Sparks

“Don’t fix it if it ain’t broke.”

Oh yeah, well what if fixing shit that ain’t broke is my long cherished coping mechanism that helps me feel safe and worthy in a world where I’m terrified that one wrong step will utterly destroy me? What THEN???

The drive to master information is a drive to feel in control of a fundamentally unctrollable reality.

Weird how the more we try to control the world through force and logic the less alive everything feels, huh?

Just saw a tweet from Jason Cohen that simply said “data informed, not date-driven.” I think it may have just opened my mind and heart up to having a constructive relationship with data?? After a decade swearing off clickbait and choosing to trust my gut, feels like the pendulum is now primed to swing back towards the middle. More will be revealed.

if ur mind and heart aren’t open to an encounter with the unknown, then it’s not a real conversation. it’s just sparkling discussion

The story is the real product, and the product has to enable the story to come true.

Poetry is a natural byproduct of paying deep attention to this world.

Humans want to work with and do business with other humans, and anything that abstracts away and tries to mechanize the process is actively damaging to trust, even if it appears to “work” in the short term.

we learn who we are and what we can contribute to this world not by thinking hard about our identity or purpose, but by Conversing With Reality as a way of life

you can just do things (use AI wisely and with discernment instead of being a techno-maximalist or becoming the unabomber)

there’s a stark difference between performing as if you’re trustworthy and actually BEING trustworthy

the trustmaxxers shall inherit the earth

you’ve gotta be trustmaxxing

my relationship with reading has shifted in a cool way of late. i used to churn thru books as if consuming info was the entire point. but now, i find myself sitting with passages that resonate, journaling about them, returning again and again to books i’ve finished. i want to deepen into conversation and suck the marrow from these works.

it’s a slow, messy, non-optimizable process. but i love it. books feel ALIVE again. 10/10 would recommend

A good product with reliable distribution are table stakes now. It’s trust, relationship, and integrity that will decide the winners of the next era. These are the moats that cannot be copied.

“When nothing seems to help, I go and look at a stonecutter hammering away at his rock perhaps a hundred times without as much as a crack showing in it. Yet at the hundred and first blow it will split in two, and I know it was not that blow that did it, but all that had gone before.”

-Jacob Riis

Most of what we refer to as trust is shallow. It’s about removing the barriers to transaction. Shallow trust can be manipulated and is quick to disappear. Deep trust, by contrast, only emerges in relationship, and is durable and nourishing to all parties, even when there’s no transaction at hand.

A founder’s job is to think deeply and communicate clearly. A writing practice serves both.

There’s an itty bitty shitty committee living in my head.

“What we don’t talk to, we don’t understand. What we don’t understand, we fear. What we fear, we destroy.”

-A quote from Francis Weller’s Alchemy of Initiation audio series.

Why do I habitually follow that which reinforces the story of my brokenness? Why, when following the breadcrumbs of resonance is always an option before me, do I turn my back and head in the opposite direction?

Resonance is a felt sense of recognition. It’s a full body remembering that can only occur when you encounter something in the world that speaks the language of your wholeness.

“An awful lot of what passes for conversation in our culture is merly just intersecting monologues. Because in real conversation you can be taken to places you never expected. You can overhear things from yourself you never knew you had in you. And you can absolutely change in a great conversation.” -John O’Donohue

“One should try to live so that one may die honorably.” John O’Donohue

Who influences the influencers? Got a suspicion that answering this question deeply would explain a lot about the modern world.

Mystical spreadsheets. Who’s working on this?

A recovery meeting is like a fire that the exhausted and weary and downtrodden gather around, where we feel a warmth and sense of belonging that we’d written off as impossible.

What is a human life for? Are we to just accept that the answer is to get materially wealthier and more secure while our spirits wither from malnourishment?

I want to work with companies that take this question seriously. What is a human life for?

I’ve always heard “othering” used in a pejorative sense—like you’re doing something wrong by making a person “the other.”

But when I think about Buber and the philosophy of encounter, to behold anyone or anything as Other is profoundly life giving for all involved. I can never fully know the mystery of you. But I can meet you, the Other, here in dialogue, with my heart open to whatever the encounter may bring.

Type of guy who’s scared of failure, success, AND mediocrity.

So if I’m gonna be scared no matter what, might as well go after what I want with everything I’ve got.

Trust isn’t a problem that can be solved mechanistically. At its core, it’s a spiritual problem that requires spiritual solutions.

If you mistake the circus for reality, you’re going to have a bad time.

A manifesto is a tool for steering a stalled conversation in a more beautiful direction. It brings awareness to the futility and pain of the current conversation and invites the reader into the new conversation. But in order for anything to change, you have to be courageous enough to live into the new conversation, day by day.

the paradox of transformation

For a long time, I’ve believed I needed to “solve” my mental health challenges and shame before I could step forward into a better life. But it’s increasingly clear my shitty mental health is downstream of staying stuck in a life where I feel like I have to fix myself before I can do anything. Much to consider.

The world feels so fucked because we’ve spent two centuries conceptualizing humans as machines, and now we’ve built machines that can out-machine us.

But the future is one where humans are free to become more human, and machines can become more machine-like. A harmony between organic intelligence and machine intelligence.