A few months ago, I began working on a small private project. Back then, the world was on lockdown and I found myself unemployed for the first time in my life. Desperation and boredom rarely go well together, and when I now reflect on those gloomy days, it’s fair to say that keeping my mind occupied with that idea was one of the very few things that kept me from slowly losing it.

I once was given advice by a senior product manager that toppled one of the fundamental assumptions I had held about the PM role. What he said was: “Don’t go down with your products.” I had intuitively thought of the PM as the proverbial captain who is supposed to go down with his ship (at least as far as popular opinion is concerned) but what my colleague suggested sounded more like an invitation to opportunistically hop from one product to the next, jumping ship whenever things started to look dire.

It’s a particularly unnerving aspect of the human condition that we’re longing the most for the things we don’t—or can’t—have at the moment. As of this writing, I’m sitting comfortably in a warm house, wearing decent clothes, am well fed and somewhat relaxed. Still I get the feeling that I’d enjoy nothing more than being outside in the blistering cold of this foggy December morning, pushing my body to physical exhaustion by running for an hour or two, only to arrive at where I started.

Good Strategy / Bad Strategy by Richard Rumelt. Recently I read Richard Rumelt's business classic Good Strategy / Bad Strategy which, beside clarifying what strategy actually is and why any organization would benefit from having one, offers many insightful stories and anecdotes on economics. One I found particularly amusing was about Andrew Carnegie, who was arguably the most successful business man of his day, being ranked the richest American for several years at the beginning of the 20th century.

Abraham Lincoln has been quoted saying: "Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe." As it turns out, he probably never said that at all. But I still think we can learn something from that advice, despite its uncertain origins. Preparation In its most literal sense, the expression reminds us that time and energy spent in preparation tends to pay off by allowing us to do the actual work more efficiently.

First things first: This blog exists mostly for myself. It exists because I was looking for means that would coerce me to write more — and better. See, nowadays we use written communication as much as never before, but I'd argue that at the same time the quality of our writing is in deterioration. At least, for me it is. I noticed that when I was younger, I enjoyed writing a lot more, and I remember being relatively good at it, but years of typing e-mails, text messages, and other one-liners somehow seemed to have damaged that ability.