Kevin Kelly writes:
“Gratitude will unlock all other virtues and is something you can get better at.”
I couldn’t agree more.
The best single sentence (so far) from “Nexus” by Yuval Noah Harari :
”As Marshall McLuhan might have put it, the pigeon was the message.”
Time is your clients’ most valuable currency.
And it’s yours too.
My first insight into AI’s genuine utility came when I asked ChatGPT to tell me how an unfamiliar Python library worked, as if I were a young child.
Even if its answer had been wrong - like an ill-advised coworker - it gave enough insight to remove my block and keep moving forward.
(But it wasn’t.)
“Nobody will open a book and wish it contains more types of letters or be disappointed because it is, again, just another variation of the same alphabet.”
-Sönke Ahrens
#Quotes
“Truth is the daughter of time, not of authority.”
-Francis Bacon
#Quotes
Instead of asking “what went well / what needs improving” during your next retrospective, try giving everyone the chance to talk about how they were challenged, what they learned, and how they personally grew during a sprint (or project, or…)
Changing the framing can make all the difference.
I find myself talking a lot more about how products adapt to unexpected changes in their operating environment.
The world is messy but our products don’t need to be fragile.
Resilience is quickly becoming a basic expectation in an increasingly chaotic time.
“You must be harsher on yourself and on others: failure to communicate is the fault not of the dull-witted audience but of the unstrategic communicator.”
-Robert Greene
I am reminded (yet again!) that I always need to be clarifying, repeating, and doing what can feel like over-explaining in the moment.
It really, really does save time, reduce friction, and end up building trust.
“The future is like weather: a thousand thunderheads on the horizon, a haze of weird thunder-sleet in our eyes, and we never know where the lightning is going to strike. The best we can do is prepare for each possible hit by testing the possibilities.”
-Warren Ellis
#Quotes
I’ve worked in an industry that prides itself on dramatic upheaval and reinvention my entire life.
Spending the time early-career to learn vi editing commands has proven to be one of the most durable investments I’ve ever made in my education.
“When asked how he would order his thoughts if he had one hour to save the world, Einstein sagely responded that he would spend fifty-five minutes defining the problem and save the world in five minutes.”
-Jim Mattis
#Quotes
“The future is unwritten.”
-Joe Strummer
#Quotes
Wordle and Edison
I really enjoy playing Wordle each day. It’s now become a standard part of my morning routine. With a mug of hot coffee in hand, I start a new game immediately after finishing my journaling.
One of the things I genuinely appreciate about Wordle is how it reminds me that my mistakes actually contain valuable bits of information.
Maybe a letter isn’t in the word at all and can be ignored.
Maybe it’s there but not yet in the right place.
It’s all worth paying attention to and by carefully considering my mistakes, I’m eventually led to the right answer.
This applies to all things in life really.
Which makes me think of what Thomas Edison was talking about when he famously remarked,
“I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.”
As long as you’re learning from your mistakes, missteps, and failures you’re growing smarter and heading in the right direction.
What builds loyalty and trust?
Consistently delivering on your product’s core promise again and again, from release to release and in every single interaction.
I’ve been learning how to setup neovim as a modern writing environment, an interface into my Obsidian vault.
No, I’m not actually writing anything during the process - but the experimentation is just fascinating.
Am I repurposing a fusion powered turbine for use as a lawn mower? I mean, maybe?
“The easiest way to learn directly is to simply spend a lot of time doing the thing you want to become good at.”
-Scott H. Young
#Quotes
Always have a well-understood rubric for determining the difference between urgent and important things when you’re prioritizing your backlog.
This adds transparency and helps communicate your thinking in any planning discussions.
Bonus points if you socialize it well in advance too.
I’m pretty sure that asking an AI to create complex regular expressions based upon your conversations should be a specific part of the Turing test.
“Without gratitude what is the point of seeing, and without seeing what is the object of gratitude?”
-Epictetus
#Quotes