18 Apr 2025 06:01 PM
Blog categorized as Learning
What if owning your time is actually isolating you from others?
17 Apr 2025 02:16 PM
Austin Kleon's book, Show Your Work! is a small and short book, but it has had an outsized impact on me. Discovering Austin's book seemed like the literal manifestation of the quote — when the student is ready, the teacher appears — often attributed to Buddhism.
I have always leaned towards th...
13 Apr 2025 01:20 PM
A reflection on rediscovering joy through making — from IDEO workshops to lines of code to pixels on a screen.
11 Apr 2025 08:12 PM
The Problem: Pilotitis
The social sector is rife with pilots.
The phenomenon of organizations in the sector launching pilot projects but then failing to scale them is so common that there is a term for it — Pilotitis.
If you are trying something new, it does make sense to start with ...
07 Apr 2025 04:44 PM
Surprisingly, those four words are my magic escape from non-essential intellectual arguments.
As someone who is curious, I've grown comfortable with my ignorance on a variety of topics. Even in areas that interest me, I'm most excited by what I don't know.
A couple of years ago, I came across a&...
06 Apr 2025 08:00 PM
My recent post on how social change is hard — and personal change even harder — might just be a textbook example of confirmation bias.
My instant appreciation o...
05 Apr 2025 03:42 PM
I never expected social change to be easy. But in the early days of my career in the sector, I was confident that I could easily pick up the skills needed to create social change. And with my middle-class dreams of seeing the world, I imagined moving from place to place, creating meaningful cha...
04 Apr 2025 08:35 PM
Today ended up being an incredibly busy day. Now, at the end of it, I am out of steam staring at a blank Writer document — still determined to keep my commitment to publishing daily. But as the minutes pass, stress builds.
It's the kind of stress Jeff Bezos describes:...
03 Apr 2025 08:55 PM
Paul Graham's essay Maker's Schedule, Manager's Schedule is one of my all time favourites. It put into words something I had always felt but never fully articulated - to myself or my colleagues. I am a Maker....
31 Mar 2025 08:52 PM
I almost dismissed one of the best teachers I've ever met - before she even said a word.
My wife and I are on the lookout for schools for our boys. Our oldest, who is four...
30 Mar 2025 09:39 PM
I left my job as a software engineer in late 2005 to join the development sector. Almost a decade later, I made another big change in my life, I decided to start my own (social) entrepreneurial journey. One of the reasons to make this change was I felt that I was increasingly becoming part of The De...
16 Oct 2024 06:59 PM
I don’t use WhatsApp or any other social media*
I am someone who aspires to be present. I love the idea of doing one thing at a time. I crave the ability to concentrate on a task for a couple of hours, like I was able to when I still coded.
I am also easily distracted. Messaging apps and socia...
15 Oct 2024 07:01 PM