Uncontroversial statement: Steven Spielberg is a pretty good director. He is good at making movies, but his genius lies in two other things he does consistently well: 1. He hires John Williams to score every film. 2. In his films, he leans into themes that resonate with the zeitgeist of the time in some way. He can see something that’s...

As a product manager, I am constantly trying to explain what exactly a product manager does (sometimes I feel like saying a PM's job responsibility is explaining what exactly they do). But the main job of a PM, the sine qua non of their job responsibilities is to understand, and speak on behalf of, the customer. The customer isn't in t...

The first note I always got in my college playwrighting class was “where’s the conflict?” This makes sense for stories. Stories without conflict lack tension, they don't build to anything, there's no mystery. There's a word for stories with no conflict: "boring." Stories are useful for communication, so it's makes sense that news repor...

Alan Watts was an American philosopher & popularizer of Buddhism and Taoism in the 1960s. I was really into him in my 20s and one thing he talked about that has stuck with me was this phrase: ““We’ve run into a cultural situation where we’ve confused the symbol with the physical reality; the money with the wealth; and the menu with the...