One of my favorite icebreakers is a simple one: What’s your favorite household chore? The answers always feel revealing in a way that’s hard to figure. Does knowing that my colleague loves steam-cleaning actually tell me anything about them? Maybe not—but it’s still a delightful little nugget to have in the back of my mind. … Continue reading On turning out all the lights before bed
Category: Thinking Hat
On weather observations
A few months ago, I watched through several hours of an EdX course on the weather. The weather has fascinated me for years now—so much so that I've read through an entire college-level weather textbook twice, not to mention countless other books on the topic. But I still felt that understanding of the topic eluded … Continue reading On weather observations
On knowing the roads where you live
It took three years, but I finally have it. Facing an unusual destination—not my regular commute or typical errand—I can now think (without needing to think): I know how to get there. Or, better: I know multiple ways to get there. I find this magical. This thought may sound absurd to people who live where … Continue reading On knowing the roads where you live
On missing the big mistakes
I received a hard copy yesterday of my recently completed book, and immediately found cause for distress. Organized into 26 tidy little sections, I’d seen cause at some point to swap “SEVEN” and “EIGHT,” but apparently managed only to retitle the former. So, the book proceeds painfully—in size 26 point headers—from 5 to 6 to … Continue reading On missing the big mistakes
On unlearning and my first InDesign experience
Learning is hard; unlearning is harder. As I've paged through Real World Adobe InDesign CC, I've had a painful realization: I need to unlearn lots of what I thought I knew. The specifics are both boring and embarrassing, so I'll leave them aside. What I will speak to is one (now evident) downside of my … Continue reading On unlearning and my first InDesign experience
On thinking (wrongly) that there was no more for me to learn about InDesign
On a whim, I picked up Real World Adobe InDesign CC at the library a few months ago. It turns out that the bulky 2013 publication—it's over a decade old!—was not in high demand in the Jeffco Public Library system. It sat, unread, for many weeks on my kitchen counter, literally gathering dust as the … Continue reading On thinking (wrongly) that there was no more for me to learn about InDesign
On John Dewey’s Experience & Education
I picked up this slim treatise—the cover copy calls it “the great educational theorist’s most concise statement of his ideas about the needs, the problems, and the possibilities of education”—after encountering a wonderful quote in Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death. What surprised me is that this this book, despite being published in 1938, manages … Continue reading On John Dewey’s Experience & Education
On people telling you about TV episodes you’ve never seen
My mom didn't let us watch a lot of TV growing up. While today I'm thankful for the enforced abstention, this withholding really irked me at the time. I felt I was missing out—recess and lunchtime conversation invariably surfaced movies and television shows I'd never seen. Remember when [that hilarious thing] happened on [television show]? … Continue reading On people telling you about TV episodes you’ve never seen
On sharing stuff you saw on the Internet
"And then the firework shot shot across the way into someone's apartment!" "What! Where were you?" "Oh, this was something on Instagram." Hearing this, the bottom dropped out of the anecdote for me. While this firework incident a was no less real for having been captured on video and posted to social media, it felt … Continue reading On sharing stuff you saw on the Internet
On helpfulness as a business development tactic
While I don’t do much business development, there’s one tenet that I know works, because I’ve seen it pay dividends again and again: Be helpful. Sounds easy enough, but this directive is harder to follow than it first seems, because knowing how to help someone is more an art than a science. So, let’s amend … Continue reading On helpfulness as a business development tactic
Taylor Coe 