Years ago I bought a small framed print in a shop in Fairbanks. It read: "When nothing is certain, anything is possible." I never forgot those words.

When the future breaks open, revealing the new and unexpected, do you see a peril or a possibility? Your response matters more than you think.

My latest article in the Pragdealist newsletter takes a closer look at the powerful insight the print offered.

Have you ever handed off something you enjoyed in the name of efficiency or profit, and regretted it? We're told, more insistently every day, to let the machine do whatever it can do for us. But some of what we're being urged to give up is the very thing that provided the value, that made the work — and the day — worth it.

This essay is about the impact and hidden cost of outsourcing experience.

As a child, I walked into a trophy shop. Little did I know I was catching a glimpse of the future.

The attention economy, to be precise.

I'm not referring to the corporate commodity side that extracts and trades in our algorithmically monitored preferences. I'm speaking of the consequences of living and working within it.

My new piece, The Trophy Shop, is about that difference—and where real validation actually comes from. (Hint: it starts with your why.)

I stopped chasing work-life balance and started using something simpler: the Fun-to-Misery Ratio. The premise—it's only work if you'd rather be doing something else. Take the time to notice.

It's a mindset that shatters the illusion of work-life balance—because it was one life all along, yours.

New post on why balance is the wrong goal, and what to measure instead.

Everything is changing, everywhere, all at once.

We won't find stability by trying to hold on to something in perpetual motion.

When change hits, the instinct is to interrogate it: What is this? We demand the chaos explain itself so we can sort it, rank it, make it hold still. It never does.

So, I recommend asking a different question. Not about the chaos—but about ourselves.

What am I to that?

To that circumstance. That change. That decision. The first question scatters our authority. The second puts us back in command.

It's the question at the heart of my book, Seeker's Mindset. And the key to stability amid constant movement.

Back in the 1990s, a keynote speaker warned a room full of us: "Be someone, not something." I was in my 20s. I understood the words. It took me decades to understand what they cost.

I finally wrote down what I've learned since — about the quiet difference between the two, and the work of choosing one.

Thirty years implementing new technologies taught me one lesson the current AI discourse keeps missing:

Innovation, implementation, and user adoption are three entirely different things.

I've watched interactive whiteboards get rejected in favor of dry-erase markers. I've watched sophisticated audioconferencing systems get bypassed for a Polycom in the middle of the table. I've watched oilfield workers cover the camera with a baseball cap—the "hat-cam"—to guard against prying eyes.

Forecasts about AI's impact are measuring from the wrong end of the supply chain.

If we choose carefully, we become the authors of the story—not a character within it.

My latest essay: The End-User Awards the Prize — What the Hat-Cam Taught Me

A month after I told my wife — and no one else — that I wanted to write a book, I sat down next to a stranger on a flight to Anchorage. What she said when I asked about her work changed everything.

I felt like I was racing the wind.

Writing a book about change while change keeps happening is its own kind of vertigo. Examples I drafted on Monday were stale by Friday. Headlines I cited became footnotes.

Fortunately, the book isn't really about change. It's about us—how we respond when change and disruption swirl around us and the ground keeps shifting beneath our feet.

Seeker's Mindset is about reclaiming our authority and our awareness. About taking action instead of taking blame. About taking control of our lives and how we meet the day.

The antidote in the moment isn't outrunning the winds of change. It's awareness—and learning how to harness them.

Every generation inherits challenges it did not create. Ours is no different.

We may not be responsible for what happens. But we are responsible for how we respond.

How will you respond?

What's your life philosophy?

Years ago at a dinner party, someone asked me that. Without hesitation, I answered: "Pragmatic Idealism." I had no polished definition — just an instinct it fit.

I now call it Pragdealism: practical in approach, idealistic in pursuit. 

In 2023, I sold one company and closed down another along with its magazine, and walked into a silence I hadn't planned for.

After twenty-five years of running businesses, the seven-day-a-week hum of responsibility was suddenly gone. What replaced it was a question I'd been too busy to ask for a quarter century: What comes next?

The answer surfaced in the quiet. This is how Seeker's Mindset began.