The operating system I run on. Principles about thinking, people, systems, things, and work. Some took decades to learn, while some took one conversation.
19 beliefs, and counting.
Thinking
Document questions in addition to ideas.
I ask myself a set of questions every month. They're more useful than any idea list. The right question reframes something I've been stuck on, or points at what I should be doing instead.
Capture the thought. The medium doesn't matter.
I wasted years searching for the perfect system. Now it's a notebook and Apple's defaults: Notes, Photos, Voice Memos.
Daydreaming is a tool.
Some of my strongest ideas came from staring out a window, not sitting at a screen. A wandering mind makes connections a focused one can't.
My space is my mind's mirror.
When my desk is cluttered, my thinking is scattered. When I clean up, clarity follows. Almost immediately.
I do my best thinking while walking.
The ideas I'm proudest of arrived in motion. On a trail, on a sidewalk, never at a desk. I've stopped trying to think my way through hard problems sitting down.
People
Every person you meet reshapes you.
The ones who challenged me left a deeper mark than the ones who agreed with me. It's constant, and usually invisible until years later.
Character over possessions, always.
I've sat across from people with incredible collections and empty inner lives. The most interesting people I know own almost nothing. What they built is inside them.
Three lenses: your parents, yourself, your kids.
My parents gave me a foundation I didn't appreciate until my 30s. My own experience tore half of it apart. My kids rebuilt it into something different.
Systems
Everything is a system with laws.
Relationships, markets, health, cities. Once I started looking for the rules underneath, the world got more legible. It's not chaotic. It's patterned.
Every system follows the same arc: birth, growth, decay, death.
Companies, technologies, relationships, empires. Nothing is exempt. The question I keep coming back to: where is this in its lifecycle?
Respect the age of a system.
Early in my career I walked into established organizations and thought I could move fast. I couldn't. The roots run as deep as the age. Now I study a system with the patience it took to build it.
The universe is not conspiring for or against you.
I used to take setbacks personally. Bad timing, missed shots, closed doors. There's no malice and no luck. Just patterns I haven't learned to read.
Complexity feels like rigor but it's usually the opposite.
I've over-engineered things because the complexity made me feel thorough. The best solutions I've shipped were embarrassingly simple. If it's hard to explain, it's probably not well understood yet.
Complex things rot the moment you stop maintaining them.
Every layer of complexity is a commitment to maintain it forever. I've watched systems built by brilliant people collapse because nobody had the energy left to hold up every piece.
Things
People have memories of things, not the other way around.
The object doesn't remember me. The attachment is entirely mine, which means I can let it go without losing what it meant.
Try to get rid of something, physical or digital, every day.
I started this as an experiment and it stuck. It's made me sharper about what I actually want to keep.
Before buying something, ask: what happens when I'm done with it?
Trash, donation, someone else's hands. Everything I own eventually has to go somewhere.
Work
World-class is a standard, not a ranking.
Some of the most world-class people I know will never be number one at anything. There's no leaderboard.
Serendipity isn't divine.
Every fortunate accident in my life traces back to a decision: showing up, staying longer than I planned, saying yes to something I almost skipped.