Explore Sean’s Essays:
Practical Philosophy
I was sitting in an aisle seat, flying at 575 miles per hour, as the flight crew came by with beverage service. When the stewardess approached me I put my book down, and asked for a club soda. As she was pouring my drink she asked me what I was reading. When I held up my book...
Robots are now cheaper than Chinese workers
Last week we saw a tipping point occur in the automation of global labor markets: Foxconn, the firm that produces iPhones and other electronics, has cut 60,000 jobs from its workforce of 110,000 — replacing them with robots. Adidas announced that it was building its first...
Stop talking about school bathrooms
Anyone reading the news today would assume that bathrooms are the biggest issue facing our education system. Why are we fighting over something as trivial as which bathroom a student prefers to use when our education system is one of the worst in the modern world? In a...
Blockchain’s Marketing Problem
Blockchain suffers from a serious marketing problem. In the minds of most consumers blockchain and bitcoin are one in the same. And the major stories of blockchain has been about speculators making (or losing) enormous amounts of money, teenagers buying drugs, or paying...
Focus time
Investment bankers and entrepreneurs love to trade horror stories about the number of hours they work in a week. 90, 100, 110 hour work weeks are seen as a badge of honor. Anyone who has ever put in long hours knows that your productive output falls apart past a certain...
Competency Stack
In the world of software engineers love to talk about their stack. Your stack is the combination of tools, apps, and utilities that power your widgets. (ex. a MEAN stack runs MongoDB, Express.js, AngularJS, and Node.js). The combination of tools is greater than the sum of...
Meditation is hard (and should be)
I have yet to meet someone who can empty their mind, and spend an hour in a thoughtless meditative state. I've met monks who tell me they still struggle with meditation. Even they have days where they can't get into it. The simplicity of the practice - focusing on your breath -...
Why I blog
Last week a friend asked me why I've been blogging so much lately. Here are some of the reasons: It forces me to clarify my thinking It builds my writing skills It helps me to notice more about the world It is a place where I can think out loud, and learn in public It has led...
China didn’t take your job
The US is on track to overtake China as the most competitive manufacturing center in the world. For the first time in decades our manufacturing base is experiencing real growth. But this growth isn’t driving a resurgence in manufacturing employment. And this story seems to be...