The Curious Engineer

Seth's Blog

2023–2026

1,486 posts

← 2020–2022

2026 326

October 2026

  1. The Hallmark dilemma
  2. Cooperation (the fall book list)
  3. Explaining funny
  4. Be careful what you wish for
  5. The half-life of disappointment
  6. Is our attitude up to us?
  7. Hospitality in the mirror
  8. Caveman leadership and the CDO*
  9. The relentless math of bandwagoning
  10. The hotlist
  11. The age of initiative
  12. Toward depth
  13. Thieves’ cant slang
  14. Two commuting hacks
  15. Anticipating confusion
  16. The race to the bottom feels inevitable…
  17. A good worker
  18. Purple Space problem solving
  19. Addressing fear
  20. Things people don’t say
  21. The unreliable witness
  22. The best in the world is a local problem
  23. Talent becomes media
  24. Productive dissatisfaction
  25. Thin friction and thicker walls
  26. Our genie problem
  27. How do you like them apples?
  28. Building a second-wave AI business
  29. Lobby expertise
  30. Create a handoff doc
  31. Getting critical
  32. Uniformity
  33. Modern vanity
  34. Media and messages

September 2026

  1. Extraction or generation
  2. What sort of fuel?
  3. Two ways to use lock-in/loyalty
  4. The opposite of mass
  5. KnotChat: Danny Meyer
  6. Easily distracted and mildly interested
  7. KnotChat: Jennifer Myers Chua
  8. Thinking about your purpose
  9. Say what you want
  10. KnotChat: Nicole Walters
  11. Responsibility, fault, blame and shame
  12. Badge vs Scoreboard
  13. KnotChat: Rodrigo Delavina Simon
  14. Invitation to a KnotChat
  15. KnotChat! (Simone Giertz and Chip Conley)
  16. A book can’t change your life
  17. Upside/downside
  18. Disconcerting genre shift
  19. A series of bad decisions
  20. GFI (and the alternative)
  21. Work isn’t optional…
  22. Maps and a compass
  23. Canceling one flight
  24. When does it become a speech?
  25. The daily review
  26. Solace
  27. Things are humming
  28. How much extra for “not lazy”?
  29. Two schools of thought about school
  30. “I don’t know”
  31. The reality of sunk costs
  32. The lab, the factory and the dentist
  33. Homo Habilis
  34. An end to fully open networks
  35. What it is like to be a dog?
  36. Enrollment and learning
  37. Apophenia cuts both ways

August 2026

  1. Ten steps on the road to efficient
  2. Taking a shot/wasting a slot
  3. Fit and Finish
  4. What’s next?
  5. Fertilizing the weeds
  6. Hiding out
  7. On the verge of done
  8. “Thanks for your quick response”
  9. The Drucker drift
  10. Don’t eat if you’re not hungry
  11. Assume misunderstanding
  12. Exponential
  13. Don’t steal the revelation
  14. The Amazon tax
  15. Consider the AI tear down
  16. Replace the filters
  17. Short term dumb, long term smart
  18. Emotional hygiene
  19. Beating yourself up
  20. The magic of a two-year waitlist
  21. Attention up for auction
  22. Give me one reason
  23. “We’re all being surprised at the same time”
  24. The McIntosh Modernity Index
  25. As the crow flies
  26. The modern library
  27. The disconnect between effort and value
  28. Preference falsification
  29. Celebrity art
  30. The Rowboat
  31. “Welcome back”

July 2026

  1. “That doesn’t work”
  2. Organizations that need you
  3. Eager to give up agency
  4. The smush
  5. Optimizing yourself into a corner
  6. The Lego problem, revisited
  7. More interesting
  8. First take/next take/last take
  9. Industrialism and the slippery slope
  10. State champs
  11. The Having/Doing job gap
  12. The power of positive argument
  13. Pointless banality and the uncanny valley
  14. Imminent, urgent, trending and important
  15. Resources and focus
  16. Two kinds of word salad
  17. Disposable software
  18. “Is it okay if I share my screen?”
  19. The hedonic treadmill
  20. Controversial
  21. Mel’s back
  22. A captive audience
  23. Riff-o-matic
  24. Generous collusion
  25. Goal clarity and the Hawking index
  26. The Builder’s Creed
  27. Facts and feelings
  28. The urgency paradox
  29. Freedom
  30. Operator error
  31. Left unsaid
  32. Can you believe it?

June 2026

  1. Fancy food update
  2. We are all weird
  3. Backlist confusion
  4. The generic headline and the lazy slogan
  5. Seeking a complement
  6. You don’t need a better camera
  7. Standby –> Intervention
  8. Empathy and good advice
  9. Limited swag (the Knot multipack)
  10. Blogs, traffic, and Google
  11. Anniversaries
  12. “In its larval state”
  13. 99% might be enough (or not)
  14. The gap between true and known
  15. Promotion, activation, conversation
  16. Status symbols
  17. The relentless math of the long tail
  18. Degrees of freedom
  19. The nature of launch day
  20. The troll button
  21. Nü Tennis
  22. Values capture
  23. Video games, movies and books
  24. None of it is important (and all of it is)
  25. Art is a verb
  26. Marketing clerks
  27. Real artists…
  28. How to teach marketing
  29. Transparency and trust
  30. Professionals know how to talk about it
  31. Stop ruining it
  32. Rethinking famous college admissions

May 2026

  1. Suboptimal events
  2. Doing your job vs doing your work
  3. “Because you’re the cheapest”
  4. Two video upgrades
  5. Unpaid labor
  6. Which one do you want?
  7. Predictions, prescriptions and systems change
  8. Laughing at you behind your back
  9. The real AI
  10. Is it plugged in?
  11. The second thing
  12. Value creation, bullshit jobs and the future of work
  13. The act of Umfunktionierung
  14. The night clerk
  15. All right and none the same
  16. Perfect or better?
  17. “Here’s a pillow the cat didn’t pee on”
  18. Personally
  19. Cats & Dogs
  20. The airplane oath
  21. Early rejections
  22. The shared tragedy of Red Queen hiring
  23. Empathy is difficult
  24. The narrow window of redemption
  25. Kinds of fast
  26. Dream physics
  27. Your work diary
  28. AI together
  29. The best year
  30. Trained equanimity and a bias toward action
  31. Just like me, but…
  32. Nostalgia can be fatal
  33. “The most exciting mobile trend is full Qwerty keyboards”

April 2026

  1. One thing at a time
  2. Photoshopping the package
  3. Puddles
  4. Warm pistachios
  5. Bad money…
  6. Breathwork
  7. Courage vs. excuses
  8. Consumers outnumber producers
  9. The banal djinni
  10. The right sort of friction
  11. Is it sciatica?
  12. The Petrillo complications
  13. The book of concern
  14. The second circle
  15. The definitive study of seed oil and health
  16. What do you own?
  17. On pricing
  18. Avoiding the purity loop
  19. Settling
  20. Even
  21. Creating the conditions for magic
  22. Attention and effort
  23. The ecard virus
  24. The right answer
  25. All the letters
  26. Kinder than necessary
  27. Plumbed
  28. Where do bad choices come from?
  29. “There is no alternative”
  30. Who sets your agenda?
  31. A persistent sense of being correctly located in time

March 2026

  1. Rehearsing possibility
  2. Redundancy and resilience
  3. Long odds and unseen differences
  4. Systems and the default to yes
  5. What’s in the status bottle?
  6. The end of the content shortage
  7. “Too complicated for people to understand”
  8. Numbers and the human/computer interface
  9. Follow-through
  10. “Cheaper not to care”
  11. The hats
  12. Can you make it worse?
  13. Freedom of focus
  14. The hollow orange
  15. Green flags
  16. A kitchen metaphor
  17. Sitting in zimbo
  18. Visible measures
  19. “It’s faster to just do it myself”
  20. Over the top
  21. Henry Ford knew how to drive
  22. The Knot: My upcoming new book (and a course that’s already here)
  23. Small changes to big systems
  24. Considering infinity
  25. Confused about donations
  26. If they knew…
  27. That’s what studies are for
  28. Tight rope standing
  29. Imagination is work
  30. The Uncanny Valley
  31. The gap between “I” and “no one”
  32. Popular (and good)
  33. A nearly perfect score
  34. AI slop

February 2026

  1. How to win a bidding war
  2. Justice and luck
  3. No 3
  4. Love your customers
  5. Time is the wildcard
  6. Sarcasm self-defeats
  7. Blizzard pasttimes
  8. Should you keep playing your hit song?
  9. Brown rice and status
  10. “Hide competitive stats”
  11. Freelancer empathy
  12. How to write a coaching/learning prompt
  13. Misguided optimization
  14. Mysterious predictability
  15. Better vs. done
  16. Things that feel risky
  17. The next generation of AI businesses
  18. Tip for tap
  19. Time well spent
  20. A starting point for the blog
  21. Process thinking
  22. Free agency
  23. Vessel size
  24. Voluntary stories
  25. Making it whole
  26. Sorting
  27. “Everybody wants to win”
  28. Precision vs. accuracy
  29. More trouble than it’s worth

January 2026

  1. The infinite tail
  2. AI ads are neither
  3. Skepticism, surprise and resistance
  4. On the hiring line
  5. Insulation > power
  6. Terrible
  7. In defense of popups
  8. A better mousetrap
  9. Bent incentives
  10. The big splash
  11. Identity violation and pricing
  12. The empathy of instructions
  13. On the wall
  14. Fake news and trust
  15. The sorting
  16. The squeeze
  17. Mad magazine autostereogram, cutecore
  18. “It’s not for you”
  19. “Leave yourself an out”
  20. Not trying very hard
  21. Make and take
  22. Room temperature
  23. Listen to yourself
  24. Assume bugs
  25. “It’s your fault”
  26. To be sure
  27. Who eats lunch first
  28. Beyond a resolution
  29. What you don’t know
  30. More like itself
  31. The paradox of ‘on trend’
  32. Bottlenecks
  33. 1981 time machine

2025 377

December 2025

  1. Which kind of ‘enough’?
  2. Library fatigue
  3. Warning labels
  4. “It’s a bargain”
  5. Building blocks of marketing
  6. Your best work
  7. All bananas are the same
  8. Popular new ideas
  9. Random access
  10. The Spiderman inversion
  11. Timing your overnight success
  12. “Use your best judgment”
  13. Bottomless
  14. Our practice
  15. The thing about chess
  16. Filtering ourselves
  17. Better than the cheap alternative
  18. Taken for granted
  19. Where did kiwi come from?
  20. Looking at pareidolia
  21. 9 shortcuts
  22. Upgrade available
  23. If your marketing isn’t working…
  24. Understanding carriage
  25. Avoiding the toxic status loop
  26. Actions and beliefs
  27. Bold enough to fail
  28. Simple and obvious… or nuanced and complicated?
  29. The red zone, wasted
  30. Mediocre means average
  31. Rehearsing emotional state

November 2025

  1. The shard moment of transition
  2. Two kinds of useful specifications
  3. Build a better alternative to Black Friday
  4. Gratitude and empathy
  5. The Prompt Decks are now available
  6. The Hotel California (and subscriptions)
  7. Complex systems
  8. Marketing lessons from the Grateful Dead
  9. On meeting spec
  10. Infantilization
  11. A convincing argument
  12. Hard work and goodwill
  13. Kinds of stealing
  14. Kinds of value
  15. Caveman economics
  16. Stop all
  17. All the cards
  18. Captaincy
  19. Stuck happens
  20. “We’re up”
  21. A good business vs. a useful idea
  22. The pursuit of wonder
  23. Good at pivoting
  24. Optimizing the landing page
  25. Perhaps we have what we need
  26. Time travel
  27. Delegate everything
  28. Landlords and tenants
  29. “But I didn’t know”
  30. “I’ve got your back”
  31. Living in ghost cities
  32. The other kind of magic

October 2025

  1. Scams at scale
  2. A little ahead (vs. a little behind)
  3. Beyond the checkbox mindset
  4. 900,000 vs 9
  5. New and old, big and small
  6. Out of the way and a little inconvenient
  7. What the world teaches us
  8. On making it worse
  9. The future
  10. Outcomes and tasks
  11. The writer’s room
  12. Foggy mirror
  13. It’s not a silly thing to do
  14. Attention is a luxury good
  15. Fermi’s Law
  16. Significant digits
  17. The other backpacks
  18. Toward obvious
  19. Two useful AI tactics
  20. Uncomfortable/unspoken
  21. Two kinds of luck
  22. Finding your cohort
  23. Bucket size
  24. Software worth paying for
  25. Unsolvable
  26. The thing about pressure
  27. The grid
  28. Status vs. goodness
  29. The questions before the questions
  30. Two kinds of confrontations
  31. Reciprocity
  32. Recalculating the cost of convenience

September 2025

  1. “Because I said so”
  2. Acceleration is felt, velocity is ignored
  3. Act now!
  4. The buffet problem
  5. Nails, glues and screws
  6. Chasing the snipe
  7. Value creation
  8. To be heard
  9. Without compromise
  10. Ject
  11. The unimaginable and the unspeakable
  12. First impressions and second chances
  13. Friendship is a story
  14. Increasing the dosage
  15. Before we learn a new skill
  16. New post
  17. Often give in
  18. Kinds of reckless
  19. No time?
  20. Items in motion
  21. Working for advertisers
  22. Making a point
  23. Under the circumstances
  24. False scarcity
  25. System architect/system victim
  26. Self awareness and the luck-skill gap
  27. Rankings and flavors
  28. The hustle loop
  29. Bringing goodwill to the conversation
  30. Walk away or dance

August 2025

  1. Possibility vs. certainty
  2. Food bonus post
  3. Brittle systems
  4. Poison
  5. For people who don’t care that much
  6. Confusing good luck with skill
  7. Mirrors and hats
  8. Job churn
  9. “GET OUTTA MY WAY”
  10. Aha
  11. Centering
  12. The violinist problem
  13. All that torque
  14. “No” is an option
  15. An invitation to vibration
  16. What sort of success?
  17. Disenchanted
  18. The new Kickstarter is live
  19. “And now, a word from our sponsor”
  20. Moving without traveling
  21. After the shortcuts
  22. What does it want?
  23. After the chores
  24. Contagious emotions
  25. Scarcity and abundance
  26. Compounding luck
  27. The table of contents (and the index)
  28. A new tool to help you get unstuck
  29. What sort of better?
  30. Movies, books and paintings
  31. The ghost in the machine
  32. After you make a strategic error

July 2025

  1. In theory…
  2. Mostly unreasonable
  3. The menu
  4. The order and the medium of feedback
  5. Hi beams
  6. Settling for better
  7. Surprising insights
  8. How much extra is the gift wrap?
  9. Seeing the lottery
  10. Casual cruelty
  11. Resilience is a practice
  12. Lunging
  13. Finding the difficult work
  14. On reading the Terms of Service
  15. Tasks and projects
  16. The talking dog
  17. Overappreciated
  18. Sunk costs and the framework for forward motion
  19. The Superman metaphors
  20. The four arcs
  21. Flailing
  22. The poetry machine
  23. Agency and contribution
  24. Notes to myself
  25. Publicity or public relations?
  26. The future doesn’t care
  27. Not smart vs. stupid
  28. Three choices
  29. Diagnostics
  30. Refocusing
  31. Digital editions on big sale
  32. Which shelf is yours?
  33. Productivity, AI and pushback
  34. Versions of reality

June 2025

  1. Daydream fatigue
  2. A billion choices
  3. Education is free, learning is expensive
  4. As hot as possible
  5. Use a lot of words
  6. Hard to predict
  7. And when it breaks?
  8. Big scale, big impact
  9. Perfect
  10. But what do they say at the meeting?
  11. Confused by signals
  12. Remembering toward better
  13. Here to please
  14. “I made a mistake”
  15. Orange cars
  16. The power of a pause
  17. Rigor and curiosity
  18. What do you need more of?
  19. Status (and the grass tax)
  20. Ecosystems come and go
  21. Grab and go
  22. Ready to be…
  23. Squeaky wheels
  24. Uphill and downhill challenges
  25. On burning bridges
  26. The Weekly World News version of the future
  27. Books (and more)
  28. Which inbox?
  29. What do we do when it breaks?
  30. Scripts and casting

May 2025

  1. Projects left undone
  2. Paying attention to attention
  3. Hallucinations and human work
  4. Just the right length
  5. Paddling upstream
  6. Worthless noise isn’t information
  7. The 1:1 method
  8. User interaction design drives outcomes
  9. 1,000 fans (which sort?)
  10. Clarke’s Law (part 2)
  11. “How do I get the most of out my people?”
  12. The most important decision
  13. “They’re not paying me enough to care”
  14. The Impact Matrix: Moving to the golden quadrant
  15. Getting to next
  16. How many more in the bag?
  17. Embracing the Rotten Tomato gap
  18. Effort and value
  19. Energy and systems complexity
  20. Infinity is not a number
  21. Activation is not a secret
  22. Expectations
  23. Hallucinations are not the same as errors
  24. Good-boss friendly
  25. Mind reading
  26. Tools and the long tail
  27. Seeking yoyu 余裕
  28. Sorting and choosing
  29. Seriously
  30. The biggest thing you bring to the project is forward
  31. Every tactic…

April 2025

  1. Uncomfortable ideas
  2. More alternatives, please
  3. Important breakthroughs
  4. Stories and hope
  5. A powerful story
  6. Best available
  7. Powerlessness
  8. Simple and painless productivity
  9. Technical debt and AI slop
  10. Good instincts
  11. Work ethic vs discipline
  12. The steps vs. the concept
  13. Enrollment and engagement
  14. The use (and design) of tools
  15. The essence of industrialism
  16. Where is your N + 1?
  17. How to win an argument with a toddler
  18. Charged by the word
  19. The AI effort gap
  20. Why and how
  21. Designed, Designy or Well-designed?
  22. A good business
  23. This is number 10,000
  24. An eroding sense of wonder
  25. Hobby mindset
  26. We are all goofballs
  27. We can agree about schismogenesis
  28. Four-word advice
  29. That might be the wrong question
  30. Credulous

March 2025

  1. Division is easier than connection
  2. “Be yourself”
  3. Toward leggiero
  4. Obvious vs perhaps
  5. The name doesn’t matter (that much)
  6. The NSE confusions
  7. Project ownership (equity and equity)
  8. The second time through
  9. Picky or particular?
  10. Maybe it’s in how you tell it
  11. Throat clearing
  12. Ways to alter the structure
  13. Waves and tides
  14. Predicting the past
  15. You are a media theorist
  16. Asking for directions
  17. Bad design might simply be obsolete design
  18. Decoding the Knock Knock situation
  19. The big sort
  20. Two kinds of instructions
  21. Birthing tech
  22. Freelancer as centaur
  23. The tactics trap
  24. Worst possible
  25. “I don’t care”
  26. Specific
  27. You might not get a third chance
  28. The opposite of a good idea…
  29. Across and within
  30. … or the highway
  31. Seeking metaphor
  32. March is strategy month
  33. The Ikea metaphors

February 2025

  1. The lonely unicorn
  2. Getting precise about tolerance
  3. At the speed of judgment
  4. Long-term selfish (and the circles of us and now)
  5. Your project is important
  6. The Mona Lisa problem
  7. Repeat happy accidents
  8. But what’s it really for?
  9. The best intern on the team
  10. Confusing status with skill
  11. Playing billiards on a boat
  12. 16 minutes
  13. All of it, all at once
  14. Time well spent
  15. Ensemble stars
  16. “I’ve got your back”
  17. “Usualing”
  18. Two kinds of creative feedback
  19. Noticed
  20. A little faster than you
  21. The two-minute warning
  22. Rainy day surfer
  23. Figs, ivy, silphium and of course, commerce
  24. Own it and label it
  25. Polishing the problem
  26. Clarity about the benefits
  27. Muscling your way through
  28. Halfway projects
  29. To be in charge
  30. “Can’t complain” (but it might be worth considering)

January 2025

  1. What’s for breakfast?
  2. What sort of progress?
  3. Organizing for urgent
  4. Analysis = Facts + Interpretation
  5. Getting clear about brand value
  6. Checking all the boxes
  7. Expertise and credentials
  8. The weird arithmetic of coordinated action
  9. Honesty about better
  10. Trusting AI
  11. Kinds of incompetence
  12. Lulled 2
  13. Don’t steal the revelation
  14. Memo to the future
  15. Embracing externalities
  16. Building a process culture
  17. Good advice
  18. Annoyed
  19. Decisions and choices
  20. “That will never work”
  21. Slow down to speed up
  22. The magic of the commons
  23. The problem with marketing puffery
  24. Situational spending
  25. Busy-ness and leverage
  26. The value of artifacts
  27. Working with problems
  28. The system has fingerprints
  29. “Does it work?”
  30. Collectibles (and list updates)
  31. Winging it
  32. Find the others

2024 393

December 2024

  1. The reality of meliorism
  2. Calendars are a choice
  3. Secret recipes
  4. Fiblets
  5. Project/Product managers
  6. Taxonomy as a service
  7. Our new school
  8. The challenge of excess capacity
  9. Leading side by side
  10. The thought that counts
  11. Mediocre tools
  12. The stories we tell ourselves
  13. Ideas need handles: the thing about subject lines
  14. The first draft of your first non-fiction book
  15. The fame/trust inversion
  16. If they know, they should tell us
  17. What do we do with our chance?
  18. Change your shoes
  19. The opportunity for AI formbots
  20. Listening to organizational decline
  21. Better at being better
  22. How many sparks?
  23. On the way to professionalism
  24. Wanting and getting
  25. Complaints
  26. What if they’re right?
  27. You’ve already failed
  28. The problem with shock design
  29. Who owns your words?
  30. Elites (vs. elitism)
  31. Searching for stars
  32. Speed, creativity and AI
  33. Thinking about jobs

November 2024

  1. Books and more, winter 2024
  2. Severe weather alert
  3. Bongo 4 – Thinking about power users (skive!)
  4. “Thank you” is a complete sentence
  5. The long walk
  6. Understanding pricing
  7. Is there a market(place)?
  8. Comfortable with the fuzziness
  9. Toward better
  10. Game design and strategy (Bongo part 3)
  11. Further vs. faster
  12. When the media is ready (Bongo part 2)
  13. Compared to what?
  14. Bongo is here
  15. The nature of traps
  16. “I changed my mind”
  17. On whining
  18. How to buy a lottery ticket
  19. Sincerity is expected
  20. Take good notes
  21. Catastrophizing toward action
  22. Broken (and not worth fixing)
  23. A thoughtful review
  24. Unforced errors
  25. “What should I do now?”
  26. Ice sculpture
  27. Dumbing it down
  28. Clear ice
  29. The problem with the movie version
  30. The paradox of points
  31. Kinds of power
  32. “I can’t go for that”
  33. At all costs
  34. The problem with ‘very’
  35. Choose your fuel wisely
  36. “Won’t get fooled again”

October 2024

  1. Wearing the costume
  2. Five lessons from week one of This is Strategy
  3. The run-on sentence
  4. What do we owe the future?
  5. Promises and our best
  6. “I didn’t see you there”
  7. Boring to who?
  8. Intuition
  9. Important problems
  10. Full circle with myopia
  11. Thoughts on audiobooks
  12. The Strategy Questions
  13. The challenge of focus groups for bold ideas
  14. Foundering or floundering?
  15. Confused about good
  16. Moving toward ease
  17. Decisions as effort
  18. Early next week…
  19. The interaction cascade
  20. It’s not easy to see time
  21. Some simple rules for source control
  22. Amplifying the fringes
  23. “Please create more tension”
  24. The cheap chocolate system
  25. Twelve days until the first worldwide strategy meetup
  26. The inevitable meeting
  27. Everything costs
  28. Facing the future
  29. Little dents
  30. It just barely works
  31. Yes, but how does it work?
  32. A really good reason
  33. The broomstick objection
  34. The opposite of ‘perfect’
  35. The paradox of brittle

September 2024

  1. Find the others: Worldwide Strategy Meetups
  2. Twenty questions
  3. Discovery and invention
  4. Who do you want to become?
  5. Snowballs and avalanches
  6. Unintended consequences
  7. Hiring for stuck
  8. Knowing the territory
  9. Embodied energy
  10. Taken for granted
  11. Sharp tools
  12. Professionals are consistent
  13. The ledge
  14. A next frontier for spam and scams
  15. A possible AI future
  16. Vocal fatigue
  17. Bye now
  18. Modern apologies
  19. The hierarchy of insight
  20. Banana Equivalents
  21. Getting AI to do your work
  22. Better pockets
  23. When did we lose consciousness?
  24. Celebrating the thousand with a special package
  25. A labor of love
  26. The bitterness loop
  27. Feeding the algorithm
  28. Empathy at a distance
  29. Compared to perfect
  30. Practical approaches for more effective teamwork
  31. The conspiracy of mediocrity
  32. Your audiobook

August 2024

  1. Omitting the herbs
  2. Language conceals and reveals
  3. Redefining a profession
  4. Brighten up a room
  5. Write for someone
  6. The steep part of the mountain
  7. “How can I help?”
  8. The sad compromise of “sponsored results”
  9. The missing file
  10. Knowing your customers
  11. Anonymity and Bugs Bunny
  12. Non-professional writers
  13. The prevailing conditions
  14. The landlord and the creative coach
  15. In defense of the hard parts
  16. The hard parts (and the important parts)
  17. The paradox of lottery thinking
  18. Long-term selfish
  19. Multiple choice
  20. Mediocrity and perfectionism
  21. Fire inspectors
  22. Living in the future
  23. Adjacent but not relevant
  24. Silence vs noise
  25. Misunderstanding bigness
  26. The challenge of “a risky scheme”
  27. Learning in August
  28. Reclaiming “fiasco”
  29. The Mississippi River paradox
  30. Infamy
  31. Stopping a runaway train

July 2024

  1. The tooth fairy
  2. The last little bit
  3. What are you thinking about?
  4. “It seems…”
  5. The Zoom stretch
  6. Important change is systems change
  7. A bowl of rice
  8. The two bicycle errors
  9. Doing it step by step
  10. Patterns and chaos
  11. Hungry (vs. not full)
  12. The new reality of old media
  13. Retreat!
  14. Glib
  15. A branding exercise
  16. Bullies
  17. The page-a-day calendar
  18. The distribution of character
  19. Giving up vs. quitting
  20. Student coach
  21. How, why and hyperbole
  22. Projects and the long haul
  23. Sudare sette camicie
  24. Kazoo lessons
  25. Blame your tools
  26. Can you draw it on a graph?
  27. The paradox of lessons
  28. Cat and mouse games
  29. Software done well
  30. Avoiding the trap questions
  31. Plasticity
  32. The lazy jugglers

June 2024

  1. Aerodynamic figureheads
  2. Meaningfully informed
  3. “Ready” vs. “Done”
  4. The Pinocchio protocol
  5. The paradox of self skepticism
  6. Return on effort
  7. Leprechauns
  8. Assume lack of context
  9. The Coney Island problem
  10. The Western Union trap
  11. The near future (and summer reads)
  12. Phrenology
  13. Are you weather?
  14. “What will I tell my boss?”
  15. The intentional stance
  16. Spam 3.0
  17. Better than Google
  18. Boundaries and limits
  19. The seduction of false promises
  20. Did we give up before AI arrived?
  21. What spoiled wrecks
  22. After the emergency
  23. The half apology
  24. An overlooked and powerful editing tool
  25. Perfect pavement
  26. Practical empathy (vs. telepathy)
  27. What does the world owe us?
  28. Did you see it in the theater?
  29. “Not your best ever”
  30. Are you pitching or are you asking?
  31. Market insulation

May 2024

  1. The third impossibility
  2. Assume goodwill
  3. Incrementally better
  4. Exceed or maintain?
  5. The hubris of creativity
  6. Play fair & work hard
  7. Transforming two-sided markets
  8. The challenge of N + 1
  9. 2 + 2
  10. “I don’t learn that way”
  11. Noodling for professionals
  12. I was wrong about sun tea
  13. Fingerprints
  14. Customer math for a new business
  15. Semantic algebra
  16. Complaints are a gift
  17. The obligations of the Town Hall
  18. The unwarranted smile
  19. Invention or discovery?
  20. Pet quirks
  21. The strategy sessions
  22. I fixed it for you
  23. Success is not an option
  24. Cats and dogs
  25. The defensive arrogance of TL;DR
  26. The half-life of magic
  27. She’s here!
  28. Don’t rush
  29. Beyond CRM
  30. The other choices
  31. Comfort and convenience
  32. What does reality look like?

April 2024

  1. Inverting the vex
  2. The Net Promoter Score
  3. Indifferent overhead
  4. Manipulation, indoctrination and addiction
  5. Books don’t sell
  6. Bottom of the funnel
  7. “What’s the catch?”
  8. Generational shifts in punditry
  9. What happened vs. what we do about it
  10. Other people’s problems
  11. ChatGPT is dumber than it looks
  12. The grid of inquiry
  13. Dreams, plans and contradictions
  14. The blank page
  15. Refusing the salon of the refused
  16. Market pressure
  17. Getting the word out
  18. The digital barback
  19. The perils of doing it live
  20. Them or us?
  21. The challenge of nonprofit fundraising
  22. Updating our stuck interactions
  23. Why tell the others?
  24. The marketing department
  25. Launching GOODBIDS
  26. Demanding certainty
  27. The color-coded wires
  28. Surprise and uncertainty
  29. Analyzing the last move
  30. Jevons paradox is not surprising
  31. Non-fatal errors
  32. Responsibility and blame
  33. “This time will be different”
  34. Generosity and fear
  35. Kinds of courage

March 2024

  1. Putting up the big numbers
  2. Boyle’s Law
  3. The B2B questions
  4. “But what if I’m wrong?
  5. Shields down
  6. The drift to normal
  7. Explaining yourself
  8. Velocity and possibility
  9. The rock star conundrum
  10. The arrogance of improvement
  11. Purchase decisions
  12. Podcasts, international covers and more
  13. The worst person on our team
  14. Out of control
  15. Willfully uninformed
  16. In search of incompetence
  17. “For what purposes will it be useful?”
  18. Later or now?
  19. Naming is part of marketing
  20. Curation (vs the road to junk)
  21. Holding on for dear life
  22. Hiding the ‘aha’
  23. Preference and utility
  24. Default to surrender
  25. Where are you?
  26. Graceful
  27. Regressing to the mean all by yourself
  28. The positive auction
  29. On building a cathedral
  30. Headwinds
  31. Becoming intentional about virtual meetings
  32. The weird math of halfway
  33. The question book

February 2024

  1. The leap
  2. By association
  3. (Free) subscription drive
  4. What are the stakes?
  5. The close proximity gap
  6. The grey goo
  7. A transformative summer
  8. And it can also do that
  9. Queued
  10. Spire confusion
  11. Easy/lazy tech journalism
  12. Make or buy?
  13. The illusion of concern
  14. Problems and the clover
  15. Trading trust
  16. Peak infrastructure
  17. Customer satisfaction and tipping
  18. The four cohorts of the status quo
  19. To be well published
  20. “I’ve never seen you paint”
  21. Transitions are difficult
  22. Understanding free software
  23. Jump in the lake
  24. All customers are the same
  25. What’s the right size?
  26. As slow as possible
  27. The pitfall of Big Game thinking
  28. Two chicken jokes
  29. Niching up
  30. What to do with firm footing

January 2024

  1. The best possible use
  2. Redundancy has a half-life
  3. Normalizing selfishness
  4. Optimized or maximized?
  5. Unaware
  6. Coercion
  7. A good idea, well executed
  8. Direct questions worth answering
  9. Communications hygiene (and the demise of texting)
  10. It’s Mac Day (#40)
  11. Stumbling in the dark
  12. Out to get you
  13. Decoding ‘story’
  14. “I didn’t get in”
  15. Who pays?
  16. Variety and the long tail
  17. Time, consequences and opportunities
  18. The generous ask
  19. Everyone wants to be connected
  20. Looking for a handle
  21. Kash’s garden
  22. Consequences
  23. Customer service is a choice
  24. The opposite of insubordination
  25. Avoiding technology
  26. Trying harder
  27. PW 5: Measuring the right thing
  28. PW 4: Productivity and tools
  29. Productivity week: Bonus
  30. PW 3: Errors and productivity
  31. PW 2: Productivity in community
  32. PW1: Two hats for productivity
  33. Where does your mind go when it wanders?

2023 390

December 2023

  1. On choosing a college
  2. Benign vs. normal
  3. Which agenda?
  4. Rewrite for humans
  5. Leverage
  6. Finding a more useful umwelt
  7. “Let’s face it”
  8. Happiness can often be traded for money
  9. Lost on purpose
  10. X1000
  11. Drama at work
  12. The clamp and the mallet
  13. The problems with flat out
  14. Focusing attention is a skill
  15. Personal process notation
  16. The friendly professional
  17. Signal and noise
  18. Eight marketing maxims
  19. Valuable contributions
  20. Digital stocking stuffers (and the other kind)
  21. Elegant and classy
  22. Walking the city, walking the world
  23. Wrestling, fighting or dancing?
  24. All species are invasive species
  25. Abundance and ideas
  26. Hope and expectations
  27. The head of marketing
  28. Wild Hope Now: The power of books for causes
  29. The sixty-day staircase
  30. True/useful
  31. When was the last time you used a compass?
  32. When the committee decides

November 2023

  1. The thing about Hobson
  2. The art of estimation
  3. Study groups
  4. The hard part first
  5. The long-range forecast keeps shifting
  6. After the meteorite
  7. The network scam
  8. Generosity and gratitude
  9. Long form AI
  10. Three sheet metaphors
  11. Nice bike
  12. The perfect conditions
  13. Working with problems
  14. Who’s got the camera?
  15. The second mistake
  16. Turtleneck confusion
  17. Learning, connecting, deciding (and amazing)
  18. A long time is not the same as never
  19. The reluctant spammer
  20. Finding the glitch
  21. Heavy Lemon Tuna
  22. The amateur presenter
  23. The paradigm flip
  24. “We used to do that”
  25. Project resistance
  26. The first nine minutes
  27. Patience
  28. The power of expectations
  29. The community orchestra
  30. Commonplace technology
  31. Two ways to defend the status quo

October 2023

  1. Confronting consciousness
  2. The 2 x 4 lessons
  3. Three things about innovation
  4. Big science
  5. Small groups, well organized
  6. What’s new at purple.space?
  7. Trouble in the grey zone
  8. The seduction of “why”
  9. Scaffolds and talent
  10. The next one
  11. Late-stage technocrats
  12. Emotional labor and its consequences
  13. Complex or complicated?
  14. The shifting status of more data
  15. The end of writer’s block
  16. Spines out
  17. The slog, the hobby and the quest
  18. Judgment
  19. What are the defaults?
  20. Different kinds of people
  21. The Pizza Principle
  22. Consider joining Purple Space
  23. It could have easily gone the other way
  24. Jargon comes and goes
  25. Writing your book
  26. Input choice is easily taken for granted
  27. No thank you
  28. Possibility and opportunity
  29. Getting it right the first time
  30. Password stupidity is no longer viable
  31. Getting better at bucket management
  32. Nothing to ad
  33. Evenly distributed
  34. Fooling ourselves
  35. But it matters a lot to them…
  36. Learning from the Amazon gift card snafu
  37. Confusion and certainty

September 2023

  1. Solving invented problems
  2. Freedom of attitude
  3. A small shopping list (floss and more)
  4. Thoughts on the manual
  5. The Jenga situation
  6. Toward stickiness
  7. More vs. better
  8. While standing on one foot
  9. High fidelity
  10. Two sides of “a big deal”
  11. Getting to no
  12. A protest or a project?
  13. ChatGPT for you
  14. Convenience and scams
  15. Just looking
  16. It goes without saying
  17. I’ve been doing it wrong all along
  18. Tricked (again)
  19. Finding the others
  20. The MVP and fear
  21. Practical philosophy
  22. Widespread resistance
  23. Digital shortcuts and cognitive load
  24. The Santa problem
  25. A new cooperative workshop
  26. No lunging
  27. The paradox of insular language
  28. The Big-O conundrum
  29. The Le Guin precepts
  30. But what if it’s voluntary?
  31. Informed consent (rarely is)
  32. The empathy of useful feedback
  33. Are you doing what you said you wanted to do?

August 2023

  1. Summarize this…
  2. The nuanced challenge of “The Regular Kind”
  3. The absence of proof
  4. The convenience fee
  5. Create value
  6. The maverick and the status quo
  7. The length trick
  8. Speaking up
  9. Belief is contagious
  10. Childish or childlike?
  11. Now in Spanish
  12. For customers vs to customers
  13. On the dot
  14. The status quo is very good…
  15. The unsurprising confusion about ‘per capita’
  16. Defending the apostrophe
  17. Ride your own bike
  18. The (very) long tail
  19. Unstable equilibrium
  20. The useful agreement
  21. Significant work is a vote
  22. Dreams and roadblocks
  23. When in doubt, look for the fear
  24. Hope and truth
  25. Deadlines and tailgaters
  26. The low-stakes argument
  27. The empathy of magic
  28. The gratuitous use of plastic
  29. The expanding frontier of ignorance
  30. If “no” is not an option…
  31. Anti-smart
  32. Choose your customers

July 2023

  1. Should we assume rational goodwill?
  2. Pavlonian coincidence
  3. The social media lottery
  4. It’s simple (it’s complicated)
  5. Good businesses solve real problems
  6. Product and process
  7. But what if we’re wrong?
  8. The early adopter (and the dilettante)
  9. There’s always a placebo switch
  10. Chasing cool
  11. Closed/open
  12. The Beatles and Taylor Swift
  13. Confusion and delay
  14. Goals and expectations
  15. Appropriate tension
  16. “I don’t like it”
  17. (Without the bad parts)
  18. The good news
  19. Raising the bar
  20. Remarkable pronouncements
  21. My Big Fat Greek Wedding
  22. Sanding off all the edges
  23. The commonweal
  24. Discernment in creativity
  25. Is it a skill?
  26. Sufficient resolution
  27. Small doses
  28. Customer traction is the hard part
  29. Throwing shade or throwing light?
  30. Are we cannibals?
  31. When the future finds us
  32. Who is undermining your brand?
  33. Actionable feedback

June 2023

  1. “And” fatigue
  2. The seduction of grad school
  3. Portfolio theory
  4. Reality as reassurance
  5. Crispiness
  6. A finite ordered set of interesting objects
  7. When we get to where we’re going
  8. Overstuffed
  9. The right marketing question
  10. Peer support
  11. Project management
  12. Which team?
  13. Can’t wait
  14. Finding agency
  15. Living in hyperbole
  16. The lens or the problem?
  17. The A.R.E. skills matter more than ever
  18. This time it’s personal
  19. What sort of bicycle?
  20. The seduction of compliance
  21. Inconvenient!
  22. Brakes and acceleration
  23. Too much competition
  24. The simple word replacement for connection
  25. Doing presentations virtually
  26. The catfight and the construction site
  27. Cheaper than that
  28. Bought or sold?
  29. Falling behind
  30. Avoid false proxies
  31. Volition and placebos
  32. Productive assets and useful flows
  33. Consider the WordWindow
  34. The swag is here
  35. The 77% threshold

May 2023

  1. Who cares?
  2. The spark
  3. Your preference is not universal
  4. On reading it in a book
  5. Captives of memetic desire
  6. Survivor bias and the mistake of stability
  7. The first person
  8. Conversations, an early review… (and the free class)
  9. It’s not easy
  10. Stevie and Marvin
  11. Compounding head starts
  12. Which sort of sinecure?
  13. More is More
  14. Our homunculus is showing
  15. Pique-a-boo
  16. When the sun is shining
  17. Ideas shared are exponential
  18. The missing post
  19. The good china
  20. Chores
  21. What’s a “techie”?
  22. Useful assumptions for teachers
  23. Skipping the good days
  24. Choosing your pacemaker
  25. What comes after trust?
  26. The thing about decay
  27. In search of chatoyancy
  28. Nihil hic deest
  29. The new way of work
  30. The price of salt
  31. The house painter and the architect
  32. The list of compromises
  33. On to the next thing

April 2023

  1. An end to pop
  2. We probably can’t buy our way out of it
  3. The magic of placebos
  4. The braid out of balance
  5. Explaining it to a kid
  6. The unwritten rules get written
  7. The Cliffs Notes paradox
  8. The search tax
  9. “But what if it doesn’t work?”
  10. No time to waste
  11. Avoiding food waste confusion
  12. The natural size
  13. The empathy device
  14. Digital prepwork
  15. A treaty
  16. The explosion
  17. Unfettered
  18. Real and apparent risk
  19. Design has a language
  20. The freedom loop
  21. The rear view mirror
  22. Consider switching sides
  23. New decisions based on new information
  24. Two kinds of salad
  25. Replacing bad systems with bad systems
  26. In and out
  27. Leverage is brittle
  28. On being missed
  29. Foibles
  30. Fooled

March 2023

  1. Tom Peters
  2. The 500 ways
  3. Making change happen
  4. Opening the pod bay door
  5. Rethinking the Sports-Industrial Complex
  6. Avoid unnecessary amplifiers
  7. The Hegelochus lesson
  8. Flashing on contempt
  9. Delivering good taste
  10. They will lose your data
  11. How to change the world
  12. The answer to every question
  13. The ghost in the machine
  14. Shields up
  15. The gap between impossible and normal
  16. Is it possible to care at scale?
  17. Your own billboard
  18. Simple techniques for complex projects
  19. Conspicuous (non) consumption
  20. Is it a t-shirt brand?
  21. Allocating scarcity
  22. Revisiting stamps for email
  23. Bob Dobalina
  24. Dancing for the early adopters
  25. Projects and the red zone
  26. A deal’s a deal
  27. Creating value as an entrepreneur
  28. “I don’t know”
  29. Rituals
  30. Choosing your problems
  31. The generosity of concealment
  32. 99 vs 0
  33. Invite: Behind-the-scenes webinar for the new book

February 2023

  1. The unaware snoop
  2. Avert your eyes
  3. The reality of chasing pop
  4. The obligation of “none of the above”
  5. Promo creep
  6. Checking the date
  7. If it were really important…
  8. But it’s included…
  9. Pleasant
  10. Effect vs affect
  11. Gentle Scrabble hacks
  12. The sportscar quadrants
  13. The leaping curve
  14. If it’s all in bold
  15. Fidelity, compression and culture
  16. With the sound off
  17. “Home is wherever my cello is”
  18. Quietly change it
  19. Cheating at golf
  20. The magic of a page a day
  21. Most people (and the people you choose)
  22. The audacity of the crowd anthem
  23. Self restaint vs systemic restraint
  24. And then that happened
  25. “What’s next?”
  26. “No photos”
  27. Confusion about performance
  28. Reimagining cities in a few simple questions
  29. Don’t know, don’t care

January 2023

  1. Get/Want/Have To
  2. Population and big innovations
  3. The coming ubiquity
  4. New ways to codify purpose
  5. Hobson’s choice
  6. Pay what you want
  7. Grandiosity as a form of hiding
  8. “What do you do around here?”
  9. Culture, care and typography
  10. The lonely zone
  11. Overconfidence and AI
  12. Bitterness is consistent
  13. Amazon Smile gets a frown
  14. Typist/Hypist
  15. There are no stupid mistakes
  16. Jumping to conclusions
  17. Generous and selfish
  18. Your secret recipe
  19. An event or a journey?
  20. The platform and the curator
  21. Three more questions
  22. And also convenient
  23. The end of the high school essay
  24. The myth of luxury goods
  25. Build a new one
  26. Just in time
  27. Patterns, culture and theft
  28. On this date
  29. Pareto optimality
  30. Hustles end badly
  31. Virtually no one
  32. Arguing for inaction

← 2020–2022