Friends

You know, friendship’s one of those things you don’t plan for. It just sort of happens when you’re not looking. My kids are starting to figure it out now, watching how life plays out. Friendship isn’t about having it easy or always agreeing—it’s about putting in the time, putting up with the bumps, and coming out the other side stronger for it.

Most of the time, it starts small, with something random. Maybe it’s a guy you met at a college party, and before you know it, you’re sharing beers and talking like you’ve known each other for years. Or maybe it’s someone you grew up with—the one who knows exactly how dumb you were as a kid but still stuck around. Or maybe it’s just someone you hit it off with over something simple, like a shared love for the same team or hobby. It doesn’t feel like much at first, but suddenly, they’re a part of your life, and it’s hard to imagine them not being there.

After family, friends are some of the most important people you’ll ever have. And in some ways, they’re even more important. Family’s tied to you by blood, but friends? Friends are tied to you by choice, and that makes them special. They’re the ones who don’t have to stick around but do anyway. They see you at your worst, call you out when you need it, and still have your back when the chips are down.

Friends give you something family sometimes can’t: a fresh perspective. They’ll tell you when you’re off base, push you to take chances, and remind you to lighten up when you’re taking life too seriously. And when the world feels like it’s falling apart, they’re there to make it feel manageable again, whether that’s cracking a joke, handing you a drink, or just showing up when you need them most. Over time, you realize friendship isn’t just something nice to have—it’s something you can’t do without.

It’s funny how it grows from there. At first, you’re just hanging out, having a good time. But then you start trusting each other, talking about things you wouldn’t tell anyone else. That’s when it shifts. It’s not just someone you share a laugh with anymore—it’s someone you’d drop everything for if they needed you.

But it’s not all easy. Sometimes you argue. Sometimes they let you down, or maybe you’re the one who drops the ball. It happens. The real ones, though? You figure it out. You get through it, and somehow, the bond is stronger because of it.

Then there are the hard times—losing someone close, struggling at work, or just feeling like life’s too much. That’s when you find out who your real friends are. They’re the ones who show up, no fanfare, no big speeches—just there, sitting beside you, letting you know you’re not in it alone.

Friendship comes in all shapes and sizes, and that’s what makes it so unique. My son asked me recently, “What kind of friends are those guys you see at lunch every year?” It got me thinking about all the different kinds of friends you gather through life and how they each bring something different to the table.

You’ve got your work friends—the ones who know when to warn you about the boss’s mood swings. Then there are skiing friends—not so much about how well anyone skis, but about the laughs, the shared chaos, and the memories that stick. There’s your Friendsgiving friends—the ones who feel like family but don’t guilt-trip you for not calling enough. Then you’ve got your sports friends—the ones you talk to during the season, swapping stories about the best plays or worst losses like it’s a ritual. There are your neighborhood friends—the ones you borrow tools from and trade beers with over backyard fences. And, of course, your old friends—the ones who’ve been around so long, they don’t just know your stories, they lived them with you.

And what about those lunch guys my son asked about? They’re all of these rolled into one. They’ve been there since the beginning, through the good, the bad, and everything in between. What matters isn’t the category—they’re the ones who stuck around.

Friendship isn’t perfect, and it’s not always easy. But it’s one of the few things that really makes life worth it. The laughs, the arguments, the late nights when the world feels a little lighter because of them—it’s all part of the deal. At the end of the day, it’s not about how it started or how often you see each other. It’s about the fact that when it matters most, they’re there. And that’s what makes it real.

"Keep It Simple" Is Stupid (Hard)

Space X Raptor Engines

"Keep it simple." It’s one of the most repeated directives in design, engineering, and product development—and one of the hardest to follow. Why? Because simplicity isn’t the absence of complexity. Instead, it’s the mastery of it. Simplicity is not where we begin; it’s where we arrive, often after traveling through a forest of complexity.

Take SpaceX’s Raptor engine, for example. The progression from Raptor 1 to Raptor 3 shows a clear evolution from a tangled, intricate design to a streamlined, elegant machine. But Raptor 1 wasn’t a failure of simplicity—it was a necessary step. It allowed SpaceX engineers to test, iterate, and refine the design through trial and error. Complexity was the scaffolding on which simplicity was built.

Another reason “Keep it simple” is so difficult is that simplicity doesn’t come from saying “no” or avoiding complexity—it comes from fully embracing complexity and learning from it. Teams naturally want to explore every possibility, solve every problem, and address every use case, and this instinct is vital. By tackling the full scope of challenges head-on, they uncover what truly matters and what can eventually be refined. Simplicity is not about cutting corners or prematurely narrowing the scope; it’s the result of working through the mess, understanding it deeply, and iterating until clarity and elegance naturally emerge.

Consider the early versions of Microsoft Word (queue the haters). They included nearly every feature imaginable—macros, formatting tools, drawing utilities, mail merge, and endless customizations. It was a kitchen-sink approach, not because the team was unfocused, but because they were embracing the unknown. These features were necessary to explore what users truly needed and how they interacted with the software. Over time, through observation, iteration, and learning, Microsoft refined Word into a more focused, streamlined experience. The introduction of features like the Ribbon toolbar in 2007 didn’t come from rejecting complexity but from deeply understanding it. By grappling with everything first, Microsoft arrived at a simplicity that works for both casual users and power users alike.

This principle applies even to physical systems. SpaceX didn’t streamline its Raptor engines by avoiding complexity; it embraced it first, learned what was essential, and ruthlessly cut the rest. If they’d tried to make Raptor 3 from the start, they would’ve failed—because without first embracing the mess, they couldn’t understand what could be simplified. Simplicity demands clarity, and clarity is born from wrestling with complexity. It’s not about making something easy; it’s about making something worth using. Teams that aim to “keep it simple” from the outset often fall into the trap of oversimplification—skipping steps, ignoring nuance, and ultimately creating something that feels shallow or incomplete.

Directing a team to "Keep It Simple" often feels like saying, "Make it perfect." It’s an aspirational target but not where the journey starts. Teams are inclined to add features, solve edge cases, and accommodate more scenarios. And honestly, that’s how it should be. You can’t simplify what you don’t fully understand. Simplicity isn’t the beginning of the process. It’s the endgame—it’s the longest, hardest road to get there. But when you do, the result is something that feels obvious, effortless, and inevitable—like it was simple all along.

AI is About to Give You a Decade of Your Time Back

Among all the challenges we face, three stand out as the greatest burdens of modern human existence: the unending pursuit of certainty, the exhaustive elaboration on vague ideas, and the overwhelming flood of information that demands our constant attention. These burdens are not trivial; they define the very nature of our struggles, consuming our time, draining our mental energy, and preventing us from focusing on what truly matters. Together, they represent the most significant obstacles within the human condition today. But with advancements in AI, particularly super intelligence, we may finally be able to alleviate these pressures.

The first of these burdens is Uncertainty. Consider the years of your life spent just verifying, validating, and confirming things—years spent double-checking diagnoses, reconfirming travel plans, rereading contracts—all for that elusive feeling of certainty. We have always paid a high price for control, consuming our time, draining our energy, and chipping away at our mental bandwidth. Much of modern life is an elaborate, time-consuming pursuit of certainty, which consumes an immense portion of our mental energy every day.

The professional cost is even higher. In high-stakes fields like engineering, healthcare, and software development, certainty takes on almost ritualistic importance. Engineers, healthcare professionals, and software developers spend a significant part of their time on quality assurance and verification tasks. Bureaucracies are built on compliance, quality assurance, and audits, consuming enormous resources. We've constructed elaborate systems to prevent failure, only to find ourselves trapped within them, exhausting resources to keep everything in check.

We can reclaim those years. AI, particularly super intelligence, is becoming a reality that can change our lives. Super-intelligent systems can handle the cross-checking, validating, and compliance tasks, addressing issues before they arise. Compliance would become an invisible layer, seamlessly embedded in our operations, freeing professionals from the tedium of verification. Certainty will always have a cost, but with AI, the cost could plummet, allowing us to direct our energy toward creativity, strategy, and human connection.

The second burden is Elaboration. We spend years—possibly decades—elaborating on the ideas and intentions of others. How often have you received a half-baked idea from a manager, an ambiguous plan from a client, or a vague directive from a team lead, and had to turn it into something concrete? This burden of elaboration is a hidden tax on our creativity, productivity, and mental energy.

Elaboration requires us to turn abstract visions into practical actions. For every big idea, there are countless small decisions to be made—how it will be executed, who will do what, what resources are needed. Project managers, software developers, designers, writers—all spend significant time filling in the gaps, interpreting sparse directives, and figuring out how to turn concepts into realities. It's an effort that extends into our personal lives as well, from household projects to organizing social events, where every broad idea demands an endless sequence of specifics.

AI can handle the burden of elaboration. Advanced AI systems could understand broad instructions, fill in the details, generate specific plans, and execute them seamlessly. AI could take an architect’s concept and generate a detailed project plan, or turn a vague product requirement into a technical specification. Instead of being bogged down by the minutiae, we could focus on strategy, creativity, and human connection, making the process of elaboration effortless and the impossible achievable.

Finally, we face the Burden of Overload. Modern life is an unceasing torrent of information—a flood of emails, notifications, messages, articles, and reports. Every day, the average person interacts with hundreds of pieces of content, makes countless decisions, and juggles numerous tasks that demand attention. This overload consumes our cognitive bandwidth, leading to decision fatigue, stress, and an erosion of our ability to focus on what truly matters.

Professionals in data-driven industries are particularly affected, spending a significant part of their time simply sorting, prioritizing, and responding to communications. This isn’t value-added labor—it’s the endless and often futile task of untangling the necessary from the irrelevant. Overload not only drains our productivity but also erodes our mental health, making it harder to see the bigger picture or engage in deep, meaningful work.

AI can act as a cognitive concierge—triaging information, distilling inputs, and presenting only what’s truly relevant. Instead of being overwhelmed by countless emails or complex reports, you’d see just the essentials, with context and suggested actions provided. Super intelligence could curate options, summarize patient data into actionable insights, or highlight only the critical metrics for an executive. With AI, the burden of overload becomes manageable, allowing us to reclaim focus and direct our attention to meaningful work and personal connection.

Together, these three burdens—Uncertainty, Elaboration, and Overload—are the defining struggles of our modern lives. They drain our time, erode our creativity, and leave us with little energy to focus on what truly matters. But with the dawn of super intelligence, we are entering a period of significant transformation. AI offers us the chance to shed these burdens—reclaiming our time, our focus, and our creativity. AI helps us turn verification, elaboration, and overload into opportunities—enabling us to dream, innovate, and connect. This future is becoming increasingly possible.

This article was cross-posted on X.

Your Credentials Are Nearly Obsolete

Andrew Wilkinson (@awilkinson) recently shared an interesting experience: his 5-year-old son chatted with ChatGPT's advanced voice mode for over 45 minutes. It all started with a simple question about how cars are made, but soon evolved into an extended learning journey. ChatGPT explained the process in a way a young child could understand, adapted to his curiosity, and turned counting practice into an engaging game. The AI’s infinite patience and ability to respond meaningfully, adjusting to the child’s learning style, made the interaction remarkable. As Andrew put it, we’re looking at the future—”an essentially free, infinitely patient, super-genius teacher that adapts perfectly to each child’s pace and interests”.

Now imagine this in the context of the workplace.

The pace of knowledge decay isn’t limited to childhood learning or education—it’s everywhere, including the professional world. In a widely cited paper from the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), the half-life of medical knowledge is estimated to be around 7 to 10 years. Some areas of medicine, particularly those related to fast-moving fields like oncology or genetics, see significant shifts in knowledge and practice in an even shorter time frame—sometimes less than 2 to 3 years. And this rapid obsolescence isn’t just limited to medicine; it affects every industry.

We are on the brink of a future where the credentials that once symbolized lifelong expertise are decaying just as quickly as the knowledge they represent. Imagine a world where your expertise is no longer defined by static credentials but by dynamic, ongoing assessments—an environment where your understanding is continuously evaluated through lifelong, meaningful conversations with AI. The future Andrew described for his son—of having a patient, genius teacher always available—is nearly here for everyone, and it will change everything about how we value, develop, and maintain skills in the workplace.

For decades, organizations have relied on degrees, certifications, and licenses as proxies for skills. These were valuable indicators at the time they were earned, but what happens when the half-life of knowledge accelerates and a static credential no longer signifies competence today? In a world of AI-driven assessments, the very concept of certification will transform. Traditional credentials will be increasingly challenged by a new standard—real, demonstrable, and evolving expertise.

Imagine each of your team members having an ongoing, personalized conversation with an AI, in which their understanding of key topics is continuously probed and deepened. These aren’t just exams—they’re natural conversations where the AI adapts, asks nuanced questions, and offers resources to help individuals grow in areas they need. This dynamic evaluation will reveal much more than any single certificate ever could. It will expose those who are stagnating while amplifying those who are actively growing—irrespective of their formal credentials.

AI is about to make lifelong learning more than just a buzzword. Picture an environment where learning and assessment happen simultaneously, in every interaction, at every stage of life. These persistent conversations with AI won’t just be for the young or the formally educated—they’ll be accessible to anyone, regardless of their age or background, fostering deep, personalized growth.

Someone in your workforce who didn’t go to a prestigious university could be benchmarked against global experts simply by showing what they know and how they think in real time. Imagine a manager who once doubted their ability to navigate emerging tech trends—now, through persistent AI-led dialogue, they’re building confidence and skill, tracked and recognized continuously.

The implications of this shift are profound. AI-driven assessment will strip away the veneer of superficial knowledge. No longer will someone be able to hide behind a dated credential or clever self-promotion. Posers—those who coast on old accomplishments without actively staying sharp—will be exposed. In contrast, those with genuine understanding, who have stayed curious and continued to learn, will finally get the recognition they deserve.

Within your teams, the value individuals bring will no longer be based on the age of their degree but on the currency and relevance of their knowledge—knowledge they are demonstrating today. Imagine what this means for identifying potential leaders, experts, or innovators within your organization. Undiscovered talent will rise, and those whose expertise has grown stale will be challenged to keep up.

In this new world, we’re not talking about badges or one-time achievements. We’re talking about fluid indicators—ongoing evaluations that adapt with the person’s growth, reflecting the full, evolving landscape of their capabilities. These indicators are like having a living profile of skills and expertise—always relevant, always up-to-date.

For managers, this is transformative. The reliance on resumes and certificates to make decisions about hiring or promotions is already showing its weaknesses. Now, imagine being able to access a real-time, dynamic picture of someone’s capability—a picture that reflects what they can contribute right now. It could mean a radical rethinking of not only how you hire but also how you train, promote, and retain your best people.

The role of a manager will shift dramatically. The emphasis will be on nurturing environments where continuous learning is the norm. Managers won’t just be credential-checkers—they will become catalysts for learning, ensuring their teams are growing, adapting, and developing the kind of resilience needed to thrive in a fast-changing world.

Credentialing will no longer be a one-time box to tick but an ongoing, adaptive process. The managers who invest in building teams capable of real-time learning, adaptation, and AI-assisted growth will find themselves leading the most effective, future-proof teams. It will be a shift from managing competencies to enabling perpetual growth.

The world of work is evolving at a breathtaking pace. In the near future, the difference between an obsolete team and a thriving one won’t be about who has the most credentials. It will be about who can demonstrate current, evolving knowledge. The AIs that will accompany us on this journey will become the mirrors that reflect the truth—they will reveal where we are, where we need to grow, and just how far we can push the limits of what we know.

This is not a distant dream. It’s happening now. And those who embrace it—who foster environments of constant growth and continuous learning—will not only survive but lead in this new era. Your credentials might be nearly obsolete, but your capacity to learn and adapt never will be.

This article was cross-posted on X.

From the Truck to YouTube: How AI is Transforming Construction Worker Expertise

Imagine you're a construction worker starting your day at 6:15 AM, sitting in the truck waiting for the crew to gather. It used to be a time of idle chatter or scrolling through your phone. Now, it’s the start of something much more impactful—a conversation with an AI that knows exactly what you’re working on today, what you might face, and what you’re curious about. Every morning begins with a personalized, dynamic learning experience, designed just for you.

AI has the potential to transform how expertise is developed on the job site, and it doesn’t require formal classrooms or outdated credentialing. Instead, it’s about daily, ongoing, and persistent engagement with an AI that understands you. It starts in the truck at 6:15 AM, and ends with suggested Instagram and YouTube videos at night—perfectly curated to fill in the gaps or expand on what you encountered throughout the day. This is learning that fits seamlessly into a construction worker’s life—real, practical, and instantly applicable.

Forget formal certifications that collect dust while the world moves on. Expertise is no longer about what you learned years ago—it's about how you’re growing today. Imagine your AI companion guiding you through safety protocols on new materials, explaining the latest building codes, or simply helping you troubleshoot that weird issue with the concrete mix that came up yesterday. The AI isn’t just there to answer questions—it’s proactively making sure you’re ready for what’s ahead, adapting to your pace, your projects, and your preferences.

In this new world, the credentials that matter aren’t static—they’re dynamic, shaped by ongoing learning and real-time problem-solving. Each day, the AI nudges you to stretch your skills a little further. It benchmarks your knowledge not against a piece of paper you got a decade ago, but against real-world expertise, constantly honed. It suggests short videos that recap the day or introduce what’s coming next. And when you watch those Instagram reels or YouTube clips, they’re not just random suggestions—they’re targeted, building on your experiences and filling gaps that matter to you.

No more stagnation, no more coasting on old knowledge. Those who thrive in this environment are the ones willing to learn every single day. And the AI makes that easier than ever—it’s patient, it’s insightful, and it’s always available. Expertise becomes a journey, not a destination marked by a certificate. The worker who’s curious and persistent, who keeps asking questions in the truck and keeps watching videos late at night, will outpace the one who relies solely on what they’ve done before.

Imagine the transformation on job sites. Teams where each member is constantly updating their skills, where every worker has access to the kind of expertise that was once reserved for specialists. Managers will no longer just look at a resume or a list of past jobs—they’ll see a dynamic profile of growth, a living picture of someone’s capability. They’ll know who’s putting in the work to learn, who’s adaptable, and who’s staying current.

This is the future of construction expertise. It’s not about credentials; it’s about conversations—daily, persistent, evolving conversations with an AI that helps every worker grow, from the morning truck ride to the last YouTube video before bed. Those who embrace this shift won’t just keep up—they’ll lead the way.

This article was cross-posted on X.

Optimizing for Status Versus Optimizing for Happiness

I've been thinking deeply about the idea of optimizing for status versus optimizing for happiness. Balancing between these two very different objectives has been a significant theme over the course of my life and career.

Early in my career, I focused on status hierarchies within industries like auto recycling and towing, and eventually branched out into software, music, intellectual property, and beyond. I've often wondered how different my life might have been if I had chosen a different starting point. Fortunately, now, at what feels like the final stage of my career, I feel a deep sense of satisfaction and happiness.

To me, success and happiness are deeply personal and subjective. Success often gets defined by external markers like prestige or wealth, while happiness is more about internal fulfillment. For some, achieving high status brings genuine joy. For others, the sacrifices—the long hours, stress, or strained relationships—can take away from what actually makes life fulfilling. It's ironic how what brings happiness doesn’t always bring status, and vice versa.

Climbing a status hierarchy requires intense focus and dedication, often at the cost of other aspects of life like health or relationships. Prioritizing happiness, meanwhile, can mean not climbing as high in professional arenas. Life is a series of trade-offs, and what we gain in one area often means a loss in another. There's no perfect balance—just the balance that works for you in a given moment.

I've also learned that what is optimal evolves with time. There are periods in life where chasing opportunities, prestige, or professional connections makes sense. But at other times, prioritizing well-being, balance, or nurturing relationships takes center stage. Neither path is static, and neither is universally right.

Society often pushes us to equate status with value, only for many of us to discover that external accolades don't always translate into fulfillment. On the other hand, optimizing for happiness—the "live your best life" mantra—can feel equally pressured and just as elusive. In the end, meaning is personal. Status often aligns with legacy, influence, or achievement—an external meaning. Happiness comes from within—from love, family, personal growth, and experiences.

The choice between optimizing for status or happiness is ultimately about our values, circumstances, and our evolving understanding of what makes a life well-lived. There is no universal answer, only personal ones, and what feels right can change as we grow and learn. For me, the goal has been finding an evolving balance that works, one that acknowledges both the external and internal measures of a meaningful life.

This post originally began as a reply to Aaron Renn's thought-provoking reflections on status hierarchies.

Complexity Coordination: The Real Business of Construction Management

The construction industry is, at its core, a business of complexity coordination. Beneath the tangible layers of facade systems, waterproofing membranes, and insulation lies an intricate web of tasks, resources, clients, and finances—each demanding meticulous orchestration. For a construction firm specializing in building envelope sciences, restoration, and maintenance, complexity coordination isn’t just a function; it’s the lifeblood of the operation. This story explores how the management team must deftly synchronize every moving part to succeed in a constantly shifting environment, while also accounting for unpredictable factors such as weather conditions.

The Lifecycle of a Task

Every task begins with evaluation—identifying needs, assessing the scope, and determining feasibility. From the initial concept through design and planning, tasks evolve through stages that demand constant refinement and realignment. Whether it’s securing permits, mobilizing equipment, or scheduling skilled personnel, each step requires precision.

Tasks are not static entities; they often span categories, involve compliance requirements, and necessitate visibility across disciplines. A single building envelope-related task might require coordination across multiple facets, such as air and moisture barriers, insulation, and facade restoration. Each component has unique compliance checks, specialized skill sets, and cross-functional resources that must be carefully managed. The management team must evaluate, estimate, and execute—ensuring each task transitions smoothly from "Not Started" to "Completed," triggering billing and client satisfaction.

The lifecycle of a task doesn't end at completion. Post-construction support—inspections, punch lists, and quality assurance—is equally critical, particularly for long-term client relationships. Tasks that are escalated, deferred, or held up due to external factors add to the overall complexity, making the ability to reprioritize and reschedule tasks an ongoing necessity.

The Lifecycle of Resources

Resources, whether personnel or equipment, follow their own intricate lifecycle. They need to be acquired, calibrated, motivated, and maintained. A crane might serve in the "Execution" phase of one project and be redeployed for maintenance purposes in another. Multi-skilled personnel, capable of switching roles from facade inspector to waterproofing technician, or from air barrier specialist to restoration applicator, reflect the flexibility demanded of a full-stack building envelope technician in this environment.

Resource tags such as "Certified Operator" or "Versatile Equipment" are not just labels; they represent the ability to deploy individuals and machinery where and when they are needed. Resources may be "In Use," "Under Maintenance," or "In Transit." Equipment must be calibrated, transported, and sometimes retired. Each stage—from "Acquisition" to "Decommissioning"—presents a logistical challenge that impacts the entire project pipeline.

Resources are also interlinked with financial aspects. High-value machinery demands regular inspections and often needs downtime for maintenance, which must be accounted for without disrupting the schedule. The management team must be adept at juggling these realities, finding the delicate balance between resource availability and project needs.

The Lifecycle of Clients

The lifecycle of clients begins with lead generation—identifying potential clients and evaluating their needs. Once needs are identified, clients move into negotiating and finalizing agreements to ensure alignment between their expectations and deliverables. Active collaboration follows, encompassing ongoing projects, where communication, progress monitoring, and support are essential to meet evolving requirements.

Clients then transition into phases of review and feedback, where satisfaction is assessed, and adjustments are made to enhance service quality. This lifecycle may also include post-completion support and re-engagement for future projects, creating opportunities for ongoing collaboration.

Throughout these stages, the focus is on maintaining strong relationships, addressing challenges proactively, and fostering mutual growth. The lifecycle of clients is dynamic, requiring continuous engagement, adaptation, and responsiveness to ensure a successful partnership that delivers value at every stage.

Coordinating Complexity: The Financial Dimension

Underpinning all these life cycles is the constant financial juggling act—cash flow, profitability, and investment in future capacity. Cash flow is often contingent upon completing tasks to unlock billing or ensuring resources are "Available" or "Deployed" as planned to avoid costly delays.

Profitability requires managing labor and equipment costs against projected revenues. Equipment downtime, deferred tasks, or escalated issues all have a direct impact on the bottom line. A machine "Under Maintenance" or a task "On Hold" can result in cascading delays, impacting multiple projects and clients simultaneously. The management team must act as financial stewards, ensuring that the investments made today align with the projected returns of tomorrow.

The Business of Complexity Coordination

Complexity coordination is far more than just scheduling resources or managing timelines; it is the essence of effective construction management. True success is achieved by aligning and optimizing the interconnected life cycles of tasks, resources, and clients to achieve efficiency, profitability, and long-term satisfaction. By integrating planning, resource allocation, execution, and post-completion phases into a cohesive approach, complexity coordination as a practice ensures that every aspect of operations is streamlined and responsive to the dynamic nature of construction projects.

Complexity Coordination Software

A custom SaaS application provides the foundation for comprehensive visibility into the intricate web of complexity. By simplifying coordination, optimizing workflows, enhancing resource utilization, and ensuring tasks are completed efficiently, this software becomes indispensable. It offers real-time insights through a life cycle dashboard for tasks, resources, and clients, making everything visible and manageable on a timeline. This functionality enables proactive decision-making, early identification of issues, and seamless communication among stakeholders.

The Integrated Business Investor Opportunity

This presents a compelling opportunity for Integrated Business Investors to participate in an evolving market that combines both software innovation and high-demand, hands-on services. Unlike traditional SaaS investments, this model integrates SaaS technology with essential building envelope restoration and maintenance services, addressing real industry needs. This dual-focus approach not only offers the potential for dual outcomes, but also capital efficiency, making it a unique and resilient investment opportunity in a shifting venture capital landscape. The core work isn’t simply construction; it’s about managing the intricate choreography of people, machines, tasks, clients, and unpredictable conditions like weather—an orchestration of complexity made simple.

Written using ChatGPT 40 with canvas.

Cross-posted on X.

Counting Lives Instead of Souls

New York Times CDT Covid data above.

Outside of the nuclear launch codes, there’s never been a set of numbers that have more power over the world than the daily publication of Cases, Deaths, and Trends (CDT).

CDT dominates headlines, drives policy worldwide, closes businesses, cuts off debate, eliminates choice, ends relationships, isolates people, is causing an explosion of diseases of despair, and is the basis for the latest wave of online hate and social division.

How did statistics - that utterly fail to capture what it means to be human - come to dominate our lives?

Here’s my theory: when we started counting lives instead of souls, we lost track of everything that makes life worth living.

If you are thinking “no life equals no soul”, that’s an argument used by those that have rearranged our world around the death math of CDT. They say “If you're not living, you're dead. Period.”; as if it was only that simple. If you can get close enough, ask the sad, the anxious, the fearful, the lonely, the isolated, the addicted, the untreated sick, and the suicidal if it’s possible to be both dead and alive, or barely living.

We live to nourish our souls and the souls of others. However, I can’t think of a single COVID directive that wasn’t soul draining. In service to Cases, Deaths, and Trends, we got social distancing, masking, shutdowns, the uneven application of rules, coerced vaccinations, censorship, racist passports, media sensationalism, and endless propaganda.

History won’t be kind to the neurotic CDT maximalists or to the petty tyrants that pushed CDT mandates.

There are more meaningful numbers in the world. We just lost track of them.

The Last Chog

Someday when I have time, I plan to dramatically shorten this post, or split it into two parts.

Like a giant inflatable blivet, they pumped fifty billion tons a year into it for decades. Eventually, it started pressing down on our oceans, causing mountains of water to surge onto the land; coastlines moved miles inward, lowlands flooded, weather patterns flipped, oceans acidified, fresh water became scarce, and entire species relocated or died off. The blivet was full.

Humanity ultimately adapted. However, the years preceding the Great Adaptation were horrifying: food supplies collapsed, billions of refugees clogged the borders of upland countries, and all life everywhere changed forever. That is, except for The Last Chog.

For over one hundred years, billions of Chogs, who made up more than twenty percent of the human population, lived as though there was an endless bounty. Like swarms of robotic wasps, Chogs scraped, mined, refined, shipped, formed, bought, and sold every resource on earth. Nothing was out of reach; anything could be built; and all could be obtained with a click. If it could be imagined - for maximum profit and minimal consequence - the Chogs ripped, clawed, sawed, melted, twisted, formed, and willed it into existence.

Year after year, more and more humans joined the Chogs. And why not? Mega Chogs, which included brand marketers, CEOs, government officials, oligarchs, and influencers everywhere, all prayed at the altars of consumption and consumerism. The message was clear: conspicuous consumption inspired envy, attracted mates, unlocked immeasurable powers, and evidenced happiness, safety, and security. If they all became world-class consumers, how could anything go wrong?

Until the Chogs arrived, humans lived in harmony with the planet for over two hundred thousand years; yet it only took them one hundred years to fill the blivet and disrupt life for everyone else. They did it using a combination of dirty [industrial] technology and misguided faith. If it was dirty technology that filled the blivet, it was misguided faith in climate tech that led them to believe they could return the blivet to its pre-industrial form. It did not.

As the Chog population grew, many predicted the consequence of filling the blivet, but very few had the courage or the willpower to pin the problem on consumption. The Chogs wouldn’t accept recurring declines in output, growth, revenue, market share, harvests, yields, or any other Chog chart trend that pointed down. Instead, top Chogs continued to fly private jets, sail motorized yachts, build mega mansions, and gorge themselves on luxury items and exotic foods. Chogs everywhere chased baubles, trinkets, fast fashion, big trucks, bloated boats, useless gadgets, supersized meals, and the instant gratification that came from point-and-no-think buying. Even worse, to become good little consumers, Chog children were given devices that taught FOMO [fear of missing out], materialism, status seeking, and impulse purchasing. By sixteen, every one of them could be tracked, targeted, and seduced to believe that happiness came from an endless stream of stuff.

To drain the blivet, the Chogs spent trillions. Nevertheless, they couldn’t keep pace with the rapidly growing population of Chogs and their insane, “consequenceless consumption”.

Over many decades, the Chogs had self-organized into huge tribes led by Mega Chogs. The Mega Chogs used their power and sway to mislead followers about what amounted to fights over the realignment of consumption patterns. “It’s ridiculous to dramatically cut...We just need to redistribute...” [consumption] so they said...

So, the race to rip, claw, saw, melt, twist, form, and sell continued. Fighting and competing took its toll on the Chogs - and on the world. Billions of tons of garbage and waste clogged oceans, filled valleys, and dotted the landscape like inverted trashbergs. In the pursuit of stature and stuff, they spent years commuting to soulless jobs; they overmedicated, abandoned their families, shortened their lifespans, and created historic economic and social inequities.

As the blivet swelled, a rapidly increasing number of hungry, scared, and desperate refugees flooded the borders of safer lands. Migrations of billions, that should have taken several hundred years, happened in decades. In the animal kingdom, food webs rapidly reordered as many animals and plants were stranded in lowland areas. Meanwhile, insects, birds, and other mobile species rapidly moved upland. Fragile ecosystems, that were already stressed from years of unpredictable weather patterns, were overwhelmed by these new adversarial and invasive arrivals. The oceans fared no better: already overfished, acidification was now destroying marine life everywhere.

Many, many Chogs doubled down on consequenceless consumption; they built modern castles and gated communities, shopped frivolously, cornered the market for fish and other rare proteins, burned fossil fuels, shunned that notion of “we instead of me”, and prepped for armed conflict. They didn’t know it yet, but these people were about to become the last Chogs on earth.

Previously, humans had survived plagues, pandemics, world wars, and famine. This was entirely different. Consuming without consequence had pushed nature and civilization to the brink of collapse that no ‘war’ on ‘X’ was going to fix. Instead, rebalancing the ecosystem required an unprecedented adaptation: a Great Adaptation, a period when all humans had to learn to live in harmony with nature and each other...seemingly overnight.

A decade or so before the blivet exceeded capacity, more than six billion humans were already spending multiple hours per day inside Deeply Immersive Virtual Environments driven by Artificial Intelligence (AI DIVES). People used AI DIVES for everything, including: learning, working, relaxing, gaming, training, and simulating alternate realities, or “alties” for short.

The three features that made AI DIVES so compelling were limitless depth, hardened integrity, and prophetic probability predictions; all of these features took decades to deliver. Limitless depth enabled users to travel, tilt, pan, and zoom in any direction without audio or visual boundaries, constraints, or distortions. Concurrently, transparent and universal access to authenticated, peer-reviewed, and censorship-resistant data and code had generated unshakeable faith in the integrity of the most compelling AI DIVES. However, it was the prophetic probability predictions that were imbued within the simulated alternate realities (alties) that drove engagement worldwide.

After fifty years of reinforced learning, the intelligent agents that backstopped the alties were capable of generating godlike depictions of the future. Early on, the range of outcomes depicted were vast and almost inactionable; but over time, altie simulations became eerily accurate. Over the span of thirty years, probable outcome counts fell from more than twenty to several; with one outcome always more believable than the other. Doing ‘this’ rather than ‘that’ became an obvious choice.

As time went on, the Chogs used alties to experience the alternative outcomes of everything including: storytelling via synthetic media, engineering and architectural decisions, genetic alterations, military planning, crowd manipulation, gambling, medical treatments, resource planning, logistics, healthcare, epidemiology, and even sports team configurations.

However, there was one altie that changed the trajectory of humankind. The Global Eco Mind (GEM) was a universal consumption altie that enabled users to visualize and predict the often unseen impact of consumption decisions. The GEM began life as a consumption analytics overlay embedded within augmented reality [AR] lenses. As AR users skimmed over recognizable products, the GEM heatmapped everything by the degree of environmental impact. Twenty years in, the GEM morphed into a full-on altie that not only incorporated a universe of transaction, device, sensor, social, and human behavior data, the GEM also incorporated millions of validated outcomes to build predictions upon.

As the blivet pressed down on the world, GEM users could visualize every forkful of impact. Through haunting, real-life depictions, they could see the personal, local, regional, countrywide, and global impact of every consumption decision on earth. Beginning with resource mining and ending at disposal, the lifecycle of simple items like toys, clothing, packaging, and food could be visualized in aggregate. Complex products and services such as phones, electronics, vehicles or air travel could be deconstructed and viewed similarly. To GEM users, a stick of gum became ten million sticks of gum; a water bottle became a fracked field, a chemical plant, and an ocean of plastics that led to contamination of the food supply; an airline ticket became billions of blivet-inflating air travel trips. The crushing consequences of consumption upon all living things, both near and far, were finally on full display.

The GEM caused two rapid and significant shifts. First, Chogs everywhere commanded their authenticated, autonomous user agents (AAUAs) to optimize their life and consumption choices for planetary well-being. As such, billions of AAUAs ranked and selected products based upon regenerative designs and sustainable ingredients; furthermore, they cast billions of ranked choice votes based upon the likelihood of planet-positive outcomes. Second, the GEM enabled anyone to zoom into the grid to find remaining patches of Chogs that were still practicing consequenceless consumption, and needless to say, these areas flipped from bad to good almost overnight. That’s how the Great Adaptation came about, and it’s how we got to today. The blivet is mostly full and slowly deflating, but the crushing danger has passed.

So what happened to the last Chog? The last Chog lives upon a massive mountain of coal. He makes disposable things that nobody wants; tossing them into his valley of trash where they take ten thousand years to decay whilst leaching into nearby rivers and streams. The last Chog is often seen driving around his mountain in a massive white pickup truck as he sings the ‘Intoxicating Tango’ song to himself. He has no friends. He has no enemies. He’s the last sad Chog, on the last sad patch, in the sad GEM grid of consequenceless consumption.

What’s a Chog?

Disrupting Radicalization

“But there is no such thing as a pure fact, innocent of interpretation. Behind every fact presented to the world–by a teacher, a writer, anyone–is a judgment. The judgment that has been made is that this fact is important, and that other facts are not important and so they are omitted from the presentation.”

— Howard Zinn

Unfortunately, a majority of Americans have become radicalized.

Radicalization: “the process by which an individual or group comes to adopt increasingly radical views in opposition to a political, social, or religious status quo.” [Wikipedia]

Radicals can be informative (the radical professor), catalysts for change (the peaceful protester), save us from mobs (the lone dissenter), and can even be entertaining (the armchair philosopher).

Radicalization ceases to be useful, works against humanity, and ruins lives when it leads to violence, violent extremism, and politically motivated assholism.

While a microdose of radicalization may be okay, any more than that is detrimental to your future.

You should be able to identify, question, and denormalize radicalizing ideas and practices. As such, here are some thoughts to consider:

Mathematics aside, all facts and truths are observer-dependent, multidimensional opinions (MDOs). Ergo, partial truths and incomplete facts are single dimension opinions (SDOs).

The road to radicalization is paved with single dimension opinions (SDOs).

Fact finding and truth seeking are hard; they require you to seek, consume, and understand competing points of view; until you have done so, the only thing you possess is an SDO.

Everyone has SDOs. Social media is an SDO machine.

Unfortunately, both commercial and public news organizations are increasingly politicized SDO machines.

You can spot a low value SDO source when they don’t welcome, don’t enable, or if they censor alternative points of view.

SDO partisans are easily triggered by alternative points of view.

SDO partisans use pronouns like “them” and “they” to demonize groups of people (e.g., “they hate you” or “they’re motivated by greed”).

SDO partisans use labels like “republicans” and “democrats” to demonize groups of people (e.g., “republicans are racists” or “democrats are socialists”).

SDO partisans use corporate names like Facebook, Google, and Twitter to demonize all employees of that corporation.

When you see or hear grouping words like “them”, “they”, “republicans”, “democrats”, or corporate names, ask for actual names (the humans); most SDO partisans can’t give more than three.

Science is never settled; therefore it’s impossible to construct an SDO using a ‘settled science’ argument.

Beware of SDOs that have been reinforced with credentials and/or anonymous sources (e.g., the Harvard graduate says…”).

Beware of SDOs that have been reinforced with cherry-picked statistics. See “How To Lie With Statistics” (1954).

News articles and social media posts become MDOs when they are accompanied by comments and responses. It’s essential to read both.

There’s really no such thing as an SDO, you’re just missing the other dimension.

Every time you convert an SDO into an MDO, you have made the world a better place.

Presenting information as an MDO (revealing all sides), makes the world a better place.

Investing in (forming and presenting) MDOs requires 2X or 3X more commitment than simply consuming and repeating SDOs.

After you have read this post and (most importantly) any responses to it (via Twitter), I hope you can use this MDO to disrupt radicalization.

Stone Walls

For twenty five years, I have walked by the same stone wall. I never gave it much thought until one day I spotted the rock shown above. Not only is this rock interesting...as a rock, it jarred me into thinking about slavery and the equity some of us have or don’t have in America.

Where I live on the east coast, between 1619 and 1869, so many stone walls were built that if it was one wall, it would circle the globe ten times. There are stone walls everywhere; some with stones so big that you’d think they were placed there by the same people that built the pyramids. But that’s not far from the truth. At least some of these walls were built by slaves.

The next time you see a five hundred pound rock in a stone wall, ask yourself how it got there? Big old, white farmers, their bull-strong sons, and donkeys didn’t move all those rocks. Now ask yourself who benefited? Fields were cleared, walls were built, crops were harvested, and four generations later the land was sold to Walmart.

The fact is, someone owned the humans that built the walls that turned into generational equity for one family and not another.

Going forward, I think it’s important to find ways to level up the equity each of us has in America. Generations later, this is not going to be easy to do. Then again, neither was lifting all those rocks for little or nothing in return…

Don’t Let Your Tongue Get Your Teeth Knocked Out

It’s obvious to most people that you wouldn't sit down at this table uninvited and rudely share your opinions, political views, medical advice, or preferences for Tesla over Harley.

I even politely asked for permission to take this picture and the guy on the right wanted to cancel me. After some calm introductions and smiles, we all implicitly agreed to be friends.

This doesn’t happen on the Internet though. Instead, most people commenting and tweeting approach others like they're hogtied in public square before a throng of angry rockthrowers. Let me insult you whilst my friends stone you to death. This might get you likes, followers, and support from a partisan tribe, but it never changes anything.

If you spend any amount of time on Twitter, you’ll notice that most of the political pundits and rubes that have amassed at least ten thousand disciples have done so by stoning people to death. They throw and their followers start looking for rocks. It’s circular, endless, and pointless. Really. I can’t think of a worse way to waste life.

Insulting statements that attract likes and followers are truly antithetical to building a foundation of genuine power that can affect change. There’s nothing less powerful than a flock of bleating sheep. Imagine spending two years becoming a political shepherd, posting fresh veg to your base, firing up the troops, and bathing in dopamine only to realize you're not an influencer, you're a mook. History will show that it’s all so pointless.

Go back to the picnic table (see photo). If you can’t find some common ground, don’t let your tongue get your teeth knocked out. Just shut up. Please. You’re undeniably part of the problem.

The one thing we all have in common is our humanity. True power resides in those that contribute to the forward and upward graph of evolution. Small kind things, family and friends, dedication to a noble mission, and the pursuit of sustainable innovations are stuff to spend time and energy on. Building a mook army on social media...well, you’re just pulling the graph down.

The same could be said for spending time on the consumption of this stuff. At least I tell myself that I’m better off reading a book or walking deviceless in the woods. With every moment spent on political bullshit there is something positive we should have done instead.

I realize this post is a contradiction of sorts. I’m throwing rocks at political twitter and producing negative energy. However, I see it as a noble mission. Moreover, I’m saving myself.

I’ll just conclude by saying: in person, on the Internet, with friends, or amongst strangers...keep your teeth.

Easy Fitness Advice

Pertaining to health, wellness, and fitness, I stay in the top 5% for my age; always have and fingers crossed, I always will.

The secret is to have a fightline.

Your fightline is an exact time each day, 10:00 AM for example, when you ask yourself these questions: “Did I win yesterday?” and “How can I win today?”. More specifically, “What do I need to do over the next twenty-four hours to be healthier than the last twenty-four hours?”

Your assessment of yesterday informs what you need to do today. You are either going to subtract stuff from yesterday (stress, caffeine, sit time, alcohol, sugar, etc.) or add stuff (steps, meditation, reps, protein, fiber, water, stretches, etc.). This addition and subtraction is fightline math.

If you lost yesterday, the day before, the day before that, and so on for days, weeks, months or even years, there’s only one thing left to do: win tomorrow.

You can win tomorrow by making small, fightline calculations: a bit of stress reduction here; some extra steps there; one less drink of coffee or wine; and/or any other smart addition to, or subtraction from, yesterday.

Be consistent. You’re better off doing ten pushups every day, than doing a hundred one day and nothing the next.

Be reasonable. You’re better off walking up one short hill every day, than climbing a mountain every month.

Be aware. When you can feel your adjustments, you’re making genuine progress. Daily walks are perceptible; removing ten grains of sugar from your daily diet might not be.

Be mathematical. You’re aging every day. There’s no such thing as staying level by living life today exactly like you did yesterday. Use fightline math to stay ahead of your biological clock.

If you are consistent, reasonable, aware and mathematical, you’ll become the best version of yourself. I guarantee it.

As for my fightline, it’s 9:30 AM, right after my Unified Health and Performance workout on Zoom. At this time, I know if I lost yesterday (always due to bad decisions); it’s also when I calculate how to win tomorrow.

FYI: the older we get, the harder the fight!

The Lego Recycling Machine

The Lego Recycling Machine is a fun, relatable, and fictional story that adults can use to teach children how technology and circular thinking will inspire the earth-friendly product designs of the future.

Last week, I drove twenty-two miles to pour two Home Depot buckets of random Lego blocks into the eager mouth of a Lego Recycling Machine.

The Machine was located at the end of a nondescript stripmall, right next to an In-N-Out burger. The entire storefront was occupied by a huge Lego logo, a collection chute (the mouth), an exit hole (for boxes and envelopes), and a locked service door.

I never saw an employee. The machine was exclusively operated through the Lego Loop app that I downloaded to my phone.

Nine minutes after pouring ten gallons of mixed Legos into the machine, using the Lego Loop app, I paid for an organized box that included: 1,830 blocks from our bucket, 315 Lego Next Life (LNL) blocks, and three new Lego Building Instruction Booklets.

I left 986 [unneeded] blocks in the machine for resale to others as LNL blocks. Every LNL block sold converts to fractional Lego Coin [crypto] that I can use within the rapidly expanding LNL economy.

91 missing blocks were mailed to me from machines located elsewhere, as these machines are each capable of autonomously preparing packages for shipping.

Even more fun, students from my son’s school used the Lego Loop app to form a club. Using the app, members voted on projects by pledging blocks and Lego Coin to an array of designs. The first build completed, a huge Battlestar Cruiser, used 9,002 blocks pledged by eighteen members. Using the pledged Lego Coin, blocks needed to complete four additional designs are being purchased from others.

Lego Recycling has become so popular that billions of abandoned Legos have been sourced from yard sales, flea markets, basements, and attics the world over.

Lego Group, the company that makes the machines, now earns more profit per year from recycling Legos and reselling designs than they do from manufacturing. Moreover, the machines are adept at detecting and rejecting counterfeits; this feature has almost wiped out the Lego black market.

Lego’s Director of Regenerative Initiatives, Hans Swedman, attributes the success of the Lego Recycling Machine and the Lego Loop app to artificial intelligence and machine learning. “The machine is able to sort, size, organize, and assemble boxes of Legos and new Building Instructions in ways that could not be imagined, and at speeds that could not be matched, by an army of engineers!”

The Lego Loop app is not only enabling a new social recycling and construction experience, it’s also fostering a generation of Lego recycling entrepreneurs. One eleven-year old boy, alias Joe Cakes, has reclaimed and is reselling nearly a million blocks; his mother told me that Joe and his father visited several hundred yard sales last year, and that Joe has earned enough LNL crypto to almost pay for his first year of college!

The Lego Recycling Machine has become so important to the Lego Group that the company has been able to cut its use of virgin plastics over the last three years by more than 50%.

Lego Group, a company which has produced over 400,000,000,000 plastic bricks since 1958, is showing the world that circular thinking, machine learning, and blockchain technology can create a profitable, regenerative, niche economy that is far more reliant on preexisting product than new.

Who would have thought that the top selling toy of 2022 would be a bucket of your old blocks and a couple of machine-generated Building Instruction Booklets?

This post was inspired through conversations with my son (age 11) about AI and ML; by the nine years I spent innovating in the Auto Recycling industry; by the Ellen MacArthur Foundation; by The Paperclip Maximizer; and by a post in the Wall Street Journal titled “Lego Struggles to Find a Plant-Based Plastic That Clicks”.

After reading about Lego’s noble effort to engineer plant-based blocks, I thought, with 400Bn Legos on earth, why bother? We don’t need more, we just need a smarter way to recover and recycle the nature-resistant bricks that already exist.

Climate Change Needs a Cigarette

By 1950 over half of all men and a fifth of all women in the United States smoked. Today, after more than fifty years of anti-smoking campaigns and deserving attacks on the tobacco industry, the smoking population has declined to less than fourteen percent of the total population.

Along the way to creating broad awareness of the dangers of smoking, smoking has become uncool, dirty, and generally viewed as an addiction of the unfortunate. Smokers are called butt suckers, ash heads, nic bitches, chimneys, cancer clouds, and other ugly names.

There are a lot of similarities between ‘the war on tobacco’ and ‘the war on climate change’: unhealthy consequences that [will] span generations, entrenched big-money interests, disinformation warfare, inept initial government responses, cultural trends, and more.

What’s missing from the war on climate change? Cigarettes.

With smoking, you can point to any effect and instantly know the cause: lung cancer…cigarettes; heart disease…cigarettes; mouth cancer…cigarettes; yellow teeth and premature aging…cigarettes; bad breath…cigarettes; and other dreadful things due to…cigarettes

Sure, with climate change there’s CO2 and greenhouse gasses, but try pointing to them.

Furthermore, climate language is constructed around addition versus subtraction: The more CO2 we ADD to the atmosphere, the bigger the problem, and so on. However, adding something [invisible] to anything that appears to have unlimited capacity [the atmosphere] instantly creates a comprehension hurdle. When we can’t comprehend the size of the groceries or the bag, it’s hard to understand the problem.

Subtraction on the other hand, is easier to grok. The world has finite resources, and eight billion humans, consuming as we do today, will deplete the resources that future generations need (e.g.: clean water). ‘Unlimited resources’ is a notion that nobody should have. On the contrary, when we consume [subtract] more than we need, we are the problem. There’s a simple truth to this common sense, depletion argument that doesn’t require specialized knowledge, carbon calculators, satellite data, climate models, or Ted Talks…demand will outstrip supply.

Since resource consumption and carbon generation are two sides of the same coin, it’s my belief as an entrepreneur and a marketer that ‘consumption’ is a far easier problem to communicate and solve than ‘generation’. Here’s a crude antidote to support my thesis: “consumption pig” or “carbon footprint”? Which combination of words generates an emotional response?

Words are everything.

My motivation for writing this post is simple: Like a lot of American families, we are generally aware that there’s a climate problem. However, we are nearly clueless about what to do about it. Sure, we recycle; we talk about climate; we read about climate; I have worked on climate initiatives; but, my family is still consuming way too much of the world’s remaining resources.

Not wanting to call — even jokingly — my family, friends, or neighbors “consumption pigs”, I decided to endeavour to come up with something we can use to lovingly shame each other into trimming our consumption.

After an extensive branding exercise, I have latched onto remixing “climate change”, “consumption”, and “hog” to come up with…”chog”.

Less offensive than “pig”, “chog” is the ‘cigarette’ climate change needs.

Excessive consumption…chogging.

Kids that leave the lights on…chogs.

McMansion…choghouse.

Large SUV…chogmobile.

Shopaholic…chogaholic.

Hamburger…chogburger (meat’s a problem)

Daily Amazon deliveries…chogwild.

Instagramming soccer mom iIdling an SUV for seventy minutes…megachog.

It’s time to make chogging as offensive as smoking.

This does not need to be mean-spirited. With family and friends, I suggest using a smile. With chogholes, try alternative approaches :)

Far too many of us are chogs. If the climate crisis is as urgent as it seems, expect to be politely prodded, then shamed, and then ultimately required to reduce consumption. Chogging and the preservation of species, including humans, are incompatible. It may take fifty years, but one way or another, chogs will become…dinosaurs.

Related post: The Last Chog

Family Entertainment Guide

I created this guide to help our children navigate the constant pull of social media, Netflix, video games, and other forms of what I call “shallow entertainment”.

I deliver this guide like a business presentation (each section as a slide). I try to be quick, to the point, upbeat, and casual.

A tabloid-sized (11 by 17) copy of this presentation (pictured below) is taped to our refrigerator. [Omnigraffle file]

This is a guide, not rules! We often remind our kids about what’s in the guide, but we don’t strictly enforce any of the bullets below.

The goal here is to create awareness [of shallow entertainment] and to inspire self-motivation.

Shallow Entertainment Sources

• video games

• social media

• episodic TV, Netflix, YouTube

• politics, cable news, local news

• cheap novels

• sports and entertainment news

• shallow news (e.g.: Apple News)

• unnecessary shopping

Why This Guide Matters?

Solitude is necessary to deep thinking; deep thinking is necessary to navigating complex tasks; your ability to complete complex tasks makes your work products highly valuable. Today, social media, endless alerts, devices, and shallow entertainment deprive almost everyone of solitude. Be different!

Your attention [your time] is your most valuable asset. Don’t waste your attention (and your youth) on shallow entertainment.

Create don’t consume. So much happiness comes from creating. Spend more time creating than consuming [entertainment].

Invest TWICE as much time into real-life, face-to-face, in-person friendships, relationships, and networking as you spend on entertainment, and you will be twice as happy, healthy, and wealthy because of it.

Entertainment is a reward for doing something charitable, for learning something complex, for accomplishing goals, and [generally] for completing a meaningful day. If you don’t deserve the reward, go to bed and try harder tomorrow.

Shallow Entertainment Timing

Beyond spending a few minutes in the morning to review social updates and headlines, mornings should never be dedicated to entertainment.

Entertainment comes at the end of the day…after you have completed your homework, chores, exercise, learning, sports, arts, health, spiritual, and goal commitments.

Shallow Entertainment Boundaries

Weekdays: 60–90 minutes TOTAL* a day is more than enough (all sources combined).

Weekends: 90–120 minutes TOTAL* a day is more than enough (all sources combined).

*Including: no more than one TV/Netflix episode a day, and 100% of your social media usage.

Better Than Shallow Entertainment

• Ted Talks and smart YouTube videos

• Exercise, sports training, walking, or running

• Important books (not shallow novels)

• Serious, thoughtful, smart internet posts

• Prayer and meditation

• Playing music or creating art

• Napping

• Spending time with friends

• Preparing healthy food

Before Entertainment Questions

• Are you getting more As than Bs, and no Cs?

• Is your homework completed?

• 30 minutes of cardio? 100–200 pushups?

• Have you prepared a healthy meal today?

• Is your room clean and organized?

• Do you need to attend to your laundry?

• Do your pets have food, water, etc.?

• Any cleaning, organizing, or chores to do?

• Have you responded to important requests to communicate (e.g.: emails)

• Have you reviewed your goals (and schedule) for the day, week, month, and more?

• Have you learned something smart and relevant to your career today (e.g.: read one long article)?

• Are your finances in order, and are all your bills paid?

Succeeding @ Youth Sports

In his best-selling book “Outliers”, Author Malcolm Gladwell states, “10,000 hours is the magic number of greatness.” In other words, if you practice 10,000 hours, you could be great…or maybe not. According to a recent study, “Practice Does Not Necessarily Make Perfect”. Instead, “greatness” can be attributed to a variety of factors. In sports, we only have to work backwards from what’s measured at the highest levels to see that ‘practice’ is just one component in an equation that also includes technical, tactical, physical, and psychological inputs, or TTPP for short.

If your athlete goes far enough in sports, you will notice that player assessment (forms and software), elite training programs, professional player development, recruiters, academies, scouts, coach training, and more are all leveraging holistic formulas that include TTPP.

So what should the parents of a young athlete focus on?

I am not an expert. Three of our kids graduated as varsity athletes; our youngest plays club soccer at a high level; I have coached soccer for many years; and as an entrepreneur, I have invested ~2,000 hours researching venture opportunities in youth sports.

I have given a lot of thought to succeeding at youth sports: what it looks like, how to obtain it, and why we should care.

In the early years, adults are obviously part of the equation. If you (the adult) and your athlete invest 3,000 hours into youth sports you can preserve three overlapping probabilities for success (see red arrow).

High probability (big circle): your athlete will become confident, outgoing, responsible, a team player, meet long-term friends, and make a lifetime commitment to health and fitness.

Reasonable probability (medium circle): your athlete will become a varsity athlete, a collegiate athlete, participate in club sports, and perhaps coach as a parent.

Extremely low probability (small circle): your athlete will be awarded a D1 scholarship, become a pro, and/or coach professionally.

It’s unpredictable, but if you and your athlete invest 3,000 hours filling the technical, tactical, physical, and psychological [TTPP] buckets, all outcomes — however remote — are possible.

Think of the first 3,000 hours as nearly a third of the way to the 10,000 hours needed to achieve mastery. The amount of hours invested per week ramps up with age. There isn’t a one-size-fits-all schedule to follow. Some kids reach mastery by age twenty, and some need five or six additional years. Accelerated investment [in a sport] doesn’t seem to be a surefire recipe. Who hasn’t seen a fast-starter (technical) that’s either lost (tactical), repeatedly injured (physical), and/or unhappy (psychological)? All of the TTPP buckets have to be filled.

In invasion sports (e.g.: soccer, hockey, basketball, lacrosse, football, etc.) where one side is always invading or defending territory, filling the TTPP buckets includes, but is not limited to:

T- Technical: The athlete is acquiring the 1v1, handling, and scoring confidence needed to assume responsibility for predominantly enabling (when attacking) or preventing (when defending) FORWARD movement of the ball or puck; versus relying upon a teammate to do it. (Eventually, someone has to move ‘it’ forward.)

T- Tactical: The athlete is acquiring the right-place-right-time situational knowledge needed to reliably participate in, or prevent, an invasion.

P — Physical: The athlete is acquiring [experiencing] an understanding of how nutrition, rest, and age-appropriate training for strength, stamina, agility, balance, coordination, and speed are all interconnected and essential to competing and winning.

P — Psychological: The athlete is learning how to embrace failure, how to process criticism, how to live in the present, how to visualize success, that succeeding in sports requires a ‘marathoner’ not a ‘sprinter’, and that the [bucket filling] journey…is the reward. Link

Google “technical tactical physical psychological” to learn more.

Note: Experts strongly suggest that kids “should not take part in organized sports activities for more hours per week than their age. For example: a twelve-year-old athlete should not participate in more than twelve hours per week of organized sport.”

The psychological bucket — the smiles bucket — is the hardest to fill. Motivating a child to happily invest 3,000 hours is the most formidable job in youth sports. Most kids quit before they become teenagers. Eventually, everyone has to self-motivate, but until early adulthood, parents and coaches play a big role in filling and [unfortunately] draining the smiles bucket.

The graphic above depicts a scenario that is all too common: technical, tactical, and physical buckets are filling, while the psychological bucket is empty…and your athlete wants to quit. How come? There’s a parent that thinks he’s building a pro, or a coach that thinks she’s launching a career, and one or both of them are fun crushing zombies.

Fun has to be the organizing idea…full stop/period. It’s amazing how many parents fail to put a foundation of fun under their athlete’s entire youth sports experience. It’s certainly not easy to position, plan, and execute every action and activity as fun. Nevertheless, everything and anything, including your advice, coaching, prodding, and feedback that’s not underpinned with an intention to fill the smiles bucket…drains it. I’ve done this. We all do it. This is easy to fix.

Begin by teaching your athlete what future fun looks like…and how to earn it.

Humans are transactional. I do X, and then I get Y. (I go to the dentist; I get a toy.) As kids and parents transact, a fun-trust account either fills or depletes. Parents create a fun-trust surplus when they consistently and reliably deliver the fun/joy/happiness they promised or implied. With a fun-trust surplus, it’s easier to pitch complex transactions that include [distant] future gratification.

In other words, parents dedicated to delivering fun in the early years and judiciously thereafter will succeed at pitching hard work, practice, patience, perseverance, and even setbacks as pathways to future fun. Conversely, no-fun parents with fun-trust deficits can’t make the same pitch. Everything about sports can be positioned and organized as either fun or as a pathway to fun.

Note: Competency builds confidence. The only way to build competency is to keep playing. The only way to keep them playing is to keep it fun. Until it’s a job, kids PLAY sports. Suggested Ted Talk

Along the way to 3,000 hours, you will see amazing young athletes that have incredible technical skills and/or advanced physical capabilities; they will seem so talented and so advanced that you may be tempted to drop out of the race. Don’t. Bigger, faster, stronger, or two years of extra experience are not reliable markers for future success. In fact, if anyone in the world could reliably predict which athletes at twelve will be successful at twenty-two, they would be wildly wealthy. Early selection is a myth; late bloomers are common; and all of the TTPP buckets have to be filled.

If you are a competitive person that’s wondering at this point, how to win, how to beat the system, and how to arrive at the end of the journey on top. Here are two observations:

First, ‘winners’ seem to simply win the war of attrition. As noted above, most kids quit, including most of the ‘future hall-of-famers’ that have been identified early on by so-called ‘experts’. Every athlete that plays a sport for fifteen to twenty years wins.

Second, overachievers have one thing in common: they’re smart and deliberate goal setters.

So, here’s my formula: During the first 3,000 hours, preserve all of your athlete’s options by filling all four of the TTPP buckets; always make it fun; ignore all the hype pertaining to young superstars…even when they’re yours; and guide the entire process via goals that are great, granular, gritty, and guided.

Goals — Activities and actions are undertaken with SMART goals in mind. Goals are essential. Work with your athlete to set weekly, monthly, season, and longer-term goals. Every two weeks, take ten minutes to review progress.

Great — Activities and actions are intended to be [great] fun, or a pathway to future fun. Especially in the early years, if it’s not fun, you’re draining the smiles bucket.

Granular — Deconstruct big picture goals such as ‘get better’ or ‘score more’ into granular goals (and routines) that add up to something bigger. Granular example: three times a week, kick with my left foot, from the right side of a small target that is twenty feet away, and strike the target ten times out of one-hundred attempts; adjust upward as the goal is met.

Grit — Choose activities and actions where initial failure is probable, a bit of agony is inevitable, and hard work is required; doing so builds grit. A good example of the intersection of grit and fun is when kids compete against older siblings.

Guided — Use highly qualified coaches and instructors to make granular adjustments, and to obtain continuous advice and feedback. (Parents are rarely qualified to do this.)

Coaching The Cross

Last week, you put seven kids on the field, and three of them were your most experienced players, but the other team’s demoralizing attack overwhelmed your defense and scored at will. Chances are, the other team was coached to cross the ball to score, and they were coached on how to defeat the cross on the defensive end of the field.

This post covers how to use the flashcards to teach scoring via ‘the cross’, and how to defeat ‘the cross’. There are certainly other winning strategies, but this one is easy to teach and easy to execute.

To begin, your team will need to understand coverage area responsibility. Once everyone understands coverage area responsibility, coaching the cross (attacking with / defending against) is simply a matter of emphasizing the flashcards listed below.

Cross to score: In a competitive 7v7 match, even your strongest players will not be able to drive the ball up the middle and through multiple defenders. Instead, coach your team to score by crossing the ball in front of the opponent’s net. Use the following flashcards to emphasize that your team is a cross-to-score team first, and not a team of superheroes:

• ATM - Avoid The Middle. When driving the ball toward the opponent’s end of the field, don't play through the middle (that’s where everyone will be). Drive the ball to the corners and cross it!

• SGS - Superheroes Get Stuffed. Superheroes that try to drive the ball through multiple defenders always get stuffed. Don’t get stuffed. Play to the corners and cross the ball to your teammate.

• AT! - Attack Together! Don’t be left behind! Every attacker should be moving forward as fast as the attacker with the ball.

As a point of emphasis, I ask the team: “Who’s faster, the player moving the ball up the field, or the player sprinting up the field without the ball?” Kids answer: “The player sprinting up the field.” My response (with a smile): “Then why are you all ten yards behind the player with ball? Attack Together Please!

Defeating the cross: Kids are hardwired to chase the ball (like cats chasing toys); defeating the cross involves deprogramming this behavior. Defenders have to be repeatedly reminded to stay on their side of the field. The Right Defender should NEVER be in the Left Defender’s area of responsibility, and vice-a-versa.

• PYP - Play Your Position. Don’t run all over the field, you will be exhausted by halftime. Focus on dominating your portion of the field. Don’t be crossing from left to right, or right to left. Stay on your side of the field.

• DTC - Defeat The Cross. Good teams know how to cross and score. The Left Defender must cover the left side of the box, and the Right Defender must cover the right side of the box. Stay on your side. PYP.

Related notes: Highly skilled players (the best players on the team) will try to play through the middle, they will get stuffed, and they will be reluctant to settle on an assist via a cross...especially when mom or dad is counting goals. Two bits of advice:

• Inform parents that you are a cross-to-score team first; that playing through the middle, taking too many touches, and getting stuffed is frowned upon.

• Inform your superstar scorers that if they take turns, work together, and cross-to-score, the Left Wing and the Right Wing will BOTH get a chance to score.

In some game situations (e.g.: when the score is lopsided), give maturing players opportunities to score by instructing advanced players to cross the ball to a maturing player. Coach maturing players to UTF (Use The Force) when receiving a crossing pass.

• UTF - Use The Force. NO WILD KICKING. Settle, inhale, look, exhale, kick.

Practicing the cross: Use half of a 7v7 field to set up a drill where three attackers (left, center, right) challenge two defenders (left, right) and a goalie.

• Use cones to divide the field vertically (between left and right).

• Instruct the defenders to NEVER cross the dividing cone line.

• Attackers begin at midfield.

• Instruct the attackers that they can only score on a cross that comes from one side of the box or the other.

• Set up two cones at midfield that the defenders can use as a small exit goal.

• Scrimmage until a score, or until the ball goes out of bounds.

• Cycle attackers and defenders until everyone has played both positions (attacker and defender) at least three times.  

• Use the flashcards to remind defenders and attackers about key points of play. For example, DDI - Don’t Dive In for defenders.

7v7 Soccer Field Strategy

Note: I realize the terms “sweeper” and “stopper” used below may seem dated to some. Nevertheless, the 7v7 strategies remain valid.

Field strategies are most effective when the coach spends fifteen minutes at a full-field practice outlining (with cones) and placing every player in a rectangle that covers each overlapping position. Showing kids their entire area (their rectangle) of responsibility prior to a game helps you to set an expectation for attacking and defending (by position) during a game. Move the ball (by hand) all around the field and ask every player to move to the place in their coverage rectangle where you expect them to be as the ball moves around the field.

Pertaining to field strategy, the most important flashcard is ABM (Always Be Moving). Soccer is a sport where players rarely stand still. Coach your players to Alway Be Moving to the best place in their coverage area to receive or to intercept a pass. With a smile and a big voice, I tell players "If you're standing still, you're probably doing something wrong; there's always a smarter place to be."

Field strategies have to be somewhat dynamic. Against a weaker opponent, your entire team will unconsciously press up and attack, and against a strong opponent, your entire team will retreat into a defensive stance. Try teaching the concept of 'shape'. When I ask players to Hold Your Shape (HYS), I tell them that no matter how small the field gets, as everyone converges toward the net (on either end), trust your teammates, hold the basic shape of the formation, and then quickly return to your assigned coverage area as the field re-expands.

Here are some suggestions for positioning your players on the field during a game.

Definitions

• Maturing Players: kick without thinking and struggle with passing.

• Skill Players: the strongest players on the team.

• Stopper: whenever possible, stops the ball at midfield / overlaps with the sweeper.

• Sweeper: sweeps the ball away from the net; when under pressure, ejects the ball from the field.

Suggestions 

• Place maturing players into positions where they can succeed. We often put maturing players where they are either 1) sandwiched between two skill players, or 2) on the wing positions, and 3) rarely on defense unless they are highly capable of clearing the ball up the sidelines and/or with smartly ejecting the ball out of the field of play.

• During practice, use cones to show the entire size and shape of each area of responsibility.

• On the diagrams below, areas of responsibility overlap; make sure to remind players of their overlapping responsibilities.

Priority Defense

This is a great formation to use when you feel that your team might be overwhelmed by an opponent. In this formation, defensive players rarely cross midfield, and the center’s primary responsibility is defense. When the center does move up to attack, you also need at least one wing that can score.

Priority Offense

This is a great, aggressive formation for teams that have more skill players than maturing players. Place your strongest skill players on defense and allow them to play up and attack like midfielders. Put the least developed player into the sweeper position, but behind a solid stopper.

Priority Center

For when you only have 2-3 skill players available.

Notice the five positions stacked in the middle.

The center is the most important player on the field.

The sweeper is the second strongest player on the field, and the primary defender.

Maturing players are sandwiched between skill players.

If you have a third skill player, place him or her at striker.

The 2-2-2

The 2-2-2 is probably the most common 7v7 positioning strategy.

Pros: easy to teach, and easy for the kids to move the ball up the field vertically.

Cons: without the center players (center-mid, stopper, striker, or sweeper) used in the formations above, passing triangles are less likely to form, and triangles lead to controlling possession and to more scoring opportunities.

Coaching Coverage Areas

Right Wing coverage area shown above.

When you coach/teach ‘coverage areas’, you will be giving your players a far better spatial sense of individual responsibility, including stamina requirements, across every position.

Every position has a coverage area of responsibility. We simply call these areas ‘coverage areas’. Most coverage areas resemble large, overlapping squares or rectangles.

Players are responsible for all of the attacking and defending within their coverage area.

“If you are not attacking, you are defending. If you are not defending, you are attacking. There is no third option.”

Suggested steps for coaching/teaching coverage areas:

• For at least one practice, reserve an entire 7v7 field.

• Prior to the practice, choose a field strategy that will complement the strengths of your team. Coverage areas for every position are delineated on the field strategy diagrams.

• Hint: prior to beginning this exercise, let the kids scrimmage to burn off some energy.

• Use cones to outline every overlapping coverage area on the field. You may need up to twenty minutes (prior to practice) to strategically place the cones.

• Put at least one player into every coverage area.

• With the ball in your hands, quickly move around the field while asking every player on the field to rapidly move to the best place within his or her coverage area to be.

• Example: If you are in the far right corner of the attacking end of the field, every player should have moved to a place within their area of responsibility that is as close to you as possible. The Right Wing should be standing next to you.

• This is a great time to stress ABM (Always Be Moving) to the best place in your coverage area to receive or to intercept a pass...no matter where the ball is on the field.

• With a smile, I tell players “If you are standing still, you are probably doing something wrong. Always Be Moving.”

• Review, correct, and repeat until everyone understands where to be in each coverage area...no matter where the ball is on the field.

• With the coverage area cones still on the field, and at your water break, using a dry erase board, relate the board to the field size, to your selected field strategy (drawn on the board), and to every overlapping coverage area on the field. If you do this while the cones are on the field, coaching with a dry erase board during games will be far more effective.

• With the coverage area cones still on the field, restart the scrimmage.

• Place yourself within the scrimmage and repeatedly communicate your on-field expectations (e.g.: Always Be Moving).

• Pertaining to this exercise [coverage areas] use the flashcards listed below [as reminders] to set your on-field expectations.

• And coach...ABS - Always Be Smiling :)

Recommended Coverage Area Flashcards / Concepts to repeatedly stress while you’re on the field during the exercise described above:

ABM - Always Be Moving. Every player needs to understand that even if he or she does not possess the ball, he or she must Always Be Moving [ABM] to the best place to receive or to intercept a pass (within their coverage area).

CES - Create Elephant Space. “When we go on attack, instantly create and maintain elephant space between you and the closest defender.” Elephant spaces are big enough for...an elephant to walk through.

PYP - Play Your Position. “Trust your teammates. Stay out of their coverage areas. If you're covering your teammate’s area, who’s covering yours? Please play your position!”

DNL - Defend Never Land. “If the ball is in Neverland, alarm bells should be going off! Instantly move into or toward Neverland! Everyone works together to drive the ball out of neverland! Defend Never Land as if invaders are coming to [use your imagination].” The younger kids love the concept of defending Neverland!

CYA - Cover Your Attackers. When the other team has possession, no matter where the ball is on the field, cover the attackers that are in your coverage area. Play Your Position (PYP), Cover Your Attackers (CYA), and get ready to intercept a pass.

Select other flashcards to use as coaching reminders during this exercise.