I love Jim Carrey’s “Yes Man.” It perfectly shows how different our lives can be when we open ourselves up to opportunity instead of shutting everything down.

When you say yes to something, it’s never that thing that’s the real benefit.

It’s the knock-on effect.

It’s what that thing might bring you 4-10 chess moves down the road.

Every time you say yes to something, you open a world of new possibilities that never would have opened if you stayed closed off.

We interact with hundreds of software platforms a day.

Some of them we enjoy using (Spotify), and some of them we hate (Microsoft Teams… Well, anything Microsoft makes, basically).

It’s not a question of money thrown at the problem, it’s a question of taste.

Some of these platforms we can’t escape, as they’re orders of magnitude more complex than the great pyramids of Egypt.

But others? We can completely replace with vibe coding and AI.

Are there sites you visit for one purpose only? Like a compound interest calculator, or CapitalizeMyTitle.com?

You can make your own version of many of these today, and start using tools that look, feel, and behave how you want them to.

The power of science is the idea that specific outcomes are repeatable—that hypotheses can be tested, proved, or disproved.

We are frequently confronted with opposing viewpoints on knowable things. It's the entire premise of sports betting. We each think a different player will win, but only one of us will be right.

In sports, we say "scoreboard!" to remind each other of the empirical truth vs. our subjective opinions.

I can't stop thinking about Rosetta: a spacecraft launched from Earth in 2004 that landed on a comet about 590 trillion kilometers away ten years later, after getting a gravity assist from a few planets along the way. Insane.

Only science could have made that happen.

When deciding which of two truths to believe, look to the results. Look to the scoreboard.

...where everybody knows your name.

And your Social Security Number and every address you’ve ever lived at.

Not long ago, students in Boston demonstrated that with camera-equipped glasses and a single frame of a passenger on the Boston metro, you could instantly see a shocking level of (personal) detail about any stranger.

There’s a shady network of data broker sites out there, making it nearly impossible for you to delete this data. Seeing what’s out there when you search your name will send chills down anyone’s spine.

There are categories of truly terrifying devices that exist today that the public is largely unaware of, eroding our privacy by the second.

In a world where 2-factor authentication is a must, biometric passkeys can replace passwords, why is an American’s social security number still just a 9-digit string? Is this the best we can do in 2025?

We must demand more from our public institutions and replace the outdated systems that define our lives. Or else, we might as well change all our passwords to “password” and stop pretending.

Some years ago, I worked for one of the top dance music record labels in the world, Armada Music in Amsterdam.

It’s the record label of frequent world’s-number-one DJ Armin van Buuren.

Armin’s business model is insane, and it’s something I’ve always thought of as a “virtuous triangle”.

There are three parts to Armin’s empire:

1. The DJ. Armin gets exorbitant fees to perform around the world. And the music he plays largely comes from the catalog of his record label.
2. The record label owner. In addition to a gigantic back-catalog of dance music classics, Armada supplies Armin the DJ with a never-ending supply of new tracks. He gives publicity to the catalog by playing the music live, and in turn the music generates extra money in the form of streams and buys.
3. The talent manager. Throwing giant events is big business. When you’re selling tens of thousands of tickets, picking the right talent is key. Ensuring your signed artists perform at these events compounds the ROI.

Each of these parts of the triangle is distinct, yet each reinforces the other.

Whenever you see an outsized personal or business success, chances are there is something like this triangle at play.

On your own path, are your activities reinforcing each other or hurting each other?