Category: Everything else

I enjoyed reading this profile of Kevin Kelly – aptly titled “Flounder mode.” It is a beautiful ode to Kevin Kelly’s approach to life – one that prioritizes creativity, discovery, and wisdom.

Here are 3 notes that resonated –

(1) I asked Kelly about the tradeoffs of focusing on a single thing if you want to be great (which is what I had been getting at before). “Greatness is overrated,” he said, and I perked up. “It’s a form of extremism, and it comes with extreme vices that I have no interest in. Steve Jobs was a jerk. Bob Dylan is a jerk.”

(2) Once I heard a serial founder say he started his second company “out of chaos and revenge.” I heard about another prominent CEO that looks in the mirror every morning and asks himself, “Why do you suck so much?” I read a biography of Elon Musk; he seems tortured. There’s some rumor floating around about how Sam Altman was so focused on building his first startup that he only ate ramen and got scurvy. According to Altman, “I never got tested but I think (I had it). I had extreme lethargy, sore legs, and bleeding gums.”

Compared to this, Kelly’s version of doing his life’s work seems so joyful, so buoyant. So much less … angsty. There’s no suffering or ego. It’s not about finding a hole in the market or a path to global domination. The yard stick isn’t based on net worth or shareholder value or number of users or employees. It’s based on an internal satisfaction meter, but not in a self-indulgent way. He certainly seeks resonance and wants to make an impact, but more in the way of a teacher. He breathes life into products or ideas, not out of a desire to win, but out of a desire to advance our collective thinking or action. His work and its impact unfold slowly, rather than by sheer force of will. Ideas or projects seem to tug at him, rather than reveal themselves on the other end of an internal cattle prod. His range is wide, but all his work somehow rhymes. It clearly comes very naturally for him to work this way, but it’s certainly not the norm. 

(3) I want more role models like Kevin Kelly. People that proudly whistle while they work. Who have boundless energy and healthy gums. Whose enthusiasm is contagious. Who are well-adjusted and emotionally regulated. Who have solid relationships and happy families. Who are hungry and impactful and care deeply, without being jerks. And I want more people to talk about these qualities with respect and reverence.

I have never been a billionaire or built a unicorn, so I can’t speak with any conviction about what it requires. I won’t be eulogized anywhere important and no one 300 years from now will talk about what great things I did. But I want to live in a world where you can have an impact and be happy. Maybe that’s naive, but I’m sticking to it.

All of this occurs naturally to Kelly, and he doesn’t have complicated feelings about it. I’m hoping to get there myself by channeling him more. “The more you pursue interests,” he told me on the good day we spent together, “the more you realize that the well is bottomless.”

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There’s a thread of self-acceptance and joy that’s perceptible. It made me think.. and inspired me.

Having watched my fair share of David Attenborough narrated shows about oceans, I knew phytoplankton are the starting point in the marine food chain.

Here’s what I didn’t know – these tiny oceanic organisms produce over half the oxygen we breathe.

Even more remarkably, they absorb more carbon dioxide than all the trees on Earth combined.

Floating on the sunlit surface of the sea, phytoplankton not only sustain the marine food web, they regulate our planet’s climate – one breath at a time.

In his latest masterful 2025 documentary “Ocean,” Sir David Attenborough points out that these creatures might be what separate us from a climate catastrophe.

Once you internalize their impact on our lives, it is easier to understand why.

“No one can persuade another to change. Each of us guards a gate of change that can only be opened from the inside. We cannot open the gate of another, either by argument or emotional appeal.”| Marilyn Ferguson

This is a beautiful visual – guarding a gate or change. It brought me right back to the Adlerian idea of “separation of tasks.”

Change happens only at that intersection of willingness and ability.

The teacher we seek will appear… when we’re ready.

The only kind of conviction that really matters in the long run is the one that comes from within.

Comparison and gratitude have an equally powerful effect on the joy we experience – just in opposite directions.

“The way out of uncertainty isn’t certainty, it is clarity.”

Changing the uncertainty level in the environment around us is almost never in our control.

Getting to clarity on our response to it always is.

One of the most nefarious tools the resistance within us employs is to get us to habitually speculate about the future rather than focus on taking action in the present.

Such speculation starts off interesting but soon simply succeeds in stopping all progress with analysis paralysis and worry. There’s no end to asking “what if” questions.

Speculation works like salt. A pinch is great. Too much spoils the dish.

Our energy is best focused on figuring out how to do the best with what we have right now.

The quality of the future isn’t determined by the quality of our speculation. It is determined by the quality of the action we take today.

I was exchanging notes about some financial predictions with my financial advisor the other day. He shared something that stuck with me – It is easy to predict something will go wrong. It is hard to predict when... and it is the “when” that decides if money is made from the prediction.

Truth.

I read an article by Dan Shapero – an executive at Linkedin – many years ago that I’ve thought about often since.

Dan’s article begins by sharing some context from when he became a manager.

“Why did the chicken cross the playground? To get to the other slide.”

That’s an awfully lame joke (it was printed on my 3 year old son’s popsicle stick), and yet, if you are a manager and tell that joke to your team, people might laugh… they need to laugh because they need you to like them.

When I took my first management job, I fell into this trap. To be honest, although I’ve had my funny moments, I’m no standup comic. Yet, as soon as I got promoted, I got more laughs. So I started telling more jokes… any joke in fact. I thought I was getting funnier, but in fact I was getting less funny… and bordering on annoying. I’d lost my feedback signal. I had become less self-aware.

The article goes on to make a salient point – Your social compass needs to come increasingly from inside of you,

I’ll push on this further and say there are two truths –

(1) As you become more senior in an organization, feedback becomes more subtle. Your self-awareness needs to be attuned to subtle feedback.

There’s a trade-off here if you don’t calibrate your feedback. Over time, you’ll get plenty of feedback – direct and indirect from various sources. So it is important to not overreact but just as important to not be oblivious.

(2) The most important feedback you can learn to read is feedback that reflects a lack of confidence in your leadership. Ignore that for a while and you’ll just find yourself surprised one day when you’re told you’re fired.

Every once a while, I jump into the shower and remember just how much of a privilege it is to take a warm shower.

Growing up, a common bath mode we were used to was “the bucket bath*.” You had half to three-quarters of a bucket of warm water. Refills weren’t possible either because there was a water shortage or because there wasn’t a geyser. In case of the latter, it would take a lot of time to pre-heat hot water.

And we were lucky to always have access to a bucket bath.

There were so many places where this was a luxury… that continues to be the case today.

The word infra means below or beneath. Infrastructure is a collection of the many systems below the surface that makes our life possible. It is, by nature, transparent. When it works, we just see right through it.

There’s a lot of incredible infrastructure that makes that glorious warm shower at the end of a long day possible.

Infrastructure I take for granted ever so often.

*Comedian Kenny Sebastian has a hilarious segment – it brought back so many memories.