Your role is to safeguard your team’s time so they can focus on the most important things. Is the meeting necessary? Or can it be discussed in an email or project thread? Or is it status quo and can be removed or redefined? theceoffice.substack.com/p/y…

Got to see this little gem of a coffee place on a Midwest road trip. Definitely worth a detour off the main road. 💚☕️ maps.app.goo.gl/Aw27DpTC2p6W…

Classic 😂 Kids’ memory is elite. Don’t say anything you can’t/won’t fulfill. They’ll teach you quick to be a better manager of expectations. 💞

Humongous American flags, Route 66, steeples, grazing cattle, and big blue skies. 🇺🇸💙

It's not an under-16 social media ban, it's digital IDs with better marketing

In honor of Flag Day 🫡 🇺🇸 Old Glory at Chicago’s Union Station.

Out here encouraging the skills for future trillionaires. ☀️🍋

Saturday Preparedness Challenge Set a timer for 10 minutes. That's it. Try to knock out a few of these tasks: ✓ Charge your power banks. ✓ Update your emergency contacts. ✓ Take photos of any new insurance cards or documents. ✓ Confirm your family's meeting location if phones fail. ✓ Check the batteries in your flashlight. ✓ Make sure your vehicle has at least half a tank of gas. ✓ Review your evacuation route and an alternate route. ✓ Identify one neighbor you could help and one neighbor who could help you. ✓ Save an out-of-state contact who can serve as a family check-in point during an emergency. ✓ Make a list to restock any medications, pet supplies, or other essentials you rely on regularly. Ten minutes today can save you hours of stress later. Preparedness isn't built in a day. It's built in small decisions made before they become urgent. The goal is never perfection. The goal is being a little more ready tomorrow than you were yesterday. Easy peasy!

The system is designed to do what the system does: prevent competition from small new entrants with capacity for disruption. Incumbents can easily foot the bill for the compliance overburden. Others not so much. This is not guaranteed protection, but it is enough friction to prevent rapid and radical change.

Great post on "brand harvesting" as part of enshittification

There’s no need to apologize for wanting election integrity. We need more people who have the courage and conviction to stand up for what’s right. There’s this argument you’ll eliminate 50% of your customer base, if you speak up. Where’s the argument that you’ll have 0% customer base, if you don’t speak up and against anti-business politicians and policies. Businesses drive the economic engine for all the “virtuous” policies. Blue cities have been bleeding businesses of all sizes. Basic math: 50% > 0%

Salami Slicing In a transactional context, sometimes your counterparty may try to essentially scam you for a small margin -- so thin that they hope you do not notice, or let it slide because it basically doesn't matter. By doing this over and over again, your counterparty hopes to accumulate some meaningful aggregate advantage. This is an amateur technique, because Salami Slicers usually do not realize that: 1. People notice. They may not say anything. But oh man do they notice. 2. Being recognized as a Salami Slicer is extremely negative and will kill you in social and business contexts, because you are showing that you will compromise your ethics for trivial amounts of money (or whatever else is at stake). Nobody will trust you for anything significant if they know you're the type of degenerate to steal pennies while others aren't looking. In fact, frequently, people will permit others to Salami Slice them as a kind of test -- will you do the wrong thing, thinking you can get away with it, for a small amount? A valuable signal. Thank you. Skilled Salami Slicers will maintain some level of plausible deniability -- "I'm sorry, I forgot to keep this minor obligation", "oh I wasn't sure whether you were paying this or I was", "I thought I didn't have to do this thing because of that other thing", etc. But there are patterns to this, and you can sniff it out quickly. (For example, Uber's ETAs are always optimistic -- the cars are always late or on time, but never early. Huh.) Some people will go 0-to-100 when they notice they're being Salami Sliced, because they understand what it says about their counterparty's view of themselves: it's extremely dehumanizing. If you try to strategically and deliberately deceive me for minuscule gains, then clearly your view of me is so low that you would cause me unlimited suffering if it was to your benefit. In a Schmittian sense, it's a hardcore Friend-Enemy distinction. Amateur Salami Slicers are occasionally surprised when they are spotted and receive the full Fuck You I'll Kill You, scorched-earth zero-mercy response: their counterparty understands the full symbolic reality of Salami Slicing. I hate being Salami Sliced.

This "rental push" is propaganda. Lack of commitment and ownership is a net negative for society. It encourages apathy because people don't have skin in the game to fight for what's good in their relationship, neighborhood, community, or workplace. A culture that lacks roots and a sense of belonging is easily overrun.

Once children became things we can create, select, freeze, discard, rent wombs for, pay for, screen for, customize, we really should not be shocked when people begin speaking of them like they are just products, because that is what products are, they are judged by their quality, they are measured by how useful they are, they are accepted or rejected based on whether they meet the desires of the buyer. This is what normalizing abortion, IVF and surrogacy has done for us. Evils beyond our wildest imaginations.

In human behavior, trust is a prerequisite for dignity. People are more likely to act with care, stewardship, and craftsmanship when they believe their efforts matter and will be reciprocated. High-trust societies tend to produce better craftsmanship, and hew to beauty, because people feel a responsibility to leave things better than they found them. As trust erodes, transactionalism increases.

Observe the pattern… H-1B flood hits Texas suburbs. Housing demand spikes, prices rocket. Builders, agents, lenders, and the immigrants got RICH. Who got rich… and who got priced out? Your kids watched starter homes become unaffordable bidding wars. Schools and neighborhoods changed fast. American Dream delayed. Let’s reverse it, folks! Mass deportation AND H-1B crackdown. Prices will drop, cheaper housing for our kids, and less pressure on schools? Americans benefit when the system tilts back toward citizens.   Media calls it a tragedy. I call it math. Who are they protecting?

😂 Leadership in a nutshell. Everyone's problem is an emergency. Your job is to stay focused on what's most important. Some "emergencies" solve themselves.

It's interesting how society can view things as... too beautiful to use too beautiful to touch too beautiful to eat Where does this come from? Do we think we're not deserving of beauty? Anecdotally, when hosting I've put a lot of effort into the aesthetics, coordinating decor, place settings, and food. Guests have said, "It's too pretty to eat". 😅 It can't sit there, please enjoy all of it!!

Congrats to Hammond and Indiana (two NFL teams)!! 🐻🐴 This is an embarASSing loss for Chicago and Illinois. Losing a legacy team with over 100 years of history.

“The other issue is less about waiting than about remaining engaged with a difficult question. It's the ability to tolerate incompleteness without immediately reaching for an answer. This is where judgment is crafted. Not in the moment of decision, but in the sustained engagement that precedes it. The slow recognition that a first answer is often far from complete or correct.“ psychologytoday.com/us/blog/…