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Happy New Year plus Reddit

December has always been a quiet month for writing for me. It’s partly because of all the other holiday distractions, but also because if you squint your eyes, you can see the new year coming… It’s almost… right here. Better prepare. I wrote the newsletter a draft of

The Pyramid

I vividly remember where I was standing when someone explained the knowledge pyramid to me. It’s called the DIKW (data, information, knowledge, wisdom) pyramid over here on Wikipedia, but when Laurie the PM scribbled it on the white board, I thought she was thinking out loud, and IT BLEW

Ahead

I’m writing a draft of this piece just for the newsletter this morning. Happy Thanksgiving. Try the Pinot — it’s excellent. Sorry about the typos. January 1st is a reset. What was late in the year — cold and dark December — transforms into a fresh new beginning in January. Resolutions,

State of the Art

The above image was generated from this article by robots. You will notice extreme misspellings and odd layout choices. This is Google's oddly named Nano Banana Pro, and they've been going out of their way to highlight that this particular model is excellent at infographics. It

Nothing Compelling Was Created...

Pretty proud of this one. It was written at a time of great stress and was a therapy piece. It was a rare circumstance when the words just showed up. As a writer, this is your goal state. It’s why you spend all that time writing garbage. You’re

Seven Daily Decisions

The next book is for senior leaders, and I spend a lot of time being very directive as opposed to my usual approach of "describe the situation and let them decide what they feel is best." Throughout the book, I'm littering these lists of seven. Why

Here. There is Meaning.

My aptitude for a pithy saying is 100% due to Twitter. It was a required skill to jam as much meaning into as few characters as possible. The practice, unfortunately, was a precursor to our widespread, crippling collective short attention spans; it also taught me how to get to the

Promotions, The Hard Part

After writing a lot about promotions for the last two weeks, I’m certain there is a valuable book to be written on the topic. The work around promotions encapsulates many skills you need to develop as both an individual and a leader, but… someone else needs to write that

On Promotions

I’m dialing up the regularity of posts to the blog because, well, there are a couple of books to write. This means you’ll be hearing from me every Tuesday. It’s Tuesday. You are supposed to be reading a piece called The Wanderer, which I think you’ll

Airplanes and Compliments

There are two new posts over at Rands, and you should probably check them out because I’m not going to write about them here. I am going to write about writing. Here, I’ll make it super easy. Alrighty. At this moment in time, I am working on two

Summarization is Sugar

The robot fever seems to be passing as I wrote a piece that at first glance has nothing to do with robots… except it sort'f does. As I was letting the final piece stew, I dropped a venty footnote that talks about a certain demographic that worries me

Dance. Robots.

Saying I've been getting the robots to dance for me is an understatement. My second display is dominated by terminal windows with the robots busily doing stuff. What stuff? The most reliable use cases are: research buddy and tool builder. I've recently started paying more attention

No One Reads Email Anymore

Which isn't true. In fact, email is doing quite well. The robots tell me that there are 4.6 billion users in 2025 and that there will be 4.8 billion in 2027. Your average email user receives 80 emails per day, with 50% of those being spam.