2026-05-12 12:00:00
Last week someone asked why I prefer books. My immediate answer was that I love their quiet, non-commercial nature. No ads. No hype. Just quiet wisdom with deep rewards for a focused mind.
But today I realized something more profound: Each of my biggest life-changing moments came from a single sentence deep inside a book.
This is a novel about a British man who shipwrecks on an island with an ideal culture. The natives are role models of mental and emotional health.
While rock climbing, someone says the instructor used to be her physics teacher. The British man is surprised, so she explains that in their culture, it’s healthy to switch jobs every two years, ideally to something the opposite of what you’ve been doing.
I was 22 years old, two years into a job. The first year, I learned so much, but the second year was just comfortable.
After reading that one sentence in this little novel, I quit, and that was the last time I ever had a job.
I was 23 years old, trying to be a full-time musician in New York City, making an average of $100 per gig.
I went to a weekend seminar called “Doing Music and Nothing Else”. The workbook said there’s an organization, called the National Association of Campus Activities, that hires entertainers to come perform at universities, for $1000 to $5000 per gig.
I was determined to get into that scene, so I joined the organization, and spent a couple years working hard to crack it. I eventually mastered it, playing at 300 colleges around the country.
With the money from those shows, I bought a house.
200-something pages into this book, it said that to keep learning, we need to be surprised. For example, read books about subjects you know nothing about. Or ideally, it said, move to a place far away, very unlike home, so that you’ll be surprised every day.
This hit me hard. I was comfortable and successful, inside my expertise, and rarely surprised.
So in the name of learning and growth, I took the book’s advice to an extreme. I forced myself to leave America forever, to live around the world for the rest of my life.
As I was selling my company for $22 million, I saw this book in a book store, and read it for pure entertainment.
The author made millions pretty early, then spent another thirty years pursuing more and more, amassing $800 million. But he used himself as a cautionary tale. He had huge regrets. He said those decades of pursuing more only made him miserable, and if he could do it all over again, he would stop at $30 million, to spend the rest of his life planting trees and writing poetry.
I was at a crucial point. I was about to pursue the path of a serial tech entrepreneur, using the proceeds from my first sale to launch a bigger thing. But I respected his perspective, followed his advice, and haven’t worked for money since then.
I have more examples like this, but these are the biggest.
And this is why I read books carefully, all the way to the end, looking for another sentence that will change my life.
2026-05-05 12:00:00
Forty years ago, a family moved from India to Canada, and raised their children with “Indian values”. When those children visited India last year, the locals laughed at their outdated beliefs. What their family had said were facts were just a perspective from 1980.
Twenty years ago, I lived in Los Angeles. Talking with an old friend that’s still there, I said it’s the nicest place I’ve ever lived, and why. She said, “Oh wow. You haven’t been here in a while. It’s not like that anymore.” She said my description was like looking at an old photo from 1999.
Last year I went to China and loved it. So clean, polite, efficient, and all-around nice. A German friend said I’m crazy because “China is filthy, rude, noisy, and awful - with everyone spitting and pushing.” I asked when he was there, and he said 2002. Ah! But that place is long gone. It’s not like that anymore.
When someone speaks of a place, you have to ask, “When?” Geography is four-dimensional. You can’t know a place - only a place as it was at a time. Where is bound to when. Unless you are in a place right now, you can only speak of it in past-tense.
I was born in America, but the last year I lived there, George Bush was president. So I’m not from the current place, though it has the same name.
Like Doc stepping out of a time machine. “I’m from here, but not this here!”
I used to describe myself as American, but that’s becoming less true with time. I’m from the America of the 80s, 90s and early 2000s.
But that place is long gone. It’s not like that anymore.
2026-05-03 12:00:00
I can relate to the original meaning of this old term that means to be good citizen of the internet.
Wikipedia says a “netizen” is someone who actively contributes to the development of the internet, not for personal gain or profit, but to make the internet a better place.
I’ve been online since 1993. In 1993, the only way to connect a Mac to the internet (unless you were at a university) was to buy a big paper book on TCP/IP networking, to get the floppy disk inside the back cover that had the MacTCP drivers with SLIP and PPP, so you could connect a dial-up modem to your computer.
Imagine what kind of nerds go to that trouble. That’s who was on the internet in 1993.
It was an amazingly helpful place. We used the web, Usenet, FTP, and email mailing lists to share what we knew. All of this was plain text. Images didn’t really come until a year later.
I was running a recording studio at the time, and I couldn’t get my hardware to sync, so I posted my problem in a Usenet forum, and the next day a man from Trinidad taught me how to fix it.
In return, I shared what I had learned about how to copyright your songs, trademark your band name, and get gigs at universities. The U.S. copyright and trademark office was years away from putting their forms online, so I bought a flatbed scanner and scanned their paper forms, sharing them on my website. Wired magazine and many forums pointed to my website as a helpful resource for musicians, since it was the only place online to get these forms and instructions.
There was no advertising, and no talk of money. I met someone who said he wanted to make money online, and I tried to explain to him that that’s not what the internet is about. It’s a free helpful place where everyone contributes and benefits from others’ contributions.
I wasn’t naïve. I’m not trying to sound pure-of-heart. It really was the culture and vibe at that time.
Slowly the culture around me changed, so now it seems I need to explain my strange behavior — why I don’t monetize everything like everyone else. I’m just a product of my place and time. 1993 shaped how I think of the internet, and I’m keepin’ on in that original spirit.
Like picking up trash where you walk, even if the rest of the world is full of litter. You keep doing what you can to make things better.
Now my netizen contribution is to…
