Same as it ever was. You know that great Talking Heads song? Yeah, that one. I love that line. Same as it ever was. It applies to almost everything. Business. Personal relationships. Life. Things happen in repeating, almost predictable, cycles. I’ve been thinking about that in the context of my current startup, which is the culmination of some cloud migration work I began a few years ago. When I invented hosted source control, I was designing & implementing enterprise build systems (working for myself) as pro services.

In addition to reducing my calories & carbs during lockdown, I re-started my lifting routine. I’ve lifted off & on since 1987 and have no illusions about becoming a bodybuilder, but this new practice feels different. I’ve made several changes to my routine that make it easier to complete each day. This means I’m more likely to actually do the workout. In no particular order, where’s what I now do:

After publishing this morning’s earlier post Is This Thing On?, I began to think through what topic I’d next choose for a real article. Here’s a list of subjects in which I have some level of expertise & about which I could write: Technology Motorcycles Risk-taking Writing (meta meta) Weightlifting Business Entrepreneurship & startups Health management The first three topics were themes in my book that I completed last summer, available here (hint hint) https://www.

Is this thing (still) on? Finding the motivation to write the past 90 days has been challenging. Lockdown has produced a number of side affects for me. A few of these have been positive, like losing weight & helping enforce my lifting routine, but the mental impact has been great. I have stared at my keyboard a dozen days in a row thinking today. Today, I’ll write. But I didn’t.

And there's the post This was the last reply in a conversation thread with two friends in which we talked about how companies - typically tech companies - go through highly predictable cycles of disruptive innovation, emerging as market leaders that ultimately begin to behave in anti-competitive, predatory ways. The company we’d begun the thread about was Amazon. They were in the news for their indefensible conduct regarding worker safety at fullfillment warehouses and then firing outspoken Amazon employees who began whistleblowing on the conduct.

So. Here we are. Almost May. Numerous states, including Colorado, have been under stay-at-home orders for the past month. Everything’s upside down. Feels pointless to enumerate here - you know what’s happening. I stopped writing. And yet... we have to look out over the horizon, beyond what we can clearly see today. We have to plan & act as though that future-state will occur, even if it's impossible to see.