Principles

Every time you drive past a license plate reader, walk by a Ring camera, or carry your phone into a room, you’re producing exhaust. Not the kind you choose to share. Not a social media post or an email or a photo you uploaded. This is the byproduct of simply existing in 2026. A friend called it “digital exhaust,” and the metaphor is almost too good. Car exhaust isn’t a decision. It’s a consequence of going somewhere. You don’t think about the fumes trailing behind you. You’re focused on the road ahead. ...

Five Guys fills your fry cup, drops it in the bag, then scoops another ladle on top. The generosity is staged so you witness it. Jerry Murrell didn’t give customers more fries. He gave them the same fries in a way that felt like more. The question a friend posed: is there an auction industry version of this? Can a business with two customer types (sellers who want maximum return, buyers who want fair access) create a single “fries” moment that lands for both? ...

PJ Fleck has “This too shall pass” tattooed on his Achilles. It’s not just the downs that shall pass, but also the ups. Source: PJ Fleck interview on the Next Up podcast. We autopsy our losses but toast our wins. Both deserve the same scrutiny. “This too shall pass” is almost always deployed as comfort during hard times. Fleck flips it: the highs are temporary too. That reframes the phrase from passive reassurance into active urgency. ...

Why suffering alone isn’t wisdom, and what turns it into one The car was a Mercury Topaz we called the Blue Bomber. The bumper was duct-taped on and wood-screwed to the body. The radio didn’t work. This was before modern cell phones, so there was no workaround, no Bluetooth, no podcast, no Spotify queue to fill the silence. I was in my twenties, and I drove that car ninety minutes each way between my place and my parents’ house. An hour and a half of nothing but the windshield, the road, and whatever was in my head. ...

Two ingredients turn a valley into wisdom, and without either one, the transformation doesn’t happen: The valley, a forced constraint you can’t opt out of. Not chosen hardship, but imposed limitation that strips away distraction and makes you sit with yourself. The namer, someone who helps you see what the valley built in you. Without the namer, the valley is just suffering you survived. With the namer, it becomes the origin story of a capacity you didn’t know you had. The principle is recursive: even the namer needs a namer. The person who helps others see what their valleys built still needs someone to reflect that role back to them. ...

Why you’re accountable for warning, not for results, and why silence isn’t neutral Ezekiel was a priest with no temple to serve in. He was thirty years old, living in exile by a canal in Babylon, watching his homeland crumble from a distance. The first wave of exiles had been taken in 597 BC. Jerusalem hadn’t fallen yet, but it would. His purpose had been stripped away. And then God showed up, not in the holy place, but in enemy territory. ...

Why the obvious hides in plain sight The Chinese surveillance balloons floated across American airspace for years before anyone noticed. Not because we lacked sensors. Not because we lacked data. The U.S. defense system collects more information than any surveillance apparatus in human history. The balloons went undetected because of something far more dangerous than technological failure: we weren’t looking for them. I heard this story recently on the Jordan B. Peterson podcast from Garry Nolan, a Stanford immunologist who’s become one of the more credible scientific voices in UAP research. He explained how our defense sensors are programmed to filter for known threat signatures (rockets, planes, missiles). Everything else gets discarded immediately as noise. The system processes what it expects and throws away what it doesn’t. ...

What we forgot when we called ourselves civilized The largest contiguous empire in human history was built by people we call barbarians. Twenty-four million square kilometers. More land than Rome, more than Britain at its peak, more than any empire before or since. Built in a single generation by a man who started with nothing, no army, no wealth, no political connections. Just a mother who dug roots to keep him alive and a wife who told him to stop following and start leading. ...

Why collecting wisdom is easier than applying it I’ve been noticing something uncomfortable about my own thinking lately. I collect principles like they’re going to save me. Framework after framework, insight after insight, all carefully documented with proper attribution and cross-references. Ray Dalio on historical cycles. Charlie Munger on market selection. Larry Page on 10x thinking. Jimmy Carr on boredom and insight. The collection grows. The application lags. This isn’t writer’s block or procrastination in the traditional sense. It’s something more insidious: epistemic displacement. I’m replacing the hard work of doing with the comfortable work of knowing. ...

Why “we’ve seen this before” is the laziest thing you can say History doesn’t repeat itself. It rhymes. That’s not a cute saying. It’s the difference between someone who files a situation under “seen it” and moves on, versus someone who does the actual work of figuring out what’s the same, what’s different, and why it matters this time. Most people stop at the first version. It feels smart. It’s not. ...