Five things I've read & enjoyed lately:

1) Morgan Housel at Collaborative Fund had a post this week called Why Things Break. Several layers of abstraction away from software engineering, nonetheless I think there’s a lot to learn in studying generalized fragility. 

This post enumerates five ways success can lead to fragility:

• Success pushes you away from whatever made you successful to begin with
• Success increases size, size increases complexity, complexity plants landmines
• Success teaches you how to win the last war, which becomes the only war you know how to fight
• Success reduces the impression of needing room for error
• What looked like success was random, mismeasured, or a temporary trend 

2) Crucial Conversations, both the book and the need to have them, came up at work this week. 

If you haven’t read the book, the authors define a crucial conversation as 

A discussion between two or more people where the stakes are high, opinions vary, and emotions run strong.

I’ve got this theory: Healthy shops are organizationally architected for the minimum number of crucial conversations. If you could plot the number of Crucial Conversations that need to happen in your shop over time, you’d have an inverse graph of your organizational health. 

WARNING: There is a consulting industry that’s emerged around this book, that, if you Google, you will quickly encounter. I’m neutral-to-wary. 

3) On Marcus and Friends by Vicki Boykis

I’m a firm believer in finding someones who are doing what doing so much better than you’re doing it, and Vicki’s Normcore Tech is an inspiration for where I hope to take this blog. Just this one post has a full week’s worth of linky goodness.  

4) Shane Parrish’s podcast interview with author Jim Dethmer contained a framework for stratifying motivation that I’m pondering how to use in my life and work.

Sources of Motivation (in order from lowest to highest) per Jim Dethmer:

• Fear, guilt, shame, anger, and rage
• Extrinsic rewards (fame, money)
• Intrinsic rewards (doing things for the sake of a purpose or calling) (the line between healthy and unhealthy motivations is here) 
• Play (when your work feels like a child at play)
• Love (love of the thing)

I appreciate how Podcast Notes helps me make sense of what I've listened to and my own notes on a podcast. 

5) Zac J. Szewczyk writes - on his own self-run website because meta - Run Your Own Website. 

This caught my eye on Hacker News. Timely for me, considering what I’m doing here.

Spending time considering whether an anchor tag belongs inside or outside of a headline tag reminds me of a zen admonition.