I am at that age where my friends are getting married. This Labor Day Weekend I traveled to California to attend a dear friend’s wedding. For this one, I was invited to be one of the groomsmen. One of us was assigned the role of a videographer to document messages by each of us to…

As I finish designing an introductory course on conservation science, I cannot help but reflect on the big ideas. One of them is the inherent lesson of time: all buildings eventually decay and fall, just as we humans will all eventually decay, and if one stretches the time scale to millions of years, our planet…

Last night I had a nightmare about being persecuted by drug cartels trying to end everyone’s lives. I was in my dad’s hotel and was running away, looking for a place to hide. A place for safety. My instinct was to get to the roof and climb one of the water towers and seek shelter.…

This weekend I went to New York City to attend a club event. On Saturday, I spent the late afternoon reading at the Rose Reading Room. When the library closed, I then headed for dinner in Bryant Park. There was an event happening in the main open greenspace and it got very crowded, very quickly.…

Yesterday I went to bed late watching movies against my optimistic belief I could just go straight to bed from work and wake up by 6am. A winding down buffer of at least an hour and a half is always needed —preferably not involving screens and involving more pages. I wonder what other areas of…

Knowledge about how your colleagues do things helps you become a better colleague. It uproots mistakes from your end and saves headaches to everyone in the work ecosystem. It helps make things easier to them. It reminds me of Socrates’ insight that ignorance is the most common root for evil. Ignorance about how things work…

I admire the work of journalist Anne Applebaum. She has a knack for producing details through her reporting that are unpredictably illustrative of her arguments. She does not produce your expected narrative to fit a bucket of left wing or right wing journalism. Incisive, thoughtful, and razor-sharp. We need mode people like Anne.

The writer James Clear asks in his 3-2-1 Newsletter: Which belief once protected you, but now confines you? Reflection time. I suspect one of these is the belief that status, power, and titles will bring protection and safety. So many people fall for it. An alternative (albeit riskier) belief would be to focus on lifestyle.…

Today I was listening to a podcast on the science of sleep and how to optimize the different stages of sleep. The differences between REM sleep and deep sleep and how the first few 90min cycles restore the body while the last cycles the emotional experiences of the day. I wonder how my brain will…

I have forgotten the value of metrics in my sports performance. For the last few years, I have been solely focused on improving the baseline systems that make me show up even in the worst of days. Consistency has been achieved. Now the next step is to measure things. Recently I got a Garmin Instinct…