A taxi driver in Hiroshima praised three words of my Japanese. One of them was a particle. It took twenty years to understand that the compliment was a gate — and that it escalates in three predictable stages, each one the assumption defending itself harder. Those same three stages now greet anything a machine writes.
Read the essay →The FAA has a rule that sounds bureaucratic and isn't: being able to fly an airplane doesn't qualify you to teach it. The teaching credential is a catalog of failure modes. Twenty-five years of learning this trade alone, with no journeyman above me, made me the most dangerous kind of instructor — the one whose scar tissue looks like technique.
Read the essay →A neighbor with a trust fund who only worked when he wanted turntables. A hundred and twenty books read for a dollar apiece, not one of them remembered. A chore app that taught my own kids to price their labor and decline. Above the floor, money stops being a lever — and the two oldest tools any manager reaches for both hide the only thing worth knowing.
Read the essay →A friend fed my words into a chatbot and it came back with a verdict: intellectual intimidation, gaslighting, a case built against me from a message that meant exactly what it said. The machine spends a bottomless good faith on whoever’s in the chair, and none at all on the person being described. A note on what that costs the people we love — and why the only fix is to put the phone down and ask.
Read the note →Inc. Best Workplaces came out this week. Indevtech made it for the second year running — and once again, the only Hawaii company on the list. A note on the new hire who took a support call on her third day, the COO’s project that made it possible, and the question the second time forces that the first time lets you wave off.
Read the note →Erin Lopez’s mainland sales training said: if a prospect says they’re fine, call them back in two weeks. They’ll have forgotten about you. Eight weeks in, she finally called one back and got six words that started the Aloha Sales Playbook. A piece on what sales looks like in a market where everyone knows someone who went to school with you.
Read the note →There’s a new question on the cyber liability renewal: do you have a written AI usage policy? More than one CFO has answered “N/A, we prohibit it” — and believed it. But Scott has remoted into enough screens to know what’s actually open next to the Outlook tab. The prohibition didn’t stop the work; it just moved it somewhere nobody’s looking. The one party who can see the gap is the one party professionally bound not to mention it.
Read the note →On a Friday night in Japan, mid-vacation, my phone buzzed with a text from one of our sales reps. I sat down to write one document under pressure. I walked away three days later with seven artifacts and a system. Here's the math behind that cascade, the one condition it requires, and a personal guarantee about what one hour a day will do.
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