The 365 Commitment

When I was young, it seemed like we were always going somewhere. I remember making the rounds with my grandfather. The hardware store owner would comment about the Sunday Service. The officer at the coffee shop would ask if Kiwanis was still happening tomrow night. Then there was Sunday School, but church extended well beyond Sunday morning. There were potlucks, youth activities, service projects...

How do you feel relaxed? This question has been with me for most of my life. I am not good at relaxing; I am one of those people who are always busy, always looking for the next thing I could be doing. A combination of being too uptight and overly ambitious, perhaps. So when my brain gets frazzled and I start slowing down mentally, I have come to recognize that I need to relax. However, what has a...

I have no idea how to work with or deal with people who view truth as merely an instrument to benefit them. Truth becomes a weapon in their arsenal, something that they can manipulate, change, and revise to fit whatever narrative best fits their current position. In political dialogue, this is called relativism, but that label is inaccurate and offers the sophist a dangerous escape route. Arguing...

Things in California have not changed much over the last few hundred years. Just like in the 1800s, Californios are still selling shovels in a gold rush. The first reported millionaire in California accumulated his fortune doing exactly that. When gold was discovered at Sutter's Mill in 1848, Samuel Brannan decided it would be a good idea to publish this discovery with great enthusiasm while simul...

Have you ever stopped to consider how you formed a particular opinion? This could be a viewpoint about conditions in an area of the world you have never visited, a conspiracy theory that you believe or do not believe, a religion you have dismissed, or a political stance that you have decided to take. What formed this opinion? The next question to consider is: How strongly do I believe this? Could...

I think we should teach young people more descriptive emotional vocabulary. Making fun of someone at that person's expense seems to be a byproduct of social media enthusiasm. To garner attention, people are constantly on patrol, looking for something they can capture and post to their account. This is especially true in the younger population that has stars in their eyes regarding the "creator eco...

As mastery increases, we tend to discount the value of capabilities that have become easy for us, forgetting that their value is determined by the difficulty they remove for others, not the difficulty they present to us. This is what I call the expertise discount. I recently saw a young person using some software to create a music track that he was recording a song to. He was so excited by his new...

I watched my daughter receive an award yesterday, one she earned through years of hard work. What struck me was how surprised she seemed by it. From her perspective, she had not done anything extraordinary. But that was precisely the point. She won because of the last three years of effort, not because of something she had done that day. The lesson was simple: perseverance pays off. My family know...

When people hear the word humility, they instantly think of someone beaten down, stripped of all pride, and suffering a great loss. Many religious people aspire to a higher ideal of becoming humble without having been forced to do so. Over the centuries, a wide variety of creative methods of "bringing a person to their knees" have been invented for this purpose. I think the error in thinking here...

I was speaking with someone who might have literally had stars in their eyes. He was glowing with enthusiasm over his newfound ability to develop complex software using an AI Coding tool. He waxed prophetic, predicting the immediate death of the software development world as we know it. This new technology was a revolution, and pretty soon, even my grandmother will be vibe coding her own SAAS tool...

The question is not: "Can I force myself to work today?" The better question is: "Will working today increase or decrease my total usefulness this week?" Many of us believe that by showing up and being present, we are at least doing something. I at least showed up is the prevailing thought in our minds. We practice presenteeism. We keep working while sick, depleted, sleep-deprived, or otherwise fu...

There is great danger in judging the value of a life from its present condition. A human life is a long trajectory, but we tend to encounter people as snapshots. We see who they are  now  and unconsciously let that moment rewrite everything that came before it. When I was in high school, my aunt and I drove around downtown, taking pictures of random people. I was trying to get on the yearbook staf...

I stood in line at a pharmacy today, waiting to check out. The self-checkout machines were down again, and the CVS pharmacy attendant was the only one working in the building. The poor woman had 1 person asking for the restroom code, 2 people frustrated because the red light was blinking above their checkout machine, several people asking for access to a locked-down product, and 10 people, includi...

My garage is currently winning. Not decisively. There has been no surrender ceremony, and I still technically control the territory, but it has established a strong defensive position. Every time I think about cleaning it, I immediately see everything that needs to be done at once: shelves that need reorganizing, tools that need homes, a collection of wasp nests that apparently believe they have p...

I came across an interesting study that demonstrates that, within a population of people being tracked, they are speaking less and less each year. The study by Pfeifer, V. A., & Mehl, M. R. (2026) found that the population of people under the age of 25 was, in fact, having fewer conversations throughout the day. This trend seems to be consistent over time. There are several reasons this matter...

If there was not enough evidence already that I am a complete geek, I found myself reading a bunch of articles published by Daniel Yon at the Uncertainty Lab at the University of London. That is right, this actually exists. There is a lab dedicated to studying the human brain's capacity to deal with uncertainty. This is a concept that has always fascinated me. I recognized this at a young age: we...

Beware of the cognitive magic pill. We used to describe these as snake oil in the last century, and in modern times they are peddled with just as much veracity. If you go on to any social platform and scroll a while, you will see them, usually because they pull at you. They offer an alluring solution to a range of your problems, all easily solved with some magic pill. A solution that requires your...

I have often pondered what art is. Creative outlets are just as much a part of human existence as eating or sleeping. Since the beginning of time, we have been expressing ourselves or trying to understand ourselves through artistic expression. Does form follow function, or does function follow form? The age-old debate. I am looking at two tape measures sitting on my desk. I was working on a projec...

Let's pretend for a moment that you could take your brain, as it is right now, copy it into a computer system, and then it suddenly becomes an advanced AI engine that you could ask questions to and get rapid responses. Would you trust it? My answer would be absolutely NO WAY. My brain is prone to taking shortcuts, embellishing facts for effect, always with a self-preservation bias, and any comment...

Believe in God or do not believe. Honestly, for the purposes of this post, that is not important. I personally believe in God, I have no qualms stating that unequivocally, but I am not writing this to convince you of anything theological. I am writing this to convince you of something far more practical. You need God. Humanity needs God. Let me explain why. Humans have a strange problem. We are wa...

The slow accumulation of incremental improvements is indeed what makes good habits so powerful. However, this process cannot be mindless. If you simply go through the motions without reinforcing in your mind what you are doing and why, the positive benefits will quickly degrade. I've often emphasized that small things matter. A single workout won't transform your life. Writing one paragraph won't...

This seems like an obvious thing to say, but I was struck by this thought when I woke up this morning and discovered that one of the systems that I had built exhausted all of its funding. When I went to check on why, I learned that the AI system that was performing the operation was stuck in a loop and had exhausted all of the credits allocated to it. The loop was silly; it was a small error that...

It has long been discussed by psychologists, theologians, and other circles that holding onto feelings of guilt is bad for your health. Carrying a heavy burden of shame around for things that you did wrong can have serious consequences in your life. The recommendation is to always seek restitution or to make apologies where possible. There is a reason why many major religions have included some fo...

There are many voices right now crying about how AI is destroying the written word. Replacing humans is a mistake for many reasons, all of which are predicting doomsday scenarios. This may or may not be true, but the evidence that I see is contrary to these predictions. What is actually happening is a significant magnification of expression, almost to an exponential scale. That seems to be the lar...

I was sitting around a conference table of people that I had just recently met. We were engaging in a business project. Those people were in business together, married, or friends for a long time. They were very much all locked into the same bubble. You could tell by how the conversations started, "Did you see that article about..." or "Wow, I cannot believe that so and so said that, what is this...