A Learning a Day

“Dance like nobody’s watching… but text, email, and post like it will be read in court someday.”

A lawyer I know shared this twist on a classic saying.

Funny and true.

A couple of years ago, I had the opportunity to speak with middle and high school students. It’s always hard to know what will resonate at that age, but I shared these three reflections:

1. There is no one path. Careers don’t follow a straight line – they zig and zag in unexpected ways. Most importantly, everyone’s journey looks different, and that’s okay. The real work is in being curious, figuring out the path you want to take, and making sure you take the best next step.

2. Hard work is just the entrance ticket. Hard work doesn’t guarantee success, but without it, your chances drop dramatically. Opportunities have a way of showing up after you put in the work.

3. A healthy body and a calm mind are the foundation. No matter what career you pursue, everything rests on your physical and mental health. Your energy, sleep, fitness, and peace of mind are the foundation on which you build your career and impact over the long run.

Given their age, it felt too early to talk choosing your life partner. That would be #1 on my list. Great partners are like great teammates – they complement us and make 1+1 > 2. That choice shapes more of your life – and your career – than you might imagine.

We watched the one and only Sir David Attenborough’s Oceans on Netflix recently. It was both sobering and awe-inspiring. 5 reflections:

1. Industrial fishing is devastating. There is a segment in the documentary where you just follow a trawler/dredger under the ocean. These vessels and their equipment don’t just harvest fish, they bulldoze entire ecosystems, tearing up sea beds and discarding huge amounts of life.

“Overfishing” feels too mild a term for the scale of destruction. It has made me think differently about seafood.

2. Phytoplankton absorb more carbon than all the world’s forests combined and generate about half the oxygen we breathe. Yet only ~2–3% of the ocean is effectively protected, far short of the 30% global goal by 2030. Protecting the ocean is about climate balance as much as biodiversity.

3. Oceans have magical powers of recovery and protection leads to spillover gains. While the section on industrial fishing definitely evokes feelings of despair, Sir David Attenborough goes onto show examples where protection of marine ecosystems has enabled marine life to rebound.

Sanctuaries in Hawaii, Scotland, and the Channel Islands demonstrate the “spillover effect” – when ecosystems recover inside marine reserves, life spills outward, strengthening surrounding waters too.

4. Inspiration can drive real change. Greece just announced two National Marine Parks covering ~27,500 km² (about the size of Belgium). Bottom trawling will be banned there, and Prime Minister Mitsotakis explicitly cited Oceans as inspiration. It’s a reminder that stories and images can catalyze policy.

5. The ocean’s fate is humanity’s fate. The health of our oceans shapes global weather systems, food security, and planetary stability. I appreciated that Sir David Attenborough didn’t sugarcoat the destruction – he shows it plainly, alongside beauty and hope. The message is clear: the next few years are critical. Bold action now can still bend the curve toward recovery.

---

Watching Oceans left me shuddering at the destruction but also hopeful about the possibility of renewal. Sir David Attenborough makes the main takeaway plain and simple – the ocean is not just something we protect, it is what protects us.

There’s a lot of talk about AI hype. I don’t know enough about the financial bubble aspect of this (though I thought Azeem’s framework was helpful). But, as far as its impact on the products we use go, it is understandable to see it dismissed as hype because it feels just like a technology wave we’ve seen in the past two decades – like mobile or cloud.

But I think there’s a difference. Mobile and cloud changed what was built. They didn’t fundamentally change how software was built.

The internet, on the other hand, changed both what was built and how it was built. Software built for the web was fundamentally different than software built for Desktop applications.

The AI wave, to me, feels closer to the internet wave. We’ll see new kinds of products and new ways of building.

When you combine those shifts and remember that the scale of this wave builds on the scale of the mobile internet, it becomes easy to imagine just how much disruption lies ahead.

It’ll take a while to play out. But play out, it will.

I was speaking with a professional fighter the other day, and we drew a parallel between making it to the highest levels of professional fighting and building something new.

The stats are brutal – the odds of success are impossibly low. If you believed only the stats, you’d never step into the ring, or start building at all.

At the same time, the stats are useful. They help set realistic expectations, so you don’t hold yourself to an impossibly high bar or confuse difficulty with failure.

But stats are only one piece of the story. The rest of the story is written by those willing to take the shot.

Richard Feynman once said: “You must not fool yourself – and you are the easiest person to fool.”

We don’t set out to fool ourselves. But we do it all the time by telling stories that explain where we are and why. Over time, with enough repetition, we start believing those stories, whether or not they’re true.

Maybe the biggest lesson here is to periodically audit the stories we tell ourselves. Are they rooted in truth, or just in comfort?

One of my favorite uses of Generative AI has been transcribing audio.

All of my posts used to be typed. Now, a significant chunk are simply me talking to ChatGPT, which then turns the speech into text reliably.

For years, voice never felt worth it. The editing overhead was higher than just typing. But now the equation has shifted – friction is dramatically lower as the quality is so high. That reduction in friction has changed the workflows.

That’s the interesting thing about AI. We hear grand predictions about human replacement, but the real story (for now at any rate) is that the technology helps make a collection of previously painful things much easier.

Each of these small but high-pain improvements, stitched together, can create real value. And taken as a whole, they hint at the scale of change ahead.

It’s a fascinating time to build technology products.

The more junk I have in the pantry, the more junk I end up eating.

Often, improving the odds of making better choices isn’t about more willpower – it’s about removing bad options in the first place.

Environment shapes behavior.

Design your environment so the better choice becomes the easier choice.

There was a recent fascinating experiment with a group of undergraduate students who are part of the digital/social media generation.

In the first half of the study, they experienced a collection of stimuli (a spanish guitar riff, an exposure to a cockroach, an electric shock, the sound of knife scraping) and were asked to share how much they’d pay to avoid the bad stimuli. Most folks said they’d pay $1.5 to $2 to avoid an electric shock.

They were then asked to entertain themselves with their thoughts for 15 minutes in an empty room. They were told that they could choose to experience one “randomly selected” stimulus during this period.

In reality, all participants were given the “electric shock” option. A computer recorded whether and how many times the participant chose to administer an electric shock.

25% of the women and ~70% of the men found it preferable to shock themselves rather than sit with their own thoughts (study summary).

Mindblowing.

When I reflect on the biggest global changes we’ve seen in the past 20 years, I think of politics powered by social media and virality.

This graph beautifully shows the representation of extreme views in all traditional media vs. cable TV vs. social media.

As extreme views increasingly become commonplace, so does its place in politics.