Medium

Concentric Circles Message Propagation

Spread any message outward from your own desk, one audience ring at a time — never skip a circle.

Cross-Subgraph Resonance Testing (Metaphor Forging)

Test framings live across unconnected audiences; the ones that land in distant subgraphs will travel.

Cultural Erogenous Zones

Stop trying to change what people care about; bridge from what they already care about to you.

Mindset5 steps

Dancing With Your Fears

Price the cost of inaction, then stop trying to kill the fears that won't die — have a conversation with them.

Communication6 steps

Energy-Aligned Writing

Write only what energises you, only what overlaps your job, and publish nearly all of it.

Engineering Financial Space

Convert your job into a contract, cut the burn, and buy back time without a clean break.

Peak Performance4 steps

Engineering the Creative Peak

Single-shot coffee, a two-hour deadline, and a good night's sleep — dial in the state, not just the effort.

Productivity5 steps

Focused Hours Over Long Hours

Overwork lets you skip the hard work of deciding what matters — force the constraint that makes you decide

Entrepreneurship3 steps

Follow the Pull

Bet your career on the thing you enjoy, are good at, and others value — even if it's not the plan.

Gardening Over Building (Farming for Miracles)

Plant many cheap compounding seeds instead of manufacturing outcomes with brute effort.

Productivity5 steps

Imperfect Metrics as Education

Report an imperfect engineering metric on purpose, then use every question about it to educate upward.

Mastery Before Management

Get technical skill into your bones before you leave IC — then stay technical by listening, not coding

Strategy4 steps

Mistakes of Commission Over Omission

Doing nothing is the riskiest comms strategy — it hands the win to the status quo by default.

Organizational Kayfabe

Diagnose the shared fiction everyone knows is false — then route around it without detonating it.

Platforms Are Products

When to start a platform team, who staffs it, and the impact metrics that keep it honest

Self-Mastery5 steps

Play Yourself Like a Fiddle (Activation Energy + Always-Rules)

Beat activation energy with tight time boxes and an escalating task ladder; hold habits with always-rules.

Strategy3 steps

Practitioner-Sourced Wisdom

The best advice comes from people on the ground doing the thing — not from pontificators.

Marketing6 steps

Pressure = Force ÷ Surface Area

Same effort, narrower target, more impact — shrink your surface area to raise message pressure.

Influence4 steps

Product-Manage the Platform Team From the Side

Frustrated by a slow internal platform team? Supply the product management they don't have

Self-Mastery3 steps

Raise Your Happiness Baseline

Big events only move you temporarily — the real lever is lifting the baseline you always return to.

Entrepreneurship4 steps

Ship, Quit, and Learn

Design the smallest thing you can ship that is built to be quit — then let shipping it tell you what's next.

Marketing4 steps

Simple, Novel, Emotional: The Shareability Formula

Make it simple, make it show something new, make it feel something — then cut the cleverness.

Slime Mold Org Design (Sports Car vs Big Rig)

Coordination cost grows with the square of headcount — drive the vehicle you actually have.

Stocks-and-Flows Pipeline Diagnosis

Model any org process as stocks and flows, then find where reality disagrees with the model.

Innovation6 steps

Strategy Salons (Nerd Clubs)

Seed a small, opt-in, yes-and idea group that spins off strategy insights as a side effect.

Superpower Naming (Be More, Not Different)

Name someone's superpower early, then frame every nudge as 'be more' rather than 'be different'.

Mindset4 steps

The 3-of-500 Months Sabbatical

Frame a sabbatical as 3 months out of a ~500-month working life, and budget 6-8 weeks just to unwind.

The 70/30 Cover Fire Allocation

Spend 70% earning the right to exist so the other 30% can plant seeds nobody will kill.

The Adjacent Possible + Low-Resolution North Star

Take only safe next steps — but always the one with the steepest gradient toward a 3-5 year North Star.

The Ambiguity Navigation Rubric

Score behavioural answers on three axes: did they impose structure, seek inputs, and define milestones?

Productivity5 steps

The Bits and Bobs Idea Distillation Loop

Capture everything, filter weekly by resonance, distil, publish — a compounding personal insight engine.

The Boring Engineering Strategy

Write the strategy down, get the diagnosis honest, then constrain options so energy goes to what matters.

The Comms Equation (Goal → People → Action → Belief → Medium)

Back-solve every comms plan from a business goal, never from an impressions target.

The Compelled Test (Storytelling as Product Signal)

After they describe a big problem, measure your own reaction — do you feel compelled to go work on it?

Self-Mastery6 steps

The Constrained Self-Awareness Probe

Remove the humble answer, borrow someone else's eyes, or jump three years forward — self-awareness can't hide.

Peak Performance4 steps

The Energy Audit

After every activity, log energised or drained — then do more of one and less of the other.

The First Performance Review Reference Call

Ask a cherry-picked referee what feedback you'll give the candidate at their first review — they can't dodge it.

Communication4 steps

The Four PM Annoyances

The four PM behaviours that quietly destroy engineering trust — and the fix for each

The Going Direct Playbook

Build one owned channel, voiced by a real human, primed before you ever need it.

Leadership6 steps

The Hardest Thing Test (Calibrating Difficulty and Agency)

Ask what's the hardest thing they've ever done, then extract their difficulty bar and how much agency they had.

The Hogwash Question (Breaking the Interview Mindset)

Ask what conventional wisdom is inaccurate — it's unanswerable without genuine opinion, so it exposes authenticity.

The Honest-Applicable-Reversible Values Test

Three tests that separate values which drive decisions from values that just describe your self-image.

Communication3 steps

The Internal-Signal Quality Bar

It's done when it makes YOU laugh or tear up — not when someone else approves it.

Mindset4 steps

The Introspection Probe (Decoupling Decisions from Outcomes)

Ask for a win that worked for the wrong reason, or a good call that failed — outcome-blind introspection tests.

Finance5 steps

The Life MBA Reframe

Set a runway budget, name it an investment in yourself, and give people a socially legible story for it.

Mindset3 steps

The Lindy Commitment Test

However long you've sustained something is roughly how much longer you can trust it to last.

Productivity4 steps

The One-on-One Diet

Hold direct-report 1:1s sacred; cut nearly all the rest — relationship-by-1:1 doesn't scale

Influence5 steps

The Path Expert Conversation

Find someone a few years ahead on the path you're curious about, and offer them written questions.

The Proudest Work Question (Taste Triangulation)

Ask what work they're proudest of and why — it exposes taste, standards, motivation, and where their gravity pulls.

Communication4 steps

The Relentless Iteration Loop

Read-through, add, repeat 50-100 times, set aside, return — then hand to editors. That's the secret.

Communication6 steps

The Repeatable Idea Test (Put the Pill in the Cheese)

Engineer a message people repeat for their own reasons — memorable, effortless, and never an inside joke.

The Rewrite Trap and the Staged Evolution Plan

Never go away for a year to rebuild — uplift well-contained pieces of the system instead

The Shared-Fate EM/PM Pair

Give the eng manager and PM the same performance rating, and make them understand before they argue.

Leadership6 steps

The Teleportation Device Test (Finding the Important Question)

Cap a candidate to two questions on a fictional problem to reveal whether they can find the decision-driving question.

Self-Mastery4 steps

The Three-Hour Work Mindfulness Experiment

Steal three hours from a workday, do something purposeless, and study the guilt that shows up.