December 21, 2025
Conversation
Today was good because I talked with Shohruh. He showed up late; we'd planned an earlier time, but the snow was bad enough that being late didn't matter. What matters is I finally have someone to talk.
But I think the conversation was shallow. Not his fault, not mine. Just shallow.
~
I've been thinking about why structured conversations fail. Learning firms run these breakout sessions. Crimson does them too. The theory is simple: put people in a room, conversation builds bonds.
But it doesn't work.
Team building only works when the team is building. Two people making small talk aren't building anything. They're just two people in a room, waiting for something interesting to happen.
The problem is preparation. Or lack of it.
When Acquired does a podcast, both hosts spend weeks researching. They pick a company, read every book about it, interview people who worked there. Then they record. The conversation becomes discovery because both people brought material to discover.
We brought nothing. So I think we discovered nothing.
This explains why those mandatory breakout rooms feel like waiting rooms. Everyone's hoping someone else will say something interesting.
Energy
I'm realizing energy is something you either have or don't.
Time management assumes you have energy to manage in the first place.
I used to think procrastination meant avoiding work. Now I think it means working on low-energy. You clean your room because you don't have the energy to write. You check email because you don't have the energy to code. The work gets done, just the wrong work.
This is why diet and exercise matter more than productivity systems. They gives me enough energy today to do the thing that matters.
The hard problem is that you need energy to notice when you're low on energy. By the time you realize you're exhausted, you've already wasted the day.
Interruptions
There's a cost to interruptions people don't measure. The interruption itself takes five minutes. But it also destroys the hour before and the hour after. Your brain needs unbroken time to load a problem into working memory. Each interruption forces a reload.
Preparation
I need to buy boots. The weather turned bad and I don't have them. I keep putting it off because I won't need them long.
But that's exactly backwards. You buy boots when you don't need them. When you need them, it's too late.
This applies to everything that matters.
You can't prepare when you're already in trouble.
Games
The admissions process is broken in an interesting way.
The people running it don't know what they're looking for. The people applying don't know what to show. Everyone optimizes for signals that don't correlate with the thing that actually matters.
What matters? Doing great work twenty years from now.
What gets measured? Essays, test scores, activities lists. Things that can be gamed.
You can't fake your way to great work. You can fake an essay: hire consultants, polish every sentence, sound impressive.
The admissions game rewards people who sound smart. Great work requires people who are excessively curious about things that bore most people.
These optimize for different things.
When you write to impress admissions officers, you avoid weird ideas. You add explanations to make your thinking more palatable.
When you write to discover, you compress ideas to their minimum. You don't know what you think until you've cut it down to the fewest words.
But good thinking doesn't happen on command. It happens when you create conditions for ideas to emerge. When you read widely, notice patterns, make unexpected connections.
So yes, admissions is broken. Because the system measures things it can measure instead of things that matter. And we've all optimized for the measurement.