Writings

I’ve been continuing to put my efforts towards seeing more toilets rolled out to those effected by the February earthquakes. In that process, there has been a surprising amount of managerial work that has needed to be done. First, beyond the obvious stuff of bringing the materials to be able to physically build these toilets into the earthquake zone (which was a project itself), we needed to create a poster with instructions on it so people could learn how to use these toilets safely and effectively....

It’s easy for us to get caught up trying to constantly deal with the deluge of problems we face day-to-day, putting out each fire as it arises. There are times where that “always on” mode of dealing with problems is indeed necessary. But it seems to me that the problems we face day-to-day are many times the direct results of different up-stream problems that we don’t always recognize. These are problems that cause other problems....

After the utterly tragic earthquakes in Türkiye and Syria on February 6th of this year, my friends and I have been doing our best to help those affected. We’re just a small group, so we can’t help at the scale that big NGOs with millions of dollars of funding can do. But, we do speak Turkish, and we have been on the ground with people affected. So, we have been able to get to know people’s situations a little more one-on-one and personally than some big international organizations might be able to do....

When everything appears to be working well, the most important question to ask is: “What could make this break?” But, when everything seems to be broken, the most important question to ask is: “What needs to happen to make this work?”

I listened to a talk today that reminded me of a valuable piece of wisdom I heard years ago, which I thought was worth pondering and sharing. The talk told the story of Bill Atkinson, who was a designer and developer at Apple throughout the 1980’s. He was responsible for an innovation that has made its way to billions of computers around the world. A quick summary of that story:...

It seems like every year we get more stressed, more scatter-brained, need more exercise and less screen-time. At least, that seems true for myself. So I wonder, what would it be like if there were a remedy to all that, which, in one single action could reduce your stress, clear your mind, give you some enjoyable exercise, and get you away from your screen, all while probably making you live longer and lowering your risk of chronic disease?...

There was a lot to be pessimistic about regarding cars 120+ years ago. 🚗 They were expensive. They were incredibly unreliable, needing repair on a sometimes daily basis. And roads good enough to drive on were exceedingly rare. There was little a car could offer you that a good horse couldn’t do much better. 🐎 Looking back on that time from today, the transition to primarily automobile-based transportation seems more-or-less inevitable....

I find myself holding a couple aspirations in increasing value as the years go on: The first of these is the minimizing of “noise” — of distraction, of clutter, and of that which fruitlessly wastes attention. The other is the maximizing of “signal” — those rich and value-filled experiences, learning opportunities, content, and relationships. Pursuing these seem to be more and more challenging every year, but yet also more and more rewarding....

Have you ever thought about what in your life makes you hopeful? Or, what saps your hope? I realized recently that my mental health often appears to be pretty tightly tied to how hopeful I feel in a given season. That seems significant. It means stewarding hope and stewarding hopefulness is much more important than I’ve tended to give space for. Churchill’s words resonate. So, it’s worth asking “what fills your hope-meter?...

I’ve always tended to like math more than the average person. I was less a fan of arithmetic — the labour intensive process of adding, subtracting, multiplying, or dividing our way to an answer to a question that a calculator could figure out instantly. More so, I’ve tended to find myself intrigued by the tools that math gives us to help us understand the world better. Sometimes that involves making use of arithmetic, but often it can simply mean applying ideas from the world of math in order to make better sense of the world, or to help us make better decisions....