What exactly is it that you do here? What’s the point of this blog?

What exactly is the focus of this blog? When I started it 10 years ago, it didn’t have a focus; it was an experiment. I wanted to find out what blogging was all about. There weren’t that many blogs, and certainly not many that were written by lawyers.

My theory has always been: if you want to find out what something is, then why not just do that thing?

My focus back then was to just experiment with the medium, this “blogging thing.” The “topics” were whatever I found interesting. Today, that’s still my objective.

But after doing it for 10 years I can reliably represent to you, the reader, the “focus” probably breaks down into these topics:

1. Innovation (mostly in terms of how people solve new problems, or how they solve old problems by thinking about them in new ways)
2. Honesty (not general ‘truthfulness,’ but the kind of honesty that requires some courage or at least disregard for what people might think about radical honesty). So let’s call this topic “radical honesty.”
3. Right-brain thinking. I haven’t blogged very much about this yet, but I plan to because it encompasses a lot of what happens in those first two categories.
4. Awareness of subtlety. We live in a world where people shout at each other, a world where the mainstream media breaks everything down into pablum that can be understood by even people with poor critical thinking skills. The truth isn’t always obvious. Many interesting ideas aren’t easily explained, or easily understood. What’s true or interesting appears to most of us as something vague or subtle. To access these truths and ideas we need to be more aware of subtlety. And that’s something I want to write about.
5. Technology. Many people think this is what I’m most interested in. I’m not all that interested in technology. I rely on it, and will never escape that reliance because of what I do and how I do it. I don’t like relying on things that I don’t understand, so I try to understand as much as I can about technology. The thing that I do find interesting about technology is how it’s disrupting the world we live in. And how people cope with radical change is something that I’ve always been fascinated by.

So if you’re interested in the stuff in that list you might find this blog interesting. If you want to put my ideas into ready-made categories, well…then you might not like it.

Oh, and if you’re a vendor who wants me to be interested in something you’re promoting I’ll probably ignore your emails. Not because I don’t like you, or wish you well. It’s just that I don’t have enough time to be curious about everything in the world.

Stuff that gets bought and sold isn’t that interesting to me.

If I naturally use something that I think is cool or useful I’ll probably naturally talk about it at some point. But, for the most part, I’m more interested in overall patterns of human behavior, and how we can get better at solving really fundamental problems.