The massacre in Pittsburgh is heartbreaking and awful, and another example of the extent to which society seems to be fraying.

The Pittsburgh attacker spent a lot of time on social media sites that stoked his fear, isolation and anger. I think about the internet a lot, and while the internet has the ability to help us form a better understanding of “we” (global humanity), it can also cultivate a strong sense of “them” (the dangerous other), as this case demonstrates.

In other words, we are simultaneously increasing our capacity to understand one another through connectedness and information, and fracturing along tribal lines, increasing the sense of distance and disconnectedness.

I am no scholar of Buddhism, but have been interested recently in the Buddhist notion of the relationship between “suffering” and the “self”. In a nutshell, the concept is: suffering is an essential human condition, and it is primarily brought about by our sense of self and how events impact us as individuals (jealousy, greed, wanting, disappointment, etc). Meanwhile, there actually is no “self”, as everything in the universe is connected. Therefore, if you can release your focus on the self, you can dissolve the suffering. (Here is a good overview of these concepts.)

I think about these concepts in the day-to-day: for me they manifest in all the little moments of going about my work and getting things done. Often times, I feel a resistance welling up, often manifested as fear, which I have written about, but more generally I think the culprit is the self-centered thinking. When this happens, an idea that works for me is actively seeking to replace thoughts of the self with thoughts of service: take the suffering that comes from seeing things through the lens of your individual self, and redirect it to the service of others. When this happens, I can physically feel the “suffering” melt away.

My own examples are of course trivial compared to the broader environment of fear, suffering, and violence. But I would like to think that we have the potential as humans to re-knit the ties that bind us together, somehow.

I wrote recently about the challenge of turning plans into routines. One of the activities that is the most impactful for me is meditation. I cannot say that I have a perfect meditation routine, but I can absolutely say that when I do do it, it makes me feel great, immediately.

There are a bunch of good tools out there to help build a meditation routine. I have found that guided meditations are the easiest to start with, since they give you a framework and something to react to, but can also be hit-or-miss in terms of fit.

The very first guided meditation that really worked for me was this 6-minute body scan, by my friend Paul Fulton. If you have never meditated and are looking for an easy way to feel it out, this is a great one to start with.

I have also used a bunch of apps to help build the habit. Insight Timer has both a library of guided meditations as well as a very nice tool for building your own meditation timer (complete with punctuating wood blocks, bells, etc). My current go-to is Simple Habit, which has very nicely curated sets of meditations. All the apps in this space try to help you out by visualizing your “streak”, which if I’m honest only kind of works for me.

In terms of building my own routine, what I struggle with the most is finding the right time. If I can manage to do it first thing in the morning, that’s what works the best, in terms of teeing up a good mindset on the day. But I have also found that tucking it in in spare moments (especially with guided meditations under 10 minutes long) also works — for me, often times on trains and planes.

Meditation, like aerobic exercise, is magical in that it is both mental and physical. I walk away feeling calmer, clearer, more focused, and more energized. It is incredible, really. So I am a bit surprised and a bit bummed that I have not yet managed to make it a bedrock of my every day. Working on it.

Just about two years ago, my wife’s parents were hit by a truck while crossing the street.

The past two years have been both difficult and wonderful. Wonderful in that two people who were on the brink of death following the accident are still with us (her mother in particular has had a miraculous if incomplete recovery from a shockingly awful head injury) – and also wonderful in that the experience brought us closer in some ways. Difficult in that not only was the recovery an overwhelming ordeal, but the life that we / they are left with now is fundamentally different, an in some ways, permanently broken.

Life happens slowly and quickly. It continues to amaze me how change both accretes imperceptibly over time, and also comes crashing through in instant bursts. In this case, that one moment, at around 7pm on Sept 29th, 2016, was an inflection point for the family. I think we all still have some amount of PTSD at this time of year, when it gets colder and dusk comes earlier, and every dark crosswalk feels like a danger zone.

I was talking to a friend this week whose family suffered an even more awful trauma several years back — a trauma which shook the family and altered the course of their existence and their relationships. In that case as well, the longer-term outcome both horribly bad, but with some silver linings.

Every person, family and community has small and large versions of life-altering trauma. Bullying, sexual assaults, suicides, natural disasters, accidents of all kinds, gang violence, political violence.

I would like to think that in each case, there is an opportunity for some surprising growth, resiliency, antifragility. And no doubt in some cases there is. But what I am sure of is that sometimes awful things happen really quickly, and they can change everything. I don’t know that there is any way to be ready for this, expect perhaps to expect it.

Sunday night over dinner, my son, parents and I were discussing the saving / investing system we set up for our kids in the spring. The idea was/is: set a monthly budget for purchases (in their case, mostly online movies, tv shows and games), and include a really healthy interest rate (20% monthly) to encourage savings. What a great idea! I got lots of really nice feedback on the post back in March.

My son described the system to my parents, but instead of describing the concept, as I just did, he described the reality: we set the budget, did it for a few months, and then basically forgot about it. So, rather than teach my kids a valuable lesson about saving and investing, I thought them how weak my own follow-through can be. Ouch.

It reminds me of a psychology study that found that announcing a plan is, in fact, detrimental to seeing the plan through — because, you get a nice dose of good feeling by announcing the plan, so much so that you lose the motivation to actually do it. This is, of course, problematic, and to be avoided.

If I’m honest, I can think of plenty of times where this has happened to me. I’ll refrain from listing them all out here, but trust me, there are more than a few examples. Looking back, the times I have been the most successful at seeing something hard and long-term all the way through are the times when I have just done it and not said anything about it. Show, don’t tell.

The holy grail is when something goes from being a plan to being a routine. Routine is so powerful, and yet somehow, sometimes, so elusive. At USV, we have built-in routine in some very useful ways — most notably, around our Monday team meeting (similar to most investment teams). The cadence is valuable and sets the tone for a lot of our work.

I have personally found it harder to get good routines going when it comes to writing, exercise, and a bunch of other things I think are important. Generally speaking, I find myself to be more bursty than reliably consistent. It is something to work on (but not talk about until it’s done…)

Dani and I have been spending a bunch of time recently thinking about the relationship between applications and infrastructure. It’s a little bit of a chicken and egg situation. You need infrastructure to build apps, but often times you don’t really know what kind of infrastructure is needed until you build some apps.

For example, we didn’t get AWS (the infrastructure) until we had Amazon (the app). Often times, the early innovators need to build all the infrastructure themselves in order to build the app they want to build. And then that helps lead the way for the next generation of infrastructure: taking what was built for a killer app and offering it up to everyone.

One of my favorite books is Steven Johnson’s Where Good Ideas Come From — punchline is: innovation is typically not a single “eureka” moment, but rather an accumulation of many years of cumulative discovery. This blog is an example of one of my favorite ideas in the book, the “slow hunch” reinforced by the “commonplace book“. Another idea from the book is the AdjacentPossible: essentially, that we can innovate only with what we can see and touch today. But by innovating at today’s edge, we continually stretch the boundary of what’s possible:

The strange and beautiful truth about the adjacent possible is that its boundaries grow as you explore them. Each new combination opens up the possibility of other new combinations.

For more on how this concept applies not only to “web 3” (crypto/blockchains) but how it played out looking back at the history of technology (internet 2.0, planes, cars, etc), here is our post.