Software is the staging ground for the future, affording us the time and space to get our ethics right, before the stakes are raised.

Jonathan Harris, Modern Medicine

This semester, I took a required class called Leadership & Corporate Accountability. At its core it was a course in ethics. I knew this going in, and felt skeptical about the subject’s usefulness; wouldn’t the answer in every case be obvious? Do the most ethical thing possible. 

As it turned out, my skepticism sat askew from reality. For when I heard ethics I understood it as rules, and rules are things you can follow. Not every rule is right, but rules at least offer a semblance of clarity; because of their visibility, they can be accepted or railed against or worried over.

But, as I learned, ethics and rules aren’t at all synonymous. Ethics provide a framework for making impossible decisions: for talking about consequences, for hacking at the brambles in the foggy thicket where you’ll find yourself. They’re about what you do when the rules don’t exist yet, or when you realize the rules are leading to dreadful, unintended outcomes.

If you try to do anything new, or accept any amount of responsibility for any number of people, you will encounter impossible choices. I believe everyone deserves practice in making these choices; that struggling with impossibility before you encounter it is the best way to prepare yourself for the discomfort you’ll need to one day push through.

Elsewhere in Harris’s essay, he writes that “We could ask our educational institutions to add an ethics curriculum to every engineering program.” Many will read that and groan, but I read that and feel hope. The study of applied ethics is gripping because the answers aren’t obvious. Struggling toward them together before the stakes are raised lets us acclimate to discomfort and uncertainty, and to build friendships that will steady us in the future as we navigate through the fog.

Thanks to Anthony for sharing this essay, and for introducing me to Jonathan Harris’s work in the first place.

[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]
track The Chronicles Of Sarnia
artist Final Fantasy
album Has A Good Home


Final Fantasy – The Chronicles of Sarnia

I had to hide myself in a book / to keep your love away

The pages worn with all of my faults / the cover torn away

Since there’s only so much room on my computer, last weekend I erased most of the music to make more space. I use Rdio almost all the time now, and I’d be storing all the songs safely on an external hard drive in case of a rainy day (or some kind of apoaclyptic post-streaming future), so I convinced myself it would be an acceptable loss; a worthwhile trade.

But I did keep a handful of albums close by. Has a Good Home by Final Fantasy was one of them. I hadn’t listened to it in ages, but as I was highlighting and deleting vast swaths of songs, I couldn’t bring myself to vanish this one.

Today, on the bus back to Boston, I remembered why: this song.

Every change creates an equal and opposite force of resistance to change. To keep resistance low, change slower than your excitement propels you to.

Buster Benson on behavior change and Habit Labs’ great new idea, the Hipster Habit App

Change slower than your excitement propels you to…this is hard advice to stick to, but so necessary. I’m going to be keeping it in my back pocket for a while, along with this piece of paper.

You can never tell what message a city sends until you live there. You won’t know whether its message will resonate with you until you hear it. And you’ll probably have to find the city where you feel at home to know what sort of ambition you have.

Amber Rae on the people you’ll meet, the places you’ll go

Amber’s post today rang all kinds of bells for me. Since Sunday, I’ve been quietly in New York—taking exams from my computer in the morning, running errands in the afternoon, letting the city sink in every evening. Thursday, it’s back to Boston to tie up loose ends and then a week with Erik. Then come June, I’ll be here all summer.

It’s only been a few days. But already, I can’t deny: a part of me feels at home here. And I think that part has something important to tell me. I’m glad I have a whole summer to listen.

Anand Mahindra is the managing director of the Mahindra Group, a multi-national conglomerate based in India. He’s also an alum at Harvard Business School, and I’m pretty sure he had a high-level hand in inviting HBS to bring a field team to Chennai, India. Which is, in turn, how I came to be in India this January, working with Club Mahindra Holidays—a time-share network, also based in India, and part of the Mahindra Group. At the end of my week in India, I decided to follow Mr. Mahindra on Twitter. Fast forward four months. Tonight—the night before my final exam in Business, Government, & the International Economy—I saw these two tweets in a row. I couldn’t help but smile: plunging rupees and soaring exports are exactly the kinds of things we’ve been studying all semester long. And they’re exactly the kinds of things that are on Mr. Mahindra’s mind. Everything is connected to everything—Greece to India, me to Mr. Mahindra. And all of this is real. In a very personal way, the truth of that hit home just now.

Anand Mahindra is the managing director of the Mahindra Group, a multi-national conglomerate based in India. He’s also an alum at Harvard Business School, and I’m pretty sure he had a high-level hand in inviting HBS to bring a field team to Chennai, India. Which is, in turn, how I came to be in India this January, working with Club Mahindra Holidays—a time-share network, also based in India, and part of the Mahindra Group.

At the end of my week in India, I decided to follow Mr. Mahindra on Twitter. Fast forward four months. Tonight—the night before my final exam in Business, Government, & the International Economy—I saw these two tweets in a row. I couldn’t help but smile: plunging rupees and soaring exports are exactly the kinds of things we’ve been studying all semester long. And they’re exactly the kinds of things that are on Mr. Mahindra’s mind.

Everything is connected to everything—Greece to India, me to Mr. Mahindra. And all of this is real. In a very personal way, the truth of that hit home just now.

If your goal is to never make mistake in your life, you should definitely never think about secrets. Thinking outside the mainstream will be dangerous for you. The prospect of dedicating your life to something that no one else believes in is hard enough. It would be unbearable if you turned out to be wrong.

Blake Masters: Peter Thiel’s CS183: Startup - Class 11 Notes Essay

Erik shared this essay with me, and these four sentences woke me up.

The purpose of /mentoring is to get people to essentially hang their sign out that they are open to mentoring. No need to wonder or ask, they’re announcing to the world that they are willing to help others and will provide their time and thoughts to those who seek guidance in the areas that the mentor has established they have experience in. I love this idea so much! I haven’t officially hung my sign yet, but I plan to.

Roz Duffy on mentoring

/mentoring—an open & distributed mentoring project I started last August—makes a cameo in Roz’s wonderful update on her quest to find mentorship and accountability.

That people continue to discover and rediscover this thing I put out into the universe just makes me impossibly happy. Share your ideas widely…you never know when they’ll click.

Two weeks ago, my mom sent me a text message. She’d read a book that was wise and true, and she was sending me a copy—she hoped I could spent some time with it. Today, I opened the book, half-distracted; but soon, the dark drawings drew me in. Clamoring at the edges of the pages, thickets of charcoal closing in on the words. By the end, I felt gutted and set free. This book speaks to the essence of dread and grief. There is no easy ending, but there is relief. Written for teenagers, it cuts to the heart quickly. All I can say is that if this speaks to you, you’ll want to spend some time with it, too. A Monster Calls, by Patrick Ness, inspired by an idea from Siobhan Dowd

Two weeks ago, my mom sent me a text message. She’d read a book that was wise and true, and she was sending me a copy—she hoped I could spent some time with it.

Today, I opened the book, half-distracted; but soon, the dark drawings drew me in. Clamoring at the edges of the pages, thickets of charcoal closing in on the words.

By the end, I felt gutted and set free. This book speaks to the essence of dread and grief. There is no easy ending, but there is relief. Written for teenagers, it cuts to the heart quickly.

All I can say is that if this speaks to you, you’ll want to spend some time with it, too.

A Monster Calls, by Patrick Ness, inspired by an idea from Siobhan Dowd

(Amateur) Magical Thinking Today, my HILOBROW debut: a reboot of my research on amateur magicians at the turn of the twentieth century—go read it, and let me know what you think! Thanks to Josh Glenn for the opportunity. This was a lot of fun. “If magic’s popularity as a fantasy hobby sprung from the desire to emulate the wily success and devious charm of the professional performer, the understanding was that, in pursuing magic, men could learn to have the same control over others that magicians had over them…”

(Amateur) Magical Thinking

Today, my HILOBROW debut: a reboot of my research on amateur magicians at the turn of the twentieth century—go read it, and let me know what you think! Thanks to Josh Glenn for the opportunity. This was a lot of fun.

“If magic’s popularity as a fantasy hobby sprung from the desire to emulate the wily success and devious charm of the professional performer, the understanding was that, in pursuing magic, men could learn to have the same control over others that magicians had over them…”

(Source: Flickr / ephemeramagica)

I don’t think a story-teller can be guilted into making great characters.
Ta-Nehisi Coates in the Atlantic