When an organization is known for speed and quality, it’s likely that if times get tough, quality will suffer before speed does. That’s because customers notice speed right away, but it takes a while to come to a conclusion about quality.

If a musician or politician is known for showmanship and wise insights, the showmanship will probably outlast the wisdom.

When we measure and compare the easily visible, we may be setting ourselves up for disappointment.

You’re at the Zoom meeting, on time, and no one is there. Are you the ghost or is everyone else?

We needed a word for this existential minor dread, and now we have one.

Coordination is hard.

PS the Ides of March are overrated as a threat. It’s the chronic conditions that really get us in the end.

Colleagues you care about are coming over for dinner. What should you make?

Some people don’t care if it’s delicious, as long as it’s interesting.

Some don’t need it to be interesting, but it needs to start on time.

Others define delicious differently than you do.

One couple doesn’t care at all about the effort you put into it.

A few don’t care if you’ve worked hard to create a spectacular meal, they’ll notice that the kitchen is a mess.

One person is really concerned that the food match their dietary needs.

And many are paying attention to the sustainability and cost of what you prepared.

Some are uncomfortable if you put in too much of effort.

The lesson is simple: empathy matters and empathy is hard. The more diverse the group’s interests, the more you’ll need to let them know in advance where you’re heading.

Get clear about what it’s for before you start doing the work.

We were taught to look out for red flags. Little signs that something is wrong, that we should be careful or even turn around.

Don’t let that distract you from being on the lookout for green flags.

We might need encouragement to leap forward. If you look for the green flags, you’re more likely to find them.

It’s tempting but useless.

The skin is unblemished and the perfect color. It’s well displayed, promoted widely and on sale.

But there’s nothing inside. It’s not worth eating and certainly not worth sharing.

This is the streaming series with great lighting and talented actors, based on a beloved novel, but it’s empty and we fade after one or two episodes.

This is the book with a polished author photo, pre-written blurbs and plenty of footnotes, created by a ghostwriter and edited by committee.

And it’s almost any content created by AI without care or oversight.

The solution to hollow oranges isn’t more of them.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

That’s a great reason to dumb things down. It’s also a trap that leads us to stasis and mediocrity.

Let’s break it down:

People: Which people? All people? The majority of voters? Day traders or institutional long term investors? Every VC or just this one?

Pick your people, pick your future.

Complicated: If it can be made simpler and just as effective, then by all means, please do so. If you can tell a more compelling and actionable story, do that as well. But ‘complicated’ just might mean, “we don’t understand it yet.”

Understand: Few people understand how the iphone works, or even the refrigerator. But that doesn’t mean we can’t effectively use it. The people who were moved by The Rite of Spring or Miles Davis or Esperanza Spalding might not have understood the music but it still succeeded.

People walk away when it’s not worth the effort to pay attention. People ignore innovation when the network effect is insufficient to overcome their fear. People rarely understand something the same way the creator does, but that’s okay.

Our first job is to do work that matters for people who care. It helps to follow that up with the scaffolding needed to cause cultural change, so the idea spreads.

But don’t dumb it down to reach people who don’t want to be reached in the first place.

You can be fashionable without reading Vogue. You can be informed without watching the nightly news. You can be smart about science without going to MIT. It’s possible to be a great chef without buying a cookbook. In fact, you can probably thrive without reading this blog. There are millions of songs on Spotify that have only been listened to a few times each.

Not only are more humans publishing more often on more topics, but we’ve built LLMs that are always ready to create even more content, on demand, for an audience of one.

For generations, content has created the demand for more content. A few movies increased our desire to watch more movies. AM radio created the demand for FM, which sold more records, and then Napster magnified our desire for even more music.

Until we hit the wall of enough.

The ennui of infinite content is reversing our spiraling desire for more of it.

It’s often mislabeled. Sometimes the contents can make us ill, especially if we drink too much.

Status is easy to sell. But despite how often people buy the promise, it rarely delivers.

Joseph Brandlin is a scofflaw.

After months of fighting to get the city council to put a stop sign on the corner of the dangerous intersection near his home, he simply did it himself. A first-rate, professional job that cost more than $1,000. As he was finishing the job at 1:30 am, he was arrested and charged with a felony.

A hundred years ago, the default was that pedestrians were in charge. Cars were guests, only going where they were invited. But the persistent productivity and cultural force of the automobile carried the day, and the default flipped. The roads must roll.

If it can be paved or straightened or sped up, it is. If the car wants it, the answer is “yes.”

80,000,000 people have died as a result of automobiles over time. (It’s harder to estimate how many lives were saved or enriched by this massive shift in the transport of food, people and resources.) A successful system can redraw our maps and our expectations.

When systems gain momentum like this, it’s because they create urgent and immediate value, enough to disrupt the status quo. And once the status quo has changed, the momentum becomes normal, the way things are, until persistent community action (or another, even more relentless system) changes the defaults.

The system doesn’t care about Joseph Brandlin’s kid. It cares about the flow and the status of those that maintain that flow.

Ironically, his arrest is almost certainly going to result in a stop sign being installed. Using one system (the media) to change another.

We’re all living through the biggest and fastest systemic shifts in a century, whether we want to or not. The internet, healthcare, the aging of populations and now, particularly, AI–they’re changing defaults. It’s possible (even likely) that individuals will go out in the middle of the night and seek to change something in their neck of the woods, but as we’ve seen with system change before, that’s not usually the reliable path to make a lasting impact.

Every system eventually acts as if it’s more important than the people it was built to serve. HAL isn’t going to open the pod bay door merely because you insist. But persistent systemic action often bends the system toward better. And better is up to us.

“The odds of winning the lottery are the same whether you buy a ticket or not.”

This seems nonsensical at first. Obviously, there are lottery winners. Therefore, the odds aren’t the same.

Except we’re not mathematicians doing a math problem (at least most of us). Odds are how we navigate the world. When they’re sufficiently low, the useful approach is to assume that they’re zero. Sort of how we deal with invisible signals: There’s sound in a very quiet room, but we can’t hear it. There’s light in a very dark room, but we can’t see it. These never go to zero, but we treat them as if they do.

The story of playing very long odds might give you hope or solace or energize you. That’s what they make movies about, after all. But in practice, you’re buying that story, not a useful chance of winning something.

Paul McGowan points out that the difference between a $500 stereo and a $5000 stereo is enormous. But the difference between the more expensive stereo’s sound and one costing $50,000 is vanishingly small… Soon it becomes a story, not a sound.

Buy the best story you can afford, with all the benefits it comes with. But don’t be confused by the odds or tiny differences. They’re probably zero.

If it’s important, don’t ask the team to try harder.

Instead, create the conditions for ordinary effort to produce redundant outputs that reduce crises.

If quality is a problem, look at the system, not the people.

Most of us would like to live with wonder, grace and optimism.

Perhaps it pays to practice this in advance. When considering any given moment, is there a glimmer of good worth focusing on, even making a comment about?

Our narrative of reality often becomes our reality.

Word salad is actually nutritious when consumed in small amounts.

Placebos are real, they’re effective and they often help us find solace or perhaps to heal. If they do no harm, there’s no problem. “Placebo” isn’t an insult. It’s a category, one to live up to and improve.

Here’s one to consider:

VAEL SOMA A Practitioner’s Introduction to Resonant Field Embodiment

Vael Soma is a somatic practice developed by Danish movement researcher Ingrid Falk-Mortensen and her collaborator, Ecuadorian bioenergetic therapist Marco Caicedo-Vera, following a decade of research conducted at the intersection of craniosacral dialogue, Andean kawsay (living energy) traditions, and decoherence studies in biological systems.

Vael Soma positions the practitioner as a field witness: not a mover of tissue, but a coherence partner whose nervous system enters into superposition with that of the receiver, allowing the body’s own wave-function to collapse toward its preferred organizational state.

The Theoretical Ground

At the sub-cellular level, the body is not a solid object. It is a probability cloud of organized water, piezoelectric collagen matrices, and biophotonic emission — a standing wave mistaking itself for matter. Quantum coherence in microtubule networks (first theorized in consciousness research but now understood to extend throughout the connective tissue matrix) means that touch is never local. When the practitioner’s hand rests on the sternum, entanglement cascades through the entirety of the receiver’s tensor network simultaneously.

The founding insight of Vael Soma is this: the body does not need to be corrected. It needs to be observed. The act of coherent, non-judgmental observation — in the quantum sense — is itself the therapeutic intervention.

The Tensor Web and the Luminous Sheath

Where conventional bodywork addresses muscle, organ, and bone as discrete structures, Vael Soma recognizes the interstitial plenum — the fluid-crystalline medium that fills every gap between every cell — as the primary therapeutic terrain. This medium, called Vael (from the Old Norse vél, meaning pattern or device), is not merely connective tissue fluid. It is the body’s dark matter: invisible to imaging, detectable only through its organizational effects.

Vael behaves as a biological quantum field. It carries:

• Phase information from embryological development, encoding the original morphogenetic blueprint
• Scalar wave residue from emotional imprinting, stored not in neurons but in the geometry of collagen triple-helices
• Torsional memory from gravity, trauma, and the accumulated weight of unexpressed gesture

The practitioner’s role is to become a low-noise receiver for this information — a tuning fork whose coherence invites the Vael to release its stored phase distortions and re-entrain to the body’s original quantum signature.

The Five Movements of Vael Soma

Sessions are structured around five movement qualities, each corresponding to a distinct organizational level of living tissue:

1. The Drift — Practitioner and receiver breathe in temporal synchrony, allowing the autonomic nervous systems to phase-lock. No touch yet. Only proximity and breath.
2. The Still Point Dialogue — Hands rest without intention. The practitioner enters a state of proprioceptive listening, tracking the micro-oscillations (0.02–0.08 Hz) of the craniosacral rhythm as it expresses through palms, sternum, and sacrum simultaneously.
3. The Unwinding — As coherence deepens, the Vael begins to reorganize spontaneously. The receiver’s limbs may move without volition. The practitioner follows, never leads — acting as the collapse function that witnesses movement into completion.
4. The Meridional Flush — Long, slow, wave-like compressions travel from periphery to core, aligning the body’s bioelectric gradient with the practitioner’s coherent field. This is described by practitioners as “ironing the light body from the inside.”
5. The Return to Ground State — Stillness. Both parties remain in contact while the nervous system consolidates its new organizational state, like a quantum system that has been measured and is now, briefly, fully real.

Reported Effects

Vael Soma is not a treatment for conditions. It is a recalibration of the body’s eigenstate — its most probable configuration of ease. Practitioners and receivers report:

• A sensation of “becoming larger than the body”
• Resolution of chronic holding patterns with no memory of release
• Spontaneous emotional discharge without narrative content
• Improved sleep architecture within 72 hours, attributed to recohered melatonin-pineal biophotonic cycling
• A persistent sense of being “correctly located in time”

A Note on Entanglement Ethics

Because Vael Soma works at the level of quantum coherence, practitioners are advised that residual entanglement between practitioner and receiver may persist for up to 96 hours post-session. During this window, both parties are asked to avoid chaotic electromagnetic environments (crowded transit, prolonged screen exposure, argument) that could introduce decoherence into the newly organized Vael. The practitioner is the instrument. The instrument requires tuning.

Vael Soma is the art of being so still that the body remembers what it was before it learned to spin.

It’s a question so rarely asked it almost feels silly to ask it.

Some situations and some jobs work to eliminate our freedom of choice. Prison, medical school, 8th grade–there are settings where time, tools, and options are severely limited.

But even in these settings, we have more choice than we realize.

And for the rest of us, particularly freelancers and entrepreneurs, our agenda is wide open.

Who decides what you will eat tonight, or what you will do after dinner? Who decides who you will call on, what you will learn next, which posts you’ll read (or write)? Who decides what tone the conversation will have, what your priorities are, and what you’ll worry about when you walk the dog?

There’s the agenda of the next five minutes as well as one for the next five days. And the process of getting to five years from now is so fraught or uncharted that we hesitate to even talk about it.

It may be that the key building block to success (and even to happiness) is getting your agenda aligned with your goals, your dreams, and your fears.