2026-08-04 19:32:00
I get a small sense of dread at a group dinner when the waiter takes everyone’s order and rushes off without repeating a word of it back. It’s remarkable how often that ends in a wrong plate arriving at the table.
There’s research on this. A well-known study found that waiters who repeated the order back to customers — word for word — earned close to 70% more in tips. One simple move that both saves heartache while boosting pay.
But the principle runs well beyond a dinner table. Replaying the key takeaways at the end of a conversation. Confirming the next steps before everyone leaves a meeting. Making sure the room is actually on the same page before moving on.
All of these are almost embarrassingly basic — which is exactly why they get skipped.
Sometimes excellence is just the ability to do the simple things consistently.
2026-08-03 20:18:00
We stayed at a place recently that didn’t have Wi-Fi in the rooms. If you wanted to get online, you had to walk out to the common area.
Which meant no internet first thing in the morning.
There was something quietly wonderful about waking up with no way to reach for the inbound from the world before the day had properly begun.
It got me thinking about how easily the phone hands my morning over to someone else. Open the internet the moment you wake, and you step straight into other people’s agendas — their news, their requests, their urgency — before you’ve had a single thought of your own.
That small bit of friction, the walk to the common area, gave the morning back to me. A little space to start the day on my own terms.
It’s been a few weeks since I’ve come back and I’m working to hold onto that. The friction is gone, so the intention has to come from me. More to follow…
2026-08-02 19:34:00
A teammate shared a lesson this week that a former CEO used to talk about: don’t pave the cow path.
It’s a beautiful warning against taking an inefficient, accidental process and simply making it faster or more permanent.
The image behind it is perfect. Cow paths are meandering trails worn into the ground by cattle wandering more or less at random. When towns grew up around them, people often just paved right over those crooked trails — locking in routes that no one would ever have designed on purpose.
It has no shortage of applications today. We inherit a clunky workflow and reach straight for automation, never pausing to ask whether the workflow should exist in the first place. Speed up a broken process and all you’ve got is a faster broken process — a nicely paved cow path.
So before automating, it’s worth the time to figure out whether you’re automating the right thing at all.
Don’t pave the cow path.
2026-08-01 19:49:00
#OurWorldIsAwesome – Edition 23 | Context on this series – we live in a beautiful world and National Parks are akin to the crown jewels of this planet. These landscapes remind us of the fine balance and complexity woven into the fabric of the world around us. Every time I spend a while inside one of these places, I’m reminded of how precious that balance is, and how much it matters that we try to understand the complexity and our own small role within it.
I think that’s what awe really is. We reach for the word “awesome” in the moments something helps us see our own insignificance — and windows into nature do that for me every time. So this is my small way of sharing it, and passing it along.
It’s hard to visit Jasper and not reckon with the wildfire of 2024. The evidence goes on for miles — hillside after hillside of blackened, branchless trunks. It feels like walking through a forest graveyard.
It was fascinating to understand the why. For thousands of years, the Indigenous people who lived here understood fire as part of a healthy forest — regular, small burns that cleared out dead wood and made room for new growth. They regularly left their campfires burning because the campfire itself told them something about the forest’s health: in a healthy forest it would burn out on its own. In a sick one, thick with deadfall, it would burn and burn.
When the parks were established, that knowledge was pushed out along with the people who held it. Officials suppressed fire for the better part of a century, and the dead wood kept piling up. Jasper, like many National Parks, has since embraced prescribed burning — but it’s playing catch-up against a hundred years of accumulated fuel.
The second amazing thing about the park was the wildlife. For all its remoteness and wildness, Jasper teems with life. Barely a drive along Maligne Lake Road or up to Miette Hot Springs passed without some encounter — an animal at the roadside, a herd in the trees.
My last memory came on the boat across Maligne Lake, out to Spirit Island — one of the canonical images of the Canadian Rockies. High treelines, still water, and trees without end. It has everything that makes these majestic Rockies what they are.
On that same boat, a park ranger said something that’s stayed with me. Home, for most of us, is a place — an address, four walls. For the Indigenous people of this land, she said, home is wherever the sun touches your skin.
It’s a far more expansive way to think about the word. And it leaves a question worth carrying long after you leave: what would the world feel like if we treated every place the way we treat home?
2026-07-31 19:28:00
Eric Weiner had a lovely post about his teenage niece on an airplane — utterly enthralled by the whole thing. The box that lifts into the sky and carries you across the world like a bird. Every part of it a marvel.
It reminded me of an old Louis C.K. bit — everything is amazing, and nobody’s happy. He was brilliant at pointing out how easily we trade wonder for complaint. The seat is cramped, the wifi is slow, the flight is delayed. Meanwhile, we’re sitting in a chair in the sky.
The underlying idea shows up everywhere: happiness is reality over expectations.
The trap is to pour all our energy into the numerator. More, better, faster, growing reality.
But the denominator sits untouched. Expectations quietly creep up, and no amount of growth ever catches them.
And, worse, this happens while a little effort spent lowering expectations tends to return far more than a lot of effort spent raising reality.
2026-07-30 19:31:00
There are always two sides to a story.
You may not like the other side. You may not agree with it. But it certainly exists.
And sometimes, simply acknowledging that it exists is enough to help us make progress.
