The best thing about a small water tank is that it makes you honest about how much you were wasting.
Jul 16On arriving somewhere versus getting there
Why the getting-there turned out to be the part I was after.
I spent the first two months of this trip treating every drive as an obstacle between me and a place I’d seen a photograph of. Then somewhere in western Nebraska — nothing, in every direction, for hours — I realised I hadn’t thought about the destination once, and that it had been the best day so far.
Keep readingEvery system I’ve built to save time has cost more time than it saved, and I’d build all of them again.
Jul 02A tool you can repair is a different category of object from a tool you can replace. We mostly stopped making the first kind.
Jun 24Where local retail is actually heading
What a year of talking to shop owners on the road turned up — and why the consensus take is wrong.
The story everyone tells is that small retail is dying and the internet killed it. The shop owners I’ve talked to this year tell a more specific and more interesting story, which is that the thing that killed them wasn’t competition. It was rent, and then it was software.
Keep readingWriting something down is the cheapest way to find out you didn’t understand it.
Jun 05Why I stopped making five-year plans
On trading the plan for a camper with good tires.
A five-year plan is a bet that you know who you’ll be in five years. I made three of them in my twenties and all three were wrong in the same direction: they assumed I’d want more of what I already had.
Keep readingNobody has ever once asked what camera I used.
May 08