Paris, with Seth and Asher — one stop on a longer circuit of watching how kids everywhere actually learn to see the game.
I spend my time trying to understand what's actually generating the outcomes people are seeing.
The moment that interests me most is when everyone agrees on the explanation — and the evidence quietly disagrees. The referee missed it. The kid lost confidence. We need AI. The team isn't trying hard enough. Each of those sentences ends a conversation that probably should have kept going.
Most of what I've learned came from conversations. A cashier taught me that the hidden motivator at work is usually autonomy, not pay. A window cleaner taught me that novelty can matter more than efficiency. An old man at a basketball court gave me one sentence — know why you believe what you believe is true — and it changed how I approach everything. I keep a public ledger of these at 100 Conversations, because every idea on this site should be traceable to a real person, not manufactured for the internet.
The rooms change. The operation doesn't. Organizations, soccer fields, statistics, technology migrations, my own kitchen — the mechanism underneath rarely cares which room it's in.
I wrote They Are Not Choking, a book about youth athletes who look like they're choking and almost never are. Before this, I spent two decades building data and machine-learning systems across retail, logistics, privacy, and finance — most recently at Apple. That work is where I learned that the constraint is almost always one layer above where everyone is looking.
I take on a small amount of advisory work with leaders trying to figure out what's actually generating the outcomes they're seeing. If that's you, start with a conversation.