Josh Bowen

The best way to get a powerful person’s attention: offer to help them.

As chief of staff, I reviewed thousands of requests for Reid’s time/attention/money. It was stunning how few requesters actually offered to help him on something. Amusingly, many requests were framed as if the asking party were doing Reid a favor by giving him the opportunity to... See more

Define the user journey before you define the feature.

1. Who is the user? — How would you classify this group of people? What do they care about? What are their habits?


2. What problems do they encounter? — What do they want to achieve? What are their pain points? How do they think and behave? What evidence do we have for believing this?


3. How will they

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Writing is a lagging indicator of observation. Those who do not observe have very little to say. Writing is the act of interpreting what you've observed. Trying to make sense of it. The reason I call them "atomic units of thought" are because observations are, in and of themselves, not a thought. Instead, thoughts have to be molded together from... See more

The first step is to understand the fundamental difference between humans and AIs. We are analog, chemical beings, with emotions and feelings. Compared with machines, we think slowly—and we act too fast, failing to consider the long-term consequences of our behavior (which AI can help predict). So we should not compete with AI; we should use it. At... See more

I’d like to keep my family together and raise my boys into adults who are “publicly useful and privately happy.” Anything else is gravy.

“If you can see a thing whole,” he said, “it seems that it’s always beautiful. Planets, lives … But close up, a world’s all dirt and rocks. And day to day, life’s a hard job, you get tired, you lose the pattern. You need distance, interval. The way to see how beautiful earth is, is to see it from the moon. The way to see how beautiful life is, is... See more