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The Premise

This is LinkedIn me. This site, on the other hand, is a reboot of three personal websites from 2010:

  • A Living Manifesto - a site with essays about my personal philosophy and worldview
  • A Working Manifesto - essays on my views on macro business issues and building companies
  • Networked Thoughts - Smaller blog posts on similar and adjacent issues to above

The goal here is to combine all those things a bit more elegantly. Let me know how it goes :).  

I want people to understand the underlying values and beliefs that inform the content on the site. To that end, the below intro is from the original "ALM" site and still more or less aligns with my current views 10 years later. The rest of that content will be consolidated here. Enjoy!!

The Premise - March 2010

The essays on this site are generally in the style of Montaigne  (who I still haven’t read), meaning they use my fundamental beliefs  about the world to better understand all aspects of life. The founding  principles/beliefs of this site are:

  • There is an objective underlying reality
  • Like other animals, humans evolved methods and mechanisms to  improve their understanding of this reality, thereby improving their  likelihood of survival
  • As the human brain evolved, we developed the ability to override  these evolutionary impulses and understand how we naturally misinterpret  the world. It is through these abilities that we can pursue  “transcendence”.
  • We can never understand objective reality though scientific methods  or measurement, but we can develop conviction about the underlying  nature of the world through subjective analysis
  • As such we have two different goals and motivations in life:  evolutionary and transcendent. These two forces affect every aspect of  our lives and determine how we act.

(For a longer explanation of my thoughts on these points, check out the full essay

So as I write about topics ranging from technology to leadership to partying to the meaning of life, the issue of evolutionary and  transcendent motivations will arise repeatedly. However, you don’t have  to accept all these principles to read anything on this site. It’s  called “A Living Manifesto” because every word on here is open to  change. My thoughts constantly evolve and will only do so more  efficiently as people agree or disagree with them!