Diagnosing a Slow Query I’m treating this as a living document. If you know me and see something wrong or missing, please reach out. I’ll keep updating this and credit contributors below. Introduction Data! Data! Data! I can’t make bricks without clay. Arthur Conan Doyle (Sherlock Holmes: The Adventure of the Copper Beeches) Anyone who has [ ]
Let us pretend that all skills and abilities are malleable. There are no fixed strengths or weaknesses, only things we develop and things we neglect. Developing them takes effort, so I have to choose which ones are worth cultivating. The same attribute can be a strength in one setting and a weakness in another. For [ ]
Overview This blog post is the tactical, internal counterweight to Positioning, Leverage, and Judgment. It’s about navigating uncertainty, sustaining momentum, and reading the room. Patience means enduring uncertainty long enough to gather the inputs intuition needs. Scaffolding creates supports and checkpoints that make progress consistent. Attunement means noticing what the situation actually…
I started therapy seriously at age 28. I had been married for years and had a decent career and good health, but circumstances required I seek help. I’ll not go into details. I wanted to describe the experience in a way my pre-therapy self could have understood. Imagine your inner world as a house you [ ]
A zoomed-out follow-up to Game Theory Patterns at Work. Introduction: Trending Towards Disorder The law that entropy always increases holds, I think, the supreme position among the laws of Nature. Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington An organization is like a living, breathing board game. The game is a complex exercise in applied social logic and strategy. [ ]
Introduction All models are wrong, but some are useful. George E. P. Box A lot has been written about machine learning (ML), so this is my own study guide. I’m not a machine learning engineer, and I’m not going to get into algorithms here. At a high level, ML is about fitting patterns in data, [ ]
Intro When you do things right, people won t be sure you ve done anything at all. God (Futurama) In many environments, people value logical reasoning, effort, and speed. These are measurable, visible skills, all useful. But a few less visible traits often matter just as much: positioning, leverage, and judgment. Positioning is where to stand before [ ]
This is a working map I’m building for myself. What is Anxiety Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards. Søren Kierkegaard The mind is a reality simulator. Anxiety is the brain simulating threats, seeking certainty where there is none. Our brains prefer false positives over false negatives. This trait helped [ ]
For the thousands affected by Block’s 40% layoffs, this is a difficult and painful change, and it will take time to adjust and figure out next steps. Before the “AI taking everyone’s jobs” narrative takes over, I wanted to share some perspective. I worked at Block for eight years (2017–2025), and everything I reference here [ ]
Foundations: Games, Rationality, and Traps In organizations, strategies and execution are interdependent. Outcomes depend not just on what you do, but on what others do, and what they expect you to do. Game theory begins where individual optimization ends. While formal solutions rarely exist for real-world situations, the framework is useful for pattern recognition at [ ]