Growth Mindset

I wrote a piece back at the start of the year called 10 Choices For a Better Future that was largely focused on behaviorally based choices, I now realize. Just to be clear there is no big plan here I just write this stuff when I’m thinking about it and have time and have some motivation. And in discussing this with someone I occasionally mentor recently (okay a couple months ago) I realized that while that list was good from a choosing how to behave daily standpoint (which is what I writing it for) it didn’t really provide any thinking how to make choices about your life, and that’s a problem because you could apply everything in that piece and still make stupid unguided choices. ...

I’m not 100% certain I love this article. I made myself write it in less than one hour. It’s core point is supposed to be around written language being the dominant skill going forward which replaces today’s primary skill of knowing how to do stuff (visual skill). I will likely revisit this topic in the future as I think about it more. For at least the next 5-10 years, professional work is going to become more language-based, not less. We are entering a period where being able to express yourself clearly in writing will be more critical than ever. ...

History creates the illusion of predictability once outcomes are already known. Only after events converge do patterns become obvious, narratives become clean, and parallels feel inevitable. Before that point, history is far less useful than most executives, investors, and commentators would like to believe. In theory, history can help us avoid repeating known failures. But even then, it only works when we extract constrained rules grounded in structural invariants - the underlying forces that actually shape outcomes, like capital availability, incentive alignment, and physical constraints. Everything else is pattern matching dressed up as wisdom. And this is problematic, because we often use that dressed-up wisdom to both constrain our choices (“history says that’s a bad idea”) and to make foolish choices (“when in history has this failed?”). ...

I’m not a fan of traditional New Years Resolutions, as I wrote about here, but as we started 2026 I wanted to think even a bit more differently about the problem of improvement. First, I don’t think anyone can know what the future holds - and anyone saying they do know, is lying or delusional or both. And while there may be things that make sense to do now (and you should therefore do them) they won’t necessarily makes sense in six or eight months. So I don’t really think we should be building plans around the fact that it just happens to be January 1st any more than we should around March 8th or June 17th or August 22nd or any other random day. Further, I didn’t want to set a simple achievable goal because simple achievable goals don’t have staying power - they won’t usually be powering you years down the road. I wanted to create something that could be applicable forever (in theory) and wasn’t situation dependent, since I don’t know what the future holds. ...

Why LLM’s will always make mistakes and we shouldn’t call them hallucinations I saw a tweet from Paul Graham a while back about how as LLMs become better their hallucinations will become more convincing. And it makes sense, a smart confident person saying something wrong often sounds more reliable than a less confident person saying the right thing timidly. Even more so, as you get good answers from the smart confident person you become more trustworthy and are less likely to question and double-check their future answers. That’s both a reality of and defect of human thinking. ...

I’ve been using GitHub Copilot, Claude, and ChatGPT to help me code for a couple of years now. But AI has always been in the assistant role – I was the one in the driver’s seat, asking technical questions or letting GitHub Copilot generate sections of code based on what I was writing. It makes you a more productive developer because it’s faster than Googling, but at the end of the day, I was still the one fundamentally coding, just with better tooling. ...

I get annoyed with the way COVID-19 data is reported. There is a lot of emphasis put on the number today and on the aggregate (total cases, total deaths, etc.) These make good headline numbers but don’t do much to help people understand the current trend - are we getting better or worse. So I built a report using the COVID-19 Tracking Project at The Atlantic’s data feed and Power BI for visualization. You can access the dashboard at bit.ly/NNCOVID19DB. The data is automatically updated several times daily. ...

2020 is going to be the year that Kubernetes (which really means containers) becomes fully ingrained in the enterprise. DevOps becomes the default model for building and deploying enterprise applications (full code, low code, and no code). Enterprise customers will increasingly want both custom apps and COTS products to fit to a Kubernetes and DevOps test/deployment/implementation model. Cybersecurity continues to grow and is a critical part of every conversation, it will be required that security is baked into every layer. ...

I used to have a monthly Gogo Wifi subscription. Then I got rid of it. Flying is better for me now, it’s more beneficial because it helps me to focus. Not long ago I realized that Delta offered free wifi for messaging (iMessage, WhatsApp, etc.) Awesome. Now I can stay in contact but not get sucked into Apps and Internet world. I wish American offered this, but they don’t - so choose Delta if it’s an option. ...

“Normality is a paved road: It’s comfortable to walk, but no flowers grow on it.” ― Vincent van Gogh Too many people spend their time seeking normality and the false security it provides. In reality, normality is a front - it makes you think you are safe, while providing no safety net at all. For when you need a safety net, normality will leave you there unprepared and inexperienced to change direction, take the other fork in the road, challenge the status quo, or make change happen. ...