JULY 1938. Qionglai Shan, Sichuan, China. The world’s most famous panda catcher was over nine thousand feet up, totally isolated, wet and waiting in a remote cave. A torrent of rain had trapped her and her local cook. They ate fried cucumbers and coagulated chicken blood for breakfast as streams ran through the middle of their primitive camp. “My one quilt is so wet it could be almost wrung…
What actually motivates you to do your work and show up every day? Is it the paycheck? Accolades? Something else? If you asked managers, the most common answers tend to be recognition, pay, or pressure. But what really keeps us going when we sit down at the studio or the keyboard? What if management and leadership have it wrong on what motivates their employees? According to a landmark study, the…
October 1883. Cape Sabine. The Greely Expedition has just reached land after fifty days adrift on the ice. Twenty-five men, still believing rescue is possible, build a makeshift shelter when a two-man scout crew returns with a letter: their relief ship, the Proteus, crushed by ice, has sunk. The scouts find three small food caches — enough for only a few weeks. Lieutenant Greely halves the…
How do you sustain creative output without burning out? How do you create high quality work and art at a sustainable pace? It’s mid-May, my activity level has been running hot on multiple fronts for months, and I recently finished Cal Newport’s Slow Productivity , a book on how to do less and still have meaningful, high-impact output. There is a certain personal irony in reflecting on this book’s…
What kind of writer am I? Am I a product builder who writes or a writer who builds products? I started my personal blog over 18 years ago and have published over 350 posts. But my writing and publishing cadence had become inconsistent over the last couple of years — long gaps between posts, half-finished drafts piling up, and the familiar guilt of knowing I should be writing more but struggling to…
I’ll admit that I sometimes feel guilty when I struggle to be productive. A few days ago, after a rough night of sleep and a productive-but-not-particularly-demanding morning, I struggled to get back to work after lunch. I knew what I wanted to accomplish. But something was off. I elected to take a break, but even after the break I still wasn’t feeling it. What was going on? Just the day before…
I often treat my blog writing and even simple book review posts like they need to be 2000+ word opuses involving research, sophisticated arguments and deep philosophical engagement. The end result is that I have read hundreds of books and amassed 35,000+ Kindle highlights, but only 7 book reviews have graduated to published posts on my blog. That’s a humbling conversion rate of roughly 2%. What if…
Even though I had finished dozens of songs and released 6 albums, I dreaded working on my latest music album. I didn’t even want to open Ableton, my music production software. I couldn’t get myself to do even the simplest acts to make progress — reviewing, diagnosing, or basic reworking of tracks. I was stuck. I was 25 hours and ten weeks into my next album, averaging barely 90 minutes a week,…
“Think of life as a series of dots” - Alfred Adler I read “The Courage to Be Disliked” in mid-2024, and it has quickly become one of the books I most often recommend, alongside Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning . Both books and their underlying questions and human sense-making journeys are worth remembering, reflecting on and returning to, especially when feeling nihilistic, lacking…
What metric are you currently hiding from? I knew going into my marathon race that I wasn’t really ready. A knee injury had disrupted my training for weeks. The course for the Xichang Marathon in southern Sichuan, China, was at 5000 feet / 1500 meters of altitude, and the terrain turned out to be much hillier than I’d assumed too. Despite that data screaming at me to adjust my expectations, I just…