Next time you’re in a restaurant sampling a foreign cuisine, order the thing that sounds the oddest or the most unfamiliar to you. Nothing ventured nothing gained — unless you overate.

I am forming a belief that work-life balance does not exist — living is work.Forms of work:Cooking;Exercising;Reading;Learning;Playing;Driving;Writing;Talking; and even,Standing up.Anything that involves applying force upon a thing is a form of work. And I love work. Perhaps what matters is achieving a healthy ratio of work that enables our thriving relative to work that allows for survival.

A former colleague of mine is a VP of Support for a tech firm. The team I lead maintains a support function. I’ve never lead a a support team.I asked my friend: “What are all of the questions I should be asking to stand up a support function?”That’s way more useful than saying: “Tell me what you know” or “where should I direct my attention first?”Going on the quest that is a question invites far more excitement, courage, and work than simply accepting an answer as true. I’ll take the excitement any day.

I remember a time in my life, in and around college, where I lived on wonder bread and peanut butter sandwiches while pursuing the coolest job ever. Points from the talk I enjoyed:We’re embarrassed about things we should be proud of, and proud of things we should be embarrassed about. Humor is the most powerful, most survival essential quality you will ever have or need to navigate through the human experience.Work, pay attention, and fall in love.The human experience is absurd; enjoy the absurd.

I needed this today.I don’t know what the future holds — perhaps that’s naive. I know that what I do now sets the stage for what’s to come. If I want to be more than what I think I am, I must decide and act that way now.From my post on naive persistence.

Know your limits and stop.

I’m on a train riding to Chicago from Kansas City. It’s Monday, and I hoped to work while on board. Imagine how happy I was to receive signal hour 5 of a 7 hour journey. The train forces pause.

I wrote about the information asymmetry in selecting your next manager in March. I’m thinking more about information economics, signaling, and how it’s been a part of my entire professional life — outside of job search.Traditionally, musicians that are new to a community attend jam sessions to meet other musicians. The new musician signals their knowledge and skill through their performance and how they interact with the others on the bandstand. The other, longstanding musicians, see the signals and determine if they want to play with that musician more. It’s a marketplace. The process of life so often seems like the process of rapidly going from the state of unknown to known.

Seth Godin fixed the controversial iPad ad. Inversion is an effective way to solve a problem.

Person A and I talked about productivity today. Person A often gets in their own way — “I don’t know what I can or cannot do.” I asked, “tell me what got in your way yesterday.” Turns out the issue is not knowing what can or cannot be done; instead, it’s “not know what to do next.”I offered a solution:Get things out of your head. Write down everything you need to do. Prioritize the things you wrote down. Act. Person A’s output improved in the course of a day — dramatically. I don’t think it’s the solution I proposed that made the difference. I think Person A benefited from getting things out of their head.