Hey 👋🏽,

Let's make confetti pumpkins today.
Ok.

Last week, we started homeschool. School, work and life happen in 25 minute pomodoros. I structured our time in sprints to create intense focus but after 4 days of 10 hour long stints of context switching I was tired so on Friday, confetti pumpkins.

I arm wrestled with a big problem all week. One I've solved many times before but impermanently. I instinctually jump in without stopping to understand the problem fully: why is it a problem? Why haven't we solved it yet? What is the goal of solving the problem? What are our constraints?

In A Mind for Numbers, army vet and engineering professor Barbara Oakley says:

Sometimes we need to lose concentration so we can think more clearly.

so on Thursday I took the problem to a farm. We passed a goat pen on our way to pick pumpkins with a cordoned off stairway. Made sense, there were two kids in the pen. They stood instead on top of a boulder, carefully climbing high-but-not-too-high while goat parent snoozed. Learn to climb before you Mount Everest.

Sitting with the problem again the next morning, I saw that I was blocked because I've been looking at constraints backwards. Instead of trying to remove or ignore constraints, how could I use them to solve the problem?

Alexa went off. 5yo ran in in his cape.

PUMPKIN TIME!

Focus, focus, rest.

🧠what I’m thinking about

Voting by mail? - Elaine Atwell, 5m
Ridley Scott’s lightning fast, meta, woman as head of household, religion as the thing that tears humanity apart dystopian future that feels like the past masterpiece, Raised by Wolves (is anyone else watching this? what do you think?)

❤️what I’m feeling

Out There, Nobody Can Hear You Scream - Outside Online, 21m via Whitney Rhodes

🚶🏽‍♀️what I’m doing

Wrapping up The Path and listening to A Mind for Numbers while making friendship bracelets
Creating a self paced math curriculum with the help of reddit and James Edgar Thompson

I see you, I love you, let’s have a great week,

P.S. I got to talk to Jimmy Daly, my former coworker, founder of Superpath and an all around amazing human being about work and life on his CareerHQ podcast. Listen here!