I continue to be fascinated by identity. I don’t mean identity on the Internet, I mean one’s personal, internal identity. I’m referring to the identity at the center of the question, “Who am I?” I’ve explored and written about identity previously, focusing on the collective identity of the USA. …

In 1997, I was a graduate student, working my way into a career in family therapy. A significant part of my graduate school experience was an internship (aka, a practicum) where I practiced counseling children or adolescents and their families. This was, naturally, heavily supervised via video recordings and weekly…

I know many businesses have had a wild ride since the hopeful beginnings of 2020. Red Squirrel is no exception. If you want the simplest possible story: we survived 2020, and we thrived in 2021. …

In early 2021, the team at Red Squirrel went through a process* that defined our company vision. We defined our purpose, our core values, and eventually, our first mission, a.k.a. our Big, Hairy, Audacious Goal. I’ll briefly share the output of this process for the curious, but I’m primarily writing…

Ever since I experienced my first significant identity crisis, I’ve been intrigued by how we construct this thing each of us calls “myself”. I’m going to use this post as a way of exploring identity in general, and American identity in specific. Note: I started writing this in December 2020…

One the most powerful ideas that we used at Dev Bootcamp was the “three zones.” These zones were so fundamental to our immersive learning program that we introduced them to our students during their first day. …

Reading books, listening to podcasts, meditating for hours, and living for 46 years has brought me to clearer thoughts about an explicit approach to living. One of the catalysts of this clarity has been getting some distance between me and my religious upbringing. I identified as an evangelical Christian for…

I recently read the autobiographical Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass. It’s a concise account of his early life as a slave in Maryland, and his eventual escape to freedom. There was one passage that absolutely blew my mind, and so I transcribed the whole thing here so I…

Red Squirrel was initially, relatively spared from the chaos of the COVID-19 pandemic. (Though we did have to cancel a trip to Northern Italy.) We were already 100% remote, working in a distributed mode, spread out from Chicago to Lagos. Our clients were adapting and some were even thriving as…