The fastest learning curve of my career came from going slowly.
The journal · Theme
Learning & habits
How fluency actually gets built, one structured hour at a time. 18 essays, newest first.
I wasn’t wrong about measuring Return on Inference. I was too early.
Before you measure what AI gives you, measure whether people are using it enough to become fluent.
The Flywheel Effect of Structured Learning
Why deliberate learning compounds differently from everything else we consume.
What the Hell Is an .md File, Anyway?
Opening PowerPoint decides the shape of your thinking before you've done any. A plain-text source layer keeps the thinking intact, so it can be rendered for any audience.
AI closes the gap between junior and senior output while the gap in judgment stays open. Use it as scaffolding, or the pipeline of experienced people runs dry.
Work is moving to a 40/20/40 split, with judgment at both ends and the machine in the middle. Feeling like the bottleneck is correct: you are what stops confident mediocrity.
It's Just Like Paris. How I tamed my Impostor Syndrome.
Calling the feeling of being new impostor syndrome turns it into a condition. A Paris Metro map taught me to read the same feeling as the start of an adventure.
Notes from My Workshop at Spikes Asia: The Experience Gap in AI Filmmaking
A show of hands at Spikes Asia: most people learning AI filmmaking have never been on a set. The craft they're missing is what makes the tools useful.
Bad Work Is Fine. Public Bad Work Is Not.
Slop isn't new. What's new is that first drafts now go straight to the public, and taste depends on knowing what to keep in the drawer.
Why I’m Giving Away One of the Most Valuable Things I Use
Why I’m Taking the Cannes Lions Creative MBA (Even Though I’ve Been Critical of Cannes)
I've been hard on Cannes for years. I enrolled anyway, to see how creative excellence is being redefined and how learning gets built to last.
Teach Them What Good Looks Like
A question at a Google workshop: how do juniors build judgment without thirty years of experience? Teach them standards, because most organizations only teach them metrics.
To Question Is to Answer: The Missing Skill in the Age of AI
AI reflects the thinking you bring to it. The book started from that idea: the quality of your questions matters more than the craft of your prompts.
Ghosts in My Notebooks, 0 to 1 thinking, and how I have moved past these.
Most of my ideas used to die as fragments in notebooks. Now I use AI to push each one far enough to judge whether it deserves to live.
Let Go. Hold On. Get Trained. Move Forward.
How to build an AI-first creative culture without losing your soul.
The Power of Optimism and Generosity: A Personal Perspective
I stopped doing optimism and generosity by halves and started giving away my time and AI know-how freely. It turns out to be a very selfish virtue.
My (continued) advice to those over 50. Strategies for Continuous Growth and Relevance
Fifty is the new mid-career. My playbook for staying relevant past it: structured learning, becoming an expert generalist, pruning your network, and protecting real conversation.
The Epilogue Economy: How Harnessing the Wisdom of Older Professionals Can Transform Your Business
Mentorship, knowledge transfer and reverse mentoring turn experienced people into the source of an organization's resilience. Fractional work gives them new ways in.