In The Four Agreements, Don Miguel Ruiz invites us to make the following commitments to ourselves: Be impeccable with your word. Try to be honest and true in everything you say. Do not lie, gossip, etc. Don’t take anything personally. You cannot choose what others say or do, but you can choose how you respond to it. Don’t make assumptions. Everyone has their own perspective and understanding of reality, and everyone is wrong much of the time. There is no shame in admitting your mistakes or un...

I would like to wait far shorter to publish, and I would like to articulate my thoughts far more often. In order to encourage that, I will do two things: I will allow myself the luxury to change my mind. Anything I write reflects my best thought process at the moment but does not define me as a person). This will allow me to write “in the now” and not worry about the future. The objective is to share my thoughts, not to measure my skill as a writer. Good writing takes time, and I strive to b...

Here are three properties that most people agree they want, but you can't have all three: local democratic accountability equal treatment under the law ability to absorb a large number of migrants It's hard to reject the first two, so many jurisdictions have laws limiting immigrants from entering. I think we should talk about a trilemma for migration, which is three things, and we can only have two out of the three. You think of the liberal democracies — what would we like as a response fo...

To change entrenched social norms, isolate a group that has the new norms. Then slowly reintroduce others at a rate where they absorb the new norms. This applies to countries and to startups. Persistent norms are not necessarily a bad thing, but you do need to think about what if you get stuck in a situation where the norms in a population are inefficient and really holding you back? Then you have to ask, what are the mechanisms where a group can change its norms? And this idea of letting a no...

I met with Corey Thomas from Rapid7 to talk about culture. Here are my notes. Culture Corey defines culture as "shared beliefs about how to create success". These are beliefs you won't compromise on, that you'll live and die by. It's better to fail with a principled and well-articulated set of beliefs than to exist in a wishy-washy state of uncertainty. Another way to think about culture is as a guide for making decisions. When something unexpected or challenging happens, how would you like ...