Signal, not noise
Photo by Matthew Henry
THE NEWSLETTER
Signal not noise. Think of reading the newsletter as a great way to hire me— for free. Let me scour the web and read hundreds of books a year. Let me filter out the noise, contextualize and synthesize the information, and present you with some well-thought-out tools you can add to your mental toolbox. I’m doing work you probably don’t have time for.
I study failure and success. Mostly, I just want to understand how the world works, how people operate, and how to solve problems. Really understand it. Studying hundreds and then thousands of cases of success and failure helps you build a repository of “moves” come to mind when you’re faced with hard and uncertain decisions. Learning history helps us think about problems in three-dimensional ways.
I tie theory to practice, always. That part is important. As you read the blog or the quarterly newsletter, I’ll always reference the science. But it would be robotic if I didn’t explore the age-old questions of what it means to live well and what makes for a good life. It would also be difficult to study these ideas and not practice them myself. Developing a practice is something I work on with each client. It is imperative for leaders at all levels to learn to build in time to reflect on what they are learning and their intentions for growth in order to integrate those learnings more deeply. So I include my own reflective practice as an example along with regular doses of philosophy, history, art, neuroscience, and basic human nature.
Smart people like to learn. Readers include engineers and creatives from technology’s top companies, entrepreneurs, teachers, professors, students, venture capitalists, and everyone between. My readers share a passion for learning and acquiring practical wisdom so they can live better lives.
Read what you’re missing. I don’t spam you. I never send you anything I haven’t read myself. I am not interested in fast food for the mind. I just pass along big chunks of knowledge to help my readers think uniquely and independently so they can gain seize opportunities that others miss.