WPenner's Blog

One of the weird things about squirrels is that they love to bury food, especially seeds, in as many places as they can get to safely. That would be totally normal if they later dug that food up. Instead, random things pop up out of the soil because a year (or maybe more) ago, a squirrel buried that...

How would your life change if you consistently brought in $10K every month? What pain would it be worth to learn the skills that make it happen?

I remember the first job I had that paid real money. It was liberating. The financial freedom I achieved gave me the confidence to take radical investmen...

I spent a lot of time in 2022 writing about space, and especially the Canadian space industry. I dug deep and found out a lot about it. You can read about my motivations in this post about why I started writing about Canadian Space.

I started with the assumption that it was similar to the US ind...

Note: I originally wrote this piece in 2022. Since then, I've stopped writing about the Canadian space sector, but that's a post for another day…

Aristotle once wrote, “all glory comes from daring to begin.” "Daring" is an interesting word because it suggests "something more" than courage. Includ...

inspired by some recent thinking I had to do, I thought I'd take this opportunity to introduce some of the most useful thinking tools I know in the context of a real-world project. We start our trip with the Trivium

Maps of Content (MOC) are widely used in the PKM world, and yet I choose not to implement them as they're usually presented. MOCs are a way of linking related ideas in a single note that brings all the ideas together. The recommended way of using this is to create a series of stand-alone documents...

I recently re-read Warren Bennis' paper "The Secrets of Great Groups."¹ I found myself considering his words in the context of groups struggling to create knowledge products to share with others. Many of these groups are really research groups, dedicating the majority of their time to discovering...

Most money histories start with bartering, talk about sea shells, gold and other mediums of exchange and finally consider coins and other currency. After starting with the network, thdey abruptly transition into objects, and keep the focus there.

What happens, though, if we retain a focus on netwo...

Last night I was reading Talmud, asking questions, and I realized that the 1st six Tarot cards are an excellent way of thinking about social implications. Those six cards, shown below, are the Fool, the Magician, the (High) Priestess, the Empress, the Emperor, and the Hierophant. Each of the persona...

I've always read a lot, enough that it's a family joke. One hundred books a year has been my default for well over a decade. About a year ago, though, I started considering the results of all that reading. I was doing it mostly wrong!

Here are the three biggest mistakes I make and one golden techn...