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We are not taught as kids to feel okay in the wide expanse between what we want to happen and what happens because the bigger that gap, the bigger the failure.

Yet the truth is that, while it’s important to stay on schedule if you want to get to kickboxing on time, what’s *not* remotely important is getting to kickboxing on time. It just doesn’t really matter.

There is a gap, too, between the tools that exist and the future we’re being sold. The innovation curve, we’re told, will be exponential. The paradigm, we’re cautioned, is about to shift. Regular people, we’re to believe, have little choice in the matter, especially as the computers scale up and become more powerful: We can only experience a low-grade disorientation as we shadowbox with the notion of this promised future. Meanwhile, the ChatGPTs of the world are here, foisted upon us by tech companies who insist that these tools should be useful in some way.

The Cybertruck is mostly but not entirely car-shaped. It is stiff and very gray and looks like home electronics looked when Bill Clinton was president; it is both too jankily long and too upright for its amusingly normal-sized tires, in a way that makes them look like small, cheap dress shoes. There is a lot of vertical space serving no evident purpose, and the vehicle is somehow imposing and goofy in exactly equal measure. It looks like if Hot Wheels made a VHS rewinder, or like what the cars would look like in an version of *Freejack* in which a circa-now Rob Schneider was the star. Imagine a neckroll-equipped NFL fullback from 1995 who gets himself onto a frankly risky steroid program and simultaneously stops working out and you are maybe some of the way there in terms of the proportion.

And if you keep looking further and further, it turns out, the sparkles emoji goes *all* the way back to Emoji 1.0 in 2015

There are many of you with kids younger than mine—dads who find themselves deep in what a close friend recently called The Tunnel: the place every parent remains whilst their kids are four and under; when keeping a small child alive and under control takes all that you have. Parents in The Tunnel can cycle through bliss and despair on a turnaround that would give non-parents whiplash.

now I’m paying for duplicate services, terrified that I might wipe out precious memories if I cancel one.

• It’s not ambition or skill that is going to set you apart but sanity.

The “size” of a leadership episode could be measured as a product of *stakes* and *energy.* Ie, the value of what’s at stake times the energy output rate (in the sense of Andy Grove’s idea of “high-output management”) that needs to be put in for the duration, to make something happen. Here’s the 2×2 with the resulting for BDFxing archetypes (which are transient *roles,* not personalities).

Some people tend to be more systematically curious than others. Those curious minds are generally adventurous, creative, less risk-averse, and seem to seek and enjoy exploration more than others.