The Human Element
What it means to be human in 2025.
Zach Ware
Hi. I'm Zach Ware. I'm a builder, investor, and competitive hybrid athlete living in Central Texas and NW Montana.
Latest posts
Hi Friends Newsletter - April 2022
This is a post from my regular friends newsletter.
Decisions, Discomfort and Confrontation
Your life experience is a sum of a million tiny decisions. Often it takes a long time for the impact of many decisions to show themselves. In my life, it’s almost always true that the second and third-order consequences are the most powerful, for good and for not. This has been true for relationships, opportunities, what Charles Duhigg calls keystone habits, for most things. My health, my friends,…
An interesting left turn
Most of the amazing outcomes in my personal and professional life have come when I favor an interesting path over a sensible one and most of my regrets can be traced to times I did the opposite. Not surprisingly, the interesting things turn out to be more sensible in retrospect. This principle recently steered me towards a hard left turn and I wanted to share an update about it. As some of you…
Interview with Ecommerce Fuel
Earlier this year Zack Kanter introduced me to Andrew Youderian who is, among other things, the founder of Ecommerce Fuel. Later in the summer, at the tail end of my summer working from rural NW Montana, I drove to Bozeman to hang out with Andrew and do a podcast interview with him. We drove to a wilderness area a few hours outside of Bozeman in his VW camper van, camped, fly fished and talked how…
Social
According to Facebook a lot has happened since I last logged into Facebook. Strangely, I feel fine. On a random Sunday a few months ago I decided to break a habit loop checking Twitter and Facebook obsessively. I had some deep thinking to do that day so I wanted to stay away from distractions. The next day for the next two months I kept not checking it. I haven’t been to either site since some…
Motivating Employees During Tough Times
One of our company managers sent a note to shareholders the other day that included an ask for advice. Several underperforming team members had recently resigned and he was considering removing a few more. In his words: Some people need to be removed from the business. With some of our recent resignations, it has been a good thing for the business either financially or because they were not adding…
The History of Time + Perception
Derek Thompson is one of my favorite writers. His work criss-crosses between economics, psychology and marketing in often wild ways. His piece on the history of the construct and perception of time came out in December and I just got around to reading it this week. And I’m mad I waited. Like most of Derek’s work it’s a simple read but full of fascinating detail. Derek’s substance to words ratio is…
Clayton Christensen Profile in The New Yorker
The New Yorker has a great profile of Clayton Christensen, author of The Innovator’s Dillemma. I’m not sure when it came out, like many things it may have been sitting in my Instapaper queue for a long time. It’s long. I read it over a solo dinner recently. Christensen is a fascinating human, full of contradictions. I particularly loved two things. First, this bit. But Christensen was a man of…
Going the other way
The nav said turn right. It was a dirt road. It went straight down and disappeared into trees. I checked around. There’s no other road. It had to be that one. I was taking a quick morning drive to an out of the way small town on the Amalfi Coast before a meeting in a small town an hour inland later in the day. I wanted to avoid the highways. I’ve seen highways in plenty of countries. I live in the…