If I could sit down with myself in 2020 and talk straight for an hour, most of it would be about what not to spend time on. Here’s the short version.

Nobody actually believes the shoes are the secret. But we talk about the shoes anyway, and maybe that’s not as shallow as it sounds.

Every other decision you make comes with an exit ramp. Tattoos don’t. That asymmetry turns out to be more instructive than any productivity system I’ve ever tried.

Most IT careers are a highlight reel of jobs hopped and titles climbed. Mine is a long, unbroken view from one window, and that turns out to be worth something nobody talks about.

The 2021 Braves were 44-45 at the All-Star break and I had already mentally moved on. That was a mistake I’ve been making my whole life, and apparently baseball had to be the thing to finally break the habit.

Somewhere between my first Exchange server and my fourteenth PowerShell script, I lost sight of the fact that there’s a whole other version of me that would have been happier moving dirt for a living.

I sat in that execution chamber and watched the man who killed my brother die, and I still don’t have a word for what I felt. Closure wasn’t it.

Nobody writes songs about the days the fish didn’t bite. But those are the days that actually teach you something — if you’re paying attention to the right thing.

The infrastructure under every major tech company’s feet was built by volunteers, academics, and stubborn nerds who didn’t ask for a press release. The companies just showed up later with a logo.

I stopped hoping for a clean ninth inning somewhere around 2023. What replaced it was something more useful than hope.