New Year’s Resolutions 2024

Last year, I did pretty well, keeping my New Year's resolutions. I feel that I did increase my fitness - I made 10,000 steps almost every day of the year. I started a strength routine that -- while patchy -- showed me that strength training is important to my well-being. I achieved my Kayak levels …

Finding reality in a world of representations

We live in a world of images. It wasn't always so. I am 49 years old. I turn 50 in late January. When I was a kid, I had a fairly simple life, immersed in the "real". While I was born in North York, a northern suburb of Toronto, I grew up in far-flung development …

In solitude, we don’t escape people, we escape machines

I went on a kayak trip to the West Coast of Canada recently. It was beautiful beyond one's imagination. I kayaked from Okeover Inlet into Desolation Sound, British Columbia. The sense of solitude and togetherness with humanity there has remained with me since. I had many adventures on this trip. I saw a Minke whale …

You will have a Lifelong AI Friend

I think that artificial intelligence is going to have a totalizing impact on anything digital in our economy and society. This will lead to a rapid transformation of our culture and sense of self. We see the precursors to this transformation in the effects of social and digital media on people. Individual and social cognition, …

Categories of reality

We think we need to categorize in order to appreciate or understand something. This is reductive, eroding that ability to appreciate the ineffable which is our true genius. Understanding comes not in labels, categories, but in an appreciation of reality in its depth and elegance, in the moment and across time in the past and …

On the Queen as an example of duty

We have heard many opinions about Queen Elizabeth II, ranging from fawning admirers to resentful critics. For me, this range of commentary, coming out of ideological commitment is of little interest. Ideological thinking is inherently unreasoned, therefore of little value if we wish to speak of any profound human truth. Ideological thinking is a reductive …

Dr. Paul Bates has died. A life in search of the Good.

We live in a world of clichés and ideologues. In this internet age, we are surrounded by glass-eyed people, robots who chase their ideas and have forgotten their humanity. And yet, in this madness there remain those who are unabashedly committed to putting aside ideological vanity and instead let themselves be guided by the old …

A visit to De Mazenod Farm – A quiet Christian contribution

Sometimes you visit a place that just feels right. My recent visit to De Mazenod Farm was like that. The Farm is a development of the De Mazenod Door program, which was started by Fathers Tony O'Dell and Jarek Pachoki, both Missionary Oblates of Mary Immaculate. It was named after Saint Eugene de Mazenod, a …

A deep convo about strategy

This post features a sequence of four videos about strategy, in which I have a conversation with Mark John Stewart, an entrepreneur of note (Wentworth Strategy, FlyPrint), not-for-profit co-founder (Empowerment Squared) and MCM strategy instructor. We really got into it. Enjoy. These videos were recorded to serve the community of learners who are seeking Accreditation …