Reasons made under pressure serve the pressure
Kierkegaard wrote a small book about a lily and a bird. It is about worry, and how to set it down. I keep it on the shelf with four others I have gone back to for the same reason. I want an axiom to act from, and I want it before I need it. One of my own: a result is evidence about the work, not a verdict on me.
The obvious objection is that reasons come from living and not from reading, and it is mostly right. But living arrives at speed, and it does not wait while I work out what I believe.
- DostoevskyThe Brothers Karamazov
- HerbertDune
- KierkegaardFear and Trembling
- CamusThe Myth of Sisyphus
- KierkegaardThe Lily of the Field and the Bird of the Air
Owning a thing means staying for the answer
At Eide Bailly I found expense reimbursement worth automating, won the executives over, and led the team that built the firm's first production AI system. What holds my attention is the arc from finding a problem to being responsible for what happens next. I trained my successors.
Now, an MBA at Yale, to widen the scope of what I can own.
I keep returning to one question: where AI should act and where a person should decide. The coach I built for Apex Training proposes changes to a workout plan; the user decides.
No cathedral more sublime, no crucible more stern
Cooper broke trail up the whole couloir so the rest of us would not have to. We did not talk about it at the top. Most of what I know about the people I adventure with, I learned on mornings like that one, and none of it was said out loud.
The climbs are committing and the ski lines are steep. I pick them that way. Most of my time away from a laptop is spent under the sun, even when it is behind thick cloud or fog. I keep going back to places that would not notice if I stopped.
Writing is thinking tested publicly
An argument that feels whole in my head usually has a hole in the third paragraph, and I only find it by writing the third paragraph. That much is selfish.
The rest is not. Once an idea is published, other people push on it, and they find out with me whether it holds or breaks. Kept to myself, it goes on feeling whole.