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Am I the only person who can't stop watching their own face on video calls? Or am I like the first person to admit it? What's that about anyway?

Your financials weren't built for you. They were built to protect the bank. Once you know that, you can stop feeling guilty and build the instrument panel that actually serves you: Unit Economics.

I had no desire to be a baseball coach having only played the sport as a kid. I didn't love it, but I stepped up so my kid could play, and I'm so glad I did.

How do you build trust? NASA and a social scientist from Stony Brook University show how we can build more personal trust in our relationships.

How I came to develop FuzzDog Edit, the everywhere markdown cowriting editor for creating stories by collaborating with AI.

On June 10th of 2026, everything I thought I knew about software development changed. Instead of expensive and slow, it became fast, affordable, and fun.

It's easy to see competence and assume talent, however sometimes what you're really looking at is a lot of work consolidated into capability.

I have seen countless presentations on the value of planning, but how do you make a plan for something you've never done before.

People think gamification is all about adding coins and prizes to an app. Not me. To me it's about clear expectations, transparent skills, and feedback.

Most people think GameTruck was as simple as tossing video games into a trailer, if only it was that easy.

Someone once told me it is better to be interested, than interesting. This is how I do it.

I struggled with how to follow the advice "Don't judge" until I discovered my new favorite question.

When you share what you know and support it with arguments, you invite argument. When you start with vulnerability, you invite curiosity.

Passion was never what I chased — it's what followed me. Passion is an emotion, and emotions can't carry you through the hard times. Chase the frustrating questions instead.

A living reference for every styled element in the notebook — keycaps, sticky notes, code, quotes, and more. Handy when writing a new post.

Fable 5 AI from Anthropic is very expensive and worth every penny.

Stephen King's door-closed / door-open method, applied to working with generative AI — and why a polished first draft is a trap.

Part of my series on working with Claude: before diving into Claude Code, a pause to cover the two techniques I use to move your work over from ChatGPT — transcript port and artifact handoff.

Part three of my series on Claude: after general chat and projects, we reach Cowork. This is about finding a footing with these modes, not an exhaustive manual for the tool.

Part three of my five-part Claude series: Project Chat. Why adding resources and priming a project changes what the AI can do — and how it quietly builds an impression of you.

The first modality in my AI scaffold is General Chat. Most people's first experience of AI is a chat window — remarkably simple, and deceptively so. Where I'd start, and why.

I started this blog post for my fellow EO GRIT members - and for anyone else who’s been trying to figure this out. This spawns from a conversation we had…

A 12-year-old dives full-extension for a perfect game. My video game league can't finish a match without someone quitting. Same kids, opposite behaviors. The difference? Environment shapes commitment

I'd greeted a lot of parents dropping kids at my leagues, but never one who introduced her son the way Janet introduced William. What that moment revealed about how screens sever connection.

Spotify's DJ plays the perfect ride-home mix, then won't let you save it. AI got me into this, so maybe AI can get me out. How I rescued my Spotify AI jams with Claude.

A laser-tag event melting down in front of impatient ten-year-olds taught me why standard operating procedures fail — and how reframing them as expectation agreements actually works.

Why would a kid who knows how to catch the ball let it drop? What I learned about shame, resilience, and making it safe to try.

How changing the way I talked to my boys helped them cultivate mental toughness.

Well-meaning adults tell kids to follow their passion — but for a boy at risk of gaming obsession, that can backfire. The story of Nate, a top-100 Madden gamer whose mom asked me to help.

Help your son build a healthy identity through video games by using curiosity to shine a light on his competence—the same way a baseball coach gives players a second chance to show who they are.

Ever ask AI for help and get a polished, confident answer that completely misses the mark? Here's how I think with AI — beyond prompting — to get past impressive-sounding noise to real help.

How I generated a CPA-approved operating budget from scratch in two hours for about a dollar in AI costs — and what it taught me about working with generative-AI agents on real problems.

When I started vibe coding, we wasted hours because my Mac wouldn't let me install Python packages — Apple's idea of keeping me safe. How to set up a Python virtual environment.

You could ask Claude how to set up an MCP server and it would walk you through it. Instead, here's how one human — me — actually approached getting Model Context Protocol running in Go.

The hedonic treadmill, named from a 1971 study of lottery winners, explains why we snap back to a happiness baseline after good and bad alike — and how a digital second brain helps me beat it.

With Claude Code running, you can add Codex and Gemini CLI too. But first, some setup to build an environment where you can do real work — and give your CLI agent a little memory.

A Murdle logic puzzle stumped me — thanks to a cognitive bias I couldn't see. Here's how I use generative AI to think through problems instead of around them.

Why I pay for three AI subscriptions when one would do: at $20 a month each, a trio of assistants that behave like different people and check each other's work is still a bargain.

For the sake of simplicity (mostly mine), I’m going to write this as if you’re using a MacBook. If you’re on Windows, you probably already think you’re…

What annoys me about most self-help books is how much time they spend trying to convince you of their position. They wade through history, details, and…

When I entered the video game industry in 1999, one of the greatest barriers to creating immersive worlds was the **NPC** (Non-Player Character). How do…

I've settled into a feeling that AI, for all its power, keeps looping the same territory — search replacement and ghostwriting. Here's how I actually use AI every day, differently.

Yesterday I was blessed enough to speak to the Boys Team Charity, a youth association to help young men find purpose in giving back. My talk focused on…

For a while, I have been playing with this idea that balance is different than I learned it was. Balance is a verb. What most people think of as balance…

I have this burning desire to write something, but I don’t know what. It’s weird. I sat down and wrote 15 blog posts in a row, day after day, and it felt…

Motorola once mandated forty hours of training a year to turn everyone into a lifelong learner. What that experiment — and gaming other people's slots — taught me about continuous learning.

Studying Constructed Emotion Theory convinced me I need to change how I present. You can't hand people finished information like a spreadsheet — brains simply don't work that way.

Neuroscience is revealing that your brain produces your experience of reality rather than just reacting to it. Why that flips how we understand perception and everyday interaction.

Reading Lisa Feldman Barrett's 'How Emotions Are Made,' I was struck by its overlap with the obscure work of Stephen Grossberg. The weird, unsettling science of how we make emotions.

Is the humble to-do list actually worth it? A 1918 story about Bethlehem Steel's Charles Schwab and efficiency expert Ivy Lee kicks off my take on whether lists really work.

Near the end of my little experiment, the offline conversations hit hardest: fourth and fifth graders hacking school computers to reach porn, and teachers with no training to stop it.

I am a little uneasy about yesterdays post. I feel like I should know a lot more about girls and social media. However, the truth is I would be taking a…

Understanding how something works is interesting, but I care more about what you can do with it. A framework for what boys and girls actually need as we try to keep kids safe online.

Note**: _This entry starts day 1 of 15 consecutive days I intend to practice a tiny experiment, sharing how I am trying to learn how to help parents and…

I am starting this blog after reading _Tiny Experiments_ by _Anne-Laure Le Cunff_. The book proposed some interesting ideas about how to switch from a…

Lately, the one recommendation I have been giving to parents the most is \"pay for your games.\" Why? Because you want to be the developers customer, not the fuel for their revenue model.

Controlling screen time may not get you the outcome you want for your kids. What coaching youth baseball — and showing up ninety minutes early — taught me about something more effective.

When I read something outrageous, my first instinct is to fire back. A friend's advice — and a few scathing diatribes I regret from my days as a young manager — taught me when not to.

I learned from baseball that simple rules can produce complex behaviors that are pretty smart under pressure. Here are my three simple rules for managing video game time.

Bringing back fun and playing together does not always require video games or much money. Sometimes a hose and a patch of dirt can create an unforgettable childhood experience.

It's obvious kids are more vulnerable than adults — but online it's hard to grasp just how much. Why our instinct to keep them physically safe misses the real risk.

When I coached my son and his friends on a neighborhood little league baseball team, I learned an important lesson about helping kids succeed.

If you are a parent trying to end game time, one question you need to answer is, how does your child's game actually END?

Coaches taught kids Growth Mindset over Fixed, and Duckworth showed effort counts twice where talent counts once. But that framing misses something — the difference between discoverers and defenders.

Here is an example of how I use my daily note with real world examples. This is for the most party my absolute go to tool for trying to manage the Chaos of being an entrepreneur.

When did it stop being fun to be a kid? What happened to our families and what can we do about it?

I read about a book a week, but for years I got little from it — highlights I never revisited, notes I never reread. Here's the process that finally changed that.

Wouldn't it be awesome if you could remember everything you ever saw, heard, or read? Well, maybe it would not be that awesome. Still, I would really be…

A great day, a big contract, a celebration dinner — derailed by a kid who wouldn't put down the controller. The family story behind the term 'cheat code.'

An interactive workshop using cooperative video games to teach adults the four core skills of connection: synchronization, shared memory, shared identity, and serendipity.

A shift in how I lay out Lost in Place — giving more visual space to the content — plus the start of a baseball coaching story told in comic form.

Seven more Lost in Place strips, following a thread on how differently people react to the same information — with my own snarky commentary mixed in.

The first seven strips from my 2024 relaunch of Lost in Place, plus the pen-and-paper-to-Canva workflow I use to draw these webtoons.

I recently felt motivated to share my webtoons on social media. For my own sanity, I also decided to archive them here on my blog.

What balances SMART goals? HEART goals. In this blog post I outline the five questions you want to answer to start defining your roles.

In this article I dig into the templates I use with Templater for creating useful daily notes in Obsidian.

Let me give you a real life example of how having a digital second brain helped me develop a new product, author a book, and create a groundbreaking team workshop.

How did I actually get into building a second brain? It didn't start with a desire to be more productive, it started with an idea to make better use of what I was learning.

The resources and overview from my Where Not What talk in Atlanta — a gentle starting point for building a second brain without drowning in someone else's system.

Start the day with a load of optimism... and a dead battery. But thanks to small town America I get back on the road in no time.

I never thought of myself as a museum person — until riding a Harley took me to Milwaukee to see how the company built one of the fiercest, most loyal brands alive.

Using the Feynman Technique with your Resources section of your Second Brain can help you retain and use more of what you learn.

How can you get a better return on your attention? Try these three techniques to retain more of what you learn.

One reason I started a PKM, was to transform listening to business books as a form of entertainment into a form of useful, engaging education.

The story of what lead me to develop a second brain, and eventually my Where Not What System. The Resources section is the heart of my personal knowledge management. Here's why.

Once my Kindle highlights flowed into my notes, I had a library of ideas to fuel my writing — until I hit a wall citing sources. How Zotero and Readwise became my writing resources.

How do I use Resources to enhance my personal resource? In this article, I share some tools and techniques I use to enhance my learning when I conduct my own research.

The power of linking ideas comes to light in the Resources section of a personal knowledge management system.

How do I use Resources in my Where Not What System? In this post I give you a quick overview and compare Resources to Projects and Areas.

Recap the Five Article Series that explores how I implement Areas in my Where Not What System.

Lets take a second and compare Projects and Areas now that we have spent a couple of weeks looking at both.

Where do the files go? Areas aren't just notes — a role comes with PDFs and Word docs that Obsidian and Notion won't store. Why Where Not What is a methodology, not a single tool.

Linked Note applications have become popular because they mimic the way we store memories, in this blog post I share what Stephen Grossberg has learned about the way we really store memories.

How do I actually use my Area Note? This blog post shares some of the techniques I use to get the most out of focusing using my second brain to help manage the many roles I play in my life

I explain the structure of my Area template, and share some of the thinking behind why I organize the areas of my life notes the way I do.

How do areas differ from projects? This article kicks off a series to look at how I work with Areas in side my Where Not What system.

I wanted to show you how I use a project in as part of my Obsidian \"second brain\". A project is something I want to get done soon and it will take…

Obsidian, like many new note taking systems uses markdown to structure your notes. But what is markdown and where did it come from? I'm glad you asked, this post gives some answers.

I've shown you my Obsidian project template and the tech behind it. Now here's how I actually use it in practice — starting, as my projects always do, with research.

When my adult kids got diagnosed with ADD, I took the plunge myself and found my charming 'quirks' were really symptoms. The behaviors that colored my life — and the strategies I'm building.

The technical bits - how my Project Management Template works with Obsidian in Detail.

Before the Obsidian plugin details, some context: my project plan template is a simplified version of the engineering problem-solving process. Here's the design.

This article starts walking through and example of How I use my Where Not What Second Brain.

How progressive summarization can help your notes become more valuable over time.

This is the best place to start to learn more about my Where Not What System.

This post takes a look at how I implement the Zettelkasten method for linking your thinking.

PARA organizes for productivity; Zettelkasten organizes for discovery and insight. Here's why I combined the two schools of personal knowledge management, and how they fit.

Managing an adult-ADHD life, I've found huge value in the Daily Note. The brain is an association engine, not a filing cabinet — and 'what happened when' is a superpower.

We overestimate what we can do in a day and underestimate a year. A simple Google Sheets 'year at a glance' calendar to lay the whole year out and actually plan it.

The tools for juggling time, tasks, and the \"things\" that make up our daily lives.

The words we use to describe our goals quietly shape how we reach them. Why leaders unconsciously speak their real priorities — and how isolationist language misleads us.

The companies that have a strategy to develop the generation of people who have never been on a team will capture an enormous advantage.

A new breed of engaging cooperative video games can help your team work together better, because they get to practice achieving a common goal.

In our goal obsessed culture, elevating the roles we play can help restore work life balance.

Using Zettelkasten numbers to make your file names unique opens the door to linking your thinking in powerful ways. In this article I share the method and a template I use.

Instead of organizing files by type Think GRIT - Goals, Roles, Interests, and Treasures. This handy acronym can help guide how you organize your work for outcome.

My hunt for a note-taking system that bridges the analog and digital worlds led me to the reMarkable tablet. Here's why it finally won me over from pen and paper.

💎 Begin keeping a daily note to harness the power of a personal knowledge management system. 🤔 Why it Matters: People get overwhelmed at the idea of…

The Key Idea Instead of turning to your phones at dinner, try playing a fun social game to create connection. Why It Matters Smart phones are brutally…

Exploring Digital Systems and the Benefits of Notability Today, I want to delve into digital systems that mimic the experience of writing on paper. From a…

Sketchnoting is another form of journaling that is fun and creative. Bring your notes to life with a few simple colors and some lines.

Bullet journaling offers a path between unstructured and structured journaling systems.

Today I'm going to give a quick overview of two of my favorite structured journals.

Beyond morning pages lies a more therapeutic form of journaling — one that's helped me navigate shame, regret, and memories hard to let go. When to reach for expressive journaling.

If you want to start building a Second Brain with obsidian, you can start right here. Stop trying to remember everything. Know where to go, to find what you need to know.

If you're new to journaling or looking for a simple starting point, let me introduce Julia Cameron's Morning Pages technique.

Personal knowledge management is so broad it's hard to know where to begin. So I start with principles: understand the problem first, then the solution — the grounding idea behind Where Not What.

A friend of mine recently asked me to a \"Cheat Sheet\" for setting up an Obsidian Vault the way that I recommend for Personal Knowledge Management. This blog post is the result of that request.

What's the big deal about putting pen to paper? Let me tell you, my friend, there's more to it than meets the eye.

I’d like to share a journey with you, a personal voyage I embarked upon over a decade ago. This journey of self-discovery lead to the development of my current Personal Knowledge Management system.

Most people expect task managers to make them more productive. I have seen people use task managers (like Todoist) to hold notes. But it never really…

I've tried a lot of productivity systems. I did my best to love GTD but ultimately it did not work for me. However, three things have stuck with me and I use them almost daily.

Here's a technical tip on how to create your own custom obsidian callouts using the css snippet file. I used this to create an idea callout in Obsidian.

A day of Spanish class in Mexico City, and a teacher's clever trick: when using a translator, start in Spanish, not English, until the meaning lands.

When we organize information for time, there are three buckets, Now, Soon, and Someday. Let's explore the first. 0:00/1×

In this video, I introduce the idea of organizing your information by WHEN you need to use them. 0:00/1×

I've started a video series to share what I have learned about Personal Knowledge Management. I will also be posting the videos here. Each video is about…

At every level of baseball I coached, I assessed the players in relation to the skills they possessed and the skills they needed. My goal was never to…

The Impact of Uncertainty Last month, I mentioned Urgency, the pressure to perform now, and how that can negatively affect performance. Urgency evil twin…

I love Will Guidara's advice to new managers, \"don't cannonball\". I realize people want to make a good impression, and prove their value, however to me…

This is Part 4 of My LinkedIn Series: Leadership Lessons from Little League As little league manager, I become the repository of knowledge about the game.…

Maya Angelou famously said, \"When we know better, we do better.\" In other words, improving our knowledge can lead to better outcomes in life. This article…

Understanding Urgency A sense of urgency is an interesting phenomenon. It turns out there is an optimal amount of stress we need to achieve high…

This is Part 3 of My LinkedIn Series: Leadership Lessons from Little League Baseball is interesting because players of all shapes and sizes can play any…

At the beginning of 2023 I started to post more long-form content. After a year of sharing quotes and insights from books I'm reading, I decided to share…

Video games are the pinnacle of designed engagement — they look like work, yet kids can't put them down. What could that teach us about designing real jobs?

Simon Sinek made finding your 'why' a sensation. But I once worked for a company whose only stated purpose was maximizing shareholder profit. Don't lose the person.

This is the second article in my LinkedIn series on Leadership Lessons from Little League.

About 15 years ago, the president of the Tempe Little League invited me to coach my son's Tee Ball team. A few years later, I started GameTruck, Left…

Walk into a GameTruck game theater and a wall of color and sound hits you. The games that have earned their place on our screens — and why they land with players.

'How did you think of GameTruck?' People experience it in the exact opposite order I invented it. Here's the real story of the idea behind the big box.

A big reason to start an esports program is exposing more kids to coaches and mentors. Establishing a just cause is what orients the whole program toward doing the right thing.

After eight weeks writing about Google's Project Oxygen management skills, I found the ingredient the list leaves out — the one that ties all the rest together.

The sixth skill of a connected leader: helping your team grow their careers. Great employees look for managers who invest in where they're headed.

Coach, mentor, teacher — the words get tossed around a lot. Here's how I define each, and why great esports coaching is really about being process-focused.

I thought a 76 sounded like a C. Then I learned Net Promoter isn't measuring satisfaction — it measures word of mouth, and that is brutally hard to earn.

Building healthy esports communities turns out to look a lot like building healthy work teams. Here are three things that reliably reduce a team's anxiety.

Coaching experience from traditional sports translates well to esports. Here's my model for helping a player develop to their maximum potential, individually and as a team.

Fifteen years of GameTruck parties taught me this: renting video games is easy, but that's not what people buy. They're buying a memory worth cherishing.

Solve one problem in a game and you earn a harder one. That's not discouraging — it's the point. What games reveal about motivation and the infinite game.

'Winning isn't everything, it's the only thing.' We all know the quote. But evenly matched contests are rare — so what is actually better than winning?

People think they're buying the cool GameTruck trailer. They're not — they're buying an effect. What a great Game Coach actually delivers, and why it matters.

The Power of Balance Did you know that humans can not see combinations of Red and Green? According to opponent processing theory, our eyes are set up in a…

After explaining Discord to clients one too many times, I wrote the primer. Not a tutorial — the professional case for why you want to get on Discord now.

2020 brought a surprise: booming demand for laser tag. Parents wanted their kids out of the house — a throwback to when we played outside until the streetlights came on.

How Connection Affects Work From Home Teams According to the reading I had done, psychological safety was supposed to be just as impactful on remote teams…

Picture a sixteen-foot LED wall, every console crowded, a coach in a blue shirt. That's what building real community engagement into an esports event looks like.

Playing video games with your kid is a chance to build a bridge to their future. Here's what you might be missing by sitting the next round out.

2020 taught everyone how to pivot. Watching two companies navigate that storm showed me how Connected Leadership is what actually unlocks a team's resilience.

Industries are made of people grouped into organizations. Here's the tangle of players — publishers, pro teams, streamers, sponsors — that make up esports.

Twitch turned watching other people play games into a phenomenon. A look at how live game streaming grew — and why it sits at the center of esports.

Single-player or team-based? Like golf versus soccer, that one distinction shapes how esports games build recognition, rivalries, and community.

Which games actually count as esports? Viewed from the angle of an organization trying to grow a community, they sort into three clear categories.

Is poker a sport? Working through that question reveals what actually makes esports a sport — and why betting and randomness disqualify some games.

Three macro-trends — cheap global internet, streaming, and team-based games — combined to turn competitive gaming into the billion-dollar industry it is today.

Real-time strategy games weren't the only draw — shooters and fighting games grew the audience too, until a $1.6M prize pool redrew what seemed possible.

The modern esports scene was born where South Korea met Blizzard, when fans built a custom map called DotA and, with it, an entirely new genre.

South Korea sparked the modern esports revolution — tiny apartments, blazing internet, and StarCraft turned internet cafes into a national pastime.

To understand esports today, I like to start at the beginning and trace cause and effect forward. Welcome to another week of industry observations.

Esports is like track and field — not one game but many. To understand the industry, start with the fundamentals: what turns a competition into a business?

Esports isn't one game — it's many, like track and field. How game publishers quietly turned video game competitions into a stadium-filling industry.