A Learning a Day

#OurWorldIsAwesome – Edition 19

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Mount Cook / Aoraki National Park is New Zealand’s premier alpine destination – and it’s not hard to see why.

Home to the country’s highest peak, Aoraki / Mount Cook, which stands at 3,724 meters, the park isn’t massive – around 700 square kilometers. But it packs a punch. It contains 23 peaks over 3,000 meters and is home to the Tasman Glacier, New Zealand’s longest glacier at around 23 kilometers.

What stands out most is how dramatic the landscape is. There are stunning glacial lakes – these start out gray near the glaciers.

They then drain into Lake Pukaki, which has that striking blue that comes from glacial particles mixing with fresh water.

The park is also part of an International Dark Sky Reserve and is known to be one of the best places on earth for stargazing. We didn’t have luck in the 3 nights we were around – the weather here is famously unpredictable.

The trails in the park are all beautiful, with stunning views of glacial landscapes all around you. For the Lord of the Rings fans, these form the range behind Minas Tirith.

Probably the most iconic view is that of the Tasman Glacier. This is, however, bittersweet. Sweet – because the sheer size of the glacier takes time to mentally adjust to. But bitter – because you can see it receding in front of your eyes, with pieces continually falling off.

It’s a reminder that the incredible progress we’ve all seen in our lifetimes has come at a cost. And while it’s easy to talk about warming temperatures from a distance with charts, seeing pieces of this incredible glacier – one that is set to disappear entirely in the next decade – is sobering.

Mount Cook / Aoraki is where Sir Edmund Hillary trained ahead of his incredible ascent of Mount Everest with Tenzing Norgay. There’s quite a lot of Edmund Hillary nostalgia at the Hermitage, which sits at the center of the Mount Cook village. The lodge has been around for the best part of the last century, and its significance fits right in with this stunning, one-of-a-kind National Park.

#OurWorldIsAwesome – Edition 18

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Mount Aspiring National Park is New Zealand’s third largest national park, covering 3,562 square kilometres. It’s part of the Te Wahipounamu World Heritage Site and is home to 100 permanent glaciers.

The park is named after Mount Aspiring – at 3,033 metres, it’s the only peak over 3,000 metres outside Mount Cook National Park. The Māori name is Tititea, meaning “glistening peak.” It’s often called “the Matterhorn of the South” due to its pyramid shape.

We only spent an afternoon in the park itself, hiking a small portion of the Routeburn Track. Most of the time in Glenorchy, it was raining heavily. And even in the small time we had, we were completely drenched.

But we were struck by how gorgeous it was. The water gushing near the track. The spectacular views. The beautiful old beech forest with its local birds. This was a kereru or a local wood pigeon – it is massive.

And this is the Tui – whose call reminded us of R2D2.

We spent more time in the surrounding Glenorchy area. And what an area it is.

The Dart River Valley and the region around Glenorchy are so popular as filming locations that it’s often referred to as “rural Hollywood.” The area was used extensively in the Lord of the Rings trilogy—the Dart Valley became Isengard, Saruman’s on-screen home.

A native beech forest near a place literally called Paradise became Lothlorien, the magical forest home of the elven queen Galadriel.

The drive from Queenstown to Glenorchy along Lake Wakatipu has been voted one of the top 10 drives in the world. And it lives up to the hype with beautiful views of the Lake Wakatipu.

This was one of those parks and surrounding areas where I would love to come back and spend more time – and hopefully experience it in less rainy conditions.

Gorgeous nevertheless.

#OurWorldIsAwesome – Edition 17

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Tongariro National Park on the North Island of New Zealand is one of the earliest national parks ever established in the world. It has dual World Heritage status – recognized for both its Māori cultural significance and its outstanding volcanic features.

In fact, it was the first property in the world to be inscribed on the World Heritage List for its cultural landscape. Some Māori view the mountains as their ancestors, with the peaks being the heads of the ancestors.

The park covers 80,000 hectares and has a truly unique landscape – a combination of volcanic and alpine terrain with three volcanoes: Tongariro, Ngauruhoe, and Ruapehu. Ruapehu is the tallest active volcano in New Zealand and the highest point on the North Island.

The fascinating part about Tongariro is the variety. It features a ski area on one side and really barren volcanic landscapes on the other.

We hiked a portion of the famous Tongariro Alpine Crossing and got to see barren landscapes, including some that were shot around Mount Doom in the Lord of the Rings films. Mount Doom itself is a digitally altered version of Mount Ngauruhoe.

At the same time, you could go into another area close by and it was lush – like Tawhai Falls, the famous Gollum’s Pool.

Similarly, you could take a hike to Taranaki Falls.

On the way to the falls, it’s a more rugged and unshaded volcanic landscape. On the way back, you’re going through a thick old forest.

That diversity makes Tongariro National Park a fascinating place to visit.

I wrote yesterday about the adoption of renewable energy and ended with the idea that “when in doubt, follow the money.” I had a few stories from some of the national parks I spotlighted recently that speak to the same idea.

At the Tadoba Andhari Tiger Reserve, we learned about one of the dominant males — Chotta Matka, or CM. You become a dominant male by challenging another dominant male. CM did that many years ago. But in his first attempt, he was lucky to escape severely injured (most die).

He found himself trying to recover near a village. As he was unfit and unable to hunt, he realized he could simply kill domestic cows. He healed himself killing a few cows and then went back, winning the subsequent battle and becoming the dominant male. He’s since continued to defend his territory by killing off any competitors.

The interesting thing about CM is that he still chooses to eat cows. He hasn’t bothered hunting deer as cows are significantly lesser work.

Which leads to the next question – why does a nearby farmer put up with that? It turns out that as soon as CM attacks a cow and the farmer reports it, the government pays the farmer 30,000 rupees – a reasonable compensation. The reason the government can do that is because CM is a major draw to the reserve and brings in revenues to the national park far greater than 30,000 rupees per cow eater. A simple illustration of cost and benefit.

There was a similar story around deer grazing in farmlands. When nearby farmers got upset, they resorted to killing the deer. But soon, the government made a deal – leave some farmland for the deer to graze, and the government would pay for its use. More deer means more ability to sustain predators, and more predators like tigers and leopards means higher revenue – revenue that can be shared back with the farmers.

Another example was from our time visiting a mangrove near Manuel Antonio National Park. The boatman’s father used to be a crocodile hunter – crocodiles were very valuable for their skin. He would literally swim into the water, find crocodiles, wrestle with them, and kill them. His son now does the opposite. He plays a role in the conservation of crocodiles, because they realized these species bring in a lot more revenue via tourists than they ever would because of their skin.

These are all examples in the wild that speak to the same idea. When the economic incentives shift, behavior shifts. None of these behaviors changed because it was the right thing to do. They changed because the incentives were right.

As humans, we often spend a lot of time talking about why certain changes matter – why something is the right thing to do. As if that leads to action.

I certainly have done that far more often than I’d like to admit.

The more effective thing to do is to figure out the incentives and change them.

A study, Recent discoveries on the acquisition of the highest levels of human performance, evaluated the performance trajectories over time of 34,000 international top performers, including Nobel laureates, renowned classical music composers, Olympic champions, and the world’s best chess players.
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The main finding: stressing out and trying to be the best as a kid can make you less successful as an adult. Most top achievers demonstrated lower performance than many peers during their early years.

In sport, knowledge work, and academia, the results showed that specialization didn’t result in elite performance. However, it is an overstatement in Chess and classical music.

As Brad Stulberg and Steve Magness share in their newsletter – “The study’s findings mirror one of the main arguments in David Epstein’s excellent book Range – In kind environments (where the rules stay the same and the variables are numbered and controlled), early specialization may prove useful. Chess and musical composition are textbook examples of kind environments. However, in wicked environments (where the rules are subject to change and there are hundreds of interacting variables) then early specialization often gets in the way of later performance. Sport, academics, and science are great examples of wicked environments.
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TLDR – if you want the highest performing child, you should push him or her to specialize and be super-disciplined from a very early age.

But if you want to raise the highest performing adult, you should encourage them to explore, not take anything too seriously, and play.
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It’s why research on prodigies shows that those who tend to make it have supportive, but not overbearing, parents – because the kid’s intrinsic motivation still has to steer the ship. So even in fields like music composition and chess, you’ve got to tread lightly and let the kid’s obsession propel the path, not yours.

I thought I’d go deeper into system iteration – one of the lessons I’ve been learning as I’ve been working on Claude Code.

During my first day, I spent a lot of time figuring out errors. Let’s imagine them to be holes in the ship. I’d point them out to Claude Code and I would get suggestions for changes. We’d keep trying to fix the holes in the ship.

However, I’d keep finding old problems recur because fixing one hole often created new ones. And, sometimes, they reopened old ones.

This process became a lot better when I adopted a three-step workflow.

First, use Claude to figure out what was missing and what the gaps were relative to the spec. Claude would identify a lot of the issues.

Second, throw those issues back to Claude Code and ask it: “What changes do I need to make structurally in my spec for this to never happen again?” It would come back with a set of improvements.

Third, ask Claude to make the changes, put it back, and have Claude Code run the job again.

Once I got this workflow going, new issues started coming up instead of the old ones.

It reminds me of a story about two men by a river who saw kids struggling in the current – it was as if they were thrown overboard. One man started jumping in to catch the kids and bring them to the bank. The other started running upstream.

The first man shouted, “What are you doing? Why don’t you help me?”

The other replied, “I need to find the jerk who’s throwing these kids into the water.”

It’s a visceral story but makes the point.

It’s important to solve problems upstream and structurally if you want the fixes to last.

Beware plugging holes in the ship.

I’ve been spending some time building on Claude Code. I started with a simple product: a morning briefing for myself.

The goal was simple. I don’t want to be checking news sites. I don’t want news briefings or notifications. I don’t want any scrolling. I don’t want to be stuck in doom cycles.

Instead, I wanted the most important news from my industry with clear “so what’s” as they pertained to me and my job. I wanted some global awareness news that didn’t require a lot of attention but was enough to not catch me off guard. And some local news.

And I wanted all of this in a one-stop source to create a high-quality information diet.

It started with a simple spec. But as time passed, the spec became more and more complex.

And as simple as this briefing was, it took about two days of iteration before getting it to a place where I was happy.

While some of this was time spent understanding how to get the best out of Claude Code, a big part of this was improving the spec.

I took away 3 lessons –

(1) If you’re able to take the time to plan and think through what you want, you’ll go much faster than if you just start building. Go slow to go fast.

(2) It helps to be systematic when we approach iteration. Initially, I used to just ask Claude what happened and make a fix directly. Every such fix then broke three other things.

Things got better when I go into the rhythm of compiling the execution errors, and asking Claude Code how I could improve the spec to avoid it.

(3) Finally, you can get to 80% quickly. But the final 20% takes a long time.

It takes time to do things well. Do fewer things. Do them well.

A few interesting charts –

The EU generated more energy from wind and solar in 2025 than fossil fuels for the first time.

For all the political noise around renewables in the US, the US Energy Information Administration forecasts 99% of new energy to come from renewables.

A few years ago, the question that followed such stats was – that’s all well and good in developed economies. What about those that are rapidly developing? That’s where this story gets complicated given the cost of development often involves burning fossil fuels.

This excellent chart lays it out beautifully. India is on a fast track in switching away from fossil fuels. China’s switching pace has continued to accelerate.

This shows up in China’s CO2 emissions – which declined a bit in 2025.

To be clear, these decisions aren’t being made because all the parties here believe it is the right thing to do.

They are being made because they are economic no-brainers.

When in doubt, follow the money.

I shared this post on LinkedIn yesterday. It was a collection of hard-won lessons I’ve written about over the years – it felt fitting to share both the update and the compilation here.

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After nearly a decade, yesterday was my last day at LinkedIn.

I’m grateful for the ride – for the chance to work on a problem I’d been chasing since college, for every member whose feedback kept us grounded especially when they were going through the pain of job seeking, and for the many colleagues who left a mark that goes well beyond work.

A few hard-won lessons I’ll be taking with me:
(1) Problem managers, not product managers. When you’re attempting to build product, everything is downstream of deeply understanding the user’s acute pain.

(2) Throwing an LLM at a problem typically just creates new problems. You have to deeply understand how the system should behave for every user problem – and then measure it and iterate. Everyone says it’s about the evals. It’s not. It’s about the eval loop.

(3) “Shit umbrella*.” The role you play as a leader that the team will appreciate the most is blocking the noise and overhead and ensuring the team has absolute clarity on what they can deprioritize and ignore. (*H/T: Kaitlin for coining a term that will live rent-free in my head)

(4) Unexpected work best friends. People will surprise you if you let them. One of my closest friendships came from someone I’d had a significant disagreement with. When in doubt, have the uncomfortable conversation and leave room for people to change. Including yourself.

(5) Hard day calls. Of all the gifts a job can give you, the biggest might be this – a few people you can call at the end of a hard day and just work through problems together.

For what’s next on all things Careers, do follow Patrick, Emily, and Hari.

I’ll share more about what’s next in a few weeks. For now, just grateful.

PS: No more feature introduction videos from me – you’re welcome. :-)

Aditya Agarwal, former Dropbox CTO and early engineer at Facebook, shared his emotions after using Claude Code over a weekend in a thoughtful post.

Every engineer who has spent time with Claude Code since the release of Opus 4.5 has come to the same conclusion – it doesn’t make sense for humans to write code after this. And it is also abundantly clear that we’re going to be creativity constrained vs. execution constrained.

It got me thinking about human computers – the kind you see in movies like Hidden Figures. These were people who used to do the job of computers. They would compute challenging problems by hand.

Computers completely replaced them. And the idea that there would be a human playing the role of a computer is now quaint.

The same is going to happen to many aspects of/tasks within knowledge work – starting with software engineering. So, a software engineer in 2028 will be doing things very differently from a software engineer in 2018. This is clear.

LLMs do many tasks very well and they’re getting better at longer and more complex tasks at a rapid clip.

It might take time for many to accept this reality.

But it is real.

And we’re going to be better off attempting to figure out how jobs, organizations and careers should evolve, and what comes next.