Category: Uncategorized

Some oft cited reasons to choose to stay together:

1. Kids

   I know plenty of folks disagree with this. But kids are a great reason to choose each other. Not for the kids sake. But for your own sanity. Someone to talk it out with. Someone to share it with. Someone else to be responsible. So in a really, really selfish way, I actually buy this one.

2. Love

   Emotions temporarily making choosing to be together easy and difficult all at once. Love tells us to stay together. Other emotions pull us apart.

   I think we’re so perfectly taught that love fixes things; love overcomes hurdles; etc. that we turn love into the choice. I choose to love her, and therefore I stay with her.

3. Sunk cost

   When leaving is too much work, or the inertia of choosing something else is too overwhelming, we decide to just let sunk cost make the choice for us. It’s a bad place to be, but one that I see a lot of people come to peace with and continue.

4. Because the pros outweigh the cons over a running average

   The idealist in me says this is the only reason we should ever choose to stay in it. It’s never this simple, but man oh man I wish it could be.

   It’s critical that it be a running average because any given incident is likely to be all pro or all con. It’s hard to see the silver lining in the moment.

   I don’t think we’re very good at calculating running averages, but in a lot of ways I think the best relationships that I’ve seen are the ones that can understand their past and predict their future based on the running average.

But none of these feel very satisfying to the larger thesis. So there has to be something else to it. I just haven’t found it yet :-/

This blog post is 7 days late. It all started when I got sick, fell behind, and I’ve been playing catch up ever since. Some of these catch up blog posts are relevant to the day. Others are just random musings.

I’m reading Founders at Work, and I’ve just had my mind blown. Like… ka-phow! The book is a series of 10 page interviews with founders and early employees of all of the companies we all know and take for granted today. I’m about 1/3 of the way through, and THE interview of the first third of the book was Dan Bricklin’s (founder of Visicalc).

Dan Bricklin is the father of the spreadsheet. Which is in and of itself an amazing task. The story of Visicalc is actually quite a sad one. Visicalc created the PC industry (the hardware existed, but it lacked a killer app. Visicalc was that killer app). But he also was a major player in the development of the first word processor as developed by DEC.

Think about that… this guy was on the ground floor of the word processor and the spreadsheet.

The line that blew my mind was how he described how his experience at DEC building the first word processor gave him visibility into how hard it is to teach people to use software. And that allowed him to create a more compelling mental model for the spreadsheet which people had to learn to use from scratch (not spreadsheets period, but spreadsheets as software).

Just think about that. He invented A1 being the upper left hand cell in a spreadsheet. The conventions we use today in word processors may have started in the version that he built. His design decisions define how we use two of the most core pieces of software.

Mind blown.

This blog post is 10 days late. It all started on this date when I got sick, fell behind, and I’ve been playing catch up ever since. Some of these catch up blog posts are relevant to the day. Others are just random musings.

I’m falling sick today. I can feel it in my nose (I hate that feeling of a running nose. It’s absolutely awful). I can feel it in my bones (They creak. That never happened when I was kid, but now when I get sick my bones creak).

I went through swimming. Babies are in bed. It’s only 9pm, but I’ve got my tea/honey/cinnamon drink down, and I’m passing out.