What my handwriting tells me

I used to have decent handwriting. Somewhere between boarding school cursive and my first startup, I lost it. Honestly, I didn’t notice until someone handed me a pen at a signing, and I was mildly embarrassed by what appeared on the page. That sent me down a...

Sit with it

We are always thinking. We are rarely with our thinking. There is a difference. When the calendar clears, and the urgent noise fades, something unusual happens. The mind does not go quiet. It goes curiously. Strange thoughts surface. An old memory lands next to a new...

We’re not busy. We’re distracted

We tell ourselves we don’t have enough time. The calendar is full. The inbox never empties. The list grows faster than we work through it. But time is not scarce. Focus is. We have built environments that make sustained attention nearly impossible. Tabs stacked...

Scoreboards don’t lie

We all tell stories. The team missed the number? There’s a reason. The pipeline shifted. The market moved. The timing was off. The story is always available, always ready, always believable enough. The problem isn’t the story. The problem is when the story...

You are the bottleneck

The most tenacious founders build something remarkable. And then they become the ceiling. Here is a simple question worth sitting with: can you leave your business for three months without it faltering? Three weeks? Three days? If the honest answer is no, you have not...

The flat pack advantage

IKEA figured something out that most businesses never do. The product isn’t the furniture. The product is the system. By shipping flat, they transferred one task to the buyer: assembly. In exchange, they cut shipping costs, eliminated warehouse bloat, and...