What Astronauts Know About Fear That Most Leaders Don't Read online → “ "We become brave by doing brave actions." — Aristotle In April 2001, Chris Hadfield was holding onto the side of the International Space Station with one hand, 250 miles above Earth, when he went blind. He was on a spacewalk, installing a robotic arm, when a drop of cleaning solution drifted off his visor and into his left eye. It turns out that in zero gravity, tears don't fall. The contamination grew into a ball, rolled...
7 days ago • 8 min read
Why Confidence Won't Fix What's Holding You Back Read online → “ "Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate." — Carl Jung Hey there, I keep getting the same question after these essays: "is there a place to do this work together?" So I'm testing the idea. A community for people serious about leveling up their life and work in the AI era. Curious if it's something you'd want. I'm thinking about starting a community for people leveling up their...
14 days ago • 10 min read
Why AI Layoffs Are the Lazy Answer (And What to Do Instead) Read online → “ "Power always stems from cooperation between large numbers of humans." — Yuval Noah Harari, Nexus In 2002, a baseball team (the Oakland Athletics) with almost no money beat teams with ten times the budget by noticing that everyone else was measuring the wrong thing. The story became a Michael Lewis book, and then a movie with Brad Pitt. Most people remember the story as being about math and statistics. I remember the...
21 days ago • 10 min read
How to Write With AI Without Losing Your Voice Read online → “ "You are showing who you are and how you think, not just what you think." — Ann Handley, Everybody Writes If you've been writing with AI for a while, you've probably felt it too. You put in a solid prompt, and it gives you back something clean. Everything is right: the structure, the grammar, and it sounds as if you know what you're talking about. The problem is that it still feels a bit empty. A little hollow. As if it just...
28 days ago • 9 min read
How to Build Trust Faster Than Your Résumé (The 3-Story Method) Read online → “ "Experience is the best teacher. A compelling story is a close second." — Paul Smith (Lead With a Story) The job market is brutal right now. More highly qualified people chasing fewer roles than maybe ever in my career. And credentials might get you in the door, but they almost never get you hired. What I keep watching, over and over, is that the people landing the role are the ones with a story to tell. The...
about 1 month ago • 13 min read
Decision Poverty: Why Your Calendar Overload Isn't a Time Problem Read online → “ Innovation is saying no to 1,000 things. — Steve Jobs I had a conversation a few weeks ago with a senior leader who told me that his calendar no longer belonged to him. For a bit of context, he's one of the sharpest people I know. He's not someone who lacks discipline or struggles with priorities, at least not in the way the word is usually used. But he was having eight hours of meetings on most days. The odd...
about 1 month ago • 10 min read
Your AI sounds generic because it doesn't know you. Here's the fix. Read online → “ "Successful careers are not planned. They develop when people are prepared for opportunities." — Peter Drucker, Managing Oneself Peter Drucker wrote the manual for working with AI in 1999. He just didn't know it yet. Drucker spent his last years writing about a specific kind of worker. Someone whose value didn't come from the company they worked for, but from what they knew, how they thought, and what they...
about 2 months ago • 11 min read
5 Findings That Will Change How You Think About Leadership Read online → “ "Conquering the world is almost easy after we have fully conquered ourselves." — Ryan Holiday For twenty years, leaders have treated self-leadership, inner work, and "lead yourself first" as wellness language. Those words fell into the same category as "fluffy." It's shorthand for something they didn't want to take seriously. I get it. I've spent enough time in corporate to know how the room reacts when someone brings...
about 2 months ago • 7 min read
Mastery Without Mattering: Why Your Wins Feel Empty (And How to Fix It) Read online → “ "Don't aim at success — the more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it. For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side-effect of one's dedication to a cause greater than oneself or as the by-product of one's surrender to a person other than oneself." — Viktor Frankl I've been working my way through Brad Stulberg's...
2 months ago • 11 min read