Personal Development

I have discovered, through rigorous Thursday-night research, that I only want to deal with Fortune 500 customer support when I am at least a little drunk. Not wrecked. Not “send three paragraphs to the wrong group chat” drunk. Just tilted enough that the whole thing becomes funny before it becomes spiritually expensive. This is not life advice. This is barely even a coping strategy. It is more like finding out that a terrible chair becomes usable if you sit in it sideways. ...

Introduction There’s a pattern in technical work where people become highly skilled at the surface layer of a technology—the tools, the interfaces, the workflows—without developing any understanding of what’s underneath. This works fine until it doesn’t. When something breaks in an unexpected way, or when the tool changes, or when you need to make a non-obvious decision, the lack of fundamentals shows. This post is about why fundamentals matter and how to actually build them. ...

Introduction Most personal finance advice is technically correct and psychologically useless. Spend less than you earn. Invest early and consistently. Don’t time the market. These are right, but they don’t address the harder problem: humans are bad at long-term thinking by default, and investing is almost entirely a long-term game. The skill worth building isn’t picking stocks—it’s training your own cognition to make better decisions across long time horizons. Key Points Why standard personal finance advice fails to change behavior The psychological obstacles to long-term thinking: hyperbolic discounting, loss aversion, availability bias How to build the habit of thinking in decades rather than quarters The investing principles that actually hold up once you account for human psychology Connecting personal finance decisions to broader life goals rather than treating them in isolation Conclusion The goal of personal finance isn’t to optimize a spreadsheet—it’s to give your future self more options. Getting there requires building a cognitive skill: the ability to treat future outcomes as real and worth protecting. That skill, once built, turns out to be useful far beyond money.

Introduction Scott Galloway’s provocation—that “follow your passion” is terrible career advice, and you should instead follow the money—is a useful corrective to a lot of fuzzy thinking. But like most contrarian takes, it overcorrects. The real framework is more nuanced: passion, skill, and economic demand interact, and the sweet spot is somewhere in the middle. This post uses Galloway’s argument as a jumping-off point for thinking clearly about how to build a career worth having. ...

Introduction Sam Altman has written and spoken about productivity in ways that are worth taking seriously—not because he’s a productivity guru, but because he’s someone who operates at very high leverage and thinks carefully about where his time goes. His framing around AI is particularly interesting: the claim isn’t just that AI makes you faster, it’s that it qualitatively changes the relationship between effort and output. This post reflects on those ideas and what they actually mean for how ordinary people should think about their time. ...

Introduction Nordstrom built a reputation on a simple idea: give employees the authority to do whatever it takes to make the customer happy. The famous employee handbook was one rule: use good judgment. This is either a profound insight into organizational culture or a naive fantasy, depending on what you believe about how people behave at work. This post takes the Nordstrom model seriously as a lens for thinking about service, culture, and what organizations actually incentivize. ...

Introduction Looking back at yourself as a student is a strange exercise. You’re trying to understand someone who had less information, fewer skills, and a different set of pressures than you do now—but who was also making decisions that shaped everything that followed. This post is a reflection on what I got right, what I got wrong, and what I wish I had understood earlier about how to actually learn. ...

Introduction Ken Thompson’s 1984 Turing Award lecture, “Reflections on Trusting Trust,” makes a deceptively simple argument: you cannot fully trust code you did not write yourself, because the compiler that built it might have been compromised. The implications reach far beyond computer security. Trust in complex systems is always, at some level, an act of faith—and understanding that shapes how you should build, operate, and rely on things you can’t fully verify. ...

Introduction Changing your mind is supposed to be a virtue—a sign of intellectual honesty and willingness to update on evidence. But in practice it’s uncomfortable, because our beliefs are entangled with our identity. Admitting you were wrong about something important can feel like admitting you were a different, lesser person. This post is about how to actually do it: update your beliefs without losing your sense of self in the process. ...

Introduction The explore/exploit tradeoff is a concept from computer science and decision theory: when do you keep searching for something better versus committing to what you’ve found? It maps surprisingly well onto how we read. Wide reading is exploration—building a broad map of ideas. Deep reading is exploitation—extracting full value from a rich vein. Both matter, and the tension between them shapes what kind of thinker you become. Key Points The explore/exploit framework and how it applies to reading and learning What wide reading provides that deep reading can’t, and vice versa How to recognize when you’re stuck in a rut versus appropriately going deep The role of serendipity in intellectual development Building a personal reading practice that balances both modes Conclusion The best readers do both. Exploration keeps you from becoming a narrow specialist who misses the bigger picture. Exploitation keeps you from becoming a dilettante who knows a little about everything and a lot about nothing. The skill is knowing when to switch.