Josh Shear – Final Archive – Page 3 – The final archive of the former JoshShear.com

Cities

James Altucher thinks COVID-19 might be the end of New York City as we know it. Manhattan, in particular, is a small island with a lot of people on it. And a lot of restaurants and small businesses. And a lot of tall towers full of rented offices. The rented offices were abandoned when people…
Chaos, chaos figures and disrupting you

Some translations of the Old Testament of the Bible begin something like this: In the beginning, when the Earth was without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep, the spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And God said, “Let there be light!” And there was light.…
‘The soup is getting cold’: Lessons in curiosity and perfectionism from Leonardo da Vinci

I’ve recently finished listening to the audio version of Walter Isaacson’s excellent Leonardo da Vinci biography. I’m sure I’ve lost something from actually holding this one, but at least it came with a PDF that’s 70-something pages long with all kinds of images and timeline information. We look up to Leonardo for a lot of…
Get a damn flu shot

It’s coming on flu season, and that probably means something much different this year, thanks to COVID-19, than it does most years. The four identified influenza (flu) viruses — A, B, C and D, the first three of which typically infect humans — have been around in some form for a long time. Data on…
Just words

Good. Nobody cares. Work harder. Stay hard. Chasing extraordinary. Conquer your inner bitch. Hardest workers in the room. Live love adventure. Work for it. Yeah buddy. Win the day. They’re words. Maybe they’re good words. Motivational words. They mean nothing if you don’t turn them into action. Write your book. Run your race. Make your…
Is your war worth fighting? Nature vs. nurture, free will and Good Omens

This post may contain spoilers about the novel Good Omens by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett. It came out in 1990, so don’t be mad at me for that. I haven’t seen the more contemporary Amazon Prime series, though, so I don’t know if it follows the story line closely. I won’t be offended if…
On lives, and mattering

At a fairly young age, Jewish children are shown a picture similar to this one: A pile of dirty shoes, all gray with soot and ash. They range in sizes from toddler to adult. It’s an uncountably large pile, with no ground visible between the shoes as you look down from above. The shoes were…
Unhindered by custom

The U.S. Air Force used to be a unit of the Army. That made some sense in the beginning, when you couldn’t carry a large payload on a plane. Airplanes weren’t good at evasive maneuvering, they weren’t very big, and they couldn’t cross an ocean. As World War II approached, however, the Air Force wanted…
Abundance, for excellence, not entitlement

Did you start a podcast or a blog during your coronavirus quarantine? If you did, you’re not alone. You’re probably also not alone in discovering that you starting a blog or podcast doesn’t entitle you to suddenly have thousands of readers or listeners, with many of them giving you money. I want to tell you,…
It’s easy to be kind

I had a lot of links pulled aside for a post on cancel culture today. Cancel culture isn’t the desire to see someone like Bill Cosby, in jail for rape after facing accusations from over 40 women, lose his audience. It’s getting someone, not a public figure, fired — and probably forced into early retirement…