My Notes
Over here, the writing is a little shorter and more experimental than in my essays. These are my conversation starters. My digital garden of ideas I’ve planted and am tending to. There are a few common themes in my Notes.
I keep coming back to exploring how people find their people, and intentionally build community. I share a little work I did with Write of Passage on making an online course globally accessible, and look at making friends online.
Writing helped me navigate a difficult career change. I loved the course that taught me to write so much, I ended up working with them for years. In Notes like On Writing and Reflective Practice, and My 12 Favorite Problems, I’m writing about my writing process.
For a long time, travel defined me. I loved walking around a new city, and watching the world go by in an unfamiliar coffee shop. I travel less now that I have an infant, but looking back, my trips to Casablanca, Louisville and the Dubai Expo all prompted me to send a postcard to my readers.
Make yourself at home in these Notes and let me know what you think.
Lessons From My First Investment Misstep
I recently experienced my first brush with investment failure. It taught me to trust my gut. It also made me question investing for impact vs. commercial return.
The Juggling Act: Balancing Priorities to go Global
The power of online companies and communities makes it automatically easy to semi-accomodate a global community. Going fully global takes intentionality, and empathy.
The Access Afya Manifesto
A manifesto on the future of healthcare. A guiding document on how I think about healthcare transformation, and how I worked to get my team onboard.
On Effective Altruism
Effective Altruism can drive scarce capital towards the simplest and cheapest options, but miss the essential systems. My long take on a conflicted relationship with the movement.
A Walk through Casablanca
A colorful walk through a growing city, and a reflection on empty neighborhoods.
12 Favorite Problems
Your 12 Favorite Problems live on the intellectual back-burner: you are scavenging the world looking for ideas that fit the things you wonder most about.
A Walk through the Dubai Expo
Walking through the World Expo can give us a sense of our identity as global citizens, a chance to pause and appreciate culture and beauty and a space to actively play and explore.
The Science of City Beauty
The evidence is piling up that health benefits are positively correlated with urban design that takes into account green and blue spaces, play, tree cover, and yes, aesthetics. Should we have a right to live somewhere beautiful?
Neighborhood Vitals: An Etymology
Is “Vitals” the right framework to measure the health of a place? Here is my current thinking on why the answer is “yes.”
My 2021 Annual Review
2021 was one of the most significant years for me in a long time. After nine years, I moved out of Kenya, and left the business that I built there in someone else’s hands. In this review I’m reflecting on what I learned from my professional and personal transitions.
My 2021 Influencers
If our attention is our most precious resource, here were some investments that I made last year that really paid off.
Making Friends Online
Vulnerability, light but regular contact and shared goals and values are at least the start of a good recipe for building online friendships.