Last week, I finally finished reading New Rules for the New Economy, by Kevin Kelly.

(The whole book is available from him, for free, at that link.)

Though it was written in 1998, much of it feels prescient and fresh today. The relationship between customers and firms, the paradox of privacy, the way connections create opportunities (which create value, often “inefficiently”) — it’s all there.

(So, too, are some now-hilarious artifacts from the dawn of the internet. I hadn’t thought of CompUSA, AOL, or floppy disks in a while.)

If you want to understand the way things are and how they got that way — and maybe how to make a little more sense of how to operate in the still-unfolding “new economy” — it’s worth an easy and enjoyable read.

That’s probably true. Most things can be figured out with time, energy, and creativity.

But the space between “we can figure this out” and “we figured it out” is where all the anxiety and elation and heartbreak and triumph really lie.

Don’t, as Kevin Kelly writes in New Rules for the New Economy, mistake a clear view for a short distance. The mountain still has to be climbed — step by step.

The past 10 years have provided some interesting and varied tastes of life:

• I traveled outside North America for the first time.
• I lived and worked on a reservation in rural north-central Washington.
• I went back and worked in D.C. for a few years.
• I became a wilderness EMT.
• I spent a wild summer in Alaska.
• I earned a master’s degree.
• I started — and stopped — a PhD program.
• I became an Akimbo coach.

That’s a pretty good list, and I’m grateful for the head starts that sent me down some of those paths and glad of the spirit of adventure that I cultivated. As always, the greatest joys came from saying yes to the most unusual and (often) risky-seeming opportunities.

What feels different now, though, is a gradual but no less real move from wanting to let a thousand flowers bloom to wanting to grow a tree — or perhaps at least a garden.

Of course, it’s always tough to choose, and I don’t want to give up the taste for adventure or sampling what life has to offer in different places and circumstances. But I do want to see what it might feel like to branch out from a more stable foundation than in the past.

No matter what, cheers to another interesting and fun decade. I trust the list of activities in my 30s will both build on what I did in my 20s and hold some new adventures and surprises altogether.

How do you shape a day?

Everyone, of course, is handed the same 24-hour canvas to work with each day. Just as clearly, not all of us choose to use it the same way.

Making sense of our own time is the first skill: understanding our own rhythms, planning activities, meeting deadlines, and all the rest.

But managing others’ time is a real art. Especially if they are many, and most especially if they’re not instantly accessible.

A group’s needs and wants are rarely the same — or satisfied in the same way — as our own. Where we might want more freedom and flexibility for ourselves, the agenda-less meeting is often a miserable experience for all.

At minimum, it’s worth learning the arts of time-shaping well enough to avoid wasting others’ time or being artificially pressured. Better still, it’s worth learning to create the feelings of momentum, tension, and release that people want to feel.

The person who knows how to manage time usually wins the day.

Two kinds of creatives, two kinds of value:

Entrepreneurs are the kind of people unafraid to take a solo — to bring forth a new and exciting melody at the risk of playing a wrong note.

Intrapreneurs make the band better. Rather than inventing a melody in the spotlight, they’re tinkering with the rhythm track to help raise the level of everyone’s playing.

Our culture is enthralled by the creation of wealth as if from nothing, and that skill is indeed sparkly. But we tend to ignore the enormous amount of value generated by persistently raising the base rate over time.

Most people don’t drive a Tesla and never will. But just compare a “normal” car from today to one from a decade ago to see what a difference — and how much value — the base rate can create.

My friend Scott Perry offered me a really helpful reframe the other day:

There’s the work we have to do, and the work we get to do.

The work we have to do covers our responsibilities and allows us to get by in the world of money and things. It might be a job, a career, or — if we’re lucky — a vocation.

The work we get to do is where we thrive, contribute, and play with possibility. It might be a hobby or a vocation, or — if we’re lucky — a job or a career.

Where people get in trouble, Scott told me, is when they conflate the two or put too much pressure on the work they get to do. Passion projects that have to pay the bills are rarely satisfying and not always successful.

The opportunity, then, is to find work worth doing to cover your responsibilities, and to do work worth talking about on the side. The better you get at the work you get to do, the more opportunities you can earn to do it.

It’s much easier to forgive them who know not what they do.

On some occasions, and in some organizations, the left hand and right hand truly do not know what the other is doing. You have to fill out a form to wait in a line to fill out another form — and if the process can’t meet its own deadline, well, that’s just tough, isn’t it?

Other places — other people — know exactly what they’re doing.

Perhaps the first kind are just trying to sleep through the day, but the other kind make you wonder how they sleep at night.

Last week, Michael Bungay Stanier highlighted two new resources in his newsletter that I’m happy to pass along:

• Chris Brogan, who chooses three words as lodestones for each new year.
• Dr. Jason Fox: an Aussie (like MBS), who gives each year just one thematic word. (His other writings offer much food for thought, too.)

Enjoy.

With an unusual amount of time on my hands over the past several days, I’ve begun working my way through the Vietnam War documentary.

Of the many things that jump out onscreen — the savagery of the fighting, the political and social complexity on both sides, the odd hybrid of WWII-era equipment and systems still in use today — the thing that’s most struck me thus far is how poorly the Americans, in particular, understood the conflict they were getting into or why.

During the Eisenhower and Kennedy years, there are example after example of poorly constructed analogies and (under Kennedy) incremental escalations. Then, under Johnson, the conflict gets blatantly out of control. At that point, any analogies in the president’s mind don’t matter as much as ego and inability to find a way out of a fight.

As one of the subjects poignantly remarks, the series shows that Vietnam was the war that proved the United States is subject to history, too.

One kind: known destination, known route.

“Does this bus stop at 82nd street?”

It does or it doesn’t; it’s for you or it’s not.

The other kind: unknown destination, unknown route.

“I’m building a rocket ship.”

Two different journeys — with very different vehicles, costs, and questions. A rocket probably won’t get you to 82nd street, and a bus won’t get you to Mars.