Should you have meniscus surgery?

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Maybe.

In medical school aspiring doctors say the Hippocratic oath: to first do no harm. I think about that teaching high school business.

I know (most days) that my activity on customer acquisition cost or intellectual property and perfume dupes is not the most important thing. High school students have a lot(!) going on in their lives. My own glasses about high school are rose colored, but I do remember riding my bike to the river, listening to Springsteen, and thinking I’d never recover from a broken heart.

So I try to first do no harm.

Kids learn a lot on their own. The goal in class is to take small steps everyday. Even just one thing. If they only remember that patents have perfect pictures it’s a win.

Windfalls are rare.

Earlier this year was my annual physical. It had been a long time since seeing a doctor. Nothing is wrong but a lack of baselines. In addition to a physical and labs is some knee pain. After a range of motion diagnostic, my PCP said it’s probably my meniscus. We could do physical therapy and go through insurance or I could pay cash for an MRI – the definitive proof. The ultimate outcome, he said, is probably surgery.

The MRI quotes were $500 and the PT appointments were weeks away so using AI, I made my own. Then I read this!

https://www.sensible-med.com/p/bravery-and-humility-is-needed-to

Patients who had a placebo surgery (everything but the actual manipulation of the meniscus) had better outcomes than actual surgery patients. There was no trial to compare PT patient outcomes.

The catalyst is time. If there’s no timeline or deadline there’s no problem. The test is Friday. The race is in December.

And time is arbitrary. It’s like Free Parking. Before a Monopoly game begins the players need to decide on what Free Parking means. Time is just like that.

Have a great Monday.

“Because I love it”

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Jerry Seinfeld has a famous productivity system. Sometimes called the Seinfeld Strategy or Don’t break the chain. It works like this: pick a task, complete the task, mark off the completion of the task on a calendar, repeat.

In a podcast with Adam Carolla, Seinfeld explained, “take your obsessive compulsive disorder and make it work for you. Don’t let it be a psychological handicap. Make it a psychological advantage. I was up at midnight working on material because I didn’t do anything all day, and I’m not going to sleep without looking at notes.”

Instead of scrolling on his phone, obsessive itself, Seinfeld gets to work.

Identities and Information in Smoking

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Summary: three things affect action. The pliable long-term solution is appealing to identity. Building relationships does this well.

“There were all these campaigns to try and get young people to quit smoking and they did not work. It’s going to give you lung cancer. This is your lungs after smoking. None of that worked. What worked was the ad campaign that had these old white dudes calling and talking about all the money they made on these young kids smoking.” – Andrew Huberman, June 2026

One of my biggest challenges teaching high school is action.

My 7th period last year was explosive. The question was could we harness that explosion to create energy.

Three avenues lead to action.

  • Inertia. The ‘good’ kids show up, take notes, try hard-ish all on their own. The ‘bad’ kids are late, fall asleep, and change the subject.

Inertia just is. Your mind would be blown away by some of the high-action high-inertia kids. A friend at our graduation party texted me the day after saying her faith in humanity was restored. The other two avenues are:

  • Short-term. Easy to use, middling effectiveness especially long-term. This is discipline, calls home, moved seats, extra credit, candy, real-life-examples-and-interestingness, detention.
  • Long-term. The goal. Perfection. The target. Like lunar eclipses rare and beautiful.

In the same way short-term is easier to spin up so is information. If you don’t X then you won’t Y. It’s so shallow. But it’s easy and sometimes I just did it.

The best technique (so far) to get to the long-term and identity based action catalyst is through relationships. When I first started teaching it was all watch how fast we’ll go from day one and that has shifted to starting slower but going further. Slow is smooth and smooth is fast.

See also: Don’t bring information to a design fight and Don’t bring educational solutions to a design fight.

How much (financial) independence?

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Our end-of-year school ceremony included two band performances and two cheer displays for America’s (checks Google) semiquincentennial (half-five-hundred). And that was just for staff. That American feeling is here.

I also spoke with a financial advisor. I got to ask reverse financial advice. There’s no self-inflicted wounds. But it got me thinking, how much financial independence do I want?

A favorite book claims someone can live on twenty-thousand dollars a year. And they can! But the number of freedoms they have are limited. They aren’t free to grocery shop whenever for whatever. They aren’t free to fly on airplanes. They aren’t free to join gyms. They lack a whole bunch of freedoms.

But everyone lacks certain freedoms. There’s no carte blanche. So the question shifts to which freedoms would you like?

These are simple but not easy questions. The advisor asked what I would like my retirement income to be. Uh, whatever it is now, I guess. There’s no way to answer those questions.

During this season of celebration, enjoy your freedoms!

Ruby Ridge: Part 2, Groups

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These are ideas about communication after listening to The American Scandal Podcast about Ruby Ridge.

Humans feel more than they think.

Humans want to feel safe. Groups make humans feel safe. Humans feel the need to be members of a group.

Adolescent weirdness is part of this. Children have familial feelings, teens less-so. But everyone needs to be part of a group.

Humans join groups and then find adjacent groups. Viewers also watched.

Groups form worldviews.

Group members communicate well. Information is less idiosyncratic. Time is more. Quality forms from shared experiences.

Group to group collaboration requires more energy than group to individual or individual to individual. There’s more “mass”. If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together. Groups are slow, but powerful.

Some of the groups involved at Ruby Ridge: white nationalists, the FBI, Federal Marshals, the United States government, the Weaver family (and extended family), Idaho neighbors, a hostage rescue team, the media, the legal system.

The Ruby Ridge story was a tragedy. It was a mess because of poor communication and unappreciated group dynamics. I’d forgotten the explosiveness of that time (Ruby Ridge ’92, Waco ’93, Oklahoma City ’95).

The American Scandal podcast ends with an episode about the threads of Ruby Ridge to current politics. That part felt less convincing that the narrative story. But in the summer of America’s semiquincentennial, I hope you find peace and joy.

Ruby Ridge: Part 1, Communication

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These are ideas about communication after listening to The American Scandal Podcast about Ruby Ridge.

Trust and information make up communication. 

Trust is the combination of quality and time. Quality is the depth of common experiences. Time is the lengths of common experiences. Relationships with frequent and deep experiences are strongest. 

Information is idiosyncratic. People overlap in their understandings – to some extent. It’s difficult to convey “information” about black swans to someone who has only seen white swans. 

Obstacles to communication. 

  1. Time: quantity is its own quality. 
  2. Quality: be vulnerable, deflate the ego, collaborate, be meaningful. 
  3. Information: everyone is a Bayesian, but we all have different priors, observations, and probabilities. 

Communication enablers. 

  1. Speed: slow down and increase time, allow quality, and refine information. 
  2. Gather their information: what assumptions have they made? 
  3. Walk in their shoes: what direction does this information lead? 

“Consumer profile” is a business-speak analogy. The less overlap with the groups communicating the more energy has to be put in the system. 

Three things from three years ago

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In early June 2023 these are the top stories and ideas floating around. Let’s see how important they are in three years.

  • “UFO Whistleblower”
  • Apple Vision headset
  • AI (LLM) development

If you were a technology optimist in the 1950s you may have predicted that practical storage would become 1,000 times larger. Maybe 10,000 times larger, if you were swinging for the fences. Few would have said “30 million times larger within my lifetime.” But that’s what happened.

The Psychology of Money

What’s it like teaching high school?

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Our school ends Memorial Day weekend, and aside from having a high school graduate!, it’s a calmer time. Tests are done and preps can wait.

But there’s an apt analogy for what it’s like teaching high school and it’s AI.

Teaching high school is like working with a different AI model each day. It might be a good one and it might by gobbledygook. This also depends on the person.

I stand at the front of the room, next to their desk, and online via Google Classroom and I make a request: Please read this article (sometimes it’s only blog posts from here) and write three sentences about what you learned.

Three sentences! Well, the AI never complains about that.

Often the work is okay to great – just like AI. Sometimes it’s nonsensical. Just like AI.

Early on, teaching felt overwhelming because I tried to do too much. It’s like parenting in that sense, only you have 120 kids. Jim Gaffigan has a good joke about this: what’s it like having a fourth kid? Imagine you’re treading water and someone hands you a baby. Students aren’t your kids, but they’re also not not your kids. I’ve hugged crying kids, fed hungry kids, listened, counseled, and encouraged. Kids are messy too.

Teaching got easier when I simplified my goals: pass the state exam, build relationships, be safe. If I’m working towards two or three of those things at any given time then we are making progress.

Teaching is a good situation to see the adage that people overestimate what they can get done in a day and underestimate what they can get done in a year. The kids change so much. It may not always be in the way I hoped – but it’s often in the way they need.

Have a great summer.

Full Hearts

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My biggest takeaway from Morgan Housel’s The Art of Spending Money was to have a rich camera roll. I want my wealth represented by the photos I take of the experiences and people in my life.

But life is busy.

Before writing this post, I spent 15 minutes updating my daughters’ and my family calendars through the next three months: high school volleyball, college orientation, college move-in, work dates, doctor dates, date dates.

To make life less busy, I track good moments. Using the year-at-a-glance calendar, I make a heart on days when something good happened. Often it’s small things: funny movies, coffee dates, just hanging out. If a few days have gone by with no pink hearts, then I know it’s time to make some plans and have some good moments.

My moments are fleeting.

In two-weeks my 16 year old sits for her driving test. In seventy-nine days my 18 year old moves into her college dorm. Just last week, she graduated high school.

Man, it goes fast. It flies by. So take today, and fill your heart.

Stop counting pushups

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I was never good at push-ups. But good is subjective. If the pool of push-up people is small enough, I’m the best, and if it’s large enough, I am not.

Better is better. Better shows progress, and that’s what life is really about. Progress, walking your path, stumbling, succeeding, and meeting people along your journey.

I did pushups wrong. I counted push-ups, not minutes. I was thinking about the wrong number.

in my class, we do an accountability partner assignment. Students choose two areas to improve, and an accountability partner for each one. I offer – if needed -to be their accountability partner.

One student, Aaron, wanted to do 100 push-ups a day. I was his accountability partner.

This was too many for me. But it was because I was doing 100. If I change the metric to minutes of push push-ups per day, it became more achievable.

Set a timer for one minute. Do as many push-ups as possible. When not doing Push-ups just be in the push-up position with arms extended.

That’s it!

My guess for the effect is ambiguity and familiarity. How many sets? How long will this take? Do I have time for this?

Nothing in my life is denominated in number of push-ups. There’s no context. But minutes, I’ve got minutes everywhere.

Where else could this work?