Happy New Year, dear readers! I'm not gonna lie; we all thought 2020 was bad and 2021 would be better, but at this point, it honestly feels like we've just been through one huge, horrible, double-length year of anguish and uncertainty. After all that, the holidays and typical year end frivolity just didn't feal right, …
Tag: systems
Time ≠ Money
Just coming off a 4-day holiday weekend, I wanted to muse a bit about time, how it can be spent and our options for how to use it. Time is fungible, as in, it is something that can change into other things, which makes it just a little bit magical. Time passes, whether we want …
Capitalism, in its Current Form, is an Addiction
America is truly a land of addictions. You need look no further than the latest statistics about the opioid epidemic to see. One hundred-thousand people died in the last year from opioid overdose, mostly from illegal fentanyl, a synthetic version of heroin. This is the same drug that took the lives of Prince, Tom Petty, …
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The Great Resignation
Everyone else is writing on this topic, so why not me too? What do people want to work for? Based on our pre-Covid economic model, it would seem people worked out of necessity, for their survival, to keep a roof over their heads and food on their tables. It was barely working. Many people do …
What is the Real Difference Between Competence and the Appearance of Competence?
From all outside observation, most people would say I was very good at school. I got good grades and generally followed the rules. I have years of report cards and transcripts that show how capable I was, how much I learned. My final high school GPA was about 3.6 on a 4.0 scale. The problem …
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Compartmentalization, or Why the Labor Economy is Broken
We are on the precipice of a whole new paradigm when it comes to who works where, how, and for how long. There may be many people who fear such upheaval and would rather just sit tight with the system we have because they had been able to hang on by the skin of their …
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Competition Does Not Always Yield the Best Results
In America, we have a philosophy that things must be ranked, optimized, put in order and our primary way of creating that order is through competition. We judge those who "win" as morally superior to those who "lose" in competition. If you lost a competition, you are encouraged to pick yourself up, dust yourself off …
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Social Media Will Destroy Us All
So I got into a "conversation " with a couple of blokes on LinkedIn the other day related to Oregon's governor and a bill she signed related to education policy and standardized testing as a graduation requirement. The article cited was also politically conservative in nature and this series of white men were exclaiming from …
The Skill of Knowing Where Your Input is NOT Needed
It is becoming increasingly apparent to me that the largest missing ingredient in the system (substitute whatever system you want) is the ability of people in power, generally abled cisgender white men (and women, depending on context), to understand when it is time for them to step back, make way, hold space, shut up, promote …
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The End of an Era?
Starting tomorrow morning, after 16 months, my husband will be going back to commuting to work in his office full time. This is going to be a bittersweet transition for both of us. When the pandemic began in March 2020, he was in no way prepared to work from home. It took adjustments and compromises …