There is a specific move a conversation makes where the thing on the table suddenly becomes you. You feel it before you can name it. The next two seconds decide the next hour, maybe the next week. These are the notes I keep for that moment. If you only remember five lines from this post, remember these: 1. Pause. 3 to 5 seconds. Say nothing. 2. Say "say that again." Flat, no edge....
In an earlier post I wrote about the mental shifts underneath a healthier way of being in your own head. This one is the next layer down: a map of where a person actually sits at any given moment, and how they move from being stuck at the bottom of the ladder to flourishing at the top. It is a seven-rung ladder. At the bottom is the most disempowered a human can get....
There are seven ideas I have been sitting with lately about how your own mind actually works. None of them are new. None of them are mine. But together they form something like an operating system for how to be in your own head without being at war with it. Here they are, in my own words, with what I think each one is really saying. 1. You are a processor of experience, not a passive victim of circumstance This is the one everything else sits on top of....
Everyone loves the story of picking the one stock that 10x’d. Nobody tells the story of the four picks that went to zero next to it. So I went looking for what the actual data says about stocks vs ETFs, and it changed how I build my portfolio. Here is the plain-English version. The uncomfortable number Over the past 15 years, about 90% of professional active fund managers underperformed the S&P 500 (SPIVA data)....
There is an old line about the software industry: cloud eats open source, open source eats software. Each layer commoditizes the one below it, and value moves up. Open source made writing code less of a differentiator. Cloud made running software into a paid service. Every generation, whatever was the moat becomes the utility. Naturally people expect AI to be the next step. Something that eats cloud the way cloud ate open source....