2026-03-24 17:03:00
If you tell me your ID number, your phone number or the wiring instructions for your bank account, not only will I forget them, I’ll need you to repeat it a few times so I write it down without making a transcription error.
When we first started using serial numbers (the Roman Legion did this thousands of years ago, and the British Board of Ordnance required it by law in the 1700s), it made perfect sense. Issue the next number on the list and move on.
But numbers alone are difficult for humans to error check and handle. So we use computers to help. The problem lies in the pesky humans who are still part of the chain.
So, here’s a simple hack. It’s unlikely to catch on worldwide, but I think it’s fascinating enough to consider…
If you had a list of 150 three letter words, all selected to be easy to say, spell and discern, you could use them to replace numbers in a productive and useful way.
So, big bob zap car cat is five words next to each other. There are 75 billion combinations of five words, which means that it replaces a number like 4839450381 with room to spare.
For ATMs that are four or five digits, you only need three words.
Think about that the next time you need to tell a customer service person your order number or serial number, or share a wifi password.
Let the computer do the work.
2026-03-23 17:03:00
How does the ball know?
In tennis, golf or just about all ball sports, the follow-through determines the flight of the ball. Great players always have a complete and confident follow-through.
But the ball is long gone before that happens.
So, what’s the point?
It turns out that the ball can tell that you intend to have a serious follow-through. A weak or non-existent follow-through requires that you start slowing down before your racquet ever gets to the ball.
The metaphor should be pretty clear.
If you show up for the audition, your first TEDx talk, your early blog posts, the job interview or your start up hoping to see what happens (“I’ll commit if I get picked”) we can tell.
On the other hand, when it’s clear that you’re going to keep on showing up, it’s an invitation to get aboard now.
Follow-through doesn’t always work. But it always works better than the alternative.
2026-03-22 17:25:00
This is the slogan of so many industrial behemoths and existing bureaucracies.
It’s in quotation marks for a reason: it’s not true. Not in the long run, not even in the medium run.
One way to highlight the hollowness of this edict is to say it out loud.
For a while, it might make the stock price go up. But it doesn’t last. It never does.
2026-03-21 17:03:00
You wear a hat, you’re not a hat.
State nouns are verbs that we talk about like they are nouns. Hurry, panic, frenzy, rage, funk, stupor, daze, fog, rut, bind, pickle, fix, slump, tailspin, tizzy. Notice that they’re almost all negative…
You’re in a hurry.
Really? I get that you’re hurrying. There might be good reasons for this. But the hurry hat isn’t what you are, it’s what you’re doing.
We can own our agency and our choices, not announce (to ourselves or the world) that we’re trapped in a container, unable to escape.
Until we start saying, “I’m in a joy” perhaps we should find the grace to choose what sort of verb we’d prefer.
The essential thing about a hat is that it’s easy to take off.
2026-03-20 17:03:00
Is there something you can do right now that would impede progress, degrade quality or simply mess up the current situation?
Is there a way you could shift perceptions to make people more distraught, less hopeful or even panicked?
If it’s so easy to accomplish worse, why do we persist in believing we don’t have the power to make things better?
2026-03-19 17:03:00
Tonight, when you’re off the clock, what will you listen to, watch or read?
I imagine that most of us would agree that this is a free choice. To watch a silly video on YouTube, read a book on Greek philosophy from the library or scroll your feeds. We have time (surprisingly called “free”) and we allocate it to focus our attention on something.
While it might seem like a free choice, well-paid people and powerful forces are working to shift our focus. Many systems are built to manipulate us into focusing on things that benefit them, not us.
If you’ve ever felt lousy after doomscrolling, you might question how free your free time actually is. It takes effort to regain our freedom of focus.
We can take this one step further. We not only make choices about the media we consume, we also make choices about our internal focus. Until you got to this sentence, I’m guessing you weren’t spending much time thinking about your high school graduation.
We don’t need research to show us that the internal narratives we focus on shift our attitude and soon become our reality. We’ve all experienced it. Soon after we stop the broken record, things get better.
Perhaps it’s not a free choice, though. Perhaps the stories we relentlessly focus on are simply the byproduct of our brain’s chemical reactions, a reaction to the world inside us and around us.
And yet… many people have learned to shift the stories they rehearse.
The first step: change the external focus. Change the people we interact with, the media we consume, the attention we offer. Not all at once, but as a habit, a persistent practice of being mindful about the triggers and amplifiers we consume. If you’re not happy with what your attention is bringing you, you can change it.
Aristotle said that we become what we do, but before we do, we focus.
And the freedom and responsibility of that focus belong to us.
