At the start of a new year, I take the time to set my focus for the coming year. By being selective about where I direct my energy, I believe I can achieve results that are exponentially greater than if I split my attention. More details about the process are in this blog post and you can review the results from past years here. 2026 Theme: (en)courage Of all of the ‘en’ words, this one is my favorite. I especially love the contrast between the two words. Courage stands bold and classically masculine – a warrior going into battle, a knight going to fight the dragon. Encourage, in contrast, seems softer, like words from a cardigan sweater wearing kind old neighbor. But both words share the same root. They are about acting in the face of difficulty. As someone said, “Courage is not the absence of fear, but the triumph
This is not only a new year, but it is also the first full year of my next sabbath year cycle. As such, before I define the focus for this year, I also need to define the guiding vision that will serve me for the next seven years. Sometime over the past few years and idea stood out to me – words that had a version with an ‘en’ or ’em’ prefix – encourage, empower, enrich, enable, enjoy, embolden, etc. En Words Both ‘en’ and ’em’ are related variants that serve as a prefix that means “in,” “into,” “to cause” or “put into a state.” Enable literally means to make something able – to give (someone or something) the authority or means to do something. Among the list of root words that ‘en’ modifies are a number of concepts that are very interesting on their own right. Courage is one
This post is part of a series where I talk about technologies and make guesses about how they’ll deliver value in the future. One of my goals in life is to be a great technologist – an expert at identifying technology that can deliver value and improve the human condition. I hope that writing this blog series and reviewing what I write will help me with that. Updates Since Last Time Winter 2025 was my most recent post in this series. I don’t expect everything I write about in this series to change in so short a period. Things that matter tend to take a decade or more to be proven right or wrong. That said, I’d like to get in the habit of checking in to see if my previous statements are revealing themselves correct or if there are things to learn from. Foundation models – I argued a
Each year I focus my attention on a few named goals as a way to be more intentional about the pursuits I direct my energy towards. The way in which I do this has evolved over time and these release notes serve to document the current state of the process and changes I’ve made recently. Review Of v1.6 I made a few changes to this process back in Jan 2019 as part of the v1.6 version. Those held true for the entire seven year sabbath cycle, which reflects on how refined this process has become. One of the most significant changes I made was to re-introduce a bucket list item, which was a way for me to take on some difficult physical challenges. I’d like to reflect back on that. Bucket List Under that category I ran around Mt. Rainier, did 125 mile multi-day run + SUP, ran a 100