The 365 Commitment

The man looked me in the eyes and said, 'Every morning when I wake up, I look in the mirror and tell myself that everything I believe is not true.' This statement shook me, especially coming from a spiritual leader. This man was a giant in my young eyes. He even looked like the Moses I imagined. He was tall and powerful, and his voice could shake the ground; when he spoke, even the rowdiest crowds fell silent. So for him to say this to me left me perplexed, to say the least. What did he mean by...

When I was young, it seemed like we were always going somewhere. I remember making the rounds with my grandfather. The hardware store owner would comment about the Sunday Service. The officer at the coffee shop would ask if Kiwanis was still happening tomrow night.

Then there was Sunday School, but church extended well beyond Sunday morning. There were potlucks, youth activities, service projects and socials. Neighborhoods had block parties. People joined bowling leagues, softball teams, Scouts, Rotary and any number of clubs that seem almost quaint today.

I don't remember thinking any of this...

How do you feel relaxed? This question has been with me for most of my life. I am not good at relaxing; I am one of those people who are always busy, always looking for the next thing I could be doing. A combination of being too uptight and overly ambitious, perhaps. So when my brain gets frazzled and I start slowing down mentally, I have come to recognize that I need to relax. However, what has always tripped me up has been: what actually is relaxing?

I have no idea how to work with or deal with people who view truth as merely an instrument to benefit them. Truth becomes a weapon in their arsenal, something that they can manipulate, change, and revise to fit whatever narrative best fits their current position. In political dialogue, this is called relativism, but that label is inaccurate and offers the sophist a dangerous escape route. Arguing that truth depends on perspective, culture, framework, or context is a far cry from using truth as a tool for achieving an objective. These two get mixed up all the time when...

Things in California have not changed much over the last few hundred years. Just like in the 1800s, Californios are still selling shovels in a gold rush. The first reported millionaire in California accumulated his fortune doing exactly that. When gold was discovered at Sutter's Mill in 1848, Samuel Brannan decided it would be a good idea to publish this discovery with great enthusiasm while simultaneously stocking his store with mining supplies at inflated prices. Funny how this has not changed much, except the gold is now AI, and we have thousands of people following Mr. Brannan's playbook.

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Have you ever stopped to consider how you formed a particular opinion? This could be a viewpoint about conditions in an area of the world you have never visited, a conspiracy theory that you believe or do not believe, a religion you have dismissed, or a political stance that you have decided to take. What formed this opinion? The next question to consider is: How strongly do I believe this? Could anything change my mind?

Growing up, I was involved in speech and debate, which was called Forensics at the time. I think that word has become...

I think we should teach young people more descriptive emotional vocabulary. Making fun of someone at that person's expense seems to be a byproduct of social media enthusiasm. To garner attention, people are constantly on patrol, looking for something they can capture and post to their account. This is especially true in the younger population that has stars in their eyes regarding the "creator economy." In many cases, this has led to a considerable lack of empathy that involves the humiliation of another person.

If a person were to take a step back before posting something that...

As mastery increases, we tend to discount the value of capabilities that have become easy for us, forgetting that their value is determined by the difficulty they remove for others, not the difficulty they present to us. This is what I call the expertise discount.

I recently saw a young person using some software to create a music track that he was recording a song to. He was so excited by his newfound ability. He could bring a full repertoire of instruments, bass lines, percussion sounds, and even some AI-generated chorus hooks. I rolled my eyes, thinking...

I watched my daughter receive an award yesterday, one she earned through years of hard work. What struck me was how surprised she seemed by it. From her perspective, she had not done anything extraordinary. But that was precisely the point. She won because of the last three years of effort, not because of something she had done that day.

The lesson was simple: perseverance pays off.

My family knows this lesson well. Growing up, I heard story after story about family members who kept going when things were difficult, uncertain, or simply taking longer...

When people hear the word humility, they instantly think of someone beaten down, stripped of all pride, and suffering a great loss. Many religious people aspire to a higher ideal of becoming humble without having been forced to do so. Over the centuries, a wide variety of creative methods of "bringing a person to their knees" have been invented for this purpose. I think the error in thinking here is that humility is viewed as a trait that can be mastered, when in reality humility is a practice that becomes a disposition. Another view is that humility is simply...

I was speaking with someone who might have literally had stars in their eyes. He was glowing with enthusiasm over his newfound ability to develop complex software using an AI Coding tool. He waxed prophetic, predicting the immediate death of the software development world as we know it. This new technology was a revolution, and pretty soon, even my grandmother will be vibe coding her own SAAS tools.

I could not help it; I immediately made a connection in my mind to the Nike Free movement circa 2004. You might remember this, especially if you are a runner...

The question is not: "Can I force myself to work today?"

The better question is: "Will working today increase or decrease my total usefulness this week?"

Many of us believe that by showing up and being present, we are at least doing something. I at least showed up is the prevailing thought in our minds. We practice presenteeism. We keep working while sick, depleted, sleep-deprived, or otherwise functioning well below capacity. Unlike absenteeism, you are technically working, but your output per hour can be dramatically lower, mistakes increase, and recovery may take longer.

...

There is great danger in judging the value of a life from its present condition. A human life is a long trajectory, but we tend to encounter people as snapshots. We see who they are now and unconsciously let that moment rewrite everything that came before it. When I was in high school, my aunt and I drove around downtown, taking pictures of random people. I was trying to get on the yearbook staff as a photographer. The only people around that afternoon were the homeless. I came across one of the photos I took of one of these men...

I stood in line at a pharmacy today, waiting to check out. The self-checkout machines were down again, and the CVS pharmacy attendant was the only one working in the building. The poor woman had 1 person asking for the restroom code, 2 people frustrated because the red light was blinking above their checkout machine, several people asking for access to a locked-down product, and 10 people, including me, waiting patiently in line to check out. Although this is not the point of this article, if you ever want to know the state of affairs in your community, the impact of cost-cutting...

My garage is currently winning.

Not decisively. There has been no surrender ceremony, and I still technically control the territory, but it has established a strong defensive position. Every time I think about cleaning it, I immediately see everything that needs to be done at once: shelves that need reorganizing, tools that need homes, a collection of wasp nests that apparently believe they have permanent leases, and a broken e-scooter that has been sitting there long enough that I am beginning to suspect it is no longer a repair project and is simply part of the garage.<...

I came across an interesting study that demonstrates that, within a population of people being tracked, they are speaking less and less each year. The study by Pfeifer, V. A., & Mehl, M. R. (2026) found that the population of people under the age of 25 was, in fact, having fewer conversations throughout the day. This trend seems to be consistent over time.

There are several reasons this matters.

First, conversation helps us think. Human thought is remarkably dependent on language. When you try to explain something to another person, vague intuitions have to become sentences. Contradictions become...

If there was not enough evidence already that I am a complete geek, I found myself reading a bunch of articles published by Daniel Yon at the Uncertainty Lab at the University of London. That is right, this actually exists. There is a lab dedicated to studying the human brain's capacity to deal with uncertainty. This is a concept that has always fascinated me. I recognized this at a young age: we humans have this unique ability to deal with what is not there. I noticed this in my dog as a young kid and how he really struggled...

Beware of the cognitive magic pill. We used to describe these as snake oil in the last century, and in modern times they are peddled with just as much veracity. If you go on to any social platform and scroll a while, you will see them, usually because they pull at you. They offer an alluring solution to a range of your problems, all easily solved with some magic pill. A solution that requires your engagement, your subscription, or your attention.

A recent example is cortisol. The recent fad is to blame all of your common human...

I have often pondered what art is. Creative outlets are just as much a part of human existence as eating or sleeping. Since the beginning of time, we have been expressing ourselves or trying to understand ourselves through artistic expression. Does form follow function, or does function follow form? The age-old debate. I am looking at two tape measures sitting on my desk. I was working on a project and for some reason collected two tape measures. One of them is ugly, bulky, but highly functional. The numbers are easy to read, the action is clean, and it even...

Let's pretend for a moment that you could take your brain, as it is right now, copy it into a computer system, and then it suddenly becomes an advanced AI engine that you could ask questions to and get rapid responses. Would you trust it?

My answer would be absolutely NO WAY. My brain is prone to taking shortcuts, embellishing facts for effect, always with a self-preservation bias, and any commentary I make is probably based on wild assumptions about what I know. I am also highly keen on what I have forgotten, which is considerable.

Believe in God or do not believe. Honestly, for the purposes of this post, that is not important. I personally believe in God, I have no qualms stating that unequivocally, but I am not writing this to convince you of anything theological. I am writing this to convince you of something far more practical. You need God. Humanity needs God. Let me explain why.

Humans have a strange problem. We are walking around with these enormously complex brains that can imagine the future, evaluate ourselves from the outside, build moral systems, sacrifice for people we have never...

The slow accumulation of incremental improvements is indeed what makes good habits so powerful. However, this process cannot be mindless. If you simply go through the motions without reinforcing in your mind what you are doing and why, the positive benefits will quickly degrade.

I've often emphasized that small things matter. A single workout won't transform your life. Writing one paragraph won't make you an author. Saving a few dollars won't make you wealthy. Reading ten pages won't make you wise. But consistently doing these things, over a long enough period, can lead to something remarkable. At...

This seems like an obvious thing to say, but I was struck by this thought when I woke up this morning and discovered that one of the systems that I had built exhausted all of its funding. When I went to check on why, I learned that the AI system that was performing the operation was stuck in a loop and had exhausted all of the credits allocated to it. The loop was silly; it was a small error that tripped everything up, and the system had been looping through this same error for over 48 hours. The only reason...

It has long been discussed by psychologists, theologians, and other circles that holding onto feelings of guilt is bad for your health. Carrying a heavy burden of shame around for things that you did wrong can have serious consequences in your life. The recommendation is to always seek restitution or to make apologies where possible. There is a reason why many major religions have included some form of confession along with a process around repentance. Confession, or admittance to wrongdoing, can go a long way toward absolving or relieving a person of guilty feelings.

I recently stumbled...

There are many voices right now crying about how AI is destroying the written word. Replacing humans is a mistake for many reasons, all of which are predicting doomsday scenarios. This may or may not be true, but the evidence that I see is contrary to these predictions. What is actually happening is a significant magnification of expression, almost to an exponential scale. That seems to be the largest identifiable trend. We were already climbing rapidly in unstructured content, and now that is nearly off the charts. Are the doomsday scenarios of all creativity and human ingenuity going to...

I was sitting around a conference table of people that I had just recently met. We were engaging in a business project. Those people were in business together, married, or friends for a long time. They were very much all locked into the same bubble. You could tell by how the conversations started, "Did you see that article about..." or "Wow, I cannot believe that so and so said that, what is this world coming to?" What was interesting is that I did not know what they were talking about. We were clearly not in the same bubble.

We are all going to be software developers in the next fifteen years.

I know that is hard to believe, but I think that is where we are headed. Not because everyone will suddenly learn Python or spend their days building applications, but because more and more of our work will involve humans directing and guiding systems to produce the results we want. In that sense, we will all be doing systems development, whether we call it that or not.

As that happens, I think we are going to have to relearn some very old...

Be wary, modern traveler.

One of the oldest habits of the human mind is also one of the easiest to miss. When confronted with ambiguity, complexity, or something we cannot fully explain, we give it a name. The name helps because it takes something shapeless and puts a boundary around it. It gives us something we can talk about, warn others about, blame, and sometimes even treat.

The danger comes later, when we forget that the name was originally just a model.

For centuries, people reported waking in the night unable to move...

Tyler. That is the name of my autonomous agent. I named him Tyler, based on the alter ego in the movie Fight Club. Seemed somehow appropriate. Tyler started out simple enough. I wanted to experiment with using some of the new agent systems out there to build one that could handle tasks for me that I did not want to do. Research a topic while I was sleeping, outline my meeting notes in preparation for discussions in my schedule, read my email and automatically take care of things, pay my bills, alert me when I am missing something important...

Years ago, I remember reading about this team that had discovered that homing pigeons were starting to adopt our roadways as navigational guides to find their way back home. This was startling because homing pigeons have a natural instinct that guides them back home, but over time, and in the right circumstances, the pigeons had adapted to using the more reliable method of following human roadways. I found that fascinating for some reason, which is why a recent article from Neuroscience News caught my attention.

A group of researchers figured out that if they could temporarily shut...

A fascinating book to read, if you can find a copy of it, was a book created by Studs Terkel in 1974 called 'Working.' This book was developed through several questions from this Chicago radio host, who moonlighted as an oral historian. He interviewed over 100 people in a wide variety of occupations and just let them speak for themselves. He did not ask them the typical types of things, like, "What do you do for a living?" He instead asked them, "What does working here do for you?"

What Terkel discovered was that people are doing a...

An interesting exercise to go through next time that you are feeling out of sorts is to ask yourself, "What exactly am I feeling?" Surprisingly, many of us are not capable of making any distinction between feeling ashamed versus feeling anxious. We simply lack the vocabulary; we just simply call it "not feeling good." I am not sure why this is the case; in raising three children, I noticed when they were growing up, they would sometimes just not be in a good mood. So we would quiz them and slowly go through the range of emotions until we...

This discussion is a nod to the work by Barbara Fredrickson and Daniel Kahneman.

In their 1993 paper, Duration Neglect in Retrospective Evaluations of Affective Episodes, Fredrickson and Kahneman contrasted two ways the mind might evaluate an experience.

One possibility is that memory works something like a movie: we mentally integrate the experience over time. If an unpleasant experience lasts twice as long, it should generally be remembered as worse because there was more total suffering.

Their alternative was essentially a snapshot model. Memory preserves selected moments rather than integrating every second equally. Some...

A few years ago, I set a goal to achieve an ultra marathon before my 50th birthday. My goal was to run a 100-miler, but I did not quite hit that objective. Instead, I went for the "50 before 50" target. I would run a 50-mile marathon before my 50th birthday. I was successful, and one of the techniques that I used during the run was to mentally focus on areas in my body where I felt pain. I would essentially cycle through my body, starting at my feet and working up toward my head, asking the question, "Am I feeling...

I have three children, two of whom are now adults. When we started having kids, we made a conscious decision not to let them have unfettered access to the Internet and, therefore, social media by handing them phones to keep with them at all times. We let them have old-school devices, but not mini-computers they could carry around with them everywhere they went.

This was not a popular decision. My children were often ridiculed for their retro 1990's technology, but we held fast. Today, it has gotten much better, as we can buy purpose-built devices that eliminate...

I woke up this morning with the walking blues. A feeling that can only be resolved by walking around. You wake up, feel around for your shoes, and just start walking. You let all the things that have been tumbling around in your head move around with you for a while.

When I finished my walk, I came home and played some blues music. I sat there feeling melancholy but, at the same time, rejuvenated. What struck me was that the conflict inside me had not really been resolved. The tension was still there. Nothing had been...

My wife and her friends are having a summit today. To help one of their dear friends figure out a way to improve her prospects of finding a partner to date and hopefully get married to. I was casually listening in on the conversation every once in a while when I went into steal snacks from the spread my wife put out for everyone. Although there were many opinions being expressed, the one universal theme that got my attention was this:

If you want to meet someone who could fundamentally change your life, you may first have...

I actually love opera. I like the music, the drama, the history, and the sheer theatrical excess of it. I like that a story can take three hours to tell and that nobody seems particularly concerned about efficiency. Yet for some reason, saying “I love opera” can feel slightly more revealing than saying I like a particular restaurant or football team.

That feeling interests me because opera itself is not the issue. The issue is what we imagine other people might conclude from the information. Someone might hear “opera” and think pretentious, old-fashioned, intellectual, or wealthy. The label ma...

We are rapidly heading into a world where it is getting easier and cheaper to automate things. I will provide an example. One day I got a notice from Google that my entire investment in their Nest architecture was going away. They made a decision to get out of this business after they bought it and started deprioritizing this whole Google Home initiative. Now, I know they are pretending to still do all of that, but seriously, it is really falling behind, and their abandonment of Nest really left a lot of us consumers hanging out to dry.

In my life experience, speed usually wins. There seems to be two general approaches in life, whether it be business, technology, or even sporting events. You can be careful and steady or you can be fast and more reckless. This is note a fast beats slow observation, but I can certainly say with absolutely certainty that speed usually wins. The question is why?

The system that can act, receive feedback, correct errors, and act again faster tends to outperform the system that tries to avoid errors in the first place.

I think there are several...