Sunday, April 13, 2025
Give me an efficient routine, and I’ll make a ritual out of it.
I love me some routine.
My swimming bag is a fine-tuned jigsaw of items, from the pocket the underwear goes (learned the hard way), to my flat hair comb and shaving kit. And this modus operandi tends to repeat throughout the 1000 minutes I’m usually awake each day.
But every couple of cycles, I’ll get an idea to improve something, meaning change.
Immediately my reptilian brain will try to stop me.
Because it’s statistically right. Most of the times the experiment fails. See underwater pocket above.
Still, those few times it succeeds, it feels great. The micro-evolution I’m acting out polishes even more the routine. Removing a friction I never felt bothered me, but oh-boy it now does.
So I wack the lizard brain with an entertain experiments mental mumbling when needed. It helps me keep things fresh.
Wednesday, April 9, 2025
This little mantra has served me well over the years.
It’s a reminder of being mindful of the moment.
Present and aware of any little detail to appreciate.
Looking to the past and the future makes worries cast shadows across time.
But in most of each of those moments in time, you’re safe and content to be here.
Wednesday, April 9, 2025
I have an unpublished draft post titled: Am I a Star Wars fan anymore?. It was supposed to be an exploration of my love for Star Wars, when I wasn’t excited about any of the upcoming movies or shows at the time. Since I was the designated Star Wars geek in multiple circles.
Never published it because it’s tone oscillated between drunken rant, and whiny whimpering. I’m glad I didn’t.
Over the past 3 days, I’ve watched Episode I, II, and III with my 9yo. And it was great. How could the same movies I never rewatched after leaving the theater decades ago, now be great? It’s because I’d forgotten that what’s fun about Star Wars is to share it. To geek out about lightsaber design and X-Wing speeds.
Any shared universe I can have with Robie is a treasure. So I’m diving headfirst back in.
Saturday, April 5, 2025
Working smart at small-scale becomes working hard at large-scale if mindset is not switched. The way we figured everything out everything when at Aeropost – which can me nicely be called “startup mode” – was more accurately an aligned mess. But we were small enough that error correction happened constantly, and quickly we got back to pulling in the same direction.
However, that same methodology becomes unworkable as you grow. The error correction doesn’t happen enough and it only works when someone has enough brute force to set the direction. So as you scale, you need to figure out how to work smart-at-scale in enterprise setting.
You still need to have smart, loosely organized teams. The problem is that if they’re all too different, they cannot build a more complex system because there’s not enough connections. You allow them independence, but you standardize the working model – the nomenclature between them. Call it agile, 37signals Shape Up, Design Thinking, whatever. The need is to figure out a way that all independent teams know where other independent teams can meet them, and be able to request or delivery.
Saturday, January 18, 2025
Even when flying alone for work, I arrive way too early at airports. I even check the weight of my carry-on. Why? rules always seem to apply to me. Some would say I’m unlucky, and I don’t mind. Because I’m lucky in love.
I don’t play the lottery or gamble. Yes, in the back of my mind the fact that I’m almost as likely to win by not playing than playing probably sends the wrong vibes on the roulette table. Still, I play for fun when the situation calls for it, but never expect to win. Yet, I don’t mind. I’m lucky in love.
Being street smarts doesn’t apply to me. If there’s a long line to be made, I stand in the back and wait. I don’t have the charm or agency to be able to skip it. Again, don’t mind. I’m lucky in love.
I wasn’t always lucky in love. For a long time I thought love was hard work. It isn’t. Marriage and relationships are hard work. But loving and being loved should be effortless. You need to be yourself and love the other person as they are. Then work hard on everything around it. For 11 years I’ve been lucky in love with Ana. And it’s all the luck I need.
Tuesday, January 14, 2025
Here’s three things I want to blog about over at 5typos.net during January:
- Paid subscriptions for 2025
- My iOS Home Screen
- Best Tech Purchases of 2024
Let’s see if sharing this publicly shames me into actually writing the posts.
Sunday, January 12, 2025
I once flew just over our Miami apartment when coming back of a work trip, and instagrammed a photo with the caption:
Home is where Ana is.
I was particularly proud of that one. Flash forward a decade, and the caption should now read:
Home is where Ana, Robie and Bettina are.
While true, it’s a bit more complex. I’d assume that Ana mostly needs our kids and myself to be present under the same roof. But Robie and Bettina also have preferences, and they’re not necessarily the same as mine.
Watching communities disappear around some internet famous people I’ve followed for a long time, makes me wonder how moving across countries — something I’ve done multiple times in the past — will play in the future with my family. By choice or not.