2025-08-22 19:30:00
One of the most dependable levers to align behavior is to align the incentive.
2025-08-21 19:32:00
A colleague recently reflected on some feedback she’d gotten and described it as “a painful lesson, but a necessary one.”
As I thought about her reflection, I realized that the presence of pain is just a sign that the lesson is likely to stick.
Pain + Reflection = Progress.
Or put simply, no pain, no gain.
2025-08-20 19:49:00
“To love someone long-term is to attend a thousand funerals of the people they used to be. The people they’re too exhausted to be any longer. The people they don’t recognize inside themselves anymore. The people they grew out of, the people they never ended up growing into.
We so badly want the people we love to get their spark back when it burns out; to become speedily found when they are lost.
But it is not our job to hold anyone accountable to the people they used to be. It is our job to travel with them between each version and to honor what emerges along the way.” | Heidi Priebe
I came across this quote in James Clear’s newsletter and I thought it was beautifully put.
It resonated.
2025-08-19 19:35:00
Running a project involving a lot of people is a lesson in chemistry.
You have to know which elements will combine beautifully, which ones will repel each other, and which ones will simply lead to explosions.
And as is often the case with complexity, some of this is science and the rest is just art.
The key is often just a willingness to improvise.
2025-08-18 19:41:00
More than a decade ago, I went go-karting with a few colleagues as part of a work event.
We did two rounds of racing. At the end of the first round, we had a clear winner.
We all had another go at improving our times in the second round. Again, the same colleague won.
As we sat down after the races, this colleague asked the rest of us a question – how many of us had focused on beating him in our 2nd round?
Nearly all of us raced our hands.
He followed up with another question – how many of us thought about beating our own time instead?
No one raced their hand.
He wisely reminded us that we’d all have been better off focusing on improving our own time instead of attempting to beat him. We don’t control how everyone else does – but we do control our own performance.
I think of that incident from time to time.
Especially when thinking about any form of external success. There are always a host of people in our view who’ve made significantly more money, gotten promoted into more prestigious roles, “made it” at more successful companies, and so on.
Any time spent in such comparisons is a sure-fire way to be unhappy. Someone always has the bigger home and there’s no point counting someone else’s money.
Best to focus on our performance and our attitude. It is what we control.
2025-08-17 19:41:00
The Farnam Street blog shared two stories about Sol Price – the godfather of retail whose innovations inspired the likes of Costco and Walmart.
Fiduciary duty. When Safeway sold sugar below cost, Sol did something insane. He put up signs in FedMart: “Sugar is cheaper at Safeway this week. Go buy it there.” His managers thought he’d lost it. Sol’s view? “I have a fiduciary duty to my members, like a lawyer to clients.” That radical honesty created something powerful. People drove 200 miles round-trip from San Diego to shop at his LA store. When you treat customers like clients, not targets, trust becomes your greatest asset.
Remove tables and chairs: Sol’s company culture always involved employees eating together. Texas law in 1957 required separate facilities by race. Sol’s San Antonio solution? Remove every table and chair from the lunch counter. If everyone had to stand, everyone could eat together.
Both stories made me smile because they were turned problems into opportunities for Sol to demonstrate his values.
We don’t control what happens.
But, as Sol demonstrated, we have a tremendous amount of agency in deciding how we respond.
