Collections
Attention and time
Where attention goes, and how to protect it.
Career and change
Moving through work without a fixed plan.
Value and money
What makes work valuable, and what money has to do with it.
Communication and meaning
Saying what you mean, and why efficiency gets in the way.
Self-authorship
Knowing yourself as the basis for everything else.
People and community
Relationships without transactions.
Technology and AI
What tools amplify, and what they cannot do for you.
Posts
Curious About the Work, Not the Person
It’s possible to be curious about someone’s work without being curious about them. To study the output, craft, the thing, and never reach the person who
56 Prompts for Your Creative Surplus
Week 10 of 10 — Creative Surplus: A Chapter a Week
What’s left when you can’t use it
On Aesthetics, the general and the specific
Self Leadership Instead of Thought Leadership
Thought leadership is a media business. It runs on the economics of attention: a post, a talk, a byline, a quote in someone else’s deck. The currency
On Generative Value
Self-leadership begins when we learn to draw a frame without drawing a picture. Every other mode of communication is, in effect, telling people what to do rather
The Economics of Mutuality
On living practice, self-authorship, and what can’t be optimized
Against a Personal Brand
There is a version of your life that is working exactly as designed. Your attention flows toward the same kinds of problems. Your professional network reinforces the same
Strategy
Who is writing your strategy? How do you navigate your practice and work in a way that aligns with your worldview and personality?
Economically, utility is cheaper and
Personal Economy
Time and attention are all we have. When do you give attention to your own thoughts, and when do you ask others to do the same?
When we
Design
On limits of planning and the potential of agency
What is creativity, and why is it important?
What is creativity, and why is it important?
Talking About Work
Thoughts on Recording 10 Podcast Conversations.
Transactional Spaces
Nothing new is created in transactional spaces.
These are spaces that operate from a scarcity mindset, which is why they prioritize access and efficiency over value and creativity.
Digital Provincialism
Digital provincialism is intentionally moving toward passive information economies and away from self-authorship. It is not only accepting but actively pursuing the snugness of algorithmic duvets.
It
Philosophizing
Optimistic act, Anchored in Realism and Love
Being in Space, Ep 1
Marcus Jenal and Sascha Mombartz
Being Reductive
Being reductive is being overly simplistic without acknowledging its cost.
Thoughtfulness is the intuitive knowledge that there is more, and having the fortitude (self-leadership) and patience to
System of Attention
You are a system of attention, waiting for stimuli and dispatching action.
Your attention is a living, moving system, like your body. It must remain free to sense.
Harmony
A practice in harmony seeks language for its curiosities and has the rigor to articulate the value of its clarity, once it comes.
They innovate at a level
Routine
Routine expands time.
When we make suggestions to ourselves instead of making a decision, we lose the robustness and mindspace that consistency opens up.
Maximizing one’s space
Not Caring
Not Caring is an Active State
Art Holds Meaning
Art holds meanings that have yet to be found in words.
Next time you find yourself in a place of deep meaning, but one that resists articulation1, consider
Mindspace
The ability to multi-lane efforts suffers the most under a scarcity mindset and is necessarily reduced to a reactive, last-in-first-out approach.
Self-Leadership
No one is going to remind you to get to know yourself
Bridges
Building Bridges Between Ambitions and Actions
Questions
On 'what-if' and 'should-I' questions
Direction of Thinking
Meaning is a uniquely embodied phenomenon
AI and Money
AI will outpace humans in all structured tasks. If you’re producing repeatable deliverables, you will be automated. What is changing at this particular moment is the definition
Money
Not all money is the same.
Jigs
When a ‘nudge’ graduates to ‘jig1,’ it integrates into a system. We are all a system (information, time, value), so is a team or an office floor. Once
Clarity, Popularity, and Value
Avoiding doing the obvious thing has nothing to do with seniority or how much you know. Without self-authorship, the student and the CEO will share many forms
People before opportunities.
Work does not define you; you define what work is.
Mindsets
On Abundance and Scarcity
All leadership is self-leadership, all knowledge is self-knowledge.
All leadership is self-leadership, all knowledge is self-knowledge.
We can’t inspire others without first dropping into a mindful place, which lets us see the beauty
Generousity
Developing the capacity to be friendly without needing to be friends is the best way to negotiate power and love (Adam Kahane).
When we say things with more
Objectivity
Objectivity is another name for clarity. It is a communication mechanism. Something that has not happened yet (future, imagination, an idea) cannot be objective. This realization is liberating
Prompts for Humans
New App
Self
Creative Disembodiment
Networking is Bad for Your Network
Efficiency is Bad for your Time
Crafting a Self is Immediately Irrelevant
Coaching content often focuses on tweaks and hacks to maximize the self. Promoting accountability and habit formation tricks can risk falling into the territory of ‘shoulds’ and indirectly
Flow
Like water, care needs to flow. When blocked by communication channels, economic models, or leadership, it will inevitably create dissonance. In these places, the inner, expansive self can
Motivation
Meaning and motivation are the same.
When we write, we seek to convey meaning. It is the fuel of connection and the currency of creativity. Communication without meaning
Technology
Technology does not change habits of mind; it amplifies existing ones.
If you use AI to write without reframing what you write, you will produce more, weaker words.
Presence and Consistency
On Professional Mindfulness
Planning Opportunities
An Oxymoron
Time and Space
Briefs need time; prompts need space.
Wanting More
Self-authorship cannot exist without self-curiosity.
On Indexes and Standards
An index is a communication meeting point, a way to describe something constantly changing and agree on a temporary pause, an evolutionary truce. If we allow indexes to
What is Your Career?
Change happens in the middle ground between meticulous 5-year plans and living in the moment.
There is an inherent tension between experiencing the now and imagining more.
Utility is for Machines
To deliver value (meaning) for others, we need to have access to understand what something means for us. Only when we can articulate the meaning (in a product,
Everything You Like, You Like For a Reason
Everything you like, you like for a reason. All of those reasons connect with your aesthetics (/intuition). In a personal constitution. Being curious about that place of noticing
Protected From Change
Taylorist image turned on its head
Better Signals
There are opportunities for opinions all around us.
Fixed Utility
Fixed utility is a stationary value. Value is a developmental movement, seeking a new frame and form of thinking that often happens through an overview, a new interpretation
Convincing
When we onboard people to a point of view (/convince), we make an invisible comment on what is right and what is wrong. Convincing can be generalized as
Generality
As I take stock of ideas, living and evergreen, I am reminded of approaching ideas as particular or general. Some ideas benefit from context and attention to individuated
Imagination
Acting on your opinions will necessarily generate dissonance. When deploying a new way of looking at reality, it will discern things, people, and habits. These ideas are part
Movement
How do we sense movement before we get anywhere? As we see more complexity and how norms limit us with cause-and-effect thinking, we begin to move,
Changing the world by Changing yourself
If we mean what we say, we will inevitably change the world. The world is made from interconnected and interrelated people, ideas, and places. Communication is the glue
Average Value
Value exists despite efficiency and not because of it. When we pursue protocols and tools to reduce friction in production or communication, we hope and measure (QA) that
Recreational Communication
Value can be recreational or transformational. The most obvious example is information (say in a book, talk, or an email). It can be either side of that dichotomy
Communication
This week, I want to open space between reporting facts and sharing meaning. You can think about the difference between the picture and the frame. Instead of putting
Writing
Writing is thinking, but we are incentivized to do rather than think. If you’re good at what you do, the market (the people you know professionally) will
Places
We work in places. A place is a location (/medium) where (/a form of) communication happens. It can be an office, Slack community, regular Zoom meetings where people
Advice
Belonging comes at a cost, but only if you don’t consider it. Mindful practice is necessary to integrate and not only follow other people’s advice.
Advice
Creativity
Creativity is the ability to be yourself next to others. Creativity is intrinsic; once it is articulated, it moves to production. It is there to be discovered rather
Branding
Counterintuitively, when it comes to language and ideas, branding operates against aesthetics. If a practitioner’s ideas or activities are alive (developing in opinions with time and people)
Open Source
Open-source culture puts access above anything else. It does not ask for care or meaning, and by ignoring those aspects of communication, it often stays limited to
Commodifying
Commodifying the self never pays off. When we optimize every interaction with other people through strict agendas and goal-setting, we effectively limit growth opportunities. Growth only comes
Articulation
Communication degrades with efficiency — when trying to communicate thin meaning with too many words, or when running out of patience and space to develop a living idea, and
Signals
Declining self-authorship is the most comprehensive offense to the self. It is an opportunity of the highest order because it informs all other places out in the
Plateaus
It is easy to think that people pay us for what we make, for producing optimized outputs in a frictionless Configuration.
But they pay us for who we
Choreography
When we choreograph our careers, we look at a scene from the outside, us included. Groups of people and events are plotted on a timeline, resulting in an
Inquisitive
You can’t be a good leader without knowing yourself. All leadership is self-leadership. Being curious, imaginative, and inquisitive about the meaning the self sees in the
Dualities
One of the best ways to revive tired words is to identify the tension they are meant to hold. Best explained through an example, we can use the
Field
Continuous integration invites playing in a changing area. And, of course, even if we opt for a more stable path, the field is constantly changing. Irrespective of a
Obviousness
Saying the obvious or the quickly understood is easy and friction-free. Doll, maybe. It holds less value than is expected; it asks for nothing and gives nothing