Personal Development on Rabid Curiosity

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Fri, 03 Jul 2026 00:15:00 +0000

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.

Building Fundamental Technical Knowledge

Tue, 17 Mar 2026 10:05:00 -0500

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.

Personal Finance, Investing, and Building the Skill of Long-Term Thinking

Tue, 17 Mar 2026 10:00:00 -0500

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.

Passion, Skill, and Profit: A Callback to Scott Galloway

Tue, 17 Mar 2026 09:55:00 -0500

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.

Sam Altman on Productivity, and How AI Creates Time

Tue, 17 Mar 2026 09:50:00 -0500

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.

Customer Service and The Nordstrom Way

Tue, 17 Mar 2026 09:45:00 -0500

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.

Reflecting on My Past as a Student

Tue, 17 Mar 2026 09:35:00 -0500

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.

Reflections on Trusting Trust

Tue, 17 Mar 2026 09:30:00 -0500

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.

How to Change Your Mind Without Losing Yourself

Tue, 17 Mar 2026 09:25:00 -0500

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.

On Reading Widely, Deeply, Exploring, Exploiting

Tue, 17 Mar 2026 09:20:00 -0500

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.

Zoloft as My Soma

Tue, 17 Mar 2026 09:15:00 -0500

Introduction

In Brave New World, soma is the drug that keeps citizens content, compliant, and untroubled by the weight of real experience. When I started taking Zoloft, I worried about something similar—that I was trading authentic suffering for chemical comfort, blunting the edges that made me who I am. This is a post about why that framing was wrong, and what psychiatric medication actually does and doesn’t change.

Key Points

The soma anxiety: fears about medication changing identity or dulling experience
What SSRIs actually do at a functional level
The difference between treating illness and altering personality
Reflections on before and after: what changed and what stayed the same
The stigma around psychiatric medication and why it persists

Conclusion

Zoloft didn’t make me a different person. It made me more capable of being the person I already was. The soma comparison gets it backwards—it’s the illness, not the treatment, that narrows your world.

The psychology of habit formation

Tue, 10 Mar 2026 14:30:00 +0000

Introduction

This post will explore the psychology behind habit formation and how understanding these mechanisms can help us build better routines.

Key Points

Explain the habit loop: cue, routine, reward.
Discuss the role of dopamine in habit formation.
Offer practical strategies for building positive habits and breaking negative ones.

Conclusion

Summarize the key takeaways and encourage readers to apply these principles to their own lives.

Growth through constraints

Sat, 29 Nov 2025 14:30:00 +0000

Introduction

This post will explore how constraints can lead to personal growth and development.

Key Points

Define constraints and their impact on personal growth.
Discuss examples of growth through constraints in various contexts.
Offer practical tips for embracing constraints in life.

Conclusion

Summarize the key takeaways and encourage readers to reflect on their own experiences with constraints.