Empowering

Kurt, Dave and Chris:

First let me apologize for taking a couple of days to put this outline together. When I spoke to Kurt I was in the middle of making a Fugazi album1, but I thought I would have a day or so between records to sort everything out. My schedule changed unexpectedly, and this is the first moment I've had to go through it all. Apology

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Confessions of a bottleneck. And my plan to change that.

Note to team from today.

My job is to help you do the best work you’ve ever done.

Not the most work you’ve ever done.

My job is not to make you tired or stressed;

My job is to keep you out of meetings;

My job is to keep you away from your inbox.

To do the best work you have ever done, you must wor... See more

Our inbox teaches us to fractionalise our attention.

• Our phone teaches us to fractionalise our attention.

• Social media teaches us to fractionalise our attention.

Unless we learn to focus for long periods of time on the problems we are trying to solve, we will live a life without ever doing our best work.

But here's the thing: being able to say, "wherever you get your podcasts" is a radical statement . Because what it represents is the triumph of exactly the kind of technology that's supposed to be impossible: open, empowering tech that's not owned by any one company, that can't be controlled by any one company, and that allows people to have owners... See more

This is the ultimate trapdoor in the hall of fame; to become a prisoner of one's own persona. The desire for recognition in an increasingly atomized world lures us to be who strangers wish us to be. And with personal development so arduous and lonely, there is ease and comfort in crowdsourcing your identity. But amid such temptations, it's worth re... See more