This weekend was the 8 year anniversary of writing this daily blog. It’s hard to imagine that it has been this long. Perhaps because COVID has accelerated the last little while and made it difficult to remember what day or year it is sometimes. I… Read More
“Very little remarkable comes out of bureaucracies for a simple reason. The members of the bureaucracy seek to be beyond reproach. Reproach is their nightmare, their enemy, the thing to avoid at all costs. And the remarkable feels like a risk.” —Seth Godin I went into… Read More
Before bed last night, I came across this New Yorker article from 2016 that I thought was fascinating and broadly useful for both life and business. In it, Maria Konnikova talks about how people learn to become resilient. And she starts by citing the work… Read More
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
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
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
“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
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
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
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
