Five reflections from 2020.

Without a single mention of you-know-what.

I’m taking a sabbatical in 2021 to write and explore and learn some lessons. I’ve started an email newsletter to share those experiences with others. If that sounds interesting to you, I’d be honored if you subscribed.

As one of the most tumultuous years on the books draws to a close, it’s natural to look back for lessons that we can take forward with us into the new year. Based on the year that we all collectively experienced, those lessons are probably bigger and more important than ever before. But it’s easy for you-know-what to overshadow everything else and to become the lesson of 2020. But you-know-what isn’t the lesson of 2020 — it’s the lessons that lie behind you-know-what that we need to reflect on and carry forward into next year and the years to come. This is an attempt to tease out some of those lessons without directly addressing you-know-what.

Science is amazing and worth the time and effort and resources.

Just over 100 years ago there was another you-know-what. The difference between 1918 and 2020 is that 100 years ago people had to sit back and wait it out as tens of millions of lives were wiped out. In 2020, our collective scientific knowledge and technological abilities are orders of magnitude greater than they were 100 years ago. All of that science and technology sprang into action in the early days of you-know-what and developed multiple highly effective…