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93 posts

Ben Berry

Reputation and Resilience

If your reputation can't absorb a few blows, it wasn't worth anything in the first place. Ryan Holiday, Ego Is The Enemy It's so tempting to think that your reputation is fragile. You feel like you spent years building it up, and then someone posts something negative about you. More people pile on. People you've never heard of before, who just enjoy the bandwagon of hate. People so empty that they have to keep busy pointing out the flaws of others to avoid facing their own. Meanwhile, … (Continued)

Improving Reading

I wouldn't call myself a voracious reader, but I try to spend 30 minutes each day doing serious, dedicated reading. Not reading to pass the time while I wait for my food at a restaurant or scrolling through my RSS reader after dinner. Sitting in a comfortable chair, with my phone out of reach, a book in my hand, a notebook within reach, with nothing else to do, for half an houror more. I am also in a never-ending experiment with different ways to take notes on books in a way that gives me the b … (Continued)

Fixing the Door

Tonight's project was a lesson in the problem not being what you thought it was. A few months ago, the front door started "catching" when we went to close the deadbolt. You had to pull the door tight to get the deadbolt to close smoothly. I thought it might just be the house settling or the door frame shifting, but Steph pointed out the house is almost 20 years old. It shouldn't be settling that much anymore. Regardless, I set out the other night to pull the deadbolt apart and see what I could … (Continued)

Areas of Influence

The smaller area you try to improve, the more effect and influence you can have. You are a tiny sliver of your country, but you are a tenth of your team at work, a quarter of your family, and one half of your marriage. You are also, of course, 100% of your own self.

On Moderation

As you move about on the internet, on each page, ask yourself "Who moderates this?" If it's someone's Twitter feed, that person doesn't just moderate it, they directly control it. Every tweet is either written by them or retweeted by them. But if you click one of their tweets and Twitter shows you the responses, who moderates those? Nobody. Literally. Even the person who originally posted the tweet, unless they block the person that replied, has no control of the content shown just below to … (Continued)

(Most) Everyone Is A Loser

Competitive shooting is an interesting sport because on any given weekend, 60-100 people show up, divided among 6-8 gear divisions. So, out of those 100, 5 or 6 might win their division. Roughly 95% of the people who show up will not win. And yet they show up anyway. You might think that the rational thing to do would be to only show up to matches you have a good shot at winning. But that's not what people do. I regularly win local matches that I show up to, but I'm planning my year around Nat … (Continued)

Seth Godin on Placebos

This is an interesting short piece from Seth about placebos: Ignoring the placebo effect won’t make it go away. Embracing it will help you do much better work, work that quite possibly is based on those skills and practices you’ve worked so hard to be good at. If it’s worth doing your work, it’s worth doing it in a way where placebos will help you do it better. Reading this, I realized that I tend look at the placebo effect at work the way a scientist might look at it in an experiment: trying … (Continued)

Kassie

"So, what do we do?" "We keep her going as long as she'll eat. And when she stops eating, we'll know it's time." There's no easy way to have a conversation about cancer, even when it's about a cat. But having the conversation over the phone doesn't make it any easier. And so, there I was, sitting there on the couch, talking to Steph on the phone. Telling her the ultrasound at the vet showed some kind of cancer, lymphoma or stomach or something, … (Continued)

Being on the Inside

One of the advantages of being early in your career is that you're on the outside of things. People talk to you and tell you the truth because you don't have any power. When you have power, people would tell you what they think you want to hear. Sometimes you'll get someone who will tell you just the right things to try to manipulate you into exercising your power to further their goals. Neither is particularly helpful. But early on, you don't have to worry about that. One of the perverse rea … (Continued)

Burning Myself Out

In January 2018, I launched a shooting podcast I called Short Course. I had previously co-hosted the Triangle Tactical Podcast for two and a half years, from 2014 through 2016, and I still had the itch. I still had ideas that I wanted to get out there, that I thought could help folks by passing on what I had learned. So in the closing days of 2017, as I left one job and started another, it felt like the right time to tackle this podcast project I had been rolling around in my head for over a y … (Continued)

Being sick and reading

The last few days have been strange. I've never caught a sore throat in the middle of summer before, so yesterday afternoon when I noticed my throat was scratchy, I figured I hadn't been drinking enough water. Working at home, I got up from my desk to get some, but drinking it didn't help. A few hours later, a package arrived from Amazon. Becoming Superman, the autobiography of J. Michael Straczynski. Growing up, we weren't a religious family in the traditional sense, but we watched 90s Sci-fi … (Continued)

Disengaging From Social Media

Marko Kloos on why he shut down his Twitter and removed comments from his blog: My Twitter account shows that I’ve posted over 20,000 Tweets over the last 11 years. Even allowing for the old 180-character limit, that’s three or four novels’ worth of words I’ve put out there for free, much of it to entertain people who don’t know me personally, and who mostly won’t notice my departure. Twitter, like Facebook before it, has been a useful tool to stay in touch with colleagues in an easy way, a … (Continued)

Three Phases of Engineering

There are three basic steps to any engineering task. First, you have to understand the constraints that the product will operate under, and also to understand as much as you can--to the limit of your research budget--about the environment that the project will operate in. Second, you have to understand the capabilities of the existing materials and solutions to the problems you'll face in this project. Sometimes this means researching and finding obscure solutions or materials that fit the p … (Continued)

Enchiridion, Section 1

"Things not in our power include the body" Perfectly nice, healthy people get sick all the time. We can try to influence our health, through things like eating a low-carb diet and exercising, but it's a mistake to think that will determinstically lead to a healthy life. Bad things happen to good people. Writing circa 125 AD, Epictetus knew this because nobody knew anything about germs or cancer. It was a truism then, but it's easy to forget with modern medicine, with X-rays and blood tes … (Continued)

Taking A Risk

Pushing someone to do better requires wagering some or all of your relationship capital with them. If you're wrong, you could lose your whole stake. If you're right, you could double your bet. But this requires that you built up the relationship capital before deciding to use it.