Know your limits and stop.

I’m on a train riding to Chicago from Kansas City. It’s Monday, and I hoped to work while on board. Imagine how happy I was to receive signal hour 5 of a 7 hour journey. The train forces pause.

I wrote about the information asymmetry in selecting your next manager in March. I’m thinking more about information economics, signaling, and how it’s been a part of my entire professional life — outside of job search.Traditionally, musicians that are new to a community attend jam sessions to meet other musicians. The new musician signals their knowledge and skill through their performance and how they interact with the others on the bandstand. The other, longstanding musicians, see the signals and determine if they want to play with that musician more. It’s a marketplace. The process of life so often seems like the process of rapidly going from the state of unknown to known.

Seth Godin fixed the controversial iPad ad. Inversion is an effective way to solve a problem.

Person A and I talked about productivity today. Person A often gets in their own way — “I don’t know what I can or cannot do.” I asked, “tell me what got in your way yesterday.” Turns out the issue is not knowing what can or cannot be done; instead, it’s “not know what to do next.”I offered a solution:Get things out of your head. Write down everything you need to do. Prioritize the things you wrote down. Act. Person A’s output improved in the course of a day — dramatically. I don’t think it’s the solution I proposed that made the difference. I think Person A benefited from getting things out of their head.

I’m watching the television series “24”. The main character, Jack Bauer, saves the world every episode. He always puts his life on the line to save thousands of others. He’s the hero.Jack consistently puts himself in situations where he’ll likely die. He says things like “I’m the only one who can do this,” “No, Chloe, we don’t have a lot of time, I will do this,” and “damnit.” If Jack’s effectiveness is the number of times he saves the day, he’s 10/10 (so far). However, if you factor in the cost of broken relationships, living isolated, and unhealthy escapism — I don’t know. The hero isn’t always the hero.

From an earlier post.“Plans are made. Plans come apart. New delights or tragedies pop up in their place. And nothing human or divine will map out this life, this life has been more pain than I could have imagined. More beautiful than I could have imagined. - Kate Bowler, “Everything Happens for a Reason”From Marcus Aurelius.You cannot lose another life than the one you’re living now, or live another one than the one you’re losing… The present is the same for everyone; its loss is the same for everyone; and it should be clear that a brief instant is all that is lost. For you can’t lose either the past or the future; how could you lose what you don’t have? - Marcus Aurelius, “Meditiations”, Book 2:14Heat will always move to what’s cold.Chaos will always move to order.Time moves forward.

People who keep diaries rarely disclose what they write. Who wants to share their most deepest, vulnerable, and fleeting thoughts with the world? The entire first book of “Meditations”, Marcus Aurelius’ personal diary, is Marcus reflecting on the people who helped him become the person he became. The diary continues with themes built upon what Marcus learned from others: death, service, justice, wisdom, nature, and acceptance of the present. Who are the people who contributed to the you of today? What lessons, good or bad, have they taught you?

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.