I wrote this in 2022, and I still maintain the belief. Reflecting on Proust, I asked myself the question, “Can having a sense of responsibility to ourselves hack depression? Can it take us out of our deepest slumps?” Perhaps it can.

For 4 years egg shells, coffee grounds, fish bones, and veggie scraps went into the garden. The scraps are never useful to the soil the year they go in. It takes time for the living soil to break them down and turn them into something productive. Productive people see the inputs of learning, experience, culture, and life the same way.

Marinating almost always makes things super tasty. I like to make Philippine-style adobo, and I love marinating the pork in a soy+vinegar marinade over night. If you haven’t had adobo, it’s an crave-worthy food product. I see a similar effect when I marinade my mind with different ideas while trying to solve a problem. Like adobo, I notice a tremendous danger in letting the ideas marinade in my mind. I become, almost, obsessed with solving the problem — it’s almost impossible not to over indulge.

If Person A delivers Person B’s complaint to you, then assume that Person A likely shares that complaint. Crafty creatures we are.

Sweeping generalization: leaders can always exhibit less hubris and more humility.I have a theory, it’s not novel, that humans connect more through failure than through success. Failure requires humiliation. Leaders who share their flaws, humble themselves, and show they are not above making mistakes get an opportunity to connect with their teams in real and humanizing ways.

There’s only so much the mind can handle and the body can do. Eventually, the ability and quality of our work degrades. Everything natural, must end. I keep reminding myself, the only way to eat an elephant is one bite at a time.

In Ancient Hellenistic times, Thucydides writes:“I do not think that one will be far wrong in accepting the conclusions I have reached from the evidence which I have put forward. It is better evidence than that of the poets, who exaggerate the importance of their themes, or of the prose chroniclers, who are less interested in telling the truth than in catching the attention of their public, whose authorities cannot be checked, and whose subject-matter, owing to the passage of time, is mostly lost in the unreliable streams of mythology.” - History of the Peloponnesian War - ThucydidesEven then, Thucydides observes that pundits and practitioners of “news” may have information, insights, or filters that the uninformed public may not. That information asymmetry is considered, in economics, a moral hazard: the agent (news publication, pundit, dramatist) may be incentivized to exaggerate, sensationalize, or strategically withhold/disclose information for their own benefit. History repeats. And, the humans of ancient Sparta and Athens haven’t changed that much from the modern human of today. The wisdom: incentives matter.

I learned that the human body has essentially two types of nervous system - one for sensing the outside and one for sensing what’s going on inside. Our sense of consciousness is, oversimplified, the integration of the two. The system responsible for sensing how life is going within our bodies — the system that tells us we’re thirsty, hungry, feeling nauseated, in pain — has tons of redundancy built into it. That system isn’t myelinated, it doesn’t have a protective sheath around it, and it integrates directly with our brain. It’s highly inefficient. You could lose your sense of sight and still survive and thrive. If you lose your ability to sense your body’s internal happenings, you could not. (again, oversimplified). Something so important must have tons of redundancy. Something so important can’t be easy to break. Systems that are inefficient aren’t easy to break.So here’s a question… how inefficient are the most important systems in your life?

The experience of “brain dead.”Thoughts that look like vague and hazy memories from a past life.A desire to produce, but no useful ideas to write about.A light and pain free tension in the front and side of my head. I hear every breath through my noise as if it was amplified 100 times.

A production function is an engineering and economics concept. It’s the maximum output that can be achieved from given inputs. The concept can be a metaphor for how think of our productivity. If you need to understand another person’s production function (e.g for an interview), consider asking: What ideas and work have you produced at your last job? What practices and traits do you attribute to your productivity? What’s your comparative advantage relative to your peers? Your goal is to learn the interviewee’s awareness of their productivity and how they engineer their life for maximum productivity. Why would you do this? The person who ships more work gets more feedback about their work. A person’s ability to delivery high quality work may be correlated to the amount of critique they receive.