A Learning a Day

Kevin Kelly shared a beautiful post the other day.

When I was in my twenties I would hitchhike to work every day. I’d walk down three blocks to Route 22 in New Jersey, stick out my thumb and wait for a ride to work. Someone always picked me up. I had to punch-in for my job as a packer at a warehouse at 8 o’clock sharp, and I can’t remember ever being late. It never ceased to amaze me even then, that the kindness of strangers could be so dependable. Each day I counted on the service of ordinary commuters who had lives full of their own worries, and yet without fail, at least one of them would do something kind, as if on schedule. As I stood there with my thumb outstretched, the question in my mind was simply: “How will the miracle happen today?”

He goes on to share wonderful experiences from his travel and experience-rich life, many of which involved incredible acts of kindness from strangers. He explains how gratitude and faith have become synonymous to him over time.

I’ve slowly changed my mind about spiritual faith. I once thought it was chiefly about believing in an unseen reality; that it had a lot in common with hope. But after many years of examining the lives of the people whose spiritual character I most respect, I’ve come to see that their faith rests on gratitude, rather than hope. The beings I admire exude a sense of knowing they are indebted, of resting upon a state thankfulness. They recognize they are at the receiving end of an ongoing lucky ticket called being alive.

And he ends with a call to be more open to kindness, commit to gratitude and embrace pronoia.

My new age friends call that state of being pronoia, the opposite of paranoia. Instead of believing everyone is out to get you, you believe everyone is out to help you. Strangers are working behind your back to keep you going, prop you up, and get you on your path. The story of your life becomes one huge elaborate conspiracy to lift you up. But to be helped you have to join the conspiracy yourself; you have to accept the gifts.

Although we don’t deserve it, and have done nothing to merit it, we have been offered a glorious ride on this planet, if only we accept it. To receive the gift requires the same humble position a hitchhiker gets into when he stands shivering on the side of the empty highway, cardboard sign flapping in the cold wind, and says, “How will the miracle happen today?”

It resonated.

A good friend once went through an experience where a former manager and mentor of theirs reached out with an opportunity.

After going through the process, they went back and forth and eventually, it didn’t pan out.

However, that wasn’t the part of the story that stayed with me. It was the grace with which the person responded.

They reinforced how important this friend was to them. They wished they’d have reached out at a different time when the timing might have worked. And they ended with a note saying they’d always be in their corner.

It is easy to show grace when things go your way.

The real test of character is how you respond when they don’t.

We were on a flight back from New Zealand recently and the aircraft had a technical issue.

There was confusion in the beginning – delays, rolling updates, uncertainty. But then the Air New Zealand crew sprung into action.

The check in crew took ownership and apologized. They said meal vouchers would be ready, and before you knew it, they were.

Within an hour, they’d run a parallel exercise of figuring out if there was another plane available. It was, and they got it ready faster than fixing the original aircraft.

Four hours in, we were on our way.

Meanwhile, they said everybody who had a connection would hear from them by the time we landed. The team worked on rebooking connections through the entire flight and let people know when they got it done.

As people had already eaten dinner by the time we flew, they made it easy for everybody to sleep by saying – “If you really want dinner, open your tray table. Otherwise, we’ll assume you want to sleep.”

A team’s reaction to a stimulus is often more a reflection of their values and state of mind than the stimulus itself.

The stimulus here was an unexpected delay. The response was ownership, clear communication, and effort.

Well played Air New Zealand.

Sometimes the best way to understand what your gut is telling you is to pay careful attention to your energy as you weigh possibilities.

Our reaction to a particular stimulus often says more about our values and state of mind than the stimulus itself.

The same comment can roll off our back one day and ruin our day in different circumstances. And the same setback can feel like a minor bump or a catastrophe – depending on the day.

Our reactions often reveal more about us than the situation.

“The real problem of humanity is the following: We have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions and godlike technology. And it is terrifically dangerous.” | E. O. Wilson

I’ve been thinking about this quote a bunch over the past weeks. It is pithy and profound.

The fart walk is an admittedly crude but catchy name that’s become popular recently as a modern rebrand of the post-meal walk.

As I’ve shared a few times over the past months, one of the things I found revelatory from wearing a continuous glucose monitor was the impact of a walk after meals. Taking the time to do a roughly 2,500 step walk – about 1.2 miles or 2 kilometers – goes a long way in managing our post-meal glucose spike. And ensuring that, especially at night, that glucose doesn’t become triglycerides.

These walks have the added effect of reducing bloating by aiding digestion. Which for a lot of people translates to farting and post-walk pooping.

The name is hilarious. But I’m all for a catchy way to label an activity that has almost magical health effects, especially when done at night.

We’ve made it a rhythm now for a fart walk as a family. It’s a lovely way to close the day because it is a win-win-win on health, conversation time, and time with nature.

Here’s to many fart walks in 2026.

Things feel better when we have fewer things in the “I expected that” category and more things in the “wow, that was a bonus” category.

Let the bar be high on how we go about our process and low on the outcomes we expect from them.

Pericles led Athens during its golden age in the 5th century BC.

He invested heavily in infrastructure – the Parthenon, temples, public buildings that still stand today. He expanded democracy and turned Athens into a cultural center that attracted philosophers, artists, and thinkers from across Greece.

But what struck me most about Pericles was his inspiration from Athena – the goddess of wisdom and strategy.

He espoused a brand of politics built on rationality, thoughtfulness, and strategic thinking. Not rhetoric and appeals to base emotions.

This even showed up in his style as a public speaker – he shunned drama for a more quiet and thoughtful style.

As he became a marginal figure toward his passing, Greece ended up in wars against Sparta that drove them toward ruin. They made wagers driven by emotions that were the antithesis of the decision-making Pericles had championed.

He was clearly so far ahead of his time in his approach.

It got me thinking about the habits needed to periodically channel our inner Athena – stepping back to make decisions rationally – are critical.

Especially in a world designed to trigger our base instincts at every turn.

AI was one of the topics that dominated the zeitgeist in 2025. There’s so much happening at any given moment and there’s so much more written about it that it’s hard to figure out how to make sense of it all.

That’s especially the case given the tremendous hype around this technology.

I find it helpful to think of AI in terms of three kinds of bets.

The first is working on a foundation model. This involves a select group of labs – for now, that’s Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, Meta, and a few others. The bet here is “superintelligence” – which I think is just a fancy term for an incredibly dependable AI assistant or agent that every consumer will use to navigate the internet and their digital life.

There’s potentially a tremendous amount of money to be made here. This is already evidenced by the billions of dollars of subscription revenue flowing into these systems. Just imagine what happens when you add advertising revenue into the mix and you can see how lucrative this could be for a lab that figures this out.

But ultimately, the game here is providing incredible intelligence in everyone’s pocket and really owning that market. That’s what every lab is racing toward.

Winning consumer attention is challenging and does tend to have winner-take-all dynamics. So, you also have these labs going after verticals (e.g., Anthropic for coding) as a way to hedge their bets. That brings us to the second category.

The second is Applied AI. This is going to be the vast majority of every other company that is building technology for various verticals/industries or functions. Here, the bet is simple – can you use AI to dramatically disrupt/change how things work in that particular industry or function?

Essentially, this is going to create new categories of winners and losers. New category winners who will get there by completely disrupting existing workflows. There are many industries/functions/verticals with archaic, human-heavy workflows that can all be reimagined – many for the better.

And, again, as you can imagine, there’s a lot of wealth creation that can occur here – proportional to the breadth and depth of the disruption.

The final area is AI adjacent companies. These are companies that provide tools or platforms. NVIDIA is an example of an AI adjacent company. So are the cloud providers – Amazon, Microsoft, and Google Cloud – along with fast-growing data and AI tool providers like Databricks and Snowflake.

In all of these, the bet is that as AI use continues, more and more workflows will need these tools, and these tools will essentially take a percentage of the AI economy.

I call these out in these three buckets just because this is the bet you’re making when you invest in one of these companies or when you decide to work at one of these companies. And it’s helpful to be clear about what you’re betting on.

For example, I know someone who was choosing between working at a lab or an applied AI company. It became a lot easier for this friend to figure out what they’d be interested in once the central bet was clarified.

This is not to say that these bets will all work. There are a collection of other factors – whether the energy needed for all this will be built out in time, whether AI will actually disrupt workflows in the timeframe being bet on,, and so on.

They are called bets for a reason.

Best to go in with clarity of thought and eyes wide open.