An Idea, Every Monday
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Last month, over beers after a round of pitch 'n' putt, my buddies and I landed on a familiar subject: Adam Carolla. None of us listened to him anymore, and it wasn't because of what had changed — it was because of what hadn't. But that raised a bigger question. Why do some things curdle on the hundredth pass while others — a book, a song, a course you've played before — keep giving? Casablanca,…
"Man, what happened to Russ?" For a few years there, you couldn't walk into a Seattle sports bar without hearing it. The spins stopped working. The cringe piled up. And because of that, losing him hurt a little less than it should have. But before any of that—before the Super Bowls, the trades, the memes—Russell Wilson taught me something in his very first interview as a Seahawk. He didn't learn…
"Mary Jane's Last Dance" won Best Male Video at the 1994 VMAs. Then, at forty-four, Tom Petty released Wildflowers—and hot damn, I became a real fan. The more I learned, the more relatable he got. The kid who didn't know what publishing was. The guy who fought his label twice in three years. The songwriter who didn't realize his own song was about him until his therapist pointed it out. The newest…
Breathwork is the closest thing we have to a manual override for the nervous system. Five minutes can change your state—measurably. This isn’t mysticism. It’s a toolkit: box breathing for acute stress, 4-7-8 for sleep, Buteyko for long-term resilience, Wim Hof for energy and immune modulation. Each protocol has a job. They are not interchangeable. The science is solid. The ROI is absurd. The only…
The series has shown you what to watch out for. The atrophy. The cosplay. The kid pushing the train. The discipline of doing your half of the work. This is Part 5—the closing post—and it's about what happens when it works. You'll meet Bacon, our robot lawnmower and the small daily reminder of what good collaboration feels like. You'll see how AI tutors are quietly delivering Seth Godin's…
Your job is to keep diverging. The robots' job is to converge. The handoff between those two—the place where divergent input meets convergent execution—that's the prompt. This is Part 4 of The Plus, and it's the practical one. I'll walk you through how I actually build prompts—not the color-coded template you've seen circulating, but a method that gets reverse-engineered from real conversations.…
The nine-dot puzzle has been around for decades. Connect all nine with four straight lines…without lifting your pen. In the control group, nobody solves it. Then researchers temporarily suppress the rule-following part of the brain with electrical stimulation. Forty percent crack it. The puzzle didn't change. The rules didn't change. The frame did. This is Part 3 of The Plus. We get into…
