Hi everyone, How's your week going?   Mine has been busy, closed-door conversations with AI founders who are trying to keep the future from being swallowed by the usual giants. Big ideas. Real stakes. A quiet urgency you don’t hear on conference stages or in press releases.   In the space between those conversations, my client responsibilities, and picking up my grandkids at school. something clicked. I knew how the Shmoo Diaries needed to end Why Any of This Matters After four chapters, it's...

When You're Inside the Pattern, You Can't See the Shape This is a very Personal story.  It was written after the announcement that one of the last remaining magazine wholesalers in the United States would be closing its doors, the same company that acquired my business and where I worked during my final year in distribution. It's another way of looking at abundance and the Morgan calculation. Hi, how’s your week been?   Mine’s been a little slower than usual. Snow’s piled up outside the...

How Control Actually Works Hi, how’s your week? Mine’s? Still thinking of my Shmoo and what it actually means have the power of control. Let me recap where we are. So far as the   Pattern Comes Into Focus Chapter 1 showed how we panic when abundance appears. Chapter 2 showed how abundance gets rejected when it cannot be owned. This chapter shows how control persists through quiet calculation. None of this requires bad actors. It only requires systems that prioritize stability over...

Hi everyone, how’s your week? Mine’s been reflective. A little unsettled. That tends to happen this time of year, and it usually means I’m circling something worth paying attention to. Every so often, a story sticks with me, and I feel the need to share it because I think it's so important. This is a story I've been sitting with for a while. Last week, I introduced most of you to the Shmoo. A creature that made food, shelter, and basic needs available for free. Lasting   Abundance . No cost....

Hi everyone, how was your week? Mine’s been one of those weeks where a single idea keeps tapping you on the shoulder until you finally sit down and listen.   An idea about what happens when something essential becomes so easy and so available that it quietly changes how everything else works. That idea came from something unexpected: a cartoon character from the 1940s. A stuffed creature I brought back from ComiCon in 1984 and have had in my office ever since. Most people have never heard of...

Hi everyone, how was your week? Every year around this time, I usually do the same thing. I clear space. I open the calendar. I start sketching the next twelve months. Strategy. Priorities. What we’re building. What we’re letting go of. That rhythm used to feel grounding. This year, it felt dishonest. Looking ahead to 2026, the ground doesn’t feel stable. Technology is accelerating, not evolving. Politics and economics shift assumptions overnight. Entire professions are being rewritten while...

Hey! How was your week?   Mine has been reflective and a little uncomfortable, which is usually a sign that something useful is happening. Last week, we talked about the people who shaped our year. This week is about the work itself. Not the polished version. The real one. The parts that worked, the parts that didn’t, and what it actually cost us to learn the difference. I want to start with something simple. Some of what we believed at the beginning of the year turned out to be wrong. What...

Hi, how was your week? Mine has been one of those where I needed to get comfortable with feeling uncomfortable. And here's why:  This is the time every year when I usually take some time to build out the strategy for the next twelve months. The team maps out priorities, spots the opportunities, and decides what we want to create.   This year feels very different, almost terrifyingly so. As I look ahead to 2026, it is clear that we are in the midst of a once-in-a-lifetime transition in how we...

Hey, how was your week? Mine ended with a song and a flash of memory. Kodachrome came on the radio just as I finished my first Medium article on understanding. Paul Simon’s line hit me hard: “When I think back on all the crap I learned in high school, it’s a wonder I can think at all.” I tried telling Siri to remind me about it. She failed miserably. So I did the old-fashioned thing: I pulled over, grabbed a pen, and wrote a note to myself. It made me pause and think about what I’d been...

Hey, how was your week? Mine was... revealing. I've been thinking a lot about something I don't talk about much: my relationship with information. And how it nearly broke me. Last week, we discussed critical thinking and why we should be questioning what we're told.   But here's what I realized: before we can think critically, we have to admit something uncomfortable. We're drowning in information and starving for understanding. I know because I've been there, and I'm slowly recovering. I'M A...