Side projects and hobbies can sometimes feel unsatisfying, and lack a sense of fulfillment. Often it’s because, even if it’s only in the back of your mind, you’re not taking it seriously. They’re “just for fun.”

But even fun can be taken seriously. Seriousness doesn’t imply “unfun,” or that we can’t laugh or smile while we do the thing. It doesn’t have to mean putting on a stern face and removing the enjoyment from the work.

To me, seriousness implies intentionality, or a sense of directedness. Like you’re pursuing a particular objective, even if that objective isn’t a long term end state. It may simply mean what you want to accomplish in the next hour.

If I sit down to write an article “unseriously,” I might allow myself to get distracted after 3 minutes and walk away from it. But with intentionality, there’s a sense of “do it anyway” where you’re honoring a promise to yourself, predetermined. That doesn’t have to mean that you know where the piece is going in the end. I don’t have to know it’ll be 3,000 words and make the following 3 points. All I have to do is sit down with the goal of working on it for the next 30 minutes, or hour, or minimum word count. What happens in that window is fungible and allowed to be undefined, yet still taken on with intention.

Consider ’s framing in his book, Turning Pro:

When we convene day upon day in the same space at the same time, a powerful energy builds up around us. This is the energy of our intention, of our dedication, of our commitment.

Commitment is a great word, directly related to this type of seriousness. People don’t necessarily think of hobbies when they think “take something seriously,” or about commitment to recreational activities. But even a pastime can be executed with commitment. Seriousness and focus reinforce one another.

Seriousness means bringing your attention, intention, and focus to the work, more than anything else. Whether you know the end state with clarity, or chase it with an unsmiling poker-face, bears little on your level of seriousness.

A practice I’ve found useful in cultivating seriousness in my own work is to use habit-forming techniques. Especially for interests and hobbies, or non-critical creative activities, creating a pattern of repeatability for yourself — and an expectation of performance — begins to coax the seriousness out of you over time.

This cultivation also requires patience. It’ll take more than a few reps to get comfortable.

Patience with this process of repetition is in a circular feedback loop with taking work seriously. The more you force yourself into deliberate practice, the more seriousness will grow with your effort. And with seriousness comes more practice, more focus, more outcome.

In thinking about creating these spaces of focus, honing the muscle of seriousness, I always come back to a quote from Jerry Seinfeld on his writing process. Even as a decades-long superstar comedian, he still has a rigorous daily ritual around his writing:

I still have a writing session every day. It’s another thing that organizes your mind. The coffee goes here. The pad goes here. The notes go here. My writing technique is just: You can’t do anything else. You don’t have to write, but you can’t do anything else.

That’s the epitome of taking the work seriously.

Two of the early pioneers in auto production harnessed many of the same advances — in precision engineering, machining, tooling, manufacturing techniques — yet came at the problem with wildly different philosophies of production.

At a time when the first “horseless carriages” were unreliable, difficult to start, and even harder to keep running, Henry Royce developed a complex method for building extremely reliable, performant, and appropriately expensive vehicles. Rolls-Royce’s famous Silver Ghost was a marvel of human ingenuity and craftsmanship. Each part meticulously machined to aggressive tolerances, and hand-crafted one at a time. They were things of beauty, but they were also neither accessible (a couple hundred-thousand in today’s dollars) or plentiful:

Superb performance and reliability were designed into Rolls-Royces through how they were made. Each Silver Ghost was manufactured as a bespoke, unique vehicle, meticulously crafted by a dedicated team led by Henry Royce, the partner responsible for engineering. The experts assembling the car were armed, according to journalist Simon Winchester’s 2018 book The Perfectionists, with “their loupes on lanyards their slide rules, micrometers, calipers, verniers, and pressure gauges.”

(Brand, Maintenance, p. 56)

For the time, in these early days of pre-mass manufacturing, the Rolls-Royce approach made sense for a certain audience. The customers that could afford them loved them: rock-solid dependability, steady and quiet (hence the name), and a nearly hands-off monument of engineering. Something like 1,500 of them are still around today over a century later, of ~7,800 produced. 20% survival over that long a haul is unprecedented for just about anything ever produced, then or certainly since.

While Royce made every Ghost a hand-crafted icon of extreme precision, Henry Ford ran with a different philosophy. He became a legend not only for his application of the assembly line, and interchangeable precision parts, but also his belief in reach. He wanted a design and manufacturing methodology that wouldn’t put an upper limit on production volume. While Rolls topped out at about 2 Ghosts per day out of the factory, Ford’s Model T could hit 10,000 per day at peak production. Royce made it his mission to satisfy his few customers for life. Ford wanted to build “the Universal Car,” one for every driveway.

High road, low road

One thing that jumped out to me reading about this history is its parallel to another Brandian idea from one of my favorite books, How Buildings Learn. There he describes a framework for thinking about buildings in two broad categories: Low Road and High Road buildings.

Low Road buildings are characterized by their flexibility and adaptability to change, designed with simple, robust components that can be easily modified or replaced without compromising the overall structure. They allow incremental, organic evolution over time without requiring major interventions or extensive renovations.

In contrast, High Road buildings are less adaptable and have a more fixed design, often constructed with specialized and intricate systems that are difficult to modify or update. They tend to exhibit a higher level of architectural ambition and style. Their rigidity makes them less resilient to change and less capable of responding to evolving user demands.

Low road buildings are flexible, scrappy. Soho’s famous cast-iron buildings from the turn of the century fit this mold. They were originally used as manufacturing houses, for things like textile production or print shops. As those industries left the city, buildings were neglected and their values dropped, until artists and creatives started renting out the huge spaces as loft studios for living and working, throwing in partitions and kitchens as needed. The openness and robustness let them adapt to changing user preferences over the course of the century, from manufacturing to artist lofts to galleries to tech offices and luxury condos of today. With the low road, our buildings adapt to our evolving needs.

The high road is about preordained purpose: buildings designed with intent. Cathedrals are among the best examples. We don’t build them to adapt to their occupants, like office buildings to be leased to the highest-paying industry. Cathedrals are built to achieve religious ends, as places of worship that should stay places of worship. The stained glass, soaring vaults, the nave-and-altar orientation — all of it conspires to produce a specific experience, a specific use. High road buildings resist modification because modification would defeat the whole enterprise. You don’t retrofit a cathedral into an open floorplan office concept. You maintain it, restore it, honor it. The building endures because it’s worthy of the extraordinary effort required to keep it exactly as it is. With a high road building, we adapt to its designed intent. Our behavior adjusts to fit its purpose.

Royce’s Silver Ghosts were objects of this kind of sacred refinement. His cars were so meticulously assembled that popping the hood and tinkering without the requisite expertise would cause damage. You didn’t modify a Rolls-Royce to go off-road. You carefully maintained it. You paid homage to it through the ritual of care and attention. And if you did, the thing would run for a hundred years.

On the other hand, Model T’s were famously “hackable.” The simple, modular design composed of interchangeable parts, its low cost accessibility, its ubiquity, all these factors contributed to the wild west of use cases found for Ford’s everyman automobile.

There were so many Model Ts that the specialized knowledge needed to keep them running became common knowledge. Anyone who tried to customize a Silver Ghost would probably screw up its tightly integrated perfection, so no one did. Every Model T, on the other hand, required some customization just to function well, and that inspired owners to devise all manner of new features and functions. A Rolls-Royce, impressive as it was, had just one use. When Ford put the power to make changes in the hands of his millions of customers, the Model T evolved rapidly in all directions and was put to countless uses.

(Brand, Maintenance, p. 62)

The T’s broke down regularly, encountered problems with routine frequency. But because they were everywhere, so were their parts. Their simplicity meant you could take them apart with basic tools. You could fix them on the roadside. And when drivers had a special need on the farm, or to haul cargo, or to drive on the ice, they modified the cars to fit their needs. Low road vehicles adapt to their users.

Two philosophies of longevity

What I find compelling about all this is two divergent approaches to longevity. We have polar opposite philosophies of design and construction that each is capable of producing things that well outlast their owners, and this applies to buildings, vehicles, and anything else we bring into our lives.

The Rolls endured through reliability. The Model T endured through repairability.

One inspired the devotion of its owner. The other devoted itself to its owner.

Beneath these differences, the two philosophies produce durability through honesty about what they are.

There’s another interesting detail worth noting. In both the architectural and automotive cases, the low road examples achieved something their creators never intended. Nobody at MIT planned for Building 20 — a plywood and timber “temporary” structure — to become a legendary incubator of science. Nobody in nineteenth-century New York designed factory lofts to become apartments. And Ford, for all his vision, didn’t set out to build a platform for improvised snowmobiles.

The magic of the low road is that its virtues are emergent. Ford’s mission was volume — get cars to as many people as possible. The assembly line, the interchangeable parts, the simplicity of design: all of these served that mission. But those same choices, that same lineage, produced a secondary gift: radical adaptability. The repairability and the hackability were byproducts of the manufacturing philosophy, not its objectives.

Making a considered choice

It strikes me that today’s cars and buildings often live in this no-man’s land, a sort of purgatory between the low and the high, taking on aspects of each but the benefits of neither. We throw up boring buildings stuck in the middle. They inherit the low road’s cheap, modularity of construction without its genuine flexibility. And they bring the high road’s rigidity without any of its grandeur or earned respect.

We do the same in the auto industry. Modern cars are a marvel of engineering, don’t get me wrong. But we use low cost, mass-manufacturing techniques, without any of the low road’s maintainability. Neither are they worthy of reverence. That 2004 Nissan Altima can’t be easily repaired at home or on the roadside, but neither does it command the worthiness of a full restoration.

This design space limbo leaves us rudderless when it comes to longevity. We don’t build things worthy of being maintained, and we couldn’t do the maintenance if we wanted to.

This is perhaps the deepest lesson of Brand’s framework. You don’t have to choose low road or high road based on which one is “better.” Both Ford and Royce built legendary businesses. The Model T and the Silver Ghost both endured into the history books. The important thing is to choose — to commit to a philosophy honestly rather than drifting into the no-man’s land where cheap construction meets inflexible design.

Then all we do is inherit the costs of both and the soul of neither.

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I stopped setting quantity goals a few years ago. And even last year I’d largely quit reading anything current. There’s no top-down set of rules I follow about what to read or avoid, but I’ve made a conscious effort to pick up things I’ve collected and had on my shelves for years.

Book people will be sympathetic to this: we could have an antilibrary with 1,000 books we’re yet to visit, and still go out and buy something new as our next read. It’s impossible to avoid. One great example from this year is Crime and Punishment. I’ve had this copy for I-don’t-know-how-many years. 15? 18? It’s laid there on my shelf, eagerly waiting for the day I’d crack it open. I finally did.

Here’s a selection of some of my favorites from the year, with a few notes about each one.

The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe; Prince Caspian; The Voyage of the Dawn Treader

C.S. Lewis, 1950, 1951, 1952.

The Narnia books are written for children, but like all the best children’s works, they translate so differently when you read them in different eras of your life.

As a kid, these stories come across as simple fairly tales. Fauns, lions, talking beavers, dragons, sea people. You read them more from the perspective of the Pevensie kids in sort of first-person, imagining yourself exploring the frozen Land of Always Winter or the castle at Cair Paravel.

Yet as an adult, and a parent, I get something completely different. I read these more as an observer watching my kids explore the world, discover the moral, find themselves. Plus there’s plenty of richness we can takeaway ourselves as adults. In Dawn Treader, when the Pevensies’ self-centered, joyless, materialistic cousin Eustace goes through a humbling experience after being transformed into a monster, his realization of his own ugliness and arrogance reads much differently as an adult than your literal reading as a kid.

I’m looking forward to finishing the Narnia re-read this year. Relatedly, I’ve listened to a couple of interviews with Michael Ward on his book Planet Narnia, which interprets each entry through one of the medieval “seven heavens” – Jupiter, Mars, Sol, Luna, Mercury, Venus, and Saturn. I had his thesis in mind when reading the first three books, but interested to dig into his analysis after I finish the series.

Turning Pro

, 2012.

This is one of those books (along with his earlier The War of Art) that’s lived in my head since reading it. No one gives you a mental kick to get yourself in gear like Pressfield.

The War of Art was all about “Resistance,” his term for the force we must overcome to get any creative work accomplished. It’s inertia, a train sitting still on the track held fixed by gravity, and it’s our job to muster the activation energy to get the train moving.

Turning Pro is about how to professionalize fighting Resistance. To be a pro means to take the work seriously, to prioritize it over other things, to be a grown up, quit making excuses and get to work. The pro doesn’t need the perfect environment to get their work in. They show up and get the practice done whether it’s at the home office, a hotel room, or sitting in the parking lot at the mall.

There are plenty of forces at work that raise Resistance and create an environment that steals our attention. But part of acting the pro is realizing you’re the one with the agency over your attention. You can decide not to hand it over to the distractions, and spend it how you want.

Mere Christianity

C.S. Lewis, 1952.

I’ve been a “nominal” Christian my entire life, yet not a practicing one — certainly not a studied one. Mere Christianity is a great entrance point to the fundamental tenets of Christianity without getting lost in doctrine or denominational differences. Lewis presents his arguments through moral philosophy and clear reasoning, building a case for Christianity that’s accessible. He doesn’t spend time differentiating in the details between Catholicism, Anglicanism, or Presbyterianism, but focuses instead on the core beliefs that unite Christians.

Rather than relying on technical theology or biblical scholarship, Lewis presents abstract ideas in a concrete, practical way, emphasizing how belief fits with human experience: our moral intuitions, our sense of right and wrong, and our persistent failure to live up to our own standards. While he does discuss how Christianity reshapes character and moral life, his primary goal is to argue that it’s not only useful to everyday life, but also true.

Crime and Punishment

Fyodor Dostoevsky, 1866.

Crime and Punishment is the best depiction of what it’s like living inside someone else’s head. The novel follows a down-and-out former university student Rodion Raskolnikov as he deals with an unfortunate situation, makes some regrettable choices to pull himself up, and how he deals with the aftermath of the hole he creates.

Very little “happens” in the book. Past the first several chapters and the commitment of the titular “crime,” for the remaining hundreds of pages we get to live through Raskolnikov’s mental and emotional anguish as he wrestles with, both to himself and to others, what he’s done. He’s wracked with intense levels of disbelief and guilt, borderline insanity, psychosomatic illness, intense fever. We watch his mental state deteriorate, in tension between hiding what he’s done and giving himself up, to his friends, family, and the authorities.

Raskolnikov is a youth consumed with ideas. He’s an idealistic believer in the “Great Man” theory: that the world is moved by extraordinary individuals, and that we permit the extraordinary among us to morally transgress in pursuit of higher purpose. Dangerously, though, he also believes that he may be one of these Great Men, and rationalizes his way to his actions from a position of desperation, poverty, and resentment. He wavers between an overconfident arrogance about a position in the world he feels he deserves, and a self-loathing rooted in his subconscious understanding that he’s just a man. In one scene he can be tender and compassionate, in the next coldly rational and abstract. He generously gives all of his money to the consumptive widow of a man he briefly meets early in the story. Yet throughout, he fancies himself a Great Man like Napoleon, who can violate moral fabric in the micro to serve some greater good in the macro. He justifies the pawnbroker’s murder to himself as ridding the world of “a louse, sucking the life out of the poor.”

Ultimately something in his subconscious doesn’t accept his own excuses to himself. Try as he might to talk himself into his abstractions, his inner struggle between his philosophical rationalization and the deep moral wrongness he knows he’s committed manifests as an unsustainable, chest-caving guilt.

In this age of the rational, where we look everywhere for scientific, legible explanations for everything (and even worse, justifications), Raskolnikov’s twisting internal pain reminds us that even if we can create a justification for our actions, we still might slam into an invisible moral foundation. Hopefully we all maintain that rigid foundation that generates guilt and shame in the presence of rationalizing our wrongs.

Even though it’s a 150 year old book, I won’t spoil the ending. Suffice it to say that it’s a satisfying end to a slow, rich burn.

Notes Towards the Definition of Culture

T.S. Eliot, 1948.

When we talk about culture, we’re often referring to different things. Often it’s the simple things like art, opera, and cuisine. Eliot is interested in deeper definition. The way societal roots grow through millions of small actions by groups and individuals over a long period of time, and how those roots support varied, interesting outputs in the societies above them. Strong foundations developed through bottom-up cultural forces are stronger and more resilient than any top-down plan. His definition of culture sits at a deep level in the pace layers stack.

This extended essay is Eliot’s attempt to come up with a concrete way of defining culture that has more utility than the way it’s bandied about most of the time, the way we might call a person more refined than others (”look how cultured he is”), or to describe the patterns of small groups or neighborhoods. He aims to figure out what culture means for whole societies.

He argues that culture is not a detachable segment of society but an organic whole. It’s the accumulated patterns of belief, custom, work, art, and everyday life that grow over generations. Culture can’t be rationally designed or imposed without distortion; it depends on historical continuity and tacit inheritance, not deliberate planning. Eliot rejects the modern tendency to treat culture as something that can be designed through education policy, state programs, or mass access alone, insisting instead that culture emerges only where ways of life are stable enough to be handed down and slowly refined.

Culture exists only where people feel bound to what came before and responsible for what comes after. He positions the family the main vessel of cultural continuity, and calls culture “a conversation between the living, the dead, and the unborn:

But when I speak of the family, I have in mind a bond which embraces a longer period of time than this: a piety towards the dead, however obscure, and a solicitude for the unborn, however remote. Unless this reverence for past and future is cultivated in the home, it can never be more than a verbal convention in the community. Such an interest in the past is different from the vanities and pretensions of genealogy; such a responsibility for the future is different from that of the builder of social programs.

The Great Debate: Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine, and the Birth of Right and Left

Yuval Levin, 2013.

It may be surprising to learn that one of the greatest supporters of the American cause in the Revolution wasn’t an American. In fact, it wasn’t even a Frenchman, allies of the Americans against the British. It was an Irish-born English politician named Edmund Burke.

When it comes to governing a people, we tend to focus on ends rather than means. What policy are you pursuing? What are the appropriate rules and laws? The decade-long disagreement between Burke and Thomas Paine demonstrated that question that should have primacy is about means. How should we go about the business of governing ourselves? What is the right strategy to implement the policies that pursue our goals?

Burke and Paine largely agreed on the merits of the American project, its goals and objectives, which is what makes their later profound disagreements so interesting. When revolution started to simmer in France by the mid-1780s, Burke and Paine were aligned on the goals, yet not the tactics. As the revolution intensified and became ever-more violent, the rift between the two widened to a chasm.

In Burke’s view, the prime directive of society is retention of what works first and foremost. An evolutionary, institution-first approach. From his vantage, it was most important to preserve the functions of institutions, even if some of those functions were corrupted and in need of reform. Tradition, by Burke’s lights, held a rich storehouse of difficult-to-replace, hard-earned knowledge. The revolutionaries, in their zeal to rip apart and rebuild French society root and branch, risked throwing the baby out with the bath water.

Paine’s angle favored reasoning in the abstract, focused on principles for their own sake irrespective of the reality on the ground. If X is “right,” we should do X. In his view, we could overhaul society from first principles and create its ideal replacement according to what should be, even if we’d have to break some eggs to get there.

The revolution in France played out much closer to Paine’s worldview. And it turned out Orwell’s line was appropriate, in response to breaking some eggs to make an omelette: “Where’s the omelette?” The revolution sought a utopian objective that its greenfield means couldn’t achieve. A few years later the nation plunged into Napoleon’s totalitarian reign.

Paine and Burke exemplified Sowell’s constrained and unconstrained visions better than just about any two contemporaries. And even though Levin (and I) hew close to a Burkean line of thinking, he makes a strong, defensible case for Paine’s point of view, and gives him plenty of credit for his earlier role in the American project.

The Roots of American Order

Russell Kirk, 1974.

The American flavor of societal order is a fascinating thing. 250 years ago we kicked off this experiment in freedom and self-government, and achieved a remarkable degree of constitutional stability, while preserving a rich cultural fabric.

Kirk’s project is to trace where we get the ingredients for this stew. Many historians would go back to Locke, Hume, and Montesquieu, and Kirk gives them their credit, too. But he traces even those roots deeper, all the way back to Jerusalem, Athens, Rome, and medieval England. Hebrew religious doctrine provided a grounded moral foundation. Ancient Greek philosophy developed into a respect for civic virtue, reason, and justice. The Roman Republic added tested, durable concepts of citizenship and political Infrastructure. And the English system gives us common law practices of building legal frameworks on empirical, locally-derived experience.

The book is a detailed investigation of how these sources have combined and evolved into the American framework. It’s all interconnected going back over two millennia, mixed and intergenerational: a fundamentally “Burkean” story. Our system that combined freedom, restraint on power, and error correction owes its existence to an inherited tradition of what’s worked over the centuries in western civilization, preserving the good while making gradual progress. From ancient Judaea through to the American founding, it didn’t take any big swings at Utopianism to get where we are (only the correction of failed ones). America’s order endures, while countless other totalitarian attempts at order have fallen into the dustbin of history.

Frankenstein

Mary Shelley, 1818.

Even with this as assigned reading in high school, I didn’t even crack it open back then. Another case of missing out big time on a fascinating read. There are so many classic works that are just silly to hand to young people and expect them to appreciate.

Frankenstein is one that’s much more cerebral and psychological than the impression left by popular culture would have you believe. The high school sophomore picks it up expecting a scary monster story, and while it is one to a degree, it’s much more a psychological thriller than anything else. After introducing Victor’s education and interest in scientific progress, the creature’s creation scene passes in a flash. In cinema it’s become a model for many a terrifying scene. But in the novel, it’s over in a couple of paragraphs. The science behind Victor’s work is not even explained one iota, which I actually appreciate. If this was published in 2025, a third of the book would be about the scientific process of Reanimation Science.

It’s a story about so many things other than “horror” (the section where you might find it on the shelf): the overreach of unrestrained rationalism, responsibility, loneliness and isolation, the limits of human knowledge, revenge.

If you’ve never read it, or it’s been a long while, I highly recommend.

Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity

, 2025.

Kingsnorth sets out to diagnose what’s wrong with the culture in 2025. He describes what he refers to as “the machine”: a ceaseless, humanless system (that humans are participants in) driven by and endless need for growth, centralization, homogenization, and abstraction.

If you find something in works like Seeing Like a State and have an anti-tech streak, there’s an argument here you’ll have sympathy for.

But I’m of mixed mind about this book. I agree with some of the diagnosis about the endless need to make everything decodable and legible, centralized, plannable, engineerable. But I get off the bus when Kingsnorth gets into his proposed answers — or at least his suggestion of where a fix might come from. He starts by making statements I agree with, that the problem is a cultural one, of human choices. If we don’t like Instagram, state surveillance, or never ending industrial growth, we should start valuing what has meaning closer to home. We should make different choices as individuals.

But then he goes hammer-and-tongs after everything tech and capitalism writ large. Those things are by no means perfect or in no need of reform. But they’re downstream of individual choice. We have agency, and can make different decisions. The free market is nothing more than the sum total of individual action. If we’ve got a problem with capitalism’s outcomes, we’ve got nowhere to look for blame but inward.

Kingsnorth is onto something here about cultural rot. Our respect for traditions, our elders, for meaning — we’ve allowed all these things to erode away through neglect.

The longer you watch, the clearer it becomes that some of the most important work happens in the gaps between the plan and reality. In every single video you’ll see them wrestle with how to handle the unplanned. And I find it fascinating to watch experts figure things out on-the-fly.

What separates experienced craftsmanship from on-paper technical expertise isn’t just what you know ahead of time. It’s how you respond when you find out the plan is insufficient.

When preparation gives way to judgment in the moment, we’re forced to improvise.

I’m not referring to improvisation as an intentional choice, like the work of a comedy troupe or a jazz trio. I mean the kind of improv we’re all forced into when we encounter the unexpected. When reality diverges from the plan, you adapt. How well you do that is a function of experience, pattern recognition, and having trained the right muscles.

In home construction, as in all kinds of lines of work — business, product development, engineering, writing — no matter how meticulously you plan ahead, improv is how you course correct, how you fill in those unshaded areas you hadn’t planned to encounter.

To some it might come as a surprise, but much of the time in construction, the plans drawn up by an architect leave out many of the details required to get the thing built. And not just trims and ornamentations; typical drawings are often missing structurally important details. Or they’ll define a configuration of parts that’s physically impossible.

This isn’t because architects and engineers don’t know how to build. Often details are explicitly missing with notes to “leave final implementation to the builder.” No matter how specific the blueprints, some things are left unanswered.

Reality has a surprising amount of detail.

It’s interesting to observe how experts adapt in motion. There’s this incredible mixture of technical knowledge and tacit experience involved in adapting well. No amount of book study gives the home builder enough of the hands-on knowledge needed to work with natural materials like wood warping, twisting, and expanding, or to mix their concrete a little dryer than the instructions say when it’s humid or rainy. Or if you invert this, having no technical understanding of the building code book or how to read a floor plan won’t have good results either. You have to have both. This combination of skillsets arms the craftsman with more tools with which to adapt.

“Life is a lot like jazz… it’s best when you improvise”

–George Gershwin

Improvisation isn’t simply “making things up.” In the world of jazz, the soloing pianist isn’t just winging it and hammering keys indiscriminately. They’re working within a key, using scales and known phrases, and playing within a constrained playground of options. Their prior knowledge of harmony, chord voicings, and technique gives them a foundation to build on and a set of quickly-retrievable building blocks to work with. The richer this foundation, the more prepared they are to “make it up as they go.”

When the Perkins crew runs into an unplanned situation on the job site with no prescribed solution, they’re left to their knowledge of similar past situations, the local building codes, and their understanding of tools and materials to figure out a way forward. They’ve got to adapt.

Not only that, they don’t have hours or days to sit around and think up the best solution. It’s a game of trade-offs. Often the best solution to the problem at hand is the one they can devise in the next hour, rather than the perfect one on paper. If an electrician or drywall installer is waiting on a detail with window framing to get handled before they can start, that hurdle halts the entire project.

Between the constraints on time and the challenges of working on remote sites (you only have what tools and materials you’ve got in the truck right now), the array of options is limited.

Improvisation is a skill you can intentionally nurture, in any field. It’s why practice is so critical to skill development. Reading the books and studying the theory is certainly part of the foundation. But there’s no substitute for the tacit practice, for the applied exposure that reality forces on you. Planning is part of the battle, but adaptability comes through trial and error.

Just because you have a plan doesn’t mean you won’t have to adapt. The best builders, musicians, and product makers aren’t the ones with the most detailed plans. They’re the ones who’ve practiced enough to adapt without panic when the plan dissolves. Improvisation isn’t freedom from structure; it’s what structure looks like when it’s been fully absorbed.

Office and residential buildings are among the worst offenders, if for no other reason than their prominence and visibility. A condo highrise goes up, cutting an utterly uninteresting profile (but beautiful units start as low as $800K!). Or that new 4-over-1 office space that could be dropped just as easily into London or Albuquerque.

This flattening of everything — architecture, design, cultural distinctiveness, etc. — creates environments with no humanness about them. Shorn of texture and local reference, it’s like we’re making things in a lab for the lowest possible cost, built to be cookie-cuttered and stamped out anywhere. We’re designing for spreadsheets and planners, not people.

Walk into a new McDonald’s location or any modern fast-casual restaurant and you’ll see the effect. Our spaces didn’t use to feel like this.

This was a typical McDonald’s in the 1980s. Sure, it’s tacky and over the top, but it used to be a place catering to kids. You could have your birthday party there. The aesthetic might not be your cup of tea, but you’ve got to admit it had an opinion. There’s life and purpose. There’s an evocation of feeling.

This is what they look like now. The sense of purpose vanished. I’m not even sure what this aesthetic is intended to make me feel. Perhaps that’s the point: pure utilitarianism, no adornments, all function. Not only is there zero life in the place, but they’ve even optimized away all human interaction, period. Just punch the buttons to order from the Machine.

One looks like it’s designed for humans — human children, in fact! The other, who knows... Automatons? Tesla Optimii? No interestingness anywhere, colorless, emotionless.

This deficiency of life is something Christopher Alexander devoted an entire series of books to.

I ran across this relevant passage of his yesterday in A Pattern Language. This is an excerpt from 95: Building Complex, where Alexander is contrasting the feel of “monolithic” buildings with smaller clusters of human-scale structures:

In the monoliths, the visitors’ experience is depersonalized. They stop thinking primarily of the people they are going to see and the quality of the relationship and focus instead on the building itself and its features. The staff become “personnel,” interchangeable, and indifferent, and the visitors pay little attention to them as people — friendly or unfriendly, competent or incompetent.

We’ve all felt what he’s describing here, where smaller buildings (or sections of buildings) can narrowcast to a particular purpose. But modernity pushes for centralization and aggregation. The “interchangeability” he calls out with respect to the people is evident throughout the whole thing. The staff feel like they’re just numbers filling spreadsheet cells. All in the name of efficiency.

Alexander goes on to describe how in studies, visitors to these buildings struggle to even describe their anxiety about the soulless monoliths (emphasis mine):

We learn also from this study that in the large buildings visitors complained frequently about the “general atmosphere” of the building, without naming specific problems. There were no such complaints among the visitors to the smaller buildings. It is as if the monoliths induce a kind of free-floating anxiety in people: the environment “feels wrong,” but it is hard to give a reason. It may be that the cause of the uneasiness is so simple — the place is too big, it is difficult to grasp, the people are like bees in a hive — the people are embarrassed to say it outright. (”If it is as simple as that, I must be wrong — after all, there are so many of these buildings.”)

In today’s parlance, we might say a place has “bad vibes.” When we rip the human elements out of our everyday experiences, we become unmoored, in a way. We can’t even immediately describe what’s wrong, but it’s a general disorientation. Something’s missing.

The size of a building is only one aspect, but it points directionally toward a general homogenization. When you jam all functions together under one roof, the result is an atomized average that can do anything, but doesn’t do anything well.

Consolidating functions and cutting away the adornments surely lowers the cost, but also removes the pleasure of walking through a space. And because “pleasure” is hard to make legible in the financial models, we ditch it as valueless. The logic of efficiency prefers the universal to the particular. It’s cheaper to build for everywhere the same than to build for somewhere specific.

Maybe there’s a market demand for this kind of thing. There’s certainly a demand for lower costs in general, particularly in the mundanities of the everyday. In our stops for fast food or our trips to the supermarket, we’re typically more interested in cost-effectiveness than some spiritual experience.

Everything doesn’t have to look like a cathedral or Monticello, though. If we went out of our way to make everything neoclassical, that would begin to grow stale. There’s room for some things to be boring. I don’t need every gas pump to have marble sculptures on top.

Yet what’s bothersome is the feeling that we’ve gone over the guardrail in pursuit of efficiency at all costs. We flattened the world in a hunt for lower prices, and didn’t know that we were signing up for these sterile surroundings.

The old, and very new:

You draw from what’s proven durable and what’s just emerging; you ignore the middle. A pop-psychology book from the early 2000s isn’t old enough to be a classic, but it’s long past the point of novelty.

I’ve noticed a trend in my own habits where I’ve been unintentionally creating this barbell between my work and personal consumption. They seem to be mirror images.

At the beginning of this year I set out on my own professionally and started a product strategy agency: Liminal Lab. I’m working with a diverse slate of companies to incubate ideas, take new tools into the market, and to generally evolve their products (and teams) from one stage to the next — hence the name.

Central to my strategy is leaning as far forward into the latest tech as possible. Since most of these companies have been around a while, with existing customer bases and services to provide, it’s difficult for them to make time to study, understand, and embrace the latest trends. At the moment the hottest topic is AI, how to leverage it in ways useful and actionable. So one place we come in is in the effective deployment of AI tools: how to use LLMs for things like product ideation, tech architecture, marketing, prototyping ideas, and ultimately building products themselves. I’ve spent the last 10 months thinking and building and rebuilding as the tool stack keeps pushing forward at high speed.

I see a wedge here: an opportunity to build a product prototyping lab that embeds the capabilities and practices of the bleeding edge. We can be a go-to experimentation proving ground for companies looking to evolve, while retaining the essence that makes them who they are.

Any company starting in 2025 and beyond not including LLMs as a key weapon in the arsenal will have an uphill battle ahead of them. So I decided to “go native” and help my customers adapt. It’s working well so far.

But this need to stay on the knife’s-edge of technology is exhausting. Every day there’s a new tool or technique that purports to up-end everything. You’ll see posts almost daily about the next “___ killer” or “paradigm shift.” Things move so fast you barely have time to try one new thing before the next one drops.

Naturally, most of what’s new on the scene pops up, steals attention for a few weeks, fizzles, and dies off. Most of what we see doesn’t stick or really transform anything. Lots of sizzle, no steak.

But to be early to what is transformative, you have to be there. My job is to be in the vanguard, to find and test and separate signal from noise.

It’s thrilling and it’s fast-paced, but it can also leave one feeling unmoored, pulled in a hundred directions at once.

In contrast to this, my personal reading interest$s have tilted to the other end of the barbell. I’ve spent more time reading books over 50 years old in the past couple years than the rest of my reading history combined. And I haven’t sensed this slowing down. My interest in classics of literature, philosophy, and foundational works of nonfiction is greater than ever. Outside of the occasional contemporary novel or history book, my reading keeps skewing older.

For example, I’ve been reading Crime and Punishment the past few months, making my way through it with a deep, thoughtful read. While it’s great on its own merits as a work of fiction, it’s interesting to explore a story that’s been delivering readers the same value and insights for a century and a half. The classics become classics because they expose everlasting, permanent truths. In the case of Dostoevsky, he wrote things about the human condition as relevant in 2025 as in 1875.

It’s a reminder that some truths don’t change, and that there’s profound value in ideas that have stood the test of time.

So on one end I’m leaning as close to the front as possible, trying new stuff. On the other, the trend is reversed.

In the professional realm, we’re tempted to lean into the new and innovative. To move fast and try stuff and look for what others haven’t yet discovered. Not many jobs are structured around learning from and incorporating the timeless truths. In professional life we’re incentivized to look for novelty. We’re expected to be on the cutting edge, and rewarded for it.

In a personal context though, your time is your own. Deep reflection rewards you at home more than in work life. A slower presentness doesn’t leave you feeling left behind. My choice of professional career affords plenty of time for testing the edges. But when I’m back to the calmness of my reading chair, I want to learn from the old and durable, rather than what’s new and volatile.

Though I still believe a sense of wisdom for the timeless does carry value in the professional sphere. One of the things I hope I bring to work with customers is a recognition of long-lived patterns that work. We call it experience.

In an age of always-on connectedness, with everything driven by attention-mining algorithms, it’s easy to get sucked into a maelstrom of “newness” everywhere. You get FOMO from every new tweet in the timeline, thinking you have to keep scrolling to know what’s going on. But as many of us know (at least consciously if not subconsciously), 90% of the content we lay our eyes on — current events, ideas, stories — have no staying power. New ideas tempt us to believe we must keep up, and that they matter, but if we remain anchored enough we’ll recognize the fallacy. The “current thing” springs up and pervades the timeline for a couple days, then vanishes like it never happened.

Spend too long swimming in the zeitgeist and you end up exhausted. You can only hear “this changes everything” so many times before you drown in the attention-sapping rip currents.

There’s a kind of awareness that comes from appreciating the old while experimenting with the new. We could call it pattern resonance: a sensitivity not to novelty itself, but to the deeper patterns underneath. The more you’re anchored in what’s proven durable, the less likely you are to be swept up by every wave of excitement, fear, or hype that attends the latest technological shift.

We don’t want to reject newness for its own sake, but look for where new innovation matches up (or not) with ideas of the past. The more time you spend with enduring ideas, the more attuned you are to recurring motifs: the thrill, the panic, the overreach, the eventual settling into pattern. Over time you can sense continuity.

For something to be a pattern, it must recur. It must be something consistent and reliable. The burden of proof is on the “new thing” to prove itself. Only time and testing in the marketplace of ideas will let us know whether there’s a fitness to a deeper underlying problem. If an idea has legitimacy, it’ll stick around.

Yet we should maintain our exposure to the trend machine, not only to be early to the party on the newest, high-value ideas, but to inoculate ourselves against calcification. Together, they balance each other.

A foundation in classic ideas builds resilience against the constant drumbeat of “this is brand new and changes everything.” You start to recognize how often the “new” are just old ideas dressed up or reframed. A foundation of accumulated wisdom provides an anchor to keep you steady, while the frenzy of media and pop culture thrashes back and forth.

This fast vs. slow, volatile vs. stable duality reminds me of another idea I’ve written about: pace layers.

’s framework describes how complex systems move and evolve at different “paces.” At the upper levels, fashion and commerce change on the order of days or weeks. At slower, deeper levels, culture and nature transform gradually over years or generations.

As the layers shear past one another, the best-fit ideas, products, norms, or adaptations seep downward into a stiffer permanence in the layers below.

The paces match the purpose of each layer. We need them all. The slow-forming rigidity of culture needs the new ideas of fashion to push it forward. And fast-paced commerce can’t function without the strong, steady foundations of governance. We need fast and slow to counterbalance one another. Where you get in trouble is when you mistake something like a fashion trend for a long-term cultural shift.

Every complex system exhibits this kind of pace-differentiated stack of related subsystems, from whole societies to buildings to software applications.

If you can attend to multiple pace layers in different contexts, this pattern resonance develops. The sense for timeless patterns provides a model to match new ideas against.

I don’t want to be a nostalgic traditionalist, or a naïve futurist. I want part of myself grounded, but another part out playing in the sandbox. I feel like this new vs. old attention barbell is like creating a personal pace layers stack.

I’m not that interested in turning this into a specific premeditated plan. It’s feeling like the right fit for my goals and well-being. And it’s nice that I can see the parallel to pace layering. What’s most important to me is balance. Trying new things, while retaining appreciation for the timeless.

For centuries sailors have had a saying: “one hand for the sailor, one hand for the ship.” When you’re aboard you need at least one hand, you’ve got work to do. But you’re no good to the ship if you’re swept overboard.

This past weekend I ran in the Pinellas Trail Challenge, a 46-mile ultramarathon that covers the entire Pinellas Trail, from St. Petersburg to Tarpon Springs, here on the Florida west coast.

To cut to the chase, I did well, but didn't finish. In about 10 1/2 hours I made it 40 miles before I decided to throw in the towel. What felt like an injury on the outside of my left foot was creeping, and I still had 6 miles to go.

That final 6 miles wasn’t even the biggest mental hurdle; it didn't sound that bad. But thinking about the 2+ additional hours it would take at my lethargic walking pace, that sounded impossible. Felt like I needed to sit down at any moment.

I've never been a big trainer, even for the few half marathon events I've done. And I mean that in the sense of having a schedule or plan to the process.

Even for this ultra there wasn't a particular plan. It seemed so wildly farfetched that I didn't bother trying to do a crazy schedule, with ramp ups and extra long weekend runs and intervals and the like. My training plan wasn't more complex than "try to run as much / as often as possible".

At the start of this year I decided to up my game on miles and consistency, and set a goal to do 1,000 miles in 2025. That's the sum total of my planning, though, for the whole year so far. It's simply been "run often, stay consistent". Not as a training build-up for this ultra, but as a way to stay on track for this annual goal without overtraining or getting hurt. So I considered that process “training”, but it wasn’t a targeted routine.

Anyway, I and three of my neighbors signed up for this ultra over a year ago. Back when that commitment was made, it seemed like fantasy how far in the future it was. No big deal, we'll train eventually. There was a feeling of "haha, isn't it wild we're on the schedule for a 46-miler?!" And it felt like it was so crazy — obviously we'd crash out somewhere on the path.

But my 3 friends all finished! Only lightly scathed. Super proud of all of them. No one trained all that much or very intentionally for this race, so it’s incredible that everyone had the grit and fortitude to get it done.

Considering that my longest run ever prior to this was probably 15 miles, my primary target at the start was to hit the marathon mark. I was locked in on 26.2 coming into Dunedin. I felt pretty confident about making it there, and told myself I'd reassess things once I crossed that objective.

We crept over the marathon mark and I felt alright, so reset the bar at the 50K (~31 miles). Didn’t think about anything else til I got there, then I’d about the next steps.

And once that objective was crossed, I felt perfectly satisfied with my achievement on the day. I had nothing else to prove to myself. Aside from hurting feet and general exhaustion, I felt okay though. So I figured I'd walk/run until it felt like an injury was incoming. So that's what I did: walked all the way up to Tarpon Springs and a few miles back before I called it.

As I laid around the house the next day, there was plenty of soreness and fatigue, but nothing a few slow days wouldn’t repair. I actually got out earlier today for 5 1/2 miles. Felt great.

I’ve already got a list of adjustments to make for my next long one like this. A couple of different decisions on clothes, shoes, and preparation and I’m certain I could’ve finished. And I don’t have any regrets about that. In fact, it feels good to know with confidence several improvements, and not many mistakes to correct.

I’ll make that checklist for next time. Oh, and maybe I’ll make an actual training plan, too.

Here are the final Garmin statistics:

• Total time: 10 hours, 45 minutes

• Distance: 40.03 miles

• Calories: 4,551

• Avg. Temperature: 79°F

• Marathon time: 6:06

• 50K time: 7:48

But I was thinking about the origins of the our particular independence: the Declaration, the Founders, its origins, and what makes our implementation of self-rule distinct and important.

(Yes, somehow I was able to be thinking about this even with him asking me random questions every 30 seconds.)

Something unique about the American Founders' flavor of revolution was that it was the first (only?) of the revolutionary movements of the past 300 years that took human nature into account. Many of the revolutions in the time since — the French Revolution, those of the 1840s, the Russian Revolution — had toppling despotic authoritarian regimes in mind.

In that respect the American Revolution shared a causal relationship in what brought it about.

Where the American version differed, though, was not in its origins, but its ends. It sought to replace an oppressive monarchy with something rooted in bottom-up individualism. A republican (small r) system of government that accepted human fallibility: one designed around the unchangeable essence of the "crooked timber of humanity."

Checks and balances, separation of powers, pitting faction against faction — mechanisms devised by the Founders designed wit the assumption that "good" people won't always occupy the seats of power. They knew we needed a system that could survive the contemporary leadership, one that didn't need a leader "enlightened" in the ways of the moment to survive and thrive.

They built a system designed to accommodate gradual change, one that would incorporate new good things, reform the flaws, evolve with the times.

Our system doesn't look to jump to the future or destroy what does work in pursuit of perfection. It's patient, accepting of contradiction. We seek to be a little bit better every day.

Counterpose this with the utopian, root-and-branch "redesign" of the French Revolution. What started as a noble attempt to stop the king's despotic rule morphed into an attempt to tear down the entire societal status quo, to design top-down a new vision for the future. It had respectable origins, but its means and goals went sideways. A few years in and you've got Robespierre, "La Terreur," and guillotines. One type of despotism replaced by another kind, a totalitarian purity cult twisting revolution for utopian ends.

In an impatience for improvement, it tried to force the issue.

If one accepts human nature as inherently flawed (the "constrained vision"), the path of the French aligns totally with humanity's tribal instincts: desire for control, for power, for influence. Humanity's factory defaults.

The "exceptionalism" of the American founding was that it took these flaws into account. It took these flaws as given, unchanging.

The Founders accepted and worked around the imperfections rather than casting them aside thinking they could socially-engineer their way around them.

The American founding understood the need for reform rather than the same "raze the status quo" model the French ended up pursuing. They knew it was necessary to break from the English and the monarchical tradition, but didn't throw out the entirety of its inherited cultural infrastructure like the French revolutionaries attempted to do.

It didn't seek to remodel all of society's norms from the ground up.

The American model appreciated that some things need changing, but many things didn't. The Founders sought a system designed around reform rather than replacement.

American culture, even if unstated and "in the water," is rooted in this appreciation for retaining the hard-won victories that took centuries to achieve.

In their fervor to behead the monarchs and replace them with something better, the French got overzealous and threw the baby out with the bathwater. They went too far and tore to pieces many of the invisible-yet-valuable elements of the culture.

In America we do this differently. We have optimism for the future, to build new things and improve our lives. But we do so in a way that doesn't jeopardize what we've earned through difficult victories over centuries of work.

There's a gratitude for this that lives deep in the American mindset, even if we don't think about it every day. Granted, there’s not enough gratitude, and too often we take these achievements as givens.

We should use the 4th of July as a time to bring out this gratitude, to remember all the great things we've achieved, the hard things we've recognized and gradually surmounted, and the confidence that we can fix, reform, and get beyond the problems we've still got.

Happy Independence Day!

“Despite his laconic reply, a terse almost-inaudible mumble, everyone could tell he was deeply thoughtful.”

And even though our sixth-grade reading levels had likely never heard laconic, we could infer it meant short, brief, blunt. Over time, if we took reading seriously (I didn't, not til much older), we'd refine this skill and build an ever-larger vocabulary. Reading attentively built the muscle for meanings, and the vocab expansion made future reading easier. A nice little flywheel.

This ability to self-teach through reading was always gratifying. Though I didn't read as a kid as much as one might predict based on my habits of today, I liked knowing words. It felt like having some secret knowledge other kids didn't. My mom says that when I was young, 8 or 9, I'd keep a list of "hard words to learn." I guess I have a thing for words.

But these days I'm more a chaser of etymologies.

Even as young as middle school (not even knowing what the word etymology meant), I liked how if you could pick apart a word's components — roots, prefixes, etc — it was like a decoder ring for figuring out tons of others.

You found out script meant "to write", and you could connect describe, manuscript, scripture, scribble. Discover Cred meant "trust", and you've got credit, credence, credulous, incredible.

Decomposing words let you under the hood, and showed that they aren't always invented from thin air; there's a guiding structure you can study and use to your advantage.

This is one of the reasons I'm such a slow reader. I see words and I can't help but go down the etymological rabbit hole. Word roots and their archaic origins stick in my brain.

So I thought I'd start what might become an occasional series, on interesting linguistic discoveries encountered in everyday reading.

Here are a few I pulled together from my recent notes. Hope you enjoy (and let me know in the comments!)

Saeculum vs. religio

Lately I've been reading a lot of theology and history of religion.

I was watching this interview with historian Tom Holland (author of the fantastic Dominion), and in part he's explaining the origins of the concept of the "secular" vs. the "religious". So I had to dig deeper.

We know the word secular today to mean, roughly, "non-religious." All the things outside of a theological context are the "secular." When we trace back the branches to where the word comes from, we find in Latin saeculum, which in the Roman period meant something like "the span of a human life," "a generation," or "an age." In late antiquity, Augustine of Hippo enters the picture and sharpens the distinction between the saeculum and aeternitas, "the timeless city of God" (eternity).

In the statesman Cicero's interpretation, religio owed its origin to "re-legere": to go over again, to rehearse (legere has to do with "reading into", gives us the likes of lecture and legible).

Augustine also recasts this one with a Christian twist, insisting on an alternate view with a root in ligare, meaning to bind, tie, or unite (think ligament, league, oblige). In his definition, religio signifies a re-tying of humanity to God after sin ruptured the original bond. Religion is the bond that ties the restless soul to the Creator.

It was fascinating to hear where we get these terms and this distinction between the secular and religious domains, but equally interesting is Holland's point about how novel an idea this was, that there could be a clear separation between a "religion" and anything else. Prior to the Middle Ages, there was simply no concept from any culture around the world of a realm divorced from the religious; everyday life was wholly integrated with one's "religion."

Latin and chemistry

From 10th grade chemistry class, I have a vivid memory of learning the Latin origins of element names in the periodic table. Our teacher, Mr. Bailey, said them with a baritone emphasis I can still hear, like he's sitting here speaking to me right now. It's surprising that he went through the effort to explain the source of our seemingly-arcane chemical symbols. Why did we pick such weird letters anyway? Well, he took the time to tell us.

Like many words in Western languages, most are rooted in Latinate origins:

• Gold (Au) → Aurum

• Silver (Ag) → Argentum.

• Lead (Pb) → Plumbum (as in lead pipes, plumbing)

• Mercury (Hg) → Hydrargyrum ("water-silver")

One that always had a euphonic ring to it, and stuck particularly in my head was Cuprum (Cu), for copper. For years every time I think copper, whether pennies or indoor pipes (no more lead these days), I remember cuprum.

But I didn't know that the Greeks and Romans themselves got the the name from a place.

When first discovered, they called it aes cyprium: "metal of Cyprus", as in the Mediterranean island that was a principle source of the metal. Over time, it morphed into cuprum, then eventually, copper.

In Annals of the Former World, John McPhee's epic tome on geology, he calls out the connection:

"In the way that the Smartville arc seems to have brought gold to California, Cyprus brought copper to the world. 'Cyprus' means copper. Whether the island is named for the metal or the metal for the island is an etymology lost in time."

I wonder where else we'll find word origins in place names?

That one has a sensible connection, but some words come to us by weird absorption.

Above the clouds

I’ll leave you with a funny one, which I first saw in Mark Forsyth's excellent Etymologicon.

Our word sky comes from the Old Norse ský, which in that language meant "cloud".

Hmm. Somehow a word for the thing in the sky became the word to describe the whole thing?

Forsyth has a funny take on this:

"Our word sky comes from the Viking word for cloud, but in England there's simply no difference between the two concepts, and so the word changed its meaning because of the awful weather."

English is such a great language for its wild diversity. A hodgepodge of 1,000+ years of word assimilation. If you've never seen it, there's a great clip of Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges talking about this exact topic: the way in which English holds such a rich collection of options for the writer to express such specific feeling and meaning:

As I find more fun origins, meanings, and histories, I hope to write about them more in future posts.

I've coached his past seasons of tee-ball and A level, but coaching AA is different. It's the first level where the kids begin learning the actual rules of the game. We start keeping score, making outs, hitting real pitches; it's their first experience with ebb and flow of a baseball game. With the slowness, the stop-and-go, the tedium followed by excitement.

Coaching gave me a front-row seat to baseball's beautiful complexity and its value as a teaching tool for a wide variety of skills: from the athletic and physical to the mental and social. When you've grown up with the game, you lose perspective on how intricate it is. Its weird rules, timing, positioning, situation-dependent strategy; it all becomes second nature. But for the kids, everything is new. As a coach you see the complexity through beginner's eyes again.

Baseball's a challenge for kids this age, but one well worth the effort. Four separate elements are thrown at them at once, each an entire sport to itself: hitting, fielding, pitching, and baserunning. For coaches, the challenge is striking the right balance between easing them into certain skills and tossing them into the deep end to learn through raw trial and error on others. Like any tacit skill, the teacher can't explain in words exactly what to do, only model it. The player must go through the motions themselves, mimicking the patterns to hone in on what works for them. No words from coach can get that 7 year old shortstop to keep the grounder from going into the outfield. The kid only learns with repetition to get in front of it, knock it down, and refine their timing, position, and bravery to make the play.

In all its complexity we have a phenomenal tool for teaching a range of hard and soft skills.

There's the physical side: athletics, coordination, strength, agility.

But even more important are the soft skills, valuable both on and off the field: quick decision-making (building intuition, pattern recognition), friendship, teamwork, humility, respect, patience, and the long, frustrating (yet powerful) process of learning through trial and error.

One of the greatest joys of parenting is watching your kids pass through these little rites of passage. And a baseball diamond of first-graders working out the game for themselves is an incredible petri dish to observe their character formation and skill development as they confront its physical, mental, and emotional challenges.

Baseball is famously failure-heavy.

Even the best hitters in the game become an out ~2/3rds of the time. Comfort with constant strikeouts and weak ground balls is just part of playing. With youngsters this means waiting patiently for their turn up to bat, only to get fanned on 3 swings (while dad/coach gets to watch the tears). You feel for the kid watching them fail. But knowing the game means knowing where it's benefits lie. The slow struggle of baseball is one of its values.

Patience, a trust in trial and error (and adjustment), and a resiliency to not let the individual failures drag you down are required skills. Everyone notches a dozen failures per game. The sport isn't about perfecting performance; it's about gradual, play-by-play improvement one step at a time. Even over the course of a 3 month season, you can watch the kids' demeanors change as they get comfortable with the frequency of failure.

In his book on baseball, Men at Work, George Will wrote about the trial and lots-of-error of the game. I love this anecdote:

Warren Spahn was one of a group of former All-Stars who were in Washington to play in an old-timers’ game. Spahn said: “Mr. Speaker, baseball is a game of failure. Even the best batters fail about 65 percent of the time. The two Hall of Fame pitchers here today (Spahn, 363 wins, 245 losses; Bob Gibson, 251 wins, 174 losses) lost more games than a team plays in a full season. I just hope you fellows in Congress have more success than baseball players have.”

It's also useful that failure happens in both private and public.

Sometimes they swing and miss on the practice field or in the batting cage, in a private space for them to take bigger risks and try things. But in the game in front of their parents and peers, the successes and failures are on display. It's good life practice to get out there and try stuff in front of others. We're not always in the safety of home. Sometimes you've got to take a swing, chalk up strike three, and sit down.

Failure's not fun, but it's healthy for them to have this low-stakes environment to condition themselves to take risk and feel the sting of failure. It's only going to happen more and more often in life as they get older. Getting used to it is healthy.

A's and Cardinal's coach Tony La Russa was a big risk guy, as in comfortable taking it. Here's George Will again, in his chapter on the legendary manager:

La Russa believes in taking risks precisely because baseball, the game of failure, is all risks, the odds being what they are: against.

The stakes in Little League aren't exactly MLB-level, but I believe in the principle of using the sport as a platform for kids to learn about risk in a context with visible consequences.

The play-by-play nature of the game makes it good for teaching situational risk/reward patterns. Each play configuration, whether you're on defense or offense, changes the risk calculus of various decisions. If you've got 1 out and bases loaded, do you try the throw to the catcher for the out at home to prevent the run? Or throw to first and give up a run in exchange for the easy 2nd out? It depends! If you're ahead by 5 runs and it's late in the game, sure. If it's early and you're down a run, take the risk.

Watching our boys learn to make these decisions mid-play is both gratifying and frustrating. But for them, they're put in a position to make risk computations quickly. And they learn from the consequences, good or bad.

Baseball is great classroom for teaching the value of incremental success, of compounding progress. It's not a game of heroic feats (though sometimes your kid clears the bases with a hit over the infield), but rather the cumulation of individual good plays. You can't get 3 outs with one catch and throw. You can't score 10 runs with a swing. You have to claw your way forward with one small success at a time. There's no lottery. Will says:

Baseball is still what it always has been and always will be, basically a 90-feet-at-a-time game.

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I'm a believer in institutions as shapers of character.

"Institution" in this context doesn't necessarily mean a specific organization — though Little League Baseball is itself an institution. I'm referring to its other definition: a law, practice, or custom, like the institution of marriage or rule of law or private property.

Over time institutions build up muscle for how to shape human characteristics and behaviors in specific ways; the older they are (lindy!), the more power they have to bring people together for a shared cause.

The game of baseball is itself an institution, with its own customs, norms, and culture. Its norms function as guardrails and guideposts to help its players model behaviors and emphasize certain values, like patience and perseverance. There are as many unwritten rules as those in the rulebook: Tuck your shirt in. Always beat out the ground ball (even if you're an easy out). No taunting opposing hitters from the infield. Celebrate successes, but maintain your humility.

wrote a whole book about this idea: on institutions as vehicles to mold and shape character toward specific ends, not merely to serve as platforms to be selfishly abused for personal gain. Institutions exist to change us as much as we use or influence them.

Baseball doesn't just teach how to hit a ball with a stick. It teaches how to wait your turn, to sacrifice for the team (sometimes literally, as in the sac bunt). It forces you to get used to standing around while still paying attention, sometimes for innings at a time. It models how to incrementally clock small victories.

The game of baseball aligns with Levin's description of the formative function of institutions:

While institutions come in a wide range of shapes and sizes, they share two distinct elements that, broadly speaking, may be said to unite them. That they are durable is essential. An institution keeps its shape over time, and so shapes the realm of life in which it operates. When it changes, it generally does so by incremental evolution of its shape and structure, not by sharp and disjunctive transformation, so that its form over time exhibits a certain continuity that is fundamental to what it is able to accomplish in the world.

Most important, each institution is a form of association. What’s distinct about an institution is that it is a form in the deepest sense: a structure, a shape, a contour... The institution organizes its people into a particular form moved by a purpose, characterized by a structure, defined by an ideal, and capable of certain functions.

(Yuval Levin, A Time to Build. 2020.)

I see the game of baseball like this — a traditional communal activity, refined over decades, with a collection of rules and norms meant to shape character.

When George Will reflects on why he decided to write a whole book about baseball as a political commentator, he saw the connection between the game of baseball and its utility for character formation:

(The book) had become an illustration of two of my most deeply held convictions: Character is destiny. And people of good character demonstrate in their daily lives the fact that, by being attentive to the small details of their vocations, big problems can be largely banished.

Attending to and shepherding the small details is an important, valuable skill for life in general. Baseball teaches us to value the iterative gains: that we don't need big, sweeping change or successes to be satisfied. The big problems we encounter in life can be overcome if we pay it forward little by little, day by day.

These lessons aren’t exclusive to baseball, of course. Soccer, football, dance — they all teach things like structure, commitment, and teamwork.

But baseball has a unique cocktail of virtues. The slow pace instills patience. Part of the game is waiting for the play to start, waiting for the ball that never comes to you, sitting in the dugout. Its difficulty breeds resilience. Its structure rewards attentiveness to small moments. It teaches kids to wait their turn, to play for the team, to pay attention even when they’re not in the spotlight. To get comfortable with silence and stillness — even boredom.

It’s a game that demands kids try, again and again. To swing and miss. To run and get thrown out. To stand in the box after a strikeout and take another cut. And that’s what makes it such a good teacher.

In an increasingly impatient society filled with distractions constantly eroding kids' attention spans, there’s something grounding about old traditions that still work, ones that force stillness and attention and its other virtues.

Imagine a bicycle where the product manager said: “people don’t get math so we can’t have numbered gears. We need labeled buttons for gravel mode, downhill mode, …”

This is the hypothetical “nightmare bicycle” that Andrea diSessa imagines in his book Changing Minds.

As he points out: it would be terrible! We’d lose the intuitive understanding of how to use the gears to solve any situation we encounter. Which mode do you use for gravel + downhill?

It turns out, anyone can understand numbered gears totally fine after a bit of practice. People are capable!

These kinds of interfaces seem to be everywhere these days. Bikes, microwaves, anything digital.

In search of a mass market, designers quest for interfaces that abstract away the underlying workings of the system. Every function needs a preset or a simplified shortcut button to do single-purpose, repetitive (in the designers' mind) actions. Think popcorn button on your microwave, or the gravel setting on the bike, or even "sport mode" on your car's transmission. Each of these provides an abstraction for controlling its underlying mechanisms.

All systems have variables we interact with to control what they do. The microwave has time and power. The bike has front and rear gears. A camera's got shutter speed and light sensitivity. The variables of the system interact in unique combinations to produce different behavior. We press "melt butter" on the microwave, but in reality it's just a shorthand for a power level and time. Unfortunately, what it's actually doing is often hidden from us.

The same nightmare interfaces appear on every home appliance, piece of electronics, or — one of my personal most-hated examples — every control on the car dashboard.

With these kinds of interfaces, "too clever by half" is a phrase that comes to mind. The designers try to get too clever, and attempt to provide an abstraction for every use case.

When a product design relies too much on abstractions, it makes it hard or impossible for the user to learn the underlying mechanics of its operation.

In pursuit of making things "easier to use", we might actually be making them more difficult or frustrating.

Abstractions like this do provide value for users, or at least that's the motivator for building them. They allow users to get started with a product with minimal learning. Knowing nothing at all about my microwave, with a pound of chicken fresh from the freezer, I can hit "defrost" and type 1.0 lbs. I may have no clue what power level or time is actually needed to get the job done. But the modern microwave doesn't always let me in on its formula: the abstraction hides from me the actual inputs, so I don't even get to learn the minutes/power-per-pound ratios that could help me in future cases.

Bad abstractions only provide surface learning, not fundamental understanding of the system.

With the nightmare interface, abstractions prevent the user from building a mental model of the system's inner workings. Without a reliable map of how the system works, we have no sense of how to go outside the guardrails of its usage. Edge cases are a pain because they require going off-script. But when we go outside the guardrails, our lack of knowledge of how the system's components work together makes it hard to navigate.

It's like being on a boat and only knowing how to navigate by instrument, staring at the dot on the GPS. But when that GPS fails you, you're adrift. Conversely, if you build the knowledge of a few basic abilities like reading a compass heading, calculating your speed, and plotting your position on a chart, you can dead reckon your way.

The abstraction gives us a steep increase in usability right away. It has the benefit of immediacy, but plateaus early. You learn how to start and do the basics quickly, but never build a rich understanding:

Intuitive, natural interfaces take longer to build competency with, but offer much higher ceilings with rich understanding.

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Learning how the bike's gears work with a simple numeric gear shifter requires you to do some riding first. You do some pedaling, riding uphill and downhill, and on different surfaces, modeling the system relationships in your head. The amount of force required in high gear versus low gear on hard ground or up an incline.

But the feedback comes quickly, and the intuitive "feel" you build with a little trial and error is much more resilient, useful learning:

Good designs expose a system's structure in a way that balances the speed and ease of getting started with the ability to understand the fundamental system dynamics.

Bad designs mask the real variables and block the user from learning the system. They require memorizing arbitrary rules instead of offering a set of basic relationships and behaviors that let us reason toward understanding.

Good design makes the underlying system legible so users can build a workable mental model, and improvise in novel situations. They surface the generative logic so users can reason, explore, and extend.

Given an intuitive design and a little time to experiment, a curious user builds a mental framework that predicts how the system will respond to new inputs.

Cracking the intuitive approach to a product's design is worth the trade-off. People are resilient and capable, and the learning they'll achieve with a few minutes of use is worth the investment.

I'll leave it with this, from Geoffrey's post:

You can just have a time (and power) button. People will figure out how to cook stuff.

Good designs expose systematic structure; they lean on their users’ ability to understand this structure and apply it to new situations. We were born for this.

"We were born for this".

Human brains are meant to handle the gradual ramp of intuitive learning. In our design processes, we should trust our users' abilities more.

But there's no silver bullet to fostering a culture like the icons of the industry we admire. The Pixars and Shopifys and Patagonias of the world didn't burst onto the scene with the wholly-formed and distinctive cultures they're known for today.

The keyword here is foster.

Just like a biological culture in a laboratory petri dish — a culture is grown, not made. It's not built brick by brick like a wall. It's cultivated like a garden. We set the environmental conditions (as best we can), we prune and direct, we water and feed. But we don't directly dictate the results we get.

PowerPoint slides full of mantras, maxims, and sayings don't grant you a culture.

I’m totally supportive of articulating a set of principles. In fact, I think the exercise of articulating values in writing is fantastic for the way it crystallizes your beliefs, and forces exclusion. By defining what you believe, you imply what you don't.

But the culture itself sprouts from how you put those principles into practice.

Culture’s built on deeds, not words

Culture is the consequence of a chain of decisions, focuses, choices, actions. It’s not handed down from above, it emerges from below, through what you choose to emphasize, the expectations you set, the examples you provide, how you comport yourself.

It’s the result of what you do, not what you say.

I’ve written before about the durability of bottom-up, evolved systems. When you understand how strong cultures work — where they come from, and respect the patience required to nurture one along — you know what it takes to produce one.

This knowledge doesn't make the process easy. Far from it, in fact. But you know much of what not to do: what things are either pointless in culture-building, or actively harmful. It's like raising children. You can be full of parenting book knowledge about how to raise healthy, honorable, productive kids. But no checklist of "best practices" produces the result. Only the years of presence and hard work create an upstanding citizen.

As with children, culture requires long investment. In either case, after several years you're blessed with this resilient organism that's able to bear weight, weather criticism, meet and overcome challenges, and emerge stronger with each new experience and failure.

Culture as infrastructure

Culture is invisible infrastructure. It’s the mycelial network in the forest weaving your organizational trees together. It lives in the spaces between the physical, formal structures. Like the subterranean fungi between the tree roots, it's an unseen fabric between your systems that supports communication, coordination, decision making. It's the stuff in between your meeting cadences and product roadmaps and SOP documents.

What actions you reinforce gradually calcify into norms of behavior. If they're the right norms, this calcification creates durability: a resource you can rely on, that can take hits without taking damage.

But if they're the wrong ones, they become rigid and hard to erode. In some cases, they have to be painfully dynamited out like rock from a strip mine.

When you reinforce the right behaviors, the organization learns, like an organism. What was enabled, permitted, and works sticks around and gets better.

I'm reminded of something I wrote a while back about habits: how when a behavior is repetitively performed and reinforced, it acts like firmware rather than software:

Firmware is like software embedded directly in hardware — a set of baked-in instructions for routine operations. It's useful where you have repetitive operations to perform. Getting closer to the metal makes operations happen faster, lowers the latency in the system, and increases reliability. In your computer things like bootloaders and peripheral controllers and network interface cards use firmware to execute repeat, rote processes. They embed "habitual" behaviors of the system.

Culture and communication

Culture works like an operational lubricant: it reduces friction and streamlines the inherently messy work of coordination and collaboration. It's like a river gradually carving channels into the landscape, speeding up the flow of information.

Culture influences communication. Team develop shorthands and internal memes for high-signal data transfer. The cultural norms create a language for transmitting ideas. It encodes shared understanding that guides how people act, choose, disagree, and form consensus.

Culture also serves as scaffolding for conflict resolution. Whether its a conflict in ideas or personalities, the evolved norms you’ve nurtured through past actions help resolve ambiguities and generate the conviction to choose one path over another.

Strong cultures don’t just resist entropy; they actually get stronger over time. They absorb new ideas, test them, and either integrate or reject them. Like a wave choosing which surrounding ripples to constructively merge with, a strong culture selectively amplifies what fits and filters out what doesn’t.

Leaders play a critical role here. Not because they define culture by fiat, but because their behavior sets the bounds of what’s acceptable, admirable, and aspirational. Culture follows the taste, discernment, and consistency of its stewards.

We'd do well to remember that the say:do ratio tilts toward action, not words. Resilient cultures come from successful patterns of doing, not from slogans or slide decks.

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Here we go.

The Fall of Hyperion

Dan Simmons, 1990.

This series is one I’ve had on my list for ages, and just started digging into last year. The first entry in the Hyperion Cantos appeared on my Best Books of 2024 list, and I’d highly recommend it for any fiction readers, but particularly fans of sci-fi.

Part 2 continues the story of the pilgrims on their journey to the Time Tombs on Hyperion, but does away with the same episodic Canterbury Tales structure from the first book. Didn’t have the same awe-inspiring surprise of the first one, but it does build on the universe in satisfying ways. We learn a lot more about a few key mysteries, and there’s plenty more to be discovered in part 3 of the tetralogy.

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Turning Pro

, 2012.

If you read Steve Pressfield’s books and don’t feel inspired (or otherwise ass-kicked) to get out of your chair and get to work creatively, your head’s probably not really in it. Turning Pro builds on his fantastic magnum creative opus, The War of Art.

In that book he was on a quest to convince you that what he calls “Resistance” is a universal force, one which every person faces pursuing creative or important endeavor.

Here he builds on the Resistance idea by differentiating how the professional handles the work compared to the amateur. The pro doesn’t sit by and let Resistance control him through procrastination or distraction or writer’s block. The pro gets down to business, puts in the time, and treats the work as work, not a hobby. To the pro there’s no such thing as “I don’t feel ‘inspired’ today.” Pressfield’s of the mind that creativity is a thing you pull from yourself through grit, work, habit, behavior, rather than some source of divine inspiration. Inspiration comes through the process of treating it like a job. Show up, do it, go home.

Pros sit down and put in the hours. It’ll certainly make you think about how seriously you’re really taking your passions.

Notes Towards the Definition of Culture

T.S. Eliot, 1948.

I can’t remember for the life of me where I saw the reference to this one. Eliot is mostly known as a poet, so this work of social commentary is outside his oeuvre — at least that of his earlier life.

In a few dozen pages, Eliot argues that true culture is a complex, organic whole that develops over time within a society, rooted in shared religion, traditions, and institutions. Culture cannot be artificially engineered or mass-produced, and that its survival depends on a healthy hierarchy, intellectual and religious continuity, and a healthy interplay between social classes. He also warns against the flattening effects of secularism and totalitarianism, advocating instead for the preservation of cultural diversity and spiritual depth as essential to a civilization’s vitality.

This one deserves a deeper dive in the future. Stay tuned.

I found the whole book available to read online here.

American Covenant

Yuval Levin, 2024.

This is Yuval Levin’s revisitation of the Constitution: its structure, its history, its reason for being architected the way that it is.

Article by article, he breaks down the purpose of the intricate web of counterposed forces. Madison gave us a wonderfully complex-yet-simple foundation to build on. One that bestows clear authorities while restraining the branches through each’s relationships to the others.

Yuval argues that the Constitution is not the source of our political discord but its solution. It was designed to not to make us all one big unified whole. It assumed a level of division as a default. Therefore, Madison (and others) architected a framework to channel division into constructive disagreement and foster unity through compromise.

We’re not all supposed to agree. We’re supposed to disagree, and that’s the point. The Constitution encourages negotiation and coalition-building to bridge diverse perspectives and temper the worst flare ups of all extreme factions.

He levels a harsh critique on contemporary politics for straying from these ideals, particularly through excessive partisanship and over-reliance on administrative power. Blending historical analysis with optimism, Levin presents the Constitution as a timeless framework for repairing America’s fractured civic culture and rebuilding a shared sense of purpose.

Believe

, 2025.

This book states its thesis on the tin in the subtitle: why everyone should be religious. I’ve heard Ross on 3 separate podcast interviews discussing it, so was curious enough to check it out.

I listened to it in audio form in one shot, on a long drive back from South Carolina, and thoroughly enjoyed it. Douthat makes his case strongly, with convincing perspective, without belaboring or insulting his target convert. Douthat himself is a devout Catholic, but here he makes no particularly strong case for Christianity, specifically. He grants that faith in many forms fills the “God-shaped hole” in our psyches, and serves as means of social and cultural formation that we lose or degrade at our peril.

I’ve never been a regular churchgoer, but I’m sympathetic to and greatly value religious history and tradition. I’d recommend this one, even for the committed atheist.

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The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe

C.S. Lewis, 1950.

I’m on something of a Lewis kick lately, having read his philosophical work The Abolition of Man last year (subject of an upcoming RE issue), and in the middle of The Screwtape Letters.

I read the first few parts of Narnia 30 years ago, yet never finished the whole collection. This time I’m going back through in publication order.

Though the Chronicles are ostensibly children’s books, there’s a satisfaction in the subtext reading as an experienced adult. The combination of myth, allegory, and the fairy tale make for a richly layered read. I’m already onto Prince Caspian. Now I want to start over reading them with the kids.

The Great Debate

Yuval Levin, 2013.

After reading Yuval on the Constitution, I decided to segue directly to one of his earlier books. As it subtitle describes, The Great Debate gives the historical account of the violent disagreement between Thomas Paine and Edmund Burke and their perspectives on the American and French Revolutions.

In short, Paine argued for utopian societal reboot in France, and favored the revolutionaries’ desire for a ground-up rebuild of French society. Burk, on the other hand, argued for gradual change, a preservation and respect for tradition, and warned against the dangers of ripping up the social fabric long fought for. He’d rather reform the institutions of government than completely rip them to shreds.

Their disagreement speaks to the opposed views on human nature, the role of institutions, and the means through which one should pursue change: through total revolution or gradual change?

Others in progress

• The Roots of American Order, Russell Kirk – This one is rich and deep. It’s taking me a long time to read, but it’s one of those books with a Wikipedia rabbit hole on every page. If books are worth reading, they’re worth reading carefully.

• Crime and Punishment, Dostoevsky – I thought Russian literature would be more impenetrable, but C&P is shockingly readable (shocking to me, anway). A page-turner in many parts. Thoroughly enjoying when I sit down with it.

• The Timeless Way of Building, Christopher Alexander – Another one I’m reading carefully, like studying a textbook as much as reading a work of nonfiction. I wrote some on form, context, and fit partially inspired by reading Alexander lately.

I hope to be back midsummer with another update on what I’ve read this year.

I opened a book to read late evening, Yuval Levin's The Great Debate, a history of Edmund Burke and Thomas Paine's feud of political ideologies. The specific book isn't terribly relevant to the point, though.

I sat there reading for, I dunno, at least 2 hours uninterrupted. No phone-touching, no screens. Just myself and the work, and the occasional note scribbled on a stack of index cards on the desk next to me.

Something just clicked and I got in the zone. I'd read a section, then go back and read it again. Probably read 80 pages. As I said, this almost never happens these days.

As I read, I wrestled with its ideas. Pull quotes from Burke triggered my own thoughts to investigate later: on the meaning of culture, the benefits to preserving social order, the villainy of the French Revolution that we didn't learn about in high school history class, the specific dangers of utopian projects. Big ideas, small ideas, and everywhere in between.

I didn't sit down with the goal to create anything; I was just soaking up Levin's writing. But this sort of active, engaged, curated consumption does something different than your typical accidental 30-minute Instagram scrolling session.

Instead of mindless waves pixels and sound leaving your brain as fast as they enter, the ideas get to come in and stay a while. They sit and simmer and cook up something new. And also since I chose that book intentionally, they're ideas I specifically wanted to engage with in that moment.

This got my mind turning on the relationship between what we consume and what we create.

Creativity is unlocked by curating what you consume, and consuming intentionally.

It's easy to consume lazily and unceasingly. Modern media technology requires no effort on our part as it dumps a shower of content on us every day that we don't consciously choose. We let the systems pull us around rather than pushing where we want to go.

We scroll feeds shoveled to us on X and LinkedIn.

We play an endless loop of reels on TikTok and YouTube that require no attention span.

We buy stuff Amazon recommends to us without second thought.

Letting others' content wash over us is much less work than our own creative pursuits. We don't even have to leave our seat or move our hands, plus that dopamine hit comes much faster. When we watch reels, we get that pang right away. Tap like, next, next, like, next.

But it's the empty calories of the Kit Kat bar. There's no lasting anything to get out of it. Scroll for an hour and all you've got is 1 less hour. No ideas, nothing to toss into your creative hopper and work with later.

Today's algorithm-driven products are scientifically tuned to feed us this virulent strain of addictive content. They don't care really if we create. The feeds are ironically driven by some that do create, but they create with the goal of keeping your attention, not to spark your creative engine. It's a self-licking ice cream cone. Creator wants attention, creator creates with the sole purpose of more attention. Rinse, repeat.

Consume carefully

Deep satisfaction comes from being generative, the wholesome calories. And consumption and generation are connected.

What you generate is a product of what you consume. What you consume informs and influences your creative output: it's the fuel.

My hours spent with Burke and Paine left me with a page and a half of notes to drive future writing sessions, and to connect with other related ideas. Even in real time I noted how Burke's thoughts on social order connected with another idea from Russell Kirk on American order's roots in the classics. Surely there's fodder for some future writing in there.

Generation doesn't require some kind of divine inspiration to fill an empty canvas. Most generation is a form of synthesis.

When we create — whether we're talking writing, painting, building furniture, or making software — we compose new ideas from existing ones. Creativity is all a form of novel recombination.

To be more generative, you don't need to gin up completely original materials in a vacuum. Our favorite artists and innovators of the past remixed what they learned of and consumed into something new.

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Andy Warhol took pop culture and silkscreen printing and created an iconic look. Gutenberg took movable type components and oil-based ink to create a way to quickly reproduce prints. Brian Eno combined atmospheric sounds and generative systems to create a whole new genre of music.

What you consume drives what you generate.

Keep this in mind when you're mindlessly doomscrolling. If we want to be more generative, it's easier when we're thoughtful.

Take control of consumption, and create more

Passive consumption is easy, passive, low-energy.

Generation is active, energetic. Requires your participation. Requires thoughtful selection of inputs.

When you let others form our consumption habits, you're on the sidelines. When you curate and create, you're in the arena.

When a design element causes friction, when users struggle with an interface, when a chair becomes uncomfortable after sitting for an hour, these misfits stand out clearly. By contrast, good fit often goes unnoticed precisely because it flows so seamlessly with its context. When something fits well, it feels natural, intuitive, and "just right."

Bad fits cause visible friction, while good fits slide by without our awareness.

Readers might recall GK Chesterton's famous fence, a warning against the destruction of existing systems without first understanding their purpose:

There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, “I don’t see the use of this; let us clear it away.” To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: “If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it.”

Chesterton's cautionary tale speaks to this good-fitness problem.

When a received solution works well, we don't notice its positive function. The proverbial fence was built by someone long ago to serve a purpose, one it served so silently that the reasons for its being have been lost. The fence sits there doing its job, downstream benefits taken for granted.

We accept the benefits as given without acknowledgement. We stop noticing the door handle that turns intuitively, the city street that channels foot traffic effortlessly, the vaccine that prevents diseases we no longer fear.

When there's high form-context fit, our attention simply moves on.

Invisible benefits

Systems we’ve built with decades (or centuries) of gradual work often hum along delivering invisible value. We’re blind to things that work precisely because they work so well. Their function becomes a background asset — a kind of infrastructural support network.

It’s especially evident in abstract systems of human interaction. Some systems, like traditions passed down through generations, exhibit a kind of long-evolved fit. They develop and adapt over time to meet a need, and not always the present or obvious kind.

A tradition takes root gradually as a solution to a tacit, historical, or moral need. Its purpose may no longer be legible to us, but its presence often indicates that some form of fit had been achieved. Religions and social structures and cultural norms develop in reaction to something missing, but our ability to explicitly explain their purpose sometimes evades us.

But when even a small aspect of a system is maladapted or inconvenient in a changing context (a metaphorical squeaky wheel), it calls attention to itself. People focus on that flaw, and — failing to perceive the deeper fitness of the whole — propose sweeping changes or removal.

In a streak of utopian hubris about a "better way" for cities to function, urban planners of the mid-20th century like Robert Moses ripped up the organic developments of Manhattan, Queens, and the Bronx to build elevated highways and planned housing projects. Are these functional? Could there have been a better way? Modern-day New Yorkers would say so.

With a delusional view of what was "better", and a lack of understanding about what currently worked, planners ripped-and-replaced the cityscape rather than evolve it piecemeal from the existing conditions outward.

It certainly makes the planner's job easier when they get to wipe the slate clean. The greenfield site is simpler to work with than a complex web of interdependencies and constraints to contend with.

But that web, even with its flaws, is full of functional life. The existing solution can't be replaced wholesale and retain all its invisible benefits.

We should address poor fit without revolutionary change

There's an irritation, a discomfort we feel when a solution isn't working. Even if it once had clear and known benefit, when that benefit stops being relevant, or is overtaken by new problems in the evolving context, it floats to the surface of our attention.

The reformer only sees the parts that aren't working well anymore and condemns the entire thing, skipping right past the benefits. Chesterton fences sometimes are impediments to progress, at least on some dimension. But the rebuilder wants to tear it down before understanding the existing relationships between form and context — between existing problems and the current solution. Perhaps on some dimension, there is a misfit between the fence and its changing context. But fitness is multidimensional. We need to do more than index on a single thing we don't like before we drive in with the bulldozers. The older and more complex the system, the more important we do our best to modify what we've got rather than risk second-system syndrome.

Misfit is obvious. But good fit is invisible. We should work harder to notice — and be grateful for — what does work, and consider how we might iteratively evolve what's working rather than being too utopian in our thinking.

Certain design approaches, whether in architecture, software, or tool-making seem to work so well, they evolve the whole design practice around them. They change the way design works in a particular domain from that point forward.

Some designs hit on such tight solution-problem fit — or form-context fit — that they become defaults.

Some adept craftsman came up with the claw hammer centuries back, and it still drives and pulls nails as well as ever. The simple paper clip has been holding sheets together for 150 years.

In biology, evolution spirals upward toward adaptations that work so well that they perpetuate for millions of years. The most tightly fit adaptations strike a near-perfect balance between specialized and generalized: they stick around even as the underlying environmental conditions change over time. Turtles developed their protective shells 200 million years ago. Squids evolved chromatophores for camouflage over 100 million years ago. An adaptation with good fitness sticks around.

When we consider effective design strategies for solving problems, the form-context fit model helps us frame and shape our understanding of the forces at work, and how we might design a solution to harness, dampen, or manipulate those forces.

In his 1964 book Notes on the Synthesis of Form, Christopher Alexander spends the first few sections describing this system of relationships, what he calls the "ensemble" of form, context, and the fitness between them.

In Alexander's conception, the three elements work together:

Form is the shape, structure, and appearance of a thing – its physical or conceptual design. In architecture it's the floor plan, features, and physical look-and-feel.

Context refers to the environment or circumstances where an activity takes place, the setting that our designed form will work within. Context isn't limited to physical attributes — it also includes culture, social factors, time, user behavior, and more. The context presents a network of forces in an existing system: pushes, pulls, and dynamics for designers to contend with.

Fit describes how well the designed system matches its intended function or environment. It's a measure of suitability of the form to the context. A well-fit form aligns with the demands, constraints, and opportunities presented by the context.

Says Alexander:

The context is that part of the world which puts demands on this form. Anything in the world that makes demands of the form is context.

Fitness is a relation of mutual acceptability between these two. In a problem of design, we want to satisfy the mutual demands which the two make on one another. We want to put the context and the form into effortless contact or frictionless coexistence.

Design is the act of manipulating this ensemble. The search for fitness is the search for harmony in a complex web of forces. If we think of a context as an existing set of relationships, we seek to design a form that, once slotted into the existing network of forces, it improves in some material way the function, beauty, or enjoyment of life within the system.

Every design problem begins with an effort to achieve fitness between two entities: the form in question and its context. The form is the solution to the problem, while the context defines the problem.

When we speak of design, the real object of discussion is not the form alone, but the ensemble comprising the form and its context.

Design constraints in practice

In real-world design, we must consider more that just how a form fits physically or culturally into the context. Just because we can think up a tool to solve a problem, and that tool nestles nicely in with our user's existing box of tools, doesn't mean we're onto something yet. There are other factors involved in putting our solution into the world. To name a few:

Can we make the product for a cost a customer is willing to pay?

Can we deliver a solution faster than they find an alternative?

Can we continue to make our solution work over time?

Is it sustainable? And do they expect it to be sustainable?

A proper consideration of the context and effective form is a complex exercise of observation and experimentation.

We can't directly change the context; only the form is within the designer's control. It's as if the designer must decode a unique collection of interacting forces (like tumblers in a lock) and then design the key that aligns them perfectly.

Achieving fitness requires working from context outward. This aligns with ideas like jobs-to-be-done: we begin from the problem side (demand) and seek to generate a solution (supply) that addresses a pain (fit).

In the real world, the context is obscured. An essential element of design is the uncovering of the context's forces. The designer must unwind both sides: to study the context from all angles, to articulate the forces at work to the best of their ability, and to devise a form that works within this fluid environment. Alexander says of the designer's dilemma:

In the case of a real design problem, even our conviction that there is such a thing as "fit" to be achieved is curiously flimsy and insubstantial. We are searching for some kind of harmony between two intangibles: a form which we have not yet designed, and a context which we cannot properly describe.

Finding fitness by reducing error

Once we create a version of our form, we look for misalignments, places where our solution doesn't work in practice. Alexander points to a fascinating aspect of design evaluation: it's easier to identify poor fit than good fit. We naturally detect when something feels off or doesn't work as expected.

When a design element causes friction, when users struggle with an interface, when a chair becomes uncomfortable after sitting for an hour, these misfits stand out clearly. Good fit, by contrast, often goes unnoticed precisely because it flows so seamlessly with its context. When something fits well, it feels natural, intuitive, and "just right."

This asymmetry in perception is actually useful in the design process. As Alexander puts it:

The process of achieving good fit between two entities is a negative process of neutralizing incongruities, irritants, or forces that cause misfit.

This suggests an iterative approach to design: we create a form, test it in context, identify misfits, and adjust accordingly. Like evolution's process of natural selection, design improvement often works through the elimination of what doesn't work rather than direct leaps to perfection.

The salience of poor fit also explains why testing and real-world deployment are so crucial. Designers might be blind to the misfits in their own creations, while fresh eyes immediately notice what doesn't work. The ultimate judge of fit is always the context itself: how the form performs in the actual environment for which it was designed.

Form-context fit is a useful lens for design, in any discipline. Viewing design as the crafting of forms that harmonize with their contexts, gives insight into why some solutions endure while others fail. The most elegant designs aren't necessarily the most complex or flashy, but those that achieve an invisible balance with their surroundings, responding to constraints while opening new possibilities. The designer's task is to uncover the hidden forces in the context, craft a form that addresses these forces effectively, and continually refine to eliminate misfits. When we achieve this delicate balance, we create designs that don't just solve problems today, but can evolve along with changing contexts over time, like the paper clip and claw hammer that have stood the test of centuries.

Evolution is an undirected process of mutation, testing, and accidental discovery of fitness. Within the genes of an organism, there is no memory acquiring feedback from these experimental genetic guesses.

Genetic drift, mutation, and natural selection are evolution’s conjecture and criticism. But the criticism feedback loop doesn’t close in a single generation.

Evolution’s feedback loop is survival. There’s no way within a single organism’s lifetime that its genes have any idea whether they specify useful traits. If a gene survives, it will replicate. If it doesn’t, that mutation is “found” not to have worked, though the genes themselves never receive the message directly1. A gene’s only goal (if one can call it that) is to copy itself. The environment provides the pressure to select one mutation over another. But the environment has no goal either. It merely is, and genes evolved to continually mutate, then they prod at the environment through random guessing (mutating) to keep replicating.

Though from the Big Bang to now it appears evolution is seeking ever-higher forms of intelligence, this too is deceiving. There are no known steps on the ladder. There’s no “global maximum” on offer.

As Stanley and Lehman wrote in their book Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned, the way to novelty is through continuous pursuit through the “adjacent possible”. Try the next nearest thing, see if it sticks, then take the next stepping stone. Evolution is a sort of upward spiral of trial and error.

Further complexity often confers an advantage, but not always. This fact is one that fools us into thinking evolution is in search of higher-order complexity on purpose. From the days of the primordial ooze, life mostly has gotten much more complex. But still, simplifying can work. Some bacteria are among the simplest, oldest, and most effective organisms evolved on the planet. They didn’t need complexity or intelligence, size or agility or strength to survive.

We’re fooled into assumptions about intention and goals because we humans have a tendency to seek patterns. Because we ourselves can conceptualize abstract goals and plan our choices in advance, we imbue evolution with a similar characteristic. The fish first evolving its way to crawling on the beach with hybrid fin/legs isn’t on a mission to eventually grow wings and feathers. It’s the complex and eons-long interplay between organism and environment that generates the continuous cycle of mutation, death, survival, and reproduction that eventually happens upon wings.

This evolutionary process still leaves us wanting on the subject of meaning. If the primary mechanism is a survival and self-perpetuation of genetic material, we still have to wonder why. We could take a religious perspective on the origins and objectives of life, and there very well may be something there. People of faith would make that claim. There is certainly a great deal we don’t know about the cosmic origins or purpose of what’s going on.

My point here only involves the mechanisms we can observe, understand, and ultimately explain. We can explain the operating action of evolution in these goal-indifferent “don’t die” terms. We can’t (yet) explain in scientific terms the “why” of the origins of life, or what it’s all for.

Evolution is a soup of primitive ingredients continually mixed, matched, and tested against a chaotic surrounding environment. When thought of as its own form of knowledge creation distinct from the way human-created knowledge works, it’s a helpful mental model for thinking about all forms of complex adaptive systems.

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How can we think about what's going on here? What drives these two distinctly different methods of productivity?

Neither is right nor wrong. If interesting output appears, the system is working!

But I'm curious about the psychology of why some kinds of people can be productive sitting behind a mountain of papers and books, while others need that sense of pristine organization. If you're a messy creator, what can you learn from the organized? If you feel overwhelmed by scattered notes and tools laying around, why are others so productive even surrounded by stacks of books?

We find creators of both stripes. I think the difference is not about which is the "right" way to think about productivity, but rather how the two cultivate that initial creative impulse into fully realized work.

Mess and order each have their place in creativity, and I think there's useful tension between the two.

The chaotic space generates serendipity, making visible the spontaneous connections between discrete ideas. When you're surrounded by fragmented thoughts and an assortment of tools, you may notice connections otherwise obscured in the organized drawer of neatly filed folders. It's like having the tools and elements in an active memory buffer, ready and within reach to bring into your work. Seeing two unrelated books in a stack next to you might spark the occasional "I wonder if..." question that leads down a trail to interesting insight.

The tidy space, in contrast, channels its user to discipline, and a methodical focus on the current task. Once you've captured the bug and know which direction you're headed, there's "nothing to it but to do it", as they say. Piles of books and Post-it notes laying around might lure you off the trail. Distractions are the enemy of execution.

One mode favors divergent work: exploring and searching for novel connections. The other convergence: after finding the spark of insight, the ability to steer the work toward completion.

The two modes are complements.

A boisterous mind might lack the discipline to push an idea to fruition. And the completely ordered one may miss the spark of originality, never noticing the unexpected connections.

When we see a Bill Buckley producing multiple insightful columns per week while editing a national magazine, all from behind a scattered mess of material, we're seeing a mind that has a talent for finding the interesting connections, but is still able to channel his attention toward execution, even with 1,000 rabbit trails in front of him.

Or picture a Jony Ive, working in his meditative calm white room. Clearly he was able to generate a creative spark or two without working in a cluttered studio.

Perhaps each type of creator is able to compensate by doing the divergent or convergent modes of work inside their head, rather than letting their head spill into their environment.

My tendencies depend on the type of activity. When it comes to knowledge work, I feel a gravitation toward the organized end of the spectrum — not all the way to sterile-operating-room aesthetic, but "together" enough that I don't feel like I'm drowning in minutiae.

On the other hand, with something like the hands-on work in the woodshop, I'm fine working in the clutter, particularly in the midst of an active project.

Likely with different types of work, I'm differently able to compensate for divergence or convergence without reorienting my whole space around each.

The two modes balance each other; you can use both to your benefit. Each has its downsides compensated for by the other's advantages.

For a messy creative, there's risk that the chaos becomes overwhelming, leading to paralysis or loss of focus. They might have brilliant ideas but struggle to execute them due to the disorder.

For the tidy, the press for order may be stifling, preventing the emergence of interesting ideas. They might produce polished work but lack the spark of originality.

The two types have fundamentally different relationships between their physical space and mental processes.

The person with a cluttered workspace isn't just avoiding organization; they're using their physical environment as an extension of their thinking process. Their desk becomes a living map of their thought patterns, with each scattered item representing a potential connection or idea. Rather than imposing structure, they allow organic patterns to emerge, trusting that meaningful relationships will surface from the apparent disorder.

In contrast, those who maintain an organized workspace see their environment as a tool for focus and execution. By eliminating visual noise and arranging their tools deliberately, they create conditions where their mind can work with minimal distraction. Their workspace becomes a reflection of a methodical approach — a controlled environment where ideas can be developed with intention and precision.

The difference lies not in the presence or absence of creativity, but in how creativity is approached. One embraces serendipity and unexpected connections, the other values methodical development and focused execution. Both serve the creative process, just through different pathways.

Next time I'm either feeling uninspired about what to make, or overwhelmed by the chaos around me, I'll try and think about which mode would be more fitting for the goal. Am I in divergent, exploratory mode? Or do I have all the right tools and I need to converge on the target?

And maybe I won't always beat myself up for my messy workspace.

Check out an earlier post about the relationship between our minds and our environments, and how the two influence one another:

This is a phenomenal, in-depth conversation with poet a on his writing process, reading habits, and his general life philosophy. A fascinating guy. His story is one of the “life of a writer” lived concurrently with a day job in corporate America. The discussion clearly conveys the level of seriousness and professionalism one must bring to the game to gradually reach his quality of output. Gioia defines what it means to behave like a pro.

A funny thing about curiosity

invites us to consider how authentic, raw emotional experiences, rather than forced searches for "interesting" ideas, lead us back to our most genuine self-expression:

It feels to me like everyone has something unrepeatable to bring into the world. And we can manifest it by going in our direction of maximal interestingness. The pattern we make as our curiosity pulls us hither and thither like a dog chasing a smell across a field—that pattern is a gift we give the world.

Interestingness comes from chasing the weird, from taking the disparate ideas you know to be divergent and jamming them back together. Sometimes it leads to nothing, but almost all interestingness comes from following the not-been-done path.

Selfish Software

In the past 6 months, the AI code tools are moving at lightning speed. We've had co-pilot / autosuggester type tools for a few years now, but the latest crop is something different: the combination of writing the code, but also unrolling abstract requests, self-troubleshooting problems, consulting the asker on technology trade-offs.

writes about how this shift is unlocking an age of personal software:

There's something beautifully honest about selfish software. The feedback loop is pure: if you're not using what you built, it's not good enough. No market research needed, no user interviews required. You can't fool yourself about its utility because you experience it firsthand.

In the past 2 months I've been experimenting with all this tech. Two of the experiments I've built are selfish tools that I wanted: totally untested and have no business being invested in… but in a world where it takes a couple hours, absolutely worth it to me. A few hours of tinkering leading to real software.

I've been thinking about how all of this will evolve the role of product management, and how companies will be built around a wildly different economic model for making software. The PM ↔ designer ↔ engineer triumvirate is collapsing into a single "product conductor": one that directs a crew of virtual designers and programming experts.

The sea was never blue

In The Odyssey, Homer famously compared the sea to wine:

And now have I put in here, as thou seest, with ship and crew, while sailing over the wine-dark sea to men of strange speech, on my way to Temese for copper; and I bear with me shining iron.

– Homer, The Odyssey

This piece explores how ancient Greeks perceived and described color differently from modern cultures, focusing on their language and philosophical theories. Unlike the Newtonian spectrum, which categorizes colors based on light refraction, Greek color vocabulary emphasized brightness, movement, and texture rather than hue:

When the sea is called porphureos, what is described is a mix of brightness and movement, changing according to the light conditions at different hours of the day and with different weather, which was the aspect of the sea that most attracted Greek sensitivity. This is why Homer calls the sea ‘winey’, which alludes not so much to the wine tint of the water as to the shine of the liquid inside the cups used to drink out of at a symposium. As shown by the naval friezes and the aquatic animals painted inside many drinking vessels, vase painters turned the image around, so that the surface of the drink suggested the waving of the sea. Porphureos conveys this combination of brightness and movement – a chromatic term impossible to understand without considering the glimmer effect.

My 9-year-old daughter exemplifies this in her crafting. Beyond the usual bracelets and beadwork, she's mastered the art of recreating makeup and skincare products from household materials. She'll spot the perfect cardboard shade from a cereal box, salvage clear plastic from packaging, and repurpose cotton from old toys. Without instruction, she creates functional replicas: cotton balls become springs, Sharpies recreate logos, wire for structure. Her fake spray bottles don't just look real — they work, too.

My son's the same way. A while back I built him a workbench. He'll join me when I'm out in the shop working on things, and pick through my scrap pile to work up his own creations. Swords, guns, ramps — 7-year-old boy stuff. He's got his own hand tools for doing the basics. When I watch him work, I notice him mimicking everything he sees me do. Without me showing him, he knew how to work the vise on his bench, how to hold the work with it so he can saw it up. Same with hammering, drilling screws, and using his tape measure.

One of the many amazing things about kids is watching them learn through this process in real-time. This got me thinking about how we learn things.

A phenomenal amount of our skills we acquire through pure mimicry. We observe, copy, and through trial and error, perfect our imitations.

Imitation is biological

We're hardwired by evolution to learn this way. The instructions for mimicry are embedded in our DNA.

Human beings are great imitators — from infancy through adulthood, we're primed to watch and mimic actions, facial expressions, language, and even emotions of those around us. This proclivity for imitation doesn’t arise incidentally; it's deeply embedded in our biology and cultural practices. By copying effective behaviors, individuals could rapidly adopt skills without needing to discover everything through slow trial-and-error. Evolutionarily, learning by direct experimentation is costly — errors can lead to injury, loss of resources, or even death in high-stakes contexts (like foraging or hunting).

Mimicry accelerates learning while minimizing the risk of dangerous mistakes.

There's also the social component. We're social animals living in close-knit communities. Imitation promotes shared norms, languages, and customs, strengthening cohesion. Groups with members who readily learn from each other innovate faster and preserve their hard-won collective knowledge across generations.

Tacit knowledge

When we learn how to learn in school, most of that time is spent learning explicit knowledge: the stuff we print in books to read and study. The modern age prizes this kind of abstract learning — and it should, but not at the expense of tacit knowledge, the kind learned through observation, imitation, and repetitive practice.

Think riding a bike, or reading a room. No printed manual will have you doing wheelies or deftly navigating a complex meeting of dynamic personalities. You simply have to experience certain skills to master them.

Mimicry accelerates this process.

Watching a Steph Curry jumper and mimicking his movement is like hitting the fast-forward button: it gets you roughly to the proper shooting mechanics in minutes. But hitting 50% of your shots from behind the arc? That takes thousands of repetitions.

Celtics guard Jayson Tatum accelerated his basketball talent as a kid by watching Kobe Bryant film on YouTube. But he became an all-star from the thousands of hours of refinement.

From copying to creativity

What about creative fields?

Copying someone else’s work sounds lame. Why not make something of your own?

I don't see copying as a cheat, though — it's a stepping stone to developing the senses for a craft. Copying builds the muscle for working with materials. It gives you a tacit understanding of what particular styles feel like.

The painter copying Van Gogh or the writer imitating Hemingway are accelerating their feel for the craft. It's hard to find your creative "voice" when you're also struggling to work with the fundamental elements themselves.

Hunter S. Thompson allegedly typed out the entirety of The Great Gatsby in order to “see how it felt to write a masterpiece.”

Writer and entrepreneur Sam Parr talked about this recently, a technique for copywriting called "copywork":

I spent months just locked in a room doing this thing called copy hour, where for an hour or two a day, I would take the best sales letters of all time and I would copy them by hand. And you have to do it with a pen and paper, not typing it. I do it with pen and paper, and then I would learn the texture of the writing. And I would see the patterns of great writing — even writing that I didn't want to emulate — but I'm going to steal that from you, steal that from you, and I'm going to create my own voice. And I do that with writing, and I think that's the best way to learn, in my opinion.

There's a creative power in this sort of copying. It's like a workout for your craft. Like going to the gym, but instead of reps with barbells, it’s reps with sentences from C.S. Lewis or Stephen King. Enough reps and you start to build muscle for how certain styles or structures work well. Then, as Sam says, you start recombining and concocting your own recipes.

Power in practiced imitation

In our rush to be original, we often dismiss copying as somehow lesser than "true" learning. But mimicry isn't just a shortcut — it's fundamental to how we master skills. We see it in my daughter's creative reproductions, in my son's workbench discoveries, and in every artist who's traced the footsteps of masters before them.

The path to originality paradoxically begins with imitation. First, we copy to build competence. Then we understand. Finally, we create.

Each phase enriches the next, giving us both the technical foundation and creative ingredients to make something uniquely our own. Perhaps the greatest innovation is knowing when to imitate and when to invent.