• The paradox that you can’t be happy without embracing unhappiness: Per prior posts, I’m very interested in exploring ideas of yin and yang, and Social Peacocking and the Shadow by Caterina Fake offers a great perspective and links to other good reads on the topic (case-in-point is The Shadow by Hans Christian Andersen)

The more a person acknowledges his shadow, and brings it into consciousness, the healthier and more whole the person will be. But if driven underground and sent into hiding, The Shadow will take on a life of its own, like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

• Two of the best interview questions I’ve heard: Graham Duncan approaches hiring by finding and matching people with opportunities. He’s not “finding talent” (because everyone has talents) but rather matching people with the right “positive feedback loops”, and he’s not trying to “catch” someone’s weakness, because we all have many.
  These two interview questions are from Tim Ferriss’s excellent interview of Graham Duncan (and there is a lot more).
  1. If you were to hire somebody for this position, what criteria would you use?
  2. If I were to hire a partner to work with you on this, what qualities would be good for them to have?

• Wikipedia is pretty amazing: Wikipedia and the Wisdom of Polarized Crowds by Brian Gallagher reveals a bunch of important insights from research on Wikipedia: Bringing together polarizing viewpoints is essential to making better things. Bias is essential, not inherently evil as it’s been portrayed lately. It is possible to create a platform and a distributed culture of creators that have vastly different ideologies, yet work together and are able to reach consensus.

• A serendipitous story of a modern day heist of Star Wars toys: The Great Star Wars Heist from the excellent longreads.com is a really fun read. One of my co-workers was telling me backstory on how the original Star Wars toys came out and the deal George Lucas struck to make it happen, and then this magically popped up on my feed. #serendipity  

• What I was doing this week in 2016: I went back to my journal to see what I was up to at this time in 2016. Three years ago we had just bought our current home (that we’re now hoping to sell next month), I was pretty crazy with my weekly bullet journal-inspire spreads, and we were in the midst of doing Core Caregiver Training (CCT) to be foster parents.