I’ve written about this before on the blog, but one of my qualms about architecture school was that it was too often taboo to talk about business and money. Why? Talking about and understanding the realities of the world doesn’t have to mean that you’re… Read More
All posts filed under “personal”
The case for speculative asset bubbles (and happy new year)
This is an interesting perspective. It is from Fred Wilson’s annual what-happened-this-past-year post: But here is the thing about speculative frenzies – they are generally directionally correct but off in their order of magnitude. And they finance the trend that they are directionally correct about.… Read More
Merry Christmas everyone
I’m taking the day off from blogging (kind of), but I would be remiss if I didn’t leave you all with something city related. And so here is an article by Bloomberg CityLab talking about how the quality of municipal Christmas trees can serve as… Read More
The game of life
“Anxiety is experiencing failure in advance.” — Seth Godin I mention and quote Seth Godin fairly often on this blog and so it only seems right to share this recent podcast that he did on the Tim Ferriss Show. Broadly speaking, the conversation is about… Read More
A mismatch of expectations
Seth Godin’s blog post this morning, called “I hate this restaurant,” is really excellent. I would encourage you all to read it. In it, he talks about a mismatch of expectations. More specifically, he gives the example of somebody going to a restaurant and not… Read More
Emotion vs. rationality
In life and business I find that we are often faced with decisions that pit emotion against rationality. What I mean by this is that maybe your ego is telling you to do something. And maybe, as a matter of principle, you know with certainty… Read More
What is it that I believe?
Back in 2008, I was living in the United States. And at that time, during the financial crisis, I remember people positing that the US wouldn’t be able to build another commercial office building for at least the next twenty years. That’s how bad things… Read More
Living in the future
Sam Altman’s recent blog post about how to generate ideas for startups has some invaluable tips that I think apply to much more than just new companies. As a reminder, Sam Altman is an entrepreneur and the former president of Y Combinator. So he’s had… Read More
City guides in the pre-smartphone era
I came across this stack of old Wallpaper city guides while reorganizing a few things over the weekend (because that’s what happens on the weekends now). They are pretty beat up and color faded from travel. It looks like these guides are still being published… Read More
The case for being a generalist
As many of you know, I am huge of Malcolm Gladwell. And one of the things that he has popularized through his writing is this idea that we all need to spend at least 10,000 hours specializing on someting in order to become truly exceptional… Read More