Seth Godin just made a great point on the value of cutting away the empty calories in your writing.

I’m quite partial to the advice in On Writing Well in this arena too.

But these rules are easy to forget, and often hard to spot when you’re so close to the writing. So I often drop my writing into hemingwayapp.com to highlight them. It’s not perfect. But I find the app is useful in identifying overuse of adverbs and passive voice, two of my worst habits.

Subtraction, not addition, is often the solution to clearer writing.

P.S. William Zinsser’s On Writing Well is another great resource to refine and add clarity to your writing.

There’s a great line in Maciej Ceglowski’s excellent “Haunted by Data” talk about the conundrum between good data and good algorithms:

“There’s a little bit of a con going on here. On the data side, they tell you to collect all the data you can, because they have magic algorithms to help you make sense of it. On the algorithms side, where I live, they tell us not to worry too much about our models, because they have magical data. We can train on it without caring how the process works.”

If you don’t understand a system or a piece of technology, you shouldn’t assume it will magically solve your problems. In fact, when a feature or function comes off as magical, it’s probably a sign you need to dig deeper and understand what’s really going on.

There’s this great section in It Doesn’t Have to Be Crazy at Work where the authors reference a technique from Jean-Louis Gassée, formerly of Apple France:

“When you deal with people who have trouble, you can either choose to take the token that says ‘It’s no big deal’ or the token that says ‘It’s the end of the world.’ Whichever token you pick, they’ll take the other.”

When you’re the one at fault, you probably should take the “it’s the end of the world” token out of habit. If only as a gesture to make things right.

Of course, when you’ve been wronged, it’s easy to pick the same token. It’s pretty natural. And yet it turns out there are very few things in life worth treating like they’re the end of the world.

So why not make “It’s no big deal” your default reaction? You can always upgrade to “end of the world” status later.

I was driving in a heavy rainstorm during the day recently. It was just light enough out that my automatic headlight sensor didn’t turn on. But it’s one of those cases where my headlights are still essential, more to be seen than to help my own visibility. I noticed every third car or so on my drive had the same issue. No headlights.

It’s interesting that something essential to safety, and seemingly simple like a light sensor still isn’t perfect yet. And yet we trust our lives to tech and automation orders of magnitude more complex than our car’s headlights.

Automation is often pitched as this magic solution that will solve all our problems—and it certainly will solve some of them. But it helps to keep a healthy pinch of skepticism, and have human systems ready to intervene when things don’t go to plan.

In other words – know where your manual headlight switch is.

I read and listened to a lot of great stuff this year – books, articles, and podcasts. But when I think about the best of the year, these titles come to mind:

The Obstacle is the Way, Ryan Holiday – This book came to me at exactly the right time for me to be absolutely consumed by it. It’s changed my outlook on daily life for the better. I only wish I had discovered it (and the source material) much earlier in life.

The War of Art, Steven Pressfield – This one forced me to look in the mirror and recognize what I really want to do in this life, and what’s holding me back from doing it today.

Steal like An Artist, Austin Kleon – Simple lessons in building creative work. You’re only as good as the ideas you surround yourself with. Embrace influence – nothing comes from nothing.

So Good They Can’t Ignore You, Cal Newport – The core message of this book is that “follow your passion” is overrated advice, and that building skills worth having will help you find the career you really want. I’ve always had a hard time with the “follow your passion” advice anyway, as it seems like something you don’t find until you’re already in your career – and this book really brings that into focus.

The Wizard and the Prophet, Charles C. Mann — A fascinating account of of our history grappling with the four major environmental challenges on this planet: food, water, energy, and climate change, and some ideas on where we may go next. Not as preachy or one sided as Naomi Klein’s This Changes Everything, but just as provocative.

In perfect and consistent conditions, forming a new habit is pretty straightforward. If you lay out running shoes and clothes the night before, you’re much more likely to follow through with that morning jog. But what happens on the day when it’s pouring rain? The days where a wrench is thrown into the plans are the best ways to see whether the habits you’re forming are built from sand or stone.

On Christmas Day I really didn’t want to make a post on this blog. I had other stuff going on, my routine was off, I just wasn’t in the right mindset to write.

I could have easily skipped that day. Told myself it was a deserved break. It’s not like anyone else was keeping score, that my readers would notice or even care that I missed a day.

But I imagined myself two weeks from then, looking back, and seeing that missed day. And realizing then that getting something posted, even small, really isn’t asking much. And really, it’s a test of willpower—if I disrupt the routine, can I still get across the finish line?

This has been a year of a lot of change and growth for me, and the moves I’ve made have been thanks to the direct or indirect actions of others. It seems only fair to reflect on some of the big events for me this year and the people who helped make it happen. For this has been a year of realizing as much as I try, I can’t get far alone.

Daily writing

I’ve admired and envied Seth Godin for years for his ability to churn out something interesting every day for a decade and a half. Sometimes, he writes about why he writes every day. I finally took his advice to heart – for a four month streak at the beginning of 2018 (on a private journal) and now here for nearly two months. It’s a challenge every day, and I’m not always happy with what I publish out in the world, but I’ve come to love the process, and the way it starts a snowball of quick wins in my day.

The altMBA

Earlier this year as I stepped away from my full-time role, I found the timing lined up almost perfectly with an altMBA session, and I decided to take the plunge. I’m thankful for the coaches and students for helping me identify and challenge my weaknesses. I believe I’m a better leader, collaborator, and communicator after my time in the program – and I’m still looking for new ways to apply the course’s lessons in personal and professional life.

Sabbatical and independent consulting

First and foremost I thank my wife, for the encouragement and support as I decided to step away from the stability of my career and try something new. I’m also thankful for my company for understanding and supporting my decision. And finally to my clients for taking a chance on me and helping me turn this experiment into a sustainable business. If there’s anything I’ve learned these past six months in consulting, it’s all about your network, and I’ve come to realize how many amazing, generous people I know in this industry.

We shouldn’t be so surprised when our forecasts are off. Especially when we try to look too far in the future.

The meteorologist limits their weather forecast to ten days or so for a reason. Things are just too hard to predict accurately beyond that. The further out we extend our crystal ball, the cloudier it gets—a one week forecast is likely a lot more precise than a one year forecast.

Yet we don’t hold forecasting in business to the same standard. We act as if meeting our forecast is a foregone conclusion, and when we’re off, it’s a disaster. We’ve got to recognize forecasting is simply a way to make our most educated guess of where things ought to land in the future. But don’t forget, it’s still just a guess.

Wow this has been the year of podcasts for me. I’ve had three in the past two months, and a few earlier in the year. While the latest interview certainly covers some familiar ground, it’s a good discussion of integration, both in terms of technology, and in the cross-team collaboration required to do it right.

As the year closes it’s easy to look at the coming twelve months as a reset to do better, improve ourselves, ditch bad habits and create new ones. But too often our approach to resolution making is one of sheer force of will – and invariably our habits, whether to exercise 3x a week or eat more vegetables fall by the wayside after a few weeks.

In Charles Duhigg’s fantastic The Power of Habit, he suggests the path to real habit forming is not one of simply willpower. There’s the habit loop of cue, routine, and reward that guides much of what we do, mostly unconsciously. We can build new habits – but we can’t really destroy old ones – merely take the same cues and rewards, and replace the routines.

If you’re trying to do something different in 2019 (and who isn’t), read the book before you make your resolutions. It will change your approach for the better.