Gays Should Be Allowed to Marry

For anyone reading this far enough into the future, the National Conversation is currently focused on the Supreme Court's decision on Friday making gay marriage legal in all 50 states, which seems to be an appropriate time to share my view on the matter. For what it's worth, I've believed essentially the same thing since some time in college, so at least three years, but since I only started posting regularly on this blog a few months ago, I hadn't gotten the chance to write it out in detail until now.

Was this a miracle?

I'd like to share a story with you from my life this week. Yes, as the title suggests, there were a couple moments that seemed a bit miraculous, in both senses of the word. But you'll have to hold tight, because the context matters and I also want you to get a glimpse into my life through the story.

How Not To Lead, Part One: How Not to Delegate

Since high school, I've found myself taking on volunteer leadership positions in pretty much everything I've been involved in. I thought I'd share some of my thoughts on leadership from those experiences from time to time. While I'm calling this post "Part One", I don't have future parts planned yet, so it's a bit of an ambitious title.

Volunteer leadership, like many things in life, tends to be a bit of a convex problem: There's a sweet spot in the middle, and there are a lot of different failure modes around the edges. Organizations vary in terms of where exactly that sweet spot is, so I don't want to focus on that side of the problem. Instead, in this series, I'll focus on the failure modes, how not to lead. Being aware of what the edges are will help you stay near the sweet spot as a leader.

(By contrast, for instance, some organizations seem to find a lot of value in the edges, by approaching problems in an unusual fashion to generate something new. Some of them can even ride roughshod over the failure modes that I mention because it's more compelling to live on that edge. If there's a large amount of competition and/or novelty in your field, this might be the case.)

This lesson in particular has to do with the failure modes around delegation, allowing or assigning other people to do tasks.

How Grace and I Met

My girlfriend Grace Goon and I are celebrating our six-month dating anniversary today. We thought this would be an appropriate time to share how we met and started dating. We've color-coded who was writing at the time; it should be easy to figure out. Enjoy!

What Are You Building?

I'm currently visiting Caltech right now, my sixth visit since graduating almost 3 years ago. One of the nice things about this pattern of visiting twice a year is the opportunity to take a step outside of the daily grind and see how things have changed (or not changed) on a larger timescale.

What I've learned from time auditing myself

For a two-week period recently (April 27 to May 11), I time-audited myself. That is, I recorded everything that I spent time on, in 5-minute increments. I'm happy to share with you what I learned from both the resulting data and the process.

Posts 1-10 Summaries and Updates

Since restarting my blog 76 days ago, I've written 10 new blog posts, one per week except for Spring Break. At this point, I'd like to take a short moment to provide some updates on those posts.

I also realize that my writing style is definitely rather long-winded, and you might not feel you have time to read everything in full detail. So I'm also taking this opportunity to write down paragraph-long summaries of each of my posts. If the paragraph intrigues you, read the full thing!