes uncomfortable territory.
Avoid using 1-on-1s as a status update meeting. There are far better (asynchronous) ways to get status updates. Make the most of this valuable time you are spending together.
Do not spend the entire meeting (or any of it!) on your phone or laptop (take notes in a notebook if needed). You are here to listen. Give them your full attention. If you aren’t listening, they will definitely notice, and likely be less open to sharing in the future. This will make it more difficult over time to understand their concerns.

Address the elephant in the room

Your team member may not want to discuss it, but 1-on-1s can be a great medium to raise and discuss sensitive issues.
If you do this right, you can learn a lot about how the controversial message is being received. Pay close attention to their tone and body language. Such invaluable signals are often missed when discussing tricky topics in group settings.
This can be exhausting if you do this with your whole team, but it’s still worth it. Would you rather spend a few hours diving into this and figure out the state of affairs, or leave things up in the air? Remember that by the time any real issues surface, they may have evolved into something far worse.

Take the temperature

Take notes during/after your 1-on-1 to identify key issues raised. Highlight any areas for yourself that might be a flag, and be sure to followup on it as soon as possible.
Record a simple “green/yellow/red” measure for each team member. Look out for extended patterns of yellow/red…
Pay close attention to their tone, words, and body language. You can usually see the signs of a disgruntled employee way before it’s too late.
Be pro-active. It only takes a couple of skipped 1-on-1s to miss even the strongest warning signals. Companies move fast, but so do people.

Track performance

Use 1-on-1s for tracking details about incidents related to performance. Sometimes, it can be difficult to see when an individual is underperforming. Each week is a mix of good and bad, so things never seem that bad. That is, until you look at your notes over a three month period, and notice some disturbing patterns.
Communicate your concerns in each meeting. Provide clear guidance to get them addressed. Use the recurring meeting as the platform for reinforcing your expectations. Be as specific as possible.
If you have to take the difficult decision of letting someone go, these notes will enable you to decide with data. It’s not only about defensibility and fairness, it’s also about peace of mind during a very stressful period.
You can track positive performance achievements the same way. Use this technique to help justify your recommendations for compensation or other awards.

Follow up

I recommend sending out emails every meeting for the following:

Reminder emails the day before a meeting, with a reminder of action items from last meeting. Team members should reply with their desired agenda items for this meeting.
Followup emails after the meeting with the action items agreed upon in the meeting.

If you wish to automate the above, consider using an online 1-on-1 management tool. There are a few out there, but the one I’ve used with success is Lighthouse (if you do sign up, tell em I sent you!).

Be sure to actually review the previous action items in the next meeting. Doing so sets the expectation that you are both going to follow-up on any commitments made. In turn, this reinforces the value of the meetings to both parties.

Hopefully you’ve gotten a sense of how important 1-on-1s are for your organization. Try applying a new technique for a couple weeks, and see how it works for you. The best path to long-term improvement is iterative changes.

What other techniques have you employed with success? Let me know in the comments, I’d love to hear them!

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Hiring for Diversity & Inclusion

May 14, 2018

There are many reasons why building diverse teams within inclusive environments is beneficial. Others have written about them at length, and the cases are compelling. If you aren’t already familiar with the data and rationale, please take the time to do some research on it. Without strong intrinsic motivation from your leadership, change is unlikely.

With that in mind, here are a few motivations that drive me:

Product: As we build products for a wide audience (especially consumer facing), we often lack a diversity of perspective in the people building it. Despite how disciplined one might be in terms of trying not to just “build for yourself”, the creative ideas that come from people who have totally different experiences than us simply cannot be emulated by will. So, our products end up suffering and a large portion of our consumer audience does not resonate with them as strongly as they could have.
Talent: Hiring is already one of the hardest things to do in terms of finding great talent without breaking the bank. Underrepresented groups are often not in the typical places we hire, and so there is a lot of untapped talent out there if we go to the right places (similar argument is often made for remote workers, it’s slightly different but core idea is the same).
Opportunity: This one is not economical but rather more around principles: We should be doing everything in our power to ensure that people actually have a truly equal opportunity to succeed and contribute to common goals. The world as it exists today has systemic discrimination which makes it easier for people carrying privilege to access certain positions and opportunities (to better understand this issue, read Ijeoma Oluo’s wonderful book. It then follows that in order to truly provide equal opportunities we need to go out of our way to provide access for those that are underprivileged. This is not over-biasing to hire them exclusively, but rather compensating for the extra obstacles they have to go through just to be seen and heard, and giving them equal voice in the conversation of our hiring decisions.

Typically, people tend to focus on (1) and (2), but personally I believe (3) is just the right thing to do, and so that is often what drives me the most.

This post is for those of you who are ready to start improving your teams today. In my last startup, I spent a lot of time working to build a healthy level of diversity in the team. While we were successful in achieving a strong representation of women in the company, we struggled in other areas. I learned a lot through the process, and am hoping some of these techniques will help you in your own efforts.

Here are 5 simple ways to improve the diversity of your hiring pipeline:

1. Write inclusive job descriptions

The easiest step is to review your job descriptions. They likely have language that discourages certain groups, without you even realizing it. Studies have shown that certain terms and words can be off-putting to women vs men. Also, women tend to avoid applying to jobs unless they feel 100% qualified. By contrast, men will generally apply as long as they feel they meet the majority of criteria. Reshma Saujani did an excellent TED talk on this topic.

To address this, you should:

Remove terms that could be discouraging or aggressive to certain groups. Textio is a great tool to help with this.
Encourage applicants to apply even if they don’t meet 100% of the criteria
Explicitly encourage candidates from underrepresented groups to apply. Emphasizing your intent and policies around equal representation

Try and imagine reading your own job descriptions from as many different perspectives as possible. Then ask yourself, “If I was X, would I really apply to this job?”

2. Create a welcoming office environment

It’s important to recognize that even with the best intentions of a hiring manager, the external perception of your company can work against you. What do the photos on your website show? It may seem welcoming to you, but try to imagine a candidate of color, a woman, or a transgendered individual. Do you paint a picture of uniformity, or inclusivity?

This is a tough thing to work on early on, but I found that once you get this right, it can yield exponential returns. Imagine a woman being interviewed by your team of all men. Even if she liked the role, she would be taking on significant cultural risk by accepting the position. Can she rely on your team to be considerate, thoughtful and inclusive of her, given they already have a team of ten without a single woman? Is the job worth that kind of risk?

By contrast, imagine her attending an interview and seeing even one other woman. The risk she takes drops dramatically. The same effect of course applies to other underrepresented groups. The lesson is here is that within each group, the first hire will be tough, but it’ll only get easier from there.

3. Look for “Culture add” not “Culture fit”

We all tend to have ideas in our head of what the perfect candidate looks like. While it’s important to have a sense of the skill-sets and experience you’re looking for, it’s equally important not to include specific schools or degrees in our “required” list of traits in the candidate. We need to remember that not everyone benefits from the privileges of top tier schools, and when they succeed in the field despite that, it demonstrates a level of perseverance and dedication that is often hard to find.

Often, hiring managers use the term “culture fit” to describe a personal, unspoken list of credentials they filter for. As a result, it becomes an invisible wall that certain candidates cannot get past, regardless of their qualifications.

Take down the wall.

Instead, look for candidates that will be a “culture add”, and evolve the overall culture of the team by extending it with their unique background and perspectives.

4. Enroll in diversity training

Building a diverse hiring funnel is hard work. It takes effort and perseverance to get right. Sometimes, it can help to get some guidance to ensure that the whole team (not just the hiring manager) is on the same page in terms of building the right environment and working against unconscious bias. Luckily, there are some great institutions focused on this issue that provide great resources and training (e.g. Women 2.0, ParadigmIQ).

If you do schedule trainings, everyone on your team should attend. While you may be interested in it for the hiring best practices, the more crucial training will likely be for your team to learn how to build and maintain an inclusive office environment.

5. Post in diversity-focused job boards

Hiring managers sometimes make a token effort to look for diverse candidates, only to give up a short time later, citing a lack of diverse candidates in their applicants list.

Are the candidates not there, or are you not looking for them in the right places? Is it really that surprising that candidates who don’t conform to the typical stereotypes for the role also don’t hang out in the typical social networks / job boards / etc.?

Thankfully, there are now job boards which focus specifically on reaching diverse candidates (here’s a good list). The goal should not be to post only in these boards, but to use them as an additional channel in your overall pipeline.

The logic behind this is simple: go where the candidates are.

Building diverse teams is not easy. It takes consistent action, perseverance and dedication. Still, from both a moral and economic perspective, it’s totally worth the effort.

If there are other techniques or resources that you’ve used with success, let me know in the comments! I’d love to hear from you. Together, we can look forward to smarter, more inclusive, and healthier hiring practices.

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The Cost of American Credit

Mar 21, 2018

About a year ago, towards the end of 2017, I wrote a quick post about the horrific Equifax breach. If you want to take a few simple steps to mitigate your risk from it, check it out. It’s been a while since then, and it occurred to me that many people have already forgotten all about it. Our politicians already have. I know there are so many things to worry about these days, but it’s important for people to truly understand the consequences of the Equifax hack, and to take whatever actions they can to protect themselves. This is no joke: it is quite likely a significant number of people’s entire livelihoods will be destroyed as a result of this breach.

We Are All At Risk Now

To put it bluntly: every single American is at risk at the moment, with the potential problems ranging from identity theft to hacking your online accounts to tax fraud to . . . well, pretty much anything is possible now. How can a simple hack be such a big deal? Aren’t there hacks all the time? Everyone always says those are a big deal and then my life doesn’t change so… how is this different?

It’s very different. The reality is that your credit information includes so much sensitive data in one location (your social security, your addresses, your credit cards, all your bank relationships, etc.).. and all of that is exposed now thanks to the breach. A malicious attacker has absolute and unprecedented power to do as they please with this information. Yes, you can monitor your credit for a while, but the attackers are intelligent, and will likely not do anything with your data until at least a year from now. They will wait for everyone to forget. Then, just when everyone feels safe with the blanket of ignorance, they’ll make their move. It will likely be very costly to many people. This is why I’m posting this now.

You may be tempted to close this tab and ignore the potential threat. That would definitely be easier, and I don’t blame you for wanting to. Dealing with security in our digital era is not simple, but the good news is you can take some steps to mitigate the damage (there is no real way to undo the damage, the best we can do is try and limit its impact on us).

So how did we even get here? Of course, the breach was the trigger, but once you dive into the infrastructure of our credit system, it seems almost inevitable that this happened. The hack could have easily been prevented, but the level of incompetence in the entities which are tasked with securing one of the most sensitive data sets in America is just shocking. To understand the real impacts of how we find ourselves so vulnerable, let’s first get a better understanding of the system of credit in America.

Building Credit is Hard

Let’s think about how people establish credit today. Put simply: people will not trust you with things of value (money, cars, houses, etc.) unless other people have already trusted you with things of value. In other words, the entire system is based on relationships — in order to make new ones, you have to have existing ones. Want a credit card with no credit? Well, you can get a crappy one, or you can get a co-signer. If you want a car, show your credit history. If you want a house, show your lease payment history. And so on.

This makes it particularly difficult for people who are just starting out in this country. You simply cannot avoid the credit system to participate in the economy. This reminds us how critical the system is to the functioning of our population (and how horrifying it is that it is among the least secure systems out there).

In my case, I came to the U.S. from Canada, and I had outstanding credit there which I expected to carry over. I was sorely mistaken. I was in my twenties, but to the American credit system, I was born in 2006 (the year I got my social security number). I found this strange, but at the time, only mildly infuriating — I didn’t have any major purchases needing credit, so it didn’t really bother me then. Also, I was lucky enough to have opened a credit card and the history of “successfully paying” my zero balances built up until I came back a year later. Still, when I moved to the U.S. in 2007, I had difficulty getting an apartment with such little credit. I was lucky and managed to get one anyway, but it was a clear lesson that I had a lot of work ahead of me — whatever this “credit” thing was, I needed to work on it and build it, or else I’d have trouble thriving in this country.

For most people, being able to establish credit is a painstaking process that can take literally their entire lives. If you think that sounds silly, and have good credit without thinking about it much, you should take a minute and thank your privilege. You likely had some help — if it wasn’t your family getting you a credit card early, it was the safety of their financial security which allowed you to so boldly go and open one up yourself. There are no real consequences to jumping if you know there’s a net waiting for you.

The rest of the country, however, has to struggle with the already overwhelming challenge of simply paying their bills — and credit is a convenient answer to their problems. Unfortunately, even though most people have a credit card, they generally don’t bother managing their credit score. It’s hard to blame them — the complexity of managing one’s credit can be so high that there are many entities out there that will happily take your money simply to help you deal with the credit agencies. Most people can’t afford luxuries like that, or simply don’t think about their credit that much. As a result, financial institutions are able to apply leverage, often with a healthy dose of superior attitude, and intimidate people into paying higher rates or fees because their credit isn’t great.

The tragedy is that most people don’t even know why their credit score is low, or what to do about it. One could write a book about ways to improve your credit (perhaps I could write another post about it, comment if you would be interested!), but for now let’s look at the who the heck these credit “agencies” are, and how they managed to get to make all decisions for the country about who is a “good” and “bad” financial citizen.

The Credit Triad

The “big three” credit agencies that are used as sources for individual credit scores are Equifax, Experian and TransUnion. While they each have different founding stories (Experian actually dates back 200 years), they each started as a way for creditors to have access to a list of “good consumers” that they could trust. This was to defend against bad actor consumers, and allow creditors to be more generous with amounts they lent without exposing themselves to too much risk.

So, the first thing to understand is that credit agencies were built, first and foremost, for creditors (i.e. banks, lenders, etc.). They were*,*of course, notdesigned and continue to not be designed for consumers.

The second thing to note is that despite the credit system being foundational to our economy and society, the government did not appoint them, nor does it oversee them. The words “agency” and “bureau” give them undue legitimacy — they are simply for-profit corporations that are seeking to provide a product (your data) to their customers (creditors and businesses).

Each agency simply gained prominence as a business, and eventually the three of them became the standard sometime around the 1970s, when credit cards really took off. At the time, creditors were getting screwed left and right, and there was a strong need for some sort of system to protect from bad actors. The demand for the “good and bad lists” grew, and eventually businesses across the country started leveraging these scores to help make their financial decisions on behalf of customers.

So, the “need for credit” is hopefully clear now (in reality, that need was dictated by Keynesian monetary policy which has caused far worse problems, but that’s a whole post in itself)… the problem is that these agencies are doing a terrible job at providing credit. Specifically, they offer very little transparency, make decisions that are often arbitrary, and heavily penalize those who they choose to deny access to credit to. Worst of all, they give consumers little or no control over their own credit data. If you’ve heard the news lately about China’s social credit system which would deny citizens rights to being able to travel, and think that’s crazy — well, our credit system already does penalize people in similar ways. It’s just not run by our government (usually that’s a good thing, but these guys have managed to outdo even the government in incompetency), and the consequences are different but arguably even more fundamental to life (e.g. you cannot buy a car or a house, or even rent an apartment).

Equifax: King of Cruelty, Emir of Incompetence, Sovereign of Stupidity…

While Experian and TransUnion have their own massive flaws, let me focus on the star of the proverbial Dipshit Display today: Equifax. Where do I even begin? I can’t even pull a narrative around all these, so I’m just going to share a few that come to mind. It’s worth noting that every time I was about to publish this post, another one would come up… but I had to stop at some point. Here goes…

They knew about the breach, and did nothing

Equifax knew about the breach for MONTHS, and was warned multiple times, but chose to do absolutely nothing. This worse than incompetence — it’s outright criminal negligence.

They built a website solely designed to trick and manipulate you

When the breach became public, they put up a website designed to tell you whether or not you were at risk of the breach. This website was utterly pointless, since pretty much all their data was exposed. Still, they managed to make a useless website *harmful.*To this day I’m still honestly shocked at how horrifyingly bad this website was… here’s why:

To find out if you were “at risk”, you had to submit your SSID just to get the info, and that would sign you up for their credit monitoring service. This wasn’t optional — you either get to find out and sign up, or you don’t get either. Yes, they gave the service away for free for one year as a gesture, but the truth is you’ll need monitoring for life now. And who the hell wants to trust EQUIFAX to monitor your credit?
By agreeing to it you would unknowingly agree to forced arbitration. This was part of a hidden clause in the agreement to signup for monitoring. Forced arbitration means you cannot ever take a case against them to court, and cannot participate in class action lawsuits. Yes, they really did that (although later once there was enough public uproar, they backed down and changed the policy). Think about how evil you need to be to do this on a website designed to inform users of how badly you just screwed them over in a massive breach? Honestly, this is cartoon villain stuff.
If you read my earlier post on the breach, one of the things you’d be doing is setting up a credit freeze on the three agencies. Of course, with Equifax, this comes with fun additional breaches of security! Specifically, when you create the freeze on their dilapidated site, you get a “secure” PIN. This unique one-time PIN can then be used to unfreeze your credit at a later time. Unfortunately, the way they generated them is to simply take the timestamp of when you requested the freeze. This is incredibly insecure, and means that an attacker who had your data through the breach could EASILY generate your PIN by just trying a small set of timestamps since the breach and unfreeze your credit without you even knowing it! There’s literally too much incompetence here for me to keep up with. Good LORD.
When sharing this amazing website with affected consumers, they actually sent out a link to a fake phishing website instead. MULTIPLE TIMES.

Their executives actually profited from the breach

Once the CIO knew about the breach, they decided to sell stock (almost $2 million worth) before it crashed from the breach news. I can’t even make this stuff up.

After spilling the oil, then throwing people overboard to choke on said oil, they later revealed there was in fact more oil

In February of this year, Equifax revealed the breach was even worse than they thought. Super duper surprising!

Honestly, every time I’m about to publish this post, they f*&! up again and I have to add another entry. I’m just going to stop now, but you should assume there is much, much more to this list…

OK, hopefully you get the point by now. Our entire American economic lives are mostly dependent on credit, which is managed by a group of private agencies, one of whom is Equifax, which probably deserves its own movie just to discuss all the various ways it is awful and evil and a colossal failure in every way.

So, how do we get out of this mess? Well… do you want the bad news, or the bad news?

In this marriage, there’s no divorce

The agencies were never elected, and so they can’t be voted out. You can’t simply “stop using” an agency: banks and businesses choose to use them and you have virtually no control over their decisions. If you want a loan from a bank, they will rely on these agencies, regardless of your opinion of them.

Can the government help? That would be great! Sadly, the FCC has limited jurisdiction over these agencies, at worst we may see them getting fines, but that doesn’t really help us. Some admirable politicians are really trying, but they can only do so much with limited power. There was a probe to investigate the massive breach and its consequences, but as you could predict, it has yielded nothing and recently it was announced that they were pulling back on the probe. Great…

Solutions

There is a story about a guy who successfully sued Equifax himself, and won $8,000. It is heartening to see, but the majority of consumers will not have the time or the patience to take such actions. That said, it could be worth it and it’s great to see that at least we can get some justice on a small scale.

Ideally, customers would have their financial relationships on a repository that they control, with full access, preventing them from having to rely entirely on some centralized entity. Some people (even the U.S. government) have hinted about how “blockchain technology” could be useful here, and there is even a company (Credito) working on this building a global credit system on the blockchain. I’m not bullish on such solutions. I have done a lot of studying into Bitcoin lately, and am pretty convinced about its potential, but am entirely unconvinced of the basis for all these “blockchain apps” that launch their own tokens. It’s probably a good topic for another post, though I did a tweetstorm on it. Still, I am in favor of any kind of research to get us away from the existing credit system in America.

Alternatively, Bitcoin could save us from this plight, by simply enabling people to be less reliant on credit in general (even if the credit system doesn’t change, people can liberate themselves from using credit as much, or at all). Bitcoin does not have any central bank to create money, artificial or otherwise, and so all money in Bitcoin is 100% backed funds. If you want to learn more about this, check out this great post on Bitcoin on monetary policy.

Hopefully this post is a strong reminder to you to be aware of the current risks with credit in America, and encourages you to take appropriate precautions. Not just right now, but on a regular basis. Spread the word, and stay safe!

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Salman Ansari

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