As you may have noticed, I’ve been posting work to Medium for several months now. This started out as an experiment to see the magnitude of the reaction to successful pieces I’ve already written here.

The results? There are a lot of humans out there and many of them traipsing around Medium had never read these pieces. In general, an article that performed well here will play well on Medium provided that it hasn’t been posted here recently.

Folks have asked. No, I’m not done posting here. My policy is to continue to post all new content here and occasionally post pieces to Medium.

Now you know.

I’ve been working on a talk about public speaking for a few weeks and I open with my worst public speaking experience. I tell the story of how I got up in front of the engineering team at my first start-up and had a full blown panic attack. Slide 7 of 15 – full stop. Couldn’t continue.

Most humans don’t like speaking in front of other humans and for me that situation is only exacerbated by being a self-identified introvert.

Thing is… I like public speaking. It’s a high. I get energy from the room and I’ve never been able to reconcile my introversion with this aspect of public speaking. Good news: outgoing introverts.

From The Muse – Outgoing Introverts Do Exist. Here’s one of the 10 signs:

It Actually Takes Less Energy to Say What’s on Your Mind Than to Make Small Talk

Introverts like talking about ideas or connecting authentically. Fake small talk bores you and drains your life force.

Yes. Right. Totally.

From typography.com:

About two years ago, H&Co Senior Designer Andy Clymer proposed that we design a monospace typeface. Monospace (or “fixed-width”) typefaces have a unique place in the culture: their most famous ancestor is the typewriter, and they remain the style that designers reach for when they want to remind readers about the author behind the words. Typewriter faces have become part of the aesthetic of journalism, fundraising, law, academia, and politics; a dressier alternative to handwriting, but still less formal than something set in type, they’re an invaluable tool for designers.

I’ve dropped Operator Mono into both Sublime and Terminal. A monospace typeface needs to be readable and without a lot of opinion. After brief usage, Operator Mono easily meets both requirements.

I’ve been fretting about the role of lead of leaders. I have a good rubric for understanding and evaluating front line leaders, but lead of leaders is a very different gig that requires a different set of leadership muscles. Briefly and incompletely, they need to be better at:

• Delegating work
• Influencing
• Decomposing vision into strategy
• Executing that strategy
• Building of new leaders

This article documents interview questions of CEOs – some useful material here.

I’m not sure what is more surprising. There’s a dog-sitting start-up in Seattle called Rover or:

The average tenure of a developer in Silicon Valley is nine months at a single company. In Seattle, that length is closer to two years.

I’d like to see the source data on this assertion. Not the existence dog-sitting start-up part.

Via Corinne Purtill on Quartz:

The higher the concentration of high-ranking executives, the more a group struggled to complete the task. They competed for status, were less focused on the assignment, and tended to share less information with each other. Their collaboration skills had grown rusty with disuse.

Next summer, the third edition of Managing Humans will be published. Like the prior edition, I’ll be nuking some chapters, adding new ones, and editing the current ones. I’m also thinking about going full Catcher in the Rye for the cover. Stay tuned.

Long ago, there was a Glossary that captured the terms I used both in the blog and in the books. This Glossary did not make the transition to the new version of the site until this morning. I’ve done a lightweight editing pass on this current version, but would love your suggestions for additions/edits to the current version which will be published along with v3 of the book.

Happy Merry.

Things physicists say that make me irrationally nervous:

“The properties of quantum particles are ‘fuzzy’ or uncertain to start with, so this gives them enough wiggle room to avoid inconsistent time travel situations,” said co-author Professor Timothy Ralph.

Via Quartz:

“The phase speed is infinite—much larger, infinitely larger than the speed of light,” Mazur tells Quartz.

This doesn’t mean light itself is traveling faster than the speed of light, which would violate the laws of relativity. “Phase velocity” refers to the speed of the crest of waves that ripple out when light strikes a material. The Harvard scientists created a material that allows these wave crests to move infinitely fast. This is a strange thought to wrap your head around, and means the crests of the waves are oscillating through time, but not space. Under these peculiar conditions, the Harvard scientists found that it’s easy to manipulate the photons, squeezing them down to the microscopic scale and turning them around. In other words, we can treat photons in the same way we currently manipulate electrons.