Espresso Shots 5-31-26

It's that time again for my weekly update, which includes a short collection of noteworthy finds, posts that inspire, as well as a few reflections from the past week or two. I'll aim to land these in your inbox by the weekend, in time to pair with your morning coffee (or your preferred cup of inspiration).

The Latest Drippings ☕️

• Don't Mistake Nice People for Good People. One of the rules I try to keep is not diving too much into politics for the newsletter, as Groucho Marx points out: 'Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly, and applying the wrong remedies.' I did appreciate this post though, which can really just be applied to life, work, or whatever suits you, about how niceness should be viewed as a skill, rather than a personality trait. 'Very few of us are outwardly rude to people in person, even those with whom we have fundamental worldview differences. In most of those cases, we're strategically civil. We smile, make small talk, wish them well, and the moment they leave, we exhale and celebrate surviving a possible public disaster. We're not exactly being phony; we're treating people with simple decency and avoiding unnecessary turbulence. We're trying to navigate already exhausting days by reducing conflict, avoiding an honest airing of grievances that might derail our day and set off a relational atomic bomb.' The world is wild right now, choose kindness.
• The Hidden Cost of Taking Yourself Too Seriously. Recently, I subscribed to Big Think, and it's been a great source of interesting topics, videos, and thought pieces. As I've alluded to in past newsletters, most of 2026 has been rethinking workflows and assumptions by focusing on things I did as a kid to fuel my creativity and drive my curiosity. The art of "play" has been especially useful, and I'm in the process of writing up a longer blog post about it. 'When we're playful, our attention shifts away from how we are doing and toward what we are doing.' Some wonderful ideas in here, and this hits home: 'The most playful adults don't have a separate "play time" carved out in their schedules. They let it leak into everything: the way they run a meeting, approach a problem, or have a conversation. It's not about what they're doing. It's the orientation they bring to it — curiosity instead of approval.'
• Megadeth Drummer Hears "Mr. Brightside" For The First Time. I've also been on The Killers Mr. Brightside kick as of late, so this video seemed appropriate. It's a series in which famous drummers hear a piece of music for the first time, and they see how they can transform it. This one is with Dirk Verbeuren from Megadeth, where his 'incredible drumming skills effortlessly transform Mr. Brightside into his own unique masterpiece, showcasing the value of learning songs quickly for session work. He also highlights the importance of having techniques and tricks for memorization and sight-reading, allowing him to effortlessly master the song with ease.'
• The Costco Theory of the Internet. 'The internet gave us access to anything, and then forced us to consume everything, and then made us responsible for sorting all of it. The modern consumer has become a part-time procurement department. We audit quality, decode incentives, compare vendors, scan reviews, avoid scams, dodge subscriptions, read refund policies, assess creators, inspect screenshots, and attempt, against all odds, to tell actual expertise apart from people who bought a microphone. This is considered normal behavior now. And it's deranged.' I don't know how Joan does it, but she always has a way of just tapping into something that's underlying in society and nails it. This post posits that digital platforms should move away from infinite choice toward curated, high-floor experiences. I can't argue with that.
• Life Lessons from a Pro Bowler. 'The key is to examine every part of your day – work, relationships, brushing your teeth – and ask: Is there a better method to do this? Can I do this task more effectively? More joyfully? Am I packing my suitcase this way because it’s the best way, or because I’ve always done it this way and I’m just being carried along by inertia?' An interesting read on some strategies/experiments questioning invisible assumptions.
• Why Your Brain Loves Games and How to Use That to Your Advantage. More on games and playing, from one of my favorites, Anne-Laure Le Cunff. 'Game mechanics work because they align with the brain’s motivational wiring at multiple levels: dopamine circuits that reward anticipation, our psychological need for competence, and learning that’s based on low-cost experimentation. These mechanics aren’t magic — they’re design patterns, and once you understand how they work, you can apply them to boost motivation in any area of your work and life.' Some really good ideas in here with several techniques on turning life into a game (I particularly liked 'add an element of randomness').
• The Sin of Noticing Reality. Another poignant post for 2026: 'When a person sees some topic of discourse they don’t like being noticed, the following is what happens after. First, they say: it’s not happening. Then, if that doesn’t work: okay, it’s happening, but it’s not a big deal. If that doesn’t stick: why do you even care about this? And the latest one, which might be my favorite for sheer audacity: yes, it happened, but it’s over now, so you can stop talking about it.'
• Red Button or Blue Button? What a Viral Question Tells Us About Game Theory and the State of the World. What's even better than a game or how to incorporate play into everything? The game -about- the game: The Infinite Game, game theory, the meta-game, second-order thinking, etc. These all cluster around the concept that if you can zoom out far enough, the real advantage is understanding the structure of the game better than the other players do. If you're lucky, you can potentially redefine what game you're actually in. This post dives into two of my favorite examples: the trolley problem and the prisoner's dilemma.
• Why Is It So Hard to Be Ordinary?. In a fellowship call this week, I mentioned that one of my favorite things to do in an organization is to find the mavericks/outcasts - the ones that won't accept the status quo. It's the fact that the mavericks don't really consider themselves as visionaries, but people who couldn't stop noticing that something was just ... wrong. That insight is what becomes extraordinary: 'When ordinariness is elevated, does it risk becoming extraordinary, and thereby losing its essential character? Here, there's a paradox. If we value only the best experiences, then we might find ourselves looking askance at ordinary life. But, if we want to properly cherish the ordinary, we must do so without making it into something it isn't - that is, into something extraordinary.' The maverick doesn't elevate the ordinary. They refuse to look away from it.
• If You're Never Wrong at Work, You're Probably Not Leading. There's a lot of value in taking risks - but you have to embrace the idea that there are going to be unpopular ideas and potential for rejection. But if you want to lead, you have to be bold. Every success is built on a mountain of failure. 'The people who create the most value are usually the ones willing to make uncomfortable decisions before the right answer is apparent.'
• Not Everything Needs to Be Simplified. Today I learned the word simplexity, 'a neologism which proposes a possible complementary relationship between complexity and simplicity.' A worthy read that discusses how 'design that ignores this treats complexity as the enemy of the user, when the real enemy is confusion.'
• Photographic Memory Is a Myth: What the Research Says. 'The idea of photographic memory is simple and powerful: Experience is captured objectively, stored completely, and retrieved perfectly. See it once, keep it forever. There's just one problem. There's no scientific evidence it exists.' I really liked this post, which dives into how memory actually works. 'Human memory does not work like a recording device. It's a reconstructive process even among those with the most extraordinary skills. When you recall an event, memory doesn't just hand you your experiences the same way every time. It's never a matter of simply accessing, retrieving, and playing back a static record of a stored slice of the past.'
• The Backward Index. 'How do dictionary makers keep track of similarly suffixed words, like those ending in -ism, -graphy, -ness, or -ology? The Backward Index'
• About the Solar Powered Website. Did you know there are a few solar-powered (and self-hosted) websites out there? Neither did I - but Low-tech Magazine is just that. But this was a great read on how (and why it was built). 'Because it uses so little energy, this website can be run on a mini-computer with the processing power of a mobile phone. It needs 1 to 2.5 watts of power, which is supplied by a small, off-grid solar PV system on the balcony of the author's home. Typical for off-the-grid renewable power systems, energy storage is limited. This means that the website will go offline during longer periods of cloudy weather.' Check it out, but as they mention, it may be offline if it runs out of power. :)
• Earth's Radio Bubble: Every Signal We've Ever Sent Into Space. Ending this week with a really interesting visualization on how far our radio signals from Earth have traveled. 'Right now, a sphere of electromagnetic radiation is expanding outward from Earth at the speed of light. It has been growing since the first powerful radio transmissions of the early 1900s. Today, that bubble is roughly 240 light-years across and it contains every piece of music, every TV broadcast, every radar ping, and every deliberate message we have ever sent into the cosmos. To any civilization with a sufficiently sensitive receiver sitting within that bubble, we have already announced ourselves.' However, we have only 'illuminated approximately 0.000002% of our own galaxy - a drop of ink that has barely left the tip of the pen.'

Amor Fati ✌🏻