Low diatribe

The line is here

I spent the last half of the 90s in Minneapolis. I lived two blocks from the corner of 26th St and Nicollet Ave.

If that intersection sounds familiar, it's where Alex Jeffrey Pretti was pepper...

Don't go chasing waterfalls

I've been playing the long game for months. Waiting. Applying. Refining. Patient in the way you learn to be patient when there's no other choice.

Then a former colleague reached out. She'd moved to...

My hubris just gave me a great idea

My hubris just gave me a great idea

Whenever I ever say this phrase out loud, I need to stop immediately.

Not because the idea is necessarily bad. Because I'm no longer capable of seeing whether...

You're not my gatekeeper (and neither am I)

When I was three, I was the Universe. When I was four, my Brother and Sister were born, and I learned competition.

Twins. Suddenly I wasn't the center anymore. I was one of three, competing for...

Holding the pen

I slept horribly last night. Tossed and turned, didn't get a wink. Just my luck — everybody is being annoying today.

Wait. I hear myself in that joke.

Is everybody annoying? Or am I filtering for...

Blob typing

I'm generally a fan of duck typing, it can be elegant in code. Identity revealed by behavior, not declaration. If it looks like a duck and moves like a duck and quacks like a duck, treat it like a...

Imposter cat

A handful of years ago, at 3 in the morning, a big fluffy orange cat mewled at our back door. I let him in. He was covered in burrs, his fur matted. "What did you get into, Ruckus?" I spent the...

Reset

The new year invites resolutions. Goals. Grand declarations of transformation.

But what I need is reset.

Not a new destination. A recalibration of what I notice. What I let dominate the frame.

I...

The stories we tell ourselves

Susie was home for winter break, helping in the kitchen for breakfast. She watched her mother carefully cut the sausages in half before putting them in the skillet to cook. "Mama," asked Susie. "Why...

Oscillate wildly

You know the shower phenomenon.

The water's too cold, so you turn the knob toward hot. Nothing happens immediately, so you turn it more. Still cold. You turn it again. Then suddenly — scalding. You...

Present for the immediate future

In the Northern Hemisphere we're currently tilted away from the sun, creating a winter wonderland or frozen hellscape, depending on your outlook. In the midwest, the Winter Solstice has about six...

The system isn't broken

I'm stuck on what it means when a system works exactly as designed but produces outcomes we can't accept.

The Eldridge City Council voted 3-2 this week to discontinue the operation of Eldridge...

Carrying eccentricities

The board member looked me up and down — eighteen, hair shaved on the sides and back with the top grown out, wearing a suit three sizes too big and combat boots to a fancy dress party — and...

After the precipitation

We've entered the Hoth Era in my part of the States — two significant snowfalls in as many weeks, each dropping more than six inches. Both times, the pattern has been identical.

The snow falls. I...

Signal trying to find its shape

I was flipping through a People magazine in a waiting room the other day — something I hadn't done in years — and it hit me: this was the feed before the feed. The glossy pages represented an early...

We are the sand in the bottom half of the hourglass

Growing up, I heard it every weekday: "Like sands through the hourglass, so are the days of our lives."

The opening line of my mother's soap opera, a daily ritual that marked the rhythm of...

Mindful solutionism

We've abandoned perfectly good words.

"Mindfulness" became corporate meditation apps. "Solutions" became everything from software to soap. "Best practices" became the thing you say when you can't...

When smart becomes friction

When Amazon started pushing Alexa+, I was hesitant. A voice assistant with personality — one that could banter, joke, maybe even argue back. Something about it felt like a category error, but I...

It's only mopping if you change the water

We've all seen someone mopping a floor with water that's long past clean. They might be working hard, moving fast, sweating even — but the floor's not getting cleaner. They're just pushing the dirt...

Penny pedantics

I've seen dozens of articles and notices about the retirement of the "penny" — something I only recently learned the US Mint has never officially coined. The designation has always been "one-cent...

The bird who lived

Three pink blobs with flappy yellow beaks. That's what my wife brought in after the storm — freshly hatched, eyes sealed shut, barely breathing. She had found them scattered in the yard among the...

Thoughts on entropy

There's an innate drive in all life to rail against entropy — the natural tendency toward disorder, decay, and the eventual heat death of the universe. I feel this relentless pull toward disorder and...

Technology: the cause of, and solution to, all our problems

Homer Simpson may have been talking about alcohol, but the absurdity in his wisdom echoes perfectly for our digital age: technology is the cause of, and solution to, all our problems. The same...

Let's start at the very beginning

Learning to roller skate again as an adult is a live metaphor for everything worth doing well: it's best to start at the beginning, even when you think you already know how. Especially if you think...

Revisiting my why

There's an archaeology to purpose. Layers beneath the mission statement. The uncomfortable truth that sits under the polished why.

Low diatribe has a clear purpose statement: "A resonance-first...

Ted Lasso was wrong

Okay, that's a bit harsh. I shouldn't say that Ted was wrong, maybe just naive about several key points.

I really do love Ted Lasso. Ask anyone. The show gave us a masterclass in vulnerability-based...

When the game is rigged, reprogram the simulation

I remember hundreds of hours spent playing Monopoly growing up, and nearly as many hours fighting about it. The game was supposed to end when one player accumulated everything and everyone else lost...

It's a great big universe, and we're all really puny

The universe is big, like, really big. Douglas Adams captured it in a way that has stuck with me ever since my first read of Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy over forty years ago: "Space is big....

What remains when everything changes

If everything about us changes over time, what makes us still us?

Almost two millennia ago the historian Plutarch asked: if you replace every plank of a ship, one by one, until none of the original...

The archer and the application

I've been fascinated by bows and arrows ever since I realized you could string a rubber band on a clothespin to launch toothpicks at action figures. Later, as I learned more about the actual physics...

When the question isn't the question

There's something unsettling about the questions we don't ask about the questions we do ask.

How often do we assume we understand what someone really wants to know? How quickly do we fill in the...

In defense of the em dash, or, punctuation and prejudice

I came of age when punctuation mattered. Teachers circled commas in red. Editors debated serial oxford usage like philosophers. A well-placed em dash wasn't a flourish — it was a gesture of rhythm....

Growing tow cables in AT-AT country

I once worked inside an organization of 600 engineers moving in perfect lockstep, like AT-ATs trudging across Hoth. Massive, methodical, unstoppable in their predetermined path. Each team knew...

I'm not a sports guy

"I'm not a sports guy."My stock response. That was my stock answer whenever someone recommended Ted Lasso. I saw the hype, saw the world was Ted Lasso crazy, and paid no attention. I wasn't a...

Start with shy

Simon Sinek's "Start with Why" changed how I think about leadership. The idea that great leaders inspire action by starting with purpose rather than process resonated deeply. I spent years learning...

Liberation through loss

Tragedy is a strong word for what happened to my LEGO collection. It's only boxes, after all.

But when you have an embarrassingly large collection of unbuilt sets, those boxes matter more than they...

Illogical frustration with the illogical

I find myself vexed by the illogical, but that's the thing about illogic. It's under no obligation to make sense to anyone. The only way to navigate is to accept and move on.

This came into focus...

Choose your own discomfort

Some pressure crushes you. Some pressure sharpens you. We tend to lump both kinds of discomfort together, but they couldn't be more different. One is meaningless suffering. The other is the itch that...

I, for one, welcome our new robot overlords

I saw Star Wars during the summer of 1977 about 6 or 7 times. I was 5, and the only child old enough on my Mom's side of the family, so everyone wanted to take me. I saw it with my parents, then with...

Cultivating enduring bonds

The best measure of leadership isn't what happens while you're in charge. It's what happens after you leave. Do people keep helping each other? Do the practices persist? Do the relationships endure? ...

Where the thrum threads the signal

I didn't know I was looking for the thrum until I found it.

On my first day as Principal Engineer at Music Startup, I was given my repo credentials and a directive to extend the ordering platform...

Vulnerability and trust as resonance

I used to think vulnerability was weakness. That admitting uncertainty would undermine my authority, that showing unfinished work would expose me as incompetent. I was wrong, with plenty of...

Lead quietly, grow imperfectly

I built Low diatribe around the philosophy that leadership isn't always loud and to embrace the fact that growth isn't always pretty. The work hums at a lower frequency: steadier, truer, and easier...

Embracing the unpolished

It occurred to me around the eighth revision of the "Why" that I was starting to wonder if I was drifting away from my original intent to stay unpolished. When we talk about "unpolished" in this *Low...

When signal becomes static

I've been thinking about the paradox of our time: we're drowning in signal.

Every email marked urgent. Every meeting labeled critical. Every notification demanding immediate attention. Every voice...

Origin story

For the first 20 years of my career in tech, I measured my worth by how much I could carry on my own shoulders.

The goal was simple: be so good that your boss barely interfaced with you except when...