Over Thanksgiving, one of my uncles told me a story about my grandfather.

My grandfather was a scientist by training, and a fairly reserved man by nature. But he was also a warm and deeply caring one, and, after the war, embarked on a second career as a Presbyterian minister.

As my uncle pointed out, this meant caring for everyone — especially people he might not know very well, and most especially people in the extremis of human experience.

Grandfather might not have been social or easily knowable, but (said my uncle) he knew he had a job to do, and so he did what any scientist would: he read the manual. And from whatever rulebook for ministers he read, he discerned that his job in times of crisis was simply to go to people, to sit with them, and to ask three questions: How are you doing? Would you like to pray? Is there anything I can do to help?

He did this for decades, until at his retirement from the ministry his flock showered their shepherd with thanks and praise for being the kindest, most personable, most available minister they had ever known.

Listening to this, my uncle said, he wondered who was this man that people were describing. He certainly didn’t sound like Dad.

But he absolutely sounded like my grandfather the minister. And that was the trick: by accompanying people and asking them three questions for years upon decades, my grandfather was the minister people needed him to be when they needed a minister.

Some of it was a learned performance. Sure it was. But he cared enough to learn it, and to perform it over and over and over again. And it worked. It made him not only a pastor but a professional, and, on the anniversary of his death, we fondly remember him still.

As a friend of mine posts every week, the work isn’t done, but it’s time to pause.

This summer, I blocked incoming email notifications on my phone, and I’ve kept it that way since. I’ve also moved more and more in the direction of batching emails (only diving in to handle a bunch at a time a few times a day) and keeping my computer mostly off on weekends. It’s done wonders for my focus and attention.

The same goes for Thanksgiving, only more so. That’s the big holiday in my family, and I’ll be spending it with them rather than on screens. More noticings next week.

We know that when we touch the web of life, it’s felt across the entire web. Drop a pebble in a pond, and the ripples keep spreading long after we stop looking.

So it is with community, perhaps especially now that so many of our communities and relationships are blended and varied across platforms and proximity. We feel close to podcast hosts we’ve never met; we sometimes find it hard to be close to those right in front of us.

I recently experienced a very powerful ripple. Someone started a community, and friends of mine became a part of it. As they accompany other people in that community on their journey through life, they decided to build another circle around themselves to accompany them — especially because their new community interacts mostly online, and they wanted to bring the experience into their face-to-face friendships.

What an honor to join them on their journey. What a joy to share it with you.

Now it’s my turn. Could it be yours, too?

That’s the easiest reason not to publish: it might be wrong.

But wrong how, and wrong for whom? If the people you weren’t trying to talk to didn’t like it, is it actually wrong?

And, if you wait until you’re absolutely, positively, beyond-a-shred-of doubt sure before you publish, how will you feel when someone says you’re wrong then?

Nobody’s right all the time. The people we trust are the ones who publish a lot, accept when they’re wrong, and try to be right just a little more often. Or, at the very least, to learn along the way.

This is easier in real life, where we can’t help it. If you want people to see you in all your complexity on the semi-anonymous, dimension-distored internet, start publishing enough that they can see how nuanced you really are.

Meeting people where they are.

Seeing who they’d like to be.

Inviting and enrolling them on a (scary, difficult, necessary) journey from here to there.

Three kinds of empathy: none of them easy, all of them essential.

How fast can you decide?

How fast can you decide correctly?

Speed kills, as they say. And it’s worth practicing.

But it’s worth practicing accuracy, too. Move too fast, and speed will kill you.

Some tips:

• Start small. See how fast you can make decisions of limited consequence (what’s for lunch?), then see if this speeds up your bigger decisions.
• Make predictions, write them down, and then write down the outcomes.
• Decide how much time you’ll take to make each decision. Again, start small: pick your outfit, or lunch, or commute a little faster each day.
• Pre-decide. If you only wear white shirts, you only need to make that decision once.
• Determine which decisions really belong to you, and which belong to someone else. If you decide to trust your subordinates, you’ll save a lot of your own decision-making energy.
• Know when to go slow. Wasting time on decisions of little consequence doesn’t make sense. Neither does it make sense to rush the really consequential ones.

This is a question I’ve been living for years. I don’t expect to answer it here, but I do want to take a quick look at how universities practice what Seth Godin calls lumping and splitting. As the names imply, “lumping” combines existing functions or categories, and “splitting” sub-divides them.

From a student’s perspective, universities lump (at least) instruction (both academic and professional), networking, and credentialing. (They also conduct research, of course, but that’s a different process, product, and market.) To this day, universities still act as if they have a monopoly on that particular lumping — and we as a society of parents, students, and employers tend to act as if that’s true.

On one level, this makes sense: teaching and credentialing are not easy tasks, and everyone wants to have something to point to as proof that they did it right. At least in the famous-college model, students get to say that hard work paid off, parents get to display a bumper sticker they’re proud of, and no one gets fired for hiring graduates of famous colleges. And, of course, those graduates all know each other, so their chances of falling through the cracks later in their careers go down somewhat. Besides, given the chance, who wouldn’t choose to spend a few years around other smart people their age, or to complete the nearest equivalent of a rite of passage into adulthood that our society has to offer?

The obvious question is whether this particular lumping is effective or desirable. How much of what we’re doing now really moves us in the right direction, and how much just keeps us moving down the path we’re already on? What would happen if we split the lumped model we’ve inherited?

Online courses made the first move by partially or completely splitting in-person contact from instruction and credentialing. That can drop the cost quite a bit (though the cost of an online degree can approach a traditional one), but it also cuts away one of the most valuable parts of school. Peers help each other learn and grow while on campus, and often remain friends and colleagues for life. Sure enough, not many people finish the online classes they start when they don’t have enough in-person support or accountability.

It seems to me that the really valuable move would be to split instruction and credentialing differently. Some of the most transformative, cost-effective teaching and learning happens outside of school. It just tends not to be credentialed in the ways we’re trained to look for. Meanwhile, a lot of the teaching and learning that happens at tremendous expense in the traditional colleges might not be worthy of the credential at the end of the rainbow.

There’s a clear first-mover problem here: who’s going to be the first parent, teacher, and employer to put a non-traditional credential ahead of an Ivy Leaguer? But I’m confident we can and must do better on this — and that the results will pay enormous dividends to society and business.

Speaking of school, it’s time to get back after it. To be continued …

Certainty and flexibility sound like good things. We want to be sure. We want to have options.

But it may not take as long as you think to run into the problem of diminishing marginal returns.

What could you accomplish if you let go of your need for a little more knowledge, a little more information, a little more assurance, a little more indecision?

At the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month of the 100th year since the first Armistice Day, I returned from a bike ride with a Polish friend and finished reading Essence of Decision, the classic study of the Cuban Missile Crisis.

As Americans and Europeans commemorate the end of the Great War and the Poles (along with several other countries) celebrate 100 years of independence, it’s worth taking a quiet moment to try to imagine what life was like for the soldiers of that war and how our own lives have been shaped by that legacy.

In the grand scheme of history, it is more than a minor miracle that my Polish friend has a free and independent country to call home. And it’s easy to forget, in the words of Essence of Decision, that there is an “awesome crack between the unlikelihood and the impossibility of … war.”

This morning, I rode a carbon bicycle designed in Wisconsin, made in Taiwan, and purchased in Alaska. This afternoon, I walked to the grocery store while listening to a podcast on my smartphone, purchased some organic vegetables with a chip-enabled credit card, and walked home to fire up my laptop. This evening, I’ll sit down to dinner with my housemates — and Poland will still be more or less free, and war seem more or less unlikely.

But, as we know, “there is a crack in everything.” Don’t forget it, even as we are lucky enough to keep dancing over it.

Regardless of your positional authority, the easiest, most generous way to assume leadership is to assume responsibility for the culture.

Are you going to stir the pot, boil it over, or pour oil on troubled waters?

As soon as people learn they can rely on you not only to do the right thing yourself but, more importantly, to point them in the right direction by example, you’ll become a leader by dint of moral influence.

Many of us want to do this, but it takes a lot of practice to do it well. The best way to ensure you’ll manage the culture effectively when times are tough is to practice when things are easy. Ask yourself what you’d do in that situation, or what needs to be done that nobody’s doing. Then do it. And then, when it really counts, you’ll be ready.

The simplest definition of leadership is being on the receiving end of the question, “What do we do now?” Be ready to answer.