People don’t buy lemonade from kids because they are selling awesome lemonade. They buy it to support the cute kids as they learn a few things about how businesses work. 

For the majority of my life I’ve used a lemonade stand-style approach. Whenever I’ve asked people to support and idea, those people have mainly been family and friends. These are people who love me and want the best for me. The problem is that they will support me irrespective of the quality of my idea. As a result, I don’t have a great sense of which ideas are strong enough to stand on their own. 

In the free market, however, your growth depends on the quality of your idea (in general, anyway). 

As a result, I’ve decided to share this blog with people who might value following my journey for its own merit and not because they know me. For the foreseeable future, I won’t be sharing any of this on Facebook.  

Instead, I’ll share my posts with aligned subreddits on Reddit, on Twitter and on LinkedIn. 

As of last night, the United Kingdom has decided to leave the European Union. This decision will have a cascade of effects: the decline of the pound, Prime Minister David Cameron’s resignation, the potential for Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland to leave the United Kingdom, and the end of the European Union itself.

To this New Yorker, grumblings of secession have usually come from either Texas or Quebec. Both of these have been mostly punchlines, with any actual movement toward making them reality never really taking hold.

This UK move is surreal. Major cairn alert. Continue reading “What the Brexit Means to Millennials in New York City” →

In the book Choose Yourself, James Altucher makes the argument that the technology available today makes it so we do not have to wait until someone chooses us for us to do what we want. If you want a radio show, start a podcast. If you want to make a documentary, film it on your smartphone and put it on YouTube.

He also makes a more global appeal for you to not wait for other people to deem you ready. You can decide that yourself.

I’ve done a lot of things to put off choosing myself. I’ve applied for programs and other things so that other people can choose me. I’ve looked to others to validate the worthiness of me going in a different direction. None of it leading to much success.

I want to do something different. I want to fight for myself.

This summer, I’m going to take every Friday off from work and will work on to developing a product or service that solves a problem in the world. I’m going to bring in my friends and colleagues who have shown interest or capacity in the areas I’m working on. By the end of the summer, I intend on having a prototype that I have tested in the wild.

I’ll be using a design thinking structure to plan those eight weeks. It will be fun and hard and scary and I’m so excited.

I recognize that one of the reasons why Donald Trump has been so popular in the last year is that he goes against the widely accepted range of what society deems politically correct. Intellectually, I understand the appeal. When I think about transgender folks, for example, I get knotted up in a jumble of pronouns, gendered language, and misconceptions. As a result, I tend to be more trepidatious when speaking about transgender people and that hinders me from able to speak as I would about anyone else.

I’m much more comfortable talking about race. I’m an Afro-Caribbean Dominican-American who identifies as both black and Latino. I’ve had countless conversations with white folks who are confused about one or another part of that sentence. It’s part of life and I get it. Continue reading “Why I Hate the Word “Minority” to Refer to People of Color” →

Sometimes in life you’re just walking along and happen to come across a cairn. Other times, it takes a little work to uncover a cairn that is in front of you.

One of my favorite ways of uncovering cairns from other people is by asking them sharp questions. If you ask a low-quality question like, “How’s it going?” you’re going to get a low-quality answer. I’m always on the hunt for a good question.

A question that has always yielded me good fruit is “What’s the biggest question you are wrestling with right now?” Sometimes I have to expand the definition of this question if I think the person thinks I’m asking exclusively about work or any other specific domain. The point is to get people to open up about what is top of mind for them. Continue reading “What’s the Biggest Question you are Wrestling with?” →

I love to go hiking. Spending time in the wilderness, where none of the constraints of modern life exist, is one of my favorite ways to refresh and reconnect.

One of the mainstays of the hiking culture is piling up rocks to let other hikers know they are going in the right direction. These piles of rocks are called cairns.

As I go through my travels, I look for cairns. Sometimes they are traditional cairns, piles of rocks that others have compiled. A lot of the time, cairns take the form of words from a mentor or actions from a colleague.

I have no idea where this journey is going to take me, but I’m confident that if I keep my eyes open I will see the cairns others have left before, letting me know that I’m going it the right direction. This blog chronicles my thoughts on those cairns.

In recent years it has become clear to me that beyond guilt, one of the other motivating factors for me is that I am eager to please. I like to be liked. I want people to find me agreeable, funny, dependable, and useful.

Like the guilt, this feeling has both positive and negative consequences. I’m not very confrontational and people can trust that no matter how stressful situations get, I tend to react in an even keel kind of way. If you ask most people who know me what they think of me, I surmise they will say positive things. I’m sure there are people I have pissed off and disappointed, but those who mainly see me that way are few in number.  Continue reading “Eager to Please “ →

I just went on a two week trip to Greece with my wife. It was an amazing experience and went super smoothly. Here are some tips I’ve picked up over the years that made the trip smooth: Continue reading “10 Travel Products I Love “ →

 

I find myself living with contradictory thoughts. Life is short. I should spend it doing the things I love.

Life is long. I should plan for how to spend it.

The contradiction I’m wrestling with most right now is “It is important to plan.” The opposite is also true: “It is important to act.”

In some sense, these two phrases are not contradictory. You can plan and then act. My problem is that I find myself often choosing between the two. I don’t want to act before I plan. I don’t plan because I don’t make it a priority. Therefore, things don’t move.

Take this blog, for example. I started writing on it in October 2015. It’s now June 2016. In that time, I’ve done fuck all to progress my vision of working on projects I’m moved by.

That’s a shame. It’s a story as old as the internet: someone starts a blog, writes in it for a little, then stops. I’m sure I have a LiveJournal account somewhere.

But I can’t be frozen by that anymore. I just have to act. This is the next step.

Last night I had a conversation with my therapist that made it clear that I was motivated by guilt.

This guilt has helped me be successful in some ways because I feel compelled to continue doing things I don’t feel like doing because I feel guilty about letting people down. As a result, I meet many of my obligations.

This feeling has also been a drag because it’s stopped me from taking actions that I want to. I stay in situations longer than I probably should.

The guilt inside me is insidious because it colors many of the other feelings I have.It’s hard to think of any other emotion that isn’t related to it.

I’d like to change this. Being motivated by guilt makes me less likely to take risks and experience the full spectrum of my humanity.