Me & This

No one ever said on their deathbed, “I wish I hadn’t been so grateful.” I shall not be the first.

I have been a street peddler in New York, a traveling salesman in Southeast Asia, a foreign correspondent in Tokyo, and for many years a technology writer in the San Francisco Bay Area/Silicon Valley. The Wall Street Journal, Forbes, The New York Times, Town & Country, and California Magazine. For a decade I taught at U.C. Berkeley’s iSchool, and for a decade I was a regular on Fox Business.

I taught writing at Google, communications agencies, and The San Quentin State Prison (donate and subscribe to The San Quentin News here.) 

These days my day job involves writing this, and helping a select number of people and companies better tell their story. One of my clients called the professional work, “getting a story/market fit,” which ain’t bad.

The thread through all this is an interest in the people’s abiding search for meaning in life. Rather than think in categories of “two cultures,” science and humanities, it’s far  more interesting and productive to think of pattern-finding, creativity, and the urge for discovery and communication as fundamental human activities. They take many forms, with different expressions and lots of connections, some spanning centuries. It’s astonishing what you can find.

That’s what this Substack is about.