I’m a collector of simple phrases, mostly one-line statements of wisdom that encapsulate something important about how to live. Here are a few I carry around with me, that have shaped how I see the world.

I had this happen to me once when flying out of Memphis.

As a Gen Xer, how many times have you started typing a reply to a post, gotten halfway through, and then realized you just don’t care enough to finish it?

The process should support the work and the workers. The process isn’t the primary work.

I think this is fabulous! It shows they didn’t reject the application without review and it gives specific actionable guidance for how to resolve their concerns. If this is offensive, you really don’t want to be part of a high performing team. This kind of feedback is how you get there.

Two things can be true at the same time. The new, cool thing can be the future AND the tried and true old thing will still be around for a very long time.

Great perspective for this Sunday morning.

No one could have seen this coming.

I get why the tech outcomes drive some people insane. I’ve joined companies 12 months “too late”, and merely made a good amount of money instead of generational wealth The people who joined before me weren’t any better or smarter. They just got lucky. Just like someone looks at me and thinks I got lucky The pure randomness of it all can either drive you crazy or give you an appreciation for the role of luck. But at the end of the day you are in the driver’s seat. You choose your perspective What I have come to learn is the people who think they alone earned their accomplishments are the most unhappy. The people with gratitude for the role luck played in their success are able to keep striving for more without losing their mind They have come to acknowledge that while they can shape the world around them, and tilt the odds in their favor ever so slightly, ultimately a lot of it is out of their hands

The older I get, the more I understand why older women disappear into gardening, candles, comfy clothes, and silence.

I’m in Kentucky and need someone to explain something to me. We will throw a party when a new auto manufacturing plant is announced. And yet, we are anti-data center? I’ve toured some of the most advanced DCs in the world. They’re way less obtrusive than a car plant.

We’re getting ready to see a ton of innovation about compute efficiency. I expect a major industry breakthrough in 6-12 months.

In history class, I never understood how “advanced” civilizations could collapse. It just didn’t seem plausible. Anyway, I’ve seen enough. I get it now.

Happy Mother’s Day! If you have a mom or have kiddos and aren’t a mom there’s someone in your life to thank today! Here’s one of my favorite mom-pics of me from a couple of Easters ago!

The older I get, the more I believe happiness lives in the ordinary. Pets. Plants. A quiet morning coffee. Blue sky. Cotton clouds. Birds singing. The gentle breeze through the trees. A clean, cosy house. Good food. Good hearted simple poeple. So much of life’s beauty is quiet, gentle, and already here. And somehow, one of the sweetest feelings is knowing I get to wake up and meet it all again tomorrow.

Jensen is one the smartest and most far seeing folks the world. "If an AI scientist warns people that AI is going to permeate across radiology and radiologists are going to get wiped out, it might seem helpful but it's hurtful. If we convince everybody not to be radiologists and we now need radiologists, that actually is hurtful to society. "It is hurtful to convince all the young college graduates not to study software engineering because we are going to need more software engineers than ever. That's hurtful." "Scaring people with nonsensical things, which are not going to happen, that this is an existential threat, there's a 20% chance that is is existential, that's ridiculous. "That it's going to wipe out 50% of college level jobs. "That is it going to completely destroy democracy. "These kinds of comments are not helpful. They are made by...CEOS. And you become a CEO, maybe you adopt a God complex and somehow you know everything." Brutal. And right.

Eli Goldratt's book, The Goal, was famous for its (then unpopular argument) that keeping every machine running 24 hours a day, the metric most plant managers cared about, was actively making factories worse. I suspect we're seeing the same fallacy in how many people are using AI agents. Goldratt's point was that machine utilization isn't throughput. What you want from a manufacturing plants is making good widgets as cost-effectively as possible. It doesn't necessarily follow that running your machines all the times optimizes that. Picture a three-station assembly line. Stations 1 and 2 each crank out 200 widgets an hour. Station 3 can only handle 100. Running stations 1 and 2 around the clock doesn't ship more product. It just piles up half-finished widgets in front of station 3, ties up cash in inventory, and creates more work managing the pile. He developed the Theory of Constraints to point out that what matters is solving the bottleneck in the system, not increasing machine utilization. I suspect a lot of agent usage right now is the same fallacy at higher resolution. Running 20 Claude Code sessions in parallel can feel productive because something is always happening. But, if the bottleneck in your work is judgment about what's worth doing, more agents just generate more output for you to wade through. This is not to say there aren't workflows running 20 agents in parallel very effectively, I'm sure there are. And, I suspect there's a general retraining we all need to do around evolving historical workflows. But.... The constraint for most knowledge work is deciding what's worth executing and no one is task switching between 20 things at the same time effectively I don't think. I find I can run maybe 2 or 3 things in parallel with maybe 1 or 2 admin-y type things on the side and that is only if I'm very locked in.

Great ways to learn from things we showed at Cloud NEXT last week.

At my husband’s favorite restaurant, Ramsey’s in Lexington, KY. Also, they make the best hot brown in the state.

For the younger gals that get attention from guys and aren’t sure if it’s appropriate for the professional setting. Here are some green flags: ✅ Talks about his family/ kids / friends often and affectionately ✅ Welcomes others to participate in the conversations and is friendly with everyone ✅ Doesn’t dominate your time and makes you feel comfortable walking away at any point ✅ Hesitates or avoids all together compliments on physical attributes. Or stops at just one quick compliment. ✅ Keeps conversations professional / friendly unconcerned with who might overhear or walk up. These guys are gold. Grateful to have worked with so may great guys over the years!

Cuando termino un libro y quiero empezar otro, pero siento que el que acabo de terminar merece un momento de silencio.