Know The Why
Working in Corpoland often feels like being a rat running through a scientist’s poorly designed maze. Disjointed requests result in unnecessary work, 80% of calls could be avoided if only we trusted our colleagues reading comprehension, and our compensation for working hard to get through the experiment rarely feels more rewarding than a wedge of […]
Thought Stream 4 | Teddy’s Arena
Increasing the self-determination in our lives is simple, not easy. As Earl Nightingale outlined in the 1950s during his spoken word recording The Strangest Secret, most things are tremendously simple and only require that we know what it is we want (choice) and that we then diligently pursue that desire with focus over a long […]
Thought Stream #3 | There Is No Surrogate For Your Own Mind
There is no surrogate for your own mind. At our fingertips we have an abundance external input, people we can call for advice, and endlessly googleable information which is often irrelevant. Through an endless series of distractions accessible via black mirrors, and automating away agency through work and routine, we can forget to think for […]
Expertise #1 | Not Quite 10,000 Hours
The most pervasive narrative that paves the road to expertise is to get our 10,000 hours in. An idea made popular by author Malcom Gladwell in Outliers. The idea being that if you spend 10,000 hours on something specific, you can become a true expert and therefore implicitly become successful (if not outright, then greatly […]
Dark Energy
Much of life has meaning in relevant opposites. Anger has kindness. Cafeteria food has gastropubs. The corpo zombie shuffle has blinding benders in Vegas. Everything has its inverse mate, is my point. It’s opposite, not necessarily, like, an evil version, just a matching reflection.1 We understandably assign real value to these differences. I don’t want […]
LALYC #1
I recently had a series of small experiences which have had a material impact on my life. It feels like a door has been blown off the hinges and a new perspective has firmly manifested. As a result, I’ve been thinking about the direction of G+D quite a bit. Particularly the purpose behind this project, […]
Inertia
Life reflects the decisions we make each day. This monotonous collective compounds over every passing year into something far greater than each individual action. There is a comparatively small number of tremendously consequential decisions which can shape our life: Where we go to school, where we start our professional careers, who we consistently spend our […]
Thought Stream #2 | Chase the Justifications
Each week, I often ask the same group of people a cluster of panicked questions. On the worst weeks, it might even be daily (sorry, guys). My standard barrage of inquiries flow out of me like a burst hydrant desperately looking to extinguish the existential flames scorching my brain. With love, empathy, and biting sarcasm, […]
Violin of Doubt
In 2007, the Washington Post put together a one-day social experiment to test whether or not “in a banal setting at an inconvenient time, would beauty transcend?”1 The idea was to take a masterful musician at the top of their respective genre, place them in a Washington DC subway station, pass them off as a […]
An Uncertain Cure To Indefinite Optimism
I mean what are we doing? What are we learning? What are we building? Why does it feel like we’re one stubbed toe or bad conference call away from totally losing it? It feels like every minor inconvenience has the potential to the be the green light to finally go rogue – reformat the laptop, […]
