I'm writing to think, learn, and remember in public. I'll be here everyday.
We talk about when it all works. The sunny day scenario.
We highlight it. We get excited. We show the investors. We show our friends.
But it’s gonna break.
You’ll get 8 inches of water in the basement. Your client will no-show. You won’t get a response. You’ll get stuck on the side of the road. The power will go out. The user will do something you never thought of. You’ll have no internet connection.
What will you do then?
We wake up to the buzzing rectangle on our bedside table.
We spend our day staring at the rectangles on our desk.
We drive to where the rectangles tell us to drive.
Maybe we need more circles and triangles.
Tornado warning. Trees and branches falling all around. Inches of rain per hour. Flash flood. Roads unpassable. The groundwater table rises above the elevation of the basement floor. The power goes out.
What can you do? What does a leader do?
Because in a real crisis, everything’s not equally important. Some things will be lost. Some things can’t be saved.
A leader doesn’t panic.
A leader doesn’t freeze.
A leader sees the mess, accepts the chaos, and makes the next decision anyway. Even if it’s the wrong decision.
Leadership isn’t about controlling the storm.
It’s about moving forward within it.
Even when the water’s rising.
Even when the lights go out.
Even when it feels like the end of the world.
Especially then.
I recently visited the Museum of the American Revolution.
Well done. I highly recommend it.
My big takeaway: the US came to be because of the crazies.
Not the reasonable people. Not those with a cool head. Not those with the ability to look at both sides and find the common ground.
The crazies.
And as someone who considers himself a reasonable person, that gives me pause.
But also, it helps me appreciate the big, beautiful chaos that is this wonderful country. We fight. We yell. We argue. We push it this way and that way.
Most importantly:
We can fight. We can yell. We can argue. We can push it this way and that way.
This is freedom. This is what it looks like.
Thank you, crazies.
My cat woke me up last night, and then kept me up batting a little plastic spring around the floor and generally making an ass of himself.
First, let’s clear this up: Cats aren’t nocturnal.
They’re crepuscular. That’s a strange-sounding word that simply means “most active during the twilight hours.”
Bullshit, this was 3 am. 3 am is never twilight in southeastern PA. Now, I’ve been to Sweden, Finland, and Norway, and in the summertime, 3 am can indeed be twilight in those areas. But not here.
Regardless, crepuscular means they are adapted to seeing much better than you do in the low light. They don’t have perfect night vision, but they don’t need much light at all — the moon, a porch light, a street light down the block — to see just fine.
It’s the rods. They got a lot more than you do.
When you stumble over the coffee table or step on an errant shoe in the dark, it’s so tempting to look at the cat and wish you could see like they do. It seems like such an advantage.
But you got the cones.
Which means you see much better color and detail in both near and far distances than your cat.
Every time you look around at others and the world, you have a choice. You can continue to wish you were like the cat, or you could recognize the advantages you have.
Life is a journey of change.
Your experiences. Your family. Your work. Your body. Your ideas.
What would be the point of living if we didn’t let life change us?
We’re (I’m) wired to resist it. We (I) lean into what’s familiar, what feels safe, what’s comfortable.
But comfort isn’t the goal. Change is.
New problems present an opportunity to change your skills.
New people present an opportunity to change your thinking.
New seasons present an opportunity to change your priorities.
This you is a different you, whether you’ve embraced it or not. The trick isn’t ignoring or avoiding change. It’s participating in it. Each day presents the opportunity of change.
Change isn’t the interruption of your life.
It is your life.
Gatekeepers have always had a niche.
When I started working at GE building satellites in the early 90s, it was pre-internet, and for the most part, pre-digitized data. Finding information was hard.
You had to know the gatekeepers.
The gatekeepers were the ones who held the information. They held the Texas Instruments and Motorola databooks, the software syntax books, and the filing cabinets full of engineering drawings, data, and reports.
The gatekeepers knew and relished their value in this market of information. Some even had a “check-out” system like a library.
Then, along came computers and the internet. Within a few years, the shelves full of books and filing cabinets full of paper no longer mattered.
The information gatekeepers lost their business model.
But gatekeepers never really disappear. They just evolve.
And now AI is the latest in the long line of gatekeepers.
AI decides what answers you get.
AI drafts the responses you never wrote.
AI filters, suggests, corrects, ranks.
AI holds the keys now. But to which doors?
Money is a charlatan. A trickster. And it is oh, so good.
It says, “Look over here,” and we do while it pockets the card with its other hand.
We fight over it in our personal lives. We fight over it in our public and political lives. We bluster, yearn, blame, and chase.
We say it doesn’t matter, yet we fashion our lives around it. We put it on the vision board as the goal.
But money isn’t a worthy goal. It’s not the end.
It’s the means to an end.
Money’s superpower is as a tool.
Once you recognize the real power of money, you stop chasing it for its own sake. You chase what it unlocks. You start chasing the real goal.
But the goal? That’s still on you.
Here was a fun little experiment.
“You are a blank slate. All you know is this:
* My name is John Macdonald
* I live in Oley, PA
Now do research on me and tell me about myself.”
It came back with a pile of mostly correct but some incorrect information. I went back and forth with it a few times to correct and clarify some things, but here is the summary what it came back with, unedited by me.
A couple of curiosities:
You should do the same. Do you like what it finds?
You can do all the science for your new startup business.
You can research the market and find the gaps. You can research the perfect product to fill that gap. You can research the development effort. You can research all the costs, risks, competition, and the pricing model. You can build a rock-solid pro forma.
But at some point, you still have to make the art.
What color? Rounded or square? What should we leave out? Who’s our person? What’s the story? What’s the story our person tells themself? What do we want them to feel? How do we convey the story? What are we willing to give up? What are we willing to change about our perspective?
Science gives you the data. The art determines success.
Anything worthwhile takes both.
