Month: April 2026

I Used to Think This Was Nonsense. I Was Wrong.

I used to roll my eyes at this. “Put good energy out there.” “The universe is listening.” It felt like something people said when they didn’t want to deal with reality.

I was wrong.

I don’t know exactly how it works. I don’t have a formula for it. But I’ve lived it enough times now to say this with complete confidence: what you put out into the universe, the universe picks up. It’s not mystical. It functions more like a law, the way gravity functions like a law. You don’t have to understand the physics for it to apply to you.

And it goes both ways. Put out cynicism, doubt, resentment, the quiet belief that things won’t work out — and watch how the world arranges itself to confirm that for you. Put out genuine optimism, clear intention, the belief that something good is possible — and watch how differently things start to unfold. The universe isn’t playing favorites. It’s just listening.

The part I’m still working on is the timing.

This is where most people get tripped up, including me. You put something out there, you believe in it, you want it to happen, and then… nothing. Or not yet. And that gap between the intention and the result is where doubt creeps in.

But I’ve come to think the timing isn’t ours to decide. The universe is working with variables you can’t see. Other people’s paths. Other events that need to happen first. A sequence of things falling into place that you’re not positioned to track from where you’re standing. The timing makes sense to something bigger than your current vantage point.

So you put it out there. You trust it. And you don’t dictate the when.

That’s the part that takes the most practice. But the rest — that it works — I’m certain of.

Your Words Are Your Code Now

Most people think the AI era is going to reward engineers and data scientists. I’d argue the opposite is becoming true.

The people who are going to thrive are the ones who can think clearly and express themselves precisely. Not because of some abstract virtue, but because of a very practical reality: AI does exactly what you tell it to. The better you are at articulating what you want, the better the output. It’s that simple.

This makes English (real command of it, not just functional literacy) one of the most valuable skills you can develop right now. Not English as a language. English as a tool for thinking. For structuring a problem. For communicating intent with enough precision that even a machine can execute on it well.

We spent decades telling philosophy and communications majors they’d picked the wrong degree. That the future belonged to STEM. That’s being proven wrong in real time. The people who studied how to argue a point, how to analyze meaning, how to construct an idea with creativity and nuance, they have an edge now that wasn’t visible ten years ago. And it’s only going to grow.

This isn’t a niche observation for knowledge workers or executives. It applies across the board. If you’re a student choosing a major, a professional mid-career wondering what to sharpen, or someone who never thought of writing and communication as a skill worth investing in, this is the moment to reconsider.

AI is a force multiplier. But a multiplier needs something to multiply. Your ability to think clearly and express precisely is what gets multiplied. If that ability is weak, AI makes you mediocre faster. If it’s strong, you can literally build solutions that used to require entire teams.

Get good with words. It’s one of the best investments you can make right now.

Have You Tried Turning Yourself Off and On Again?

Every IT technician has the same first question. Before they look at anything, before they run diagnostics, before they even ask what’s wrong — “Have you tried turning it off and on again?”

And it works. Almost embarrassingly often, it works.

We accept this without question for our devices. Overheating laptop? Reboot. Frozen phone? Hold the button, restart. We know that a system running too hot, too long, without a reset — eventually stops functioning the way it should.

So why don’t we apply this to ourselves?

When we’re exhausted, running on fumes, pushing through back-to-back days — we don’t unplug. We caffeinate. We push harder. We schedule a vacation six months out and tell ourselves we’ll rest then. Meanwhile the system is overheating.

The unplug doesn’t have to be a two-week holiday. It can be twenty minutes. A walk. A nap. A genuine laugh with someone you like. Play that has no productive outcome whatsoever. Meditation. Sitting outside without your phone. Whatever “off” looks like for you.

The point is the wait. The actual pause before you re-engage. Not a five-second restart — a real one.

Computers don’t feel guilty about rebooting. They don’t apologize for needing a reset. They just do it, come back cleaner, and work better.

You already know this works. You just need to apply it to the most important system you’re running.

You Don’t Find Yourself — You Uncover Yourself

People talk about “finding themselves” as if the self is somewhere out there, waiting to be discovered. A new city, a new career, a new relationship — and maybe that’s where the answer lives.

But I don’t think it works that way.

All of it — meditation, spirituality, sitting quietly with nothing to do and nowhere to be, genuine reflection — what it’s actually doing is removing dust. That’s it. The dust of other people’s expectations. The dust of habits you picked up without choosing them. The dust of noise that’s been accumulating since you were old enough to be told who you should be.

The self underneath isn’t lost. It’s just covered.

When you sit still long enough, when you stop performing and planning and reacting — something becomes clearer. Not a revelation from the outside. Something from the inside that was already there. Your actual perspective on things. What genuinely matters to you, not what you’ve been told should matter. The particular way you see the world that no one else quite sees the same way.

That’s your truth. And it was never missing.

The reason practices like meditation feel profound isn’t because they add anything. It’s because they subtract. Less noise, less reactivity, less borrowed identity — and gradually, you start to see yourself more accurately. Your real strengths. Your actual values. What you bring to the world that’s genuinely yours.

The truth is within. It always has been. It just needs clarity to surface — and clarity doesn’t come from doing more. It comes from pausing long enough to let the dust settle.

Why One Waymo Accident Feels Worse Than a Thousand Human Ones

When a Waymo car gets into an accident, the whole fleet goes on trial. Every self-driving car is suddenly suspect. Every algorithm gets questioned. The incident becomes a referendum on whether autonomous vehicles should exist at all.

When a human driver causes an accident — and tens of thousands do, every day — it’s that person’s fault. Not humanity’s. Not the auto industry’s. Not every other driver on the road. Just that one individual who made a mistake, had a bad day, or was distracted for a moment.

Think about what that actually means. If autonomous vehicles caused one accident for every thousand human accidents, they’d still be considered the dangerous ones. The math doesn’t matter. The optics do. And the optics are that Waymo is a single entity — a company, a system, a hive — while humans are individuals. We extend grace to individuals. We don’t extend it to corporations or machines.

This isn’t entirely irrational. It’s just the way human psychology works. We’ve always judged collective systems more harshly than individuals. We expect institutions to be perfect in a way we’d never expect of a person. And when they’re not, we feel betrayed.

But here’s what this means going forward: this same dynamic is going to follow AI everywhere. Every AI-generated mistake will be treated as evidence of a systemic flaw. Every autonomous system that fails will trigger calls to slow down, roll back, reconsider. The human equivalent — which happens far more often and far more severely — will keep being absorbed as normal, expected, just the cost of being alive.

It’s not fair. It’s also not going away. Anyone building or deploying autonomous systems needs to understand this. The bar isn’t “better than humans.” The bar is “nearly perfect, all the time, with no exceptions.” That’s a hard bar. But it’s the real one.

Meditating on a Decision Is Not the Same as Thinking About It

For most of my life, when someone said “I need to meditate on that,” I assumed it was just a fancy way of saying they needed more time to think. Same thing, different words.

It’s not the same thing at all.

Thinking is an active process. You weigh options, run scenarios, argue with yourself, look for evidence. It’s useful when there’s a right answer that logic can uncover. But a lot of the decisions we actually struggle with aren’t like that. Whether to leave a job, end a relationship, take a leap on something unproven — these aren’t math problems. They’re gut problems.

And your gut doesn’t respond well to being cross-examined.

That’s where meditation comes in — not as a productivity hack or a stress reliever, but as a way to go inward. To stop the noise long enough for something deeper to surface. The answers to those kinds of decisions are already inside you. They’re just buried under anxiety, second-guessing, and the pressure to be rational about everything.

When you meditate on a decision, you’re not analyzing it. You’re releasing it. You’re creating the quiet that lets the right answer come forward on its own.

There’s a reason people with great instincts — experienced leaders, wise elders, anyone you’d describe as having good judgment — tend not to rush their decisions. They sit with things. They let clarity come to them rather than hunting it down.

So the next time you’re stuck on something that isn’t a factual question — something that comes down to who you are and what you actually want — try not to think about it. Meditate on it instead. Get still, get quiet, and trust that what you need to know is already in there.

It usually is.