The Whiteboard

Get a cheap digital tape recorder. Go on a walk with someone you want to teach about your topic of expertise. Spend half an hour explaining, in the most cogent way you can, person to person, what they might learn from you.

When you’re simply talking and walking, teaching from experience and anecdote, your best voice arrives.

Go ahead and transcribe... See more

We are all agents within a complex adaptive system, and we’re systems ourselves. so we might as well get good at it.

The best advice doesn’t come as a barrage of statements but rather from a series of questions, asked by someone playing devil’s advocate. Rarely will an advisor know more than you do about your domain of expertise but that doesn’t mean an outside voice is useless. Pointed questions force you to defend your choices. A healthy debate challenges your

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This is why for the past eight years or so I've been maintaining a single document where I keep all my hunches: ideas for articles, speeches, software features, startups, ways of framing a chapter I know I'm going to write, even whole books. I now keep it as a Google document so I can update it from wherever I happen to be. There's no organizing... See more

People tend to overcomplicate AI, which feels right. The tech behind AI is new and complex—shouldn’t it be hard to use? Even the common term for working with AI, prompt engineering, gives the impression of hard-won technical expertise.

Here's the truth: expert AI users don't have a mysterious technical skillset you're missing. They've just developed... See more