Recent articles
February 23, 2026
Sarcasm self-defeats
Sarcasm is an easy way to amplify feedback. It has two hidden costs: If you have confidence in your standing and your idea, then sarcasm is simply getting in the way, because it undermines both.
seths.blog
February 22, 2026
Blizzard pasttimes
Millions of folks are about to get snowed in. Stay safe. Here’s a code for last year’s Thriving with AI course on Udemy. It’s free for the first 1,000 people. And I see that This is Marketing is cu...
seths.blog
February 22, 2026
Should you keep playing your hit song?
It depends. A freelancer, a brand, a musician–they’re here to serve. If people come to the restaurant for your famous marinara sauce, if new clients hire you to architect your signature style home ...
seths.blog
February 21, 2026
Brown rice and status
Rice is one of the most consumed foods in the world, and it gives us insight into our relentless search for status and for affiliation. Once rice is harvested for consumption, it’s brown. The outer...
seths.blog
February 20, 2026
“Hide competitive stats”
I’ve been playing an online wordgame for a few months, and after each round, it shows me how well I’m doing against the 10,000 other people who are also playing. It didn’t take long for me to reali...
seths.blog
February 19, 2026
Freelancer empathy
When phone cameras got good enough, portrait photographers scolded people who took their own headshots. And when the Mac got pretty good at typesetting, professional designers pointed out that peop...
seths.blog
February 18, 2026
How to write a coaching/learning prompt
An AI like Claude is actually a pretty good fortune cookie. You can ask a simple question and get a simple answer, sometimes a profound one. But this is a waste of the tool’s potential. The AI is p...
seths.blog
February 17, 2026
Misguided optimization
Industrialism brought us the idea of optimization. Incremental improvements combined with measurement to gradually improve results. We can optimize for precision. A car made in 2026 is orders of ma...
seths.blog
February 16, 2026
Mysterious predictability
A watched pot will boil. As it heats up, there’s no way to predict where the cavitation will start and which bubble will arrive first. But with enough time and enough heat, it’s going to boil. That...
seths.blog
February 15, 2026
Better vs. done
“There, it’s done.” This is the production mindset and the rule of school. Pencils down. Hand it in. The alternative is, “Sign me up for a commitment to better.” Ship an update every day. Learn fro...
seths.blog
February 14, 2026
Things that feel risky
Often aren’t. In fact, they might be the safest way forward.
seths.blog
February 13, 2026
The next generation of AI businesses
The first generation was built on large models, demonstrating what could be done and powering many tools. The second generation is focused on reducing costs and saving time. Replacing workers or ma...
seths.blog
February 12, 2026
Tip for tap
There is plenty of unintentional harm in our world. We’ve all been bruised or derailed by someone who had no ill intent. We often respond with intentional harm, to make a point and to teach a lesso...
seths.blog
February 11, 2026
Time well spent
What an admirable goal. Perhaps the overriding goal of all goals. How often do we measure this? Do we even know how? Do the systems we’re in push us from considering this? I wonder why.
seths.blog
February 10, 2026
A starting point for the blog
The challenge of the library is the card catalog. If you don’t know what you’re looking for, it’s hard to find much of anything. The challenge of the web is the search box, for the same reason. It’...
seths.blog
February 9, 2026
Process thinking
Sure, you made it work this time, but will it work next time? Can you teach the method to someone else? Do you have a protocol for what to do when it doesn’t work? How can someone else contribute t...
seths.blog
February 8, 2026
Free agency
Unrestricted free choice is a myth. There are always boundaries and trade-offs. But being fully stuck is also a myth. We might not like the trade offs, but we also have a choice. Since we always li...
seths.blog
February 7, 2026
Vessel size
“May your cup runneth over…” This begs the question: how big a cup? The logistics of vessel size determine how much money we need to raise, how big a team we need, how many customers are necessary ...
seths.blog
February 6, 2026
Voluntary stories
The narrative we run in our head is a choice. It might or might not be based on objective reality and verified history. Doesn’t matter, it’s still a choice. There are millions of ways we can remind...
seths.blog
February 5, 2026
Making it whole
Integrity is the act of being in and of itself, from every angle. As we see the bait-and-switch of the online networks and monopolists, it’s easy to imagine that nothing with integrity stays that w...
seths.blog
February 4, 2026
Sorting
A surprising amount of our time is spent sorting things to create value. They sort the rotten cranberries from the good ones to ensure that the bag at the market is worth buying. And we sort the mo...
seths.blog
February 3, 2026
“Everybody wants to win”
Sports analogies often let us down. A colleague was explaining how measurement was difficult in many organizations, unlike a basketball game, where the time, the score and the stats are clear and o...
seths.blog
February 2, 2026
Precision vs. accuracy
Precision requires producing the same results each time. Repeatable, measurable, dependable. Accuracy means hitting the target. The only way to consistently be accurate is to be precise. But there ...
seths.blog
February 1, 2026
More trouble than it’s worth
This is the hallmark of projects that turn out to be worth doing. The trouble might be a symptom that we’re onto something that others don’t care enough to do. And the things that are obviously wor...
seths.blog
January 31, 2026
The infinite tail
The Long Tail was a profound cultural insight. When we created YouTube, Amazon, Roon, recipe websites and Netflix, the culture changed. When you give people a choice, they make a choice. We went fr...
seths.blog
January 30, 2026
AI ads are neither
Neither AI nor ads. The problem started with search, and was weaponized by Amazon. Display ads go back at least 100 years. A century ago, the idea was simple: Show up in a place where people are of...
seths.blog
January 29, 2026
Skepticism, surprise and resistance
Every important medical innovation of the last five hundred years has been ridiculed, undermined and ignored by doctors and the medical establishment. Every single one. Hand-washing, antibiotics, a...
seths.blog
January 28, 2026
On the hiring line
There have always been two sides: Hiring people to do tasks and jobs, or hoping to be hired to do those tasks and jobs. The difference now is that it’s increasingly difficult to find a good job to ...
seths.blog
January 27, 2026
Insulation > power
When energy is cheap, people build buildings that are poorly insulated. It’s faster and cheaper in the short run. In the long run, though, insulation always wins. You invest in it once and get the ...
seths.blog
January 26, 2026
Terrible
Most of us are terrible at some things. Lack of skill, focus, practice, care or just temperament means that we don’t do the task as well as we might. This might be anything from promptness to confl...
seths.blog