One way I make a living is by coaching CEOs. Recently I was speaking with one of my clients, the CEO of a startup with 60-plus employees.

The CEO told me how they and one of their executives had been disagreeing about something. My client’s initial instinct was to assert…

If you’ve ever slept outdoors or even just watched a survival reality show, you know the importance of fire. Fire is warmth, energy, safety. Fire bridges the line between comfort and discomfort. Even life and death.

Early humans’ ability to tame fire — which took hundreds of thousands of years…

In the late 1990s, people around the world began to live in a state of rising fear of two missing numbers.

The computer bug known as Y2K threatened to wreak havoc on the global infrastructure through the tiniest of details: computers being programmed to represent years in two digits (“99”)…

How’s your apocalypse going? Yeah, mine too.

Sending love to everyone right now. The chaos is overwhelming. Even more disturbing, it’s already normal. I write this as my windows are blanketed in smoke from the West Coast fires.

We’re hoping that 2020 is a blip on the radar. But at…

Last week I took an internet vacation. I didn’t go anywhere. I just wasn’t online.

I spent a lot of my time in the woods. I recently moved to the Pacific Northwest and have fallen in love with the trees. They’re incredible creatures.

You see a lot of these fallen…

For millennia, thinkers from ancient philosophers to modern cosmologists have grappled with the question of how time functions. In a book called The Fourth Turning, the authors William Strauss and Neil Howe sort the theories of time into three categories:

1. Time is chaotic. There’s no order at all.

2…

It’s getting harder to remember life before, but we’re still in the early, “in it together” phase of this crisis. Barely. The stratification of society that was already here is becoming clear again. The gap between who has power and who doesn’t — already big — is getting bigger.

Here’s…

Two weeks ago I shared the Values Stack as an illustration of how values operate.

Values are expressed through three layers. At the deepest layer are a culture’s Morals. Those Morals are expressed as Rules. Those Morals are also positively expressed as Incentives.

Today I’m going to share three examples…