Month: July 2025

Posted on

Money and Other Stuff

Last week I mentioned some conversations I had last week. One of them was a situation where a friend had a decision to make about two separate positions at different companies. In terms of comp package they were the same. My response?

“Well now that money isn’t the issue you have to decide why you would want to do one or the other.” Many aren’t as fortunate as my friend to be thrown into turmoil because suddenly the decision isn’t about income. If you ever have a moment like that, it’s odd in it’s ability to cause turmoil rather than peace. That’s usually because most of us aren’t clear on why we’re working beyond the paycheck. It’s healthy to have that level of clarity though. It’s actually what will produce your best work.

What is your why and how did you get clarity about that?

Posted on

Wants, Relationships, Work

I had 4 separate conversations this past week with different individuals where the subject of clarifying your wants so that you can state them in a clear way came up as a subject of conversation.

1 was with an employee and 3 were through personal relationships
1 was on the subject of a personal desire and 3 were related to career drivers

The mix of the foundational why for my relationship with each person as it relates to the subject matter we were discussing was certainly not a direct correlation towards a hard lined stance of work and personal life.

The issue is that compartmentalizing your work and personal life isn’t clean and if you work to make it extremely clean it might not be healthy or useful. It’s not that they’re the same thing, it’s that they draw a tension for you to manage when deciding your use of time and activities.
e.g. If I use my angry work voice with a staff member they’re going to carry that home to their families and if a staff member’s 2 year old cries in their ear all night they’re going to com into work tired the next morning.

It helps me to be aware that those around me have other things happening beyond what I can see. I have a note in front of me at my desk to remind me of this. I’m curious how others keep this reality in front of them. What have you done as your reminder? I’m curious to learn.

Posted on

In and Out of The Box with Others

I keep finding this common thought as I interact with growing organizations. Everyone feels dumped on by other teams. It’s not necessarily a true thought. In fact, 99% of the time I find it’s not true at all after asking a few more questions on the subject. It’s generally a lot of hardworking smart people, with limited visibility, who are trying to do the right thing.

The trick is to have empathy and ask good questions from a generally curious posture. When you assume the best in others it’s easier to do this. That is what gets you to the point of understanding why something is happening. You can walk away with understanding and possibly even have knowledge about how to change the situation and add value for, not only your team, but also other teams.

A few quick principles here:
-When there’s a gap from someone’s actions, assume the best
-Stay curious and ask questions
-Sharing your perspective if it helps the other person or increases the other person’s view

How’s this going? Anyone else need a reset about those around them after feeling dumped on?

Posted on

Nerdy AI Post

Nerdy AI Post. I’ve always thought the best way to talk about anything is to at least understand it well enough that you might do it. Doesn’t mean you have to be the best, but you should at least know how all the dots connect.

I had some spare time recently, and have been wanting to grow my understanding of the underlying stack to get a to a GPT Chat Screen so I worked towards the install. In that address the 127.0.0.1 address means this is an GPT Chat running locally on the computer. Was an enlightening task that not only required me to learn more about models, but also about containerization. The other odd thing I did, was actually point this to an Intel i7 to really see what the performance hit is. Now I know. You DO NOT want to run this on an i7 ever. This is why everyone uses GPUs.

If you want to know something, sometimes the lowest cost option to get there is to simply roll up your sleeves and play for an afternoon.

Like if you agree. Comment if you want to change my mind.

Posted on

July 5th

Happy 5th! I didn’t post yesterday since everyone else seemed to and I enjoyed simply spending time with my people.
Started the day with a run though and it gave me some thoughts. There are plenty of places where simply being able to go about my day in peace like that isn’t possible. All the technical advancements that enabled that run (moisture wicking clothes, lighter shoes, Strava) would arguably not be here if it weren’t for the advent of our nation and the attitude we carry around pioneering, innovation, and work.

There are trade-offs/costs to it and there are plenty who will rave about other parts of the world’s choice towards less work days, social needs outweighing our own individualist tendencies, etc. There’s truth to that, we get to choose what to opt in and out of and the value that gives us. I will say that those models of living are also not the ones that gave us the benefits we have today.

So here’s to July 5th. The day after the celebration. The day we get to go back to what we celebrated and are priviledged to participate in. The day we get to go back, innovate, push further towards a preferred future.

Let’s go!