Now
This is a now page. If you also have one, let me know!
February 2026
February is a month of family.
Three out of five in my close family, and a few more in the wider family, have birthdays in February. We had quite a bit of cake. Time flies when you’re having fun, but it’s good sometimes to pause and notice the flying of said time with cake.
There were trips for work and service, a weekend at the Sacra di San Michele (a medieval abbey bolted onto a mountain in Piedmont, overlooking the Val di Susa. If you haven’t been, go. It is the kind of place that makes you feel correctly sized against history. It also inspired Umberto Eco to write The Name of The Rose).
Work has been good. A lot of it, in the best sense: meaningful, directional, and intense. I have taken on a few more responsibilities, which is great. The tradeoff is that it leaves less room for everything else, which is why the personal life section of this update is thin.
I did my first flights with the Aeroclub Milano. They went well. There’s something similar to mindfulness when you’re in the air: the things on the ground stop being the most important thing for a while, and that’s useful.
I caught a cold mid-month, which combined with the travelling meant running took a back seat for longer than I’d have liked.
On the other hand: Inklin is live. It’s an MVP, with rough edges, missing features, and not what I ultimately want it to be, but it’s real, it’s deployed, and it has actual users. That counts for more than I expected it to.
Goals
(Check the Goals page for week-by-week progress and numbers.)
Second review of the quarterly OKRs.
Objective: Advance my personal mastery and competence in body, mind, and action.
Running has been a casualty of February. A cold, some travel, and a general loss of rhythm meant I got only three runs in all month. The training deficit is significant.
I will be skiing in a couple of weeks, instead of running, and I’m now targeting an April event instead, which means I need a solid March to get there.
First insight: life happens. The question is not whether you fell, but whether you get back up.
The book reading KR is going better. I published the Talking to Strangers report, and I’m 70% through The Body by Bill Bryson, which is brilliant and comforting and fun.
Objective: Deliver helpful creations that people anywhere can use to improve their life in a practical, tangible way.
I dropped the 30-skill book KR. I said I might in January, and I did. It wasn’t really clear, and it would have forced me to painfully write something mediocre that nobody would read.
Second insight: sometimes you need to stop and reassess. That’s not always failure.
Inklin is shipped. It’s still super basic, and I need to put some more time into the things that actually matter to users, which I can now learn directly from them: I apparently have a few users.
On my mind
The Body: A Guide for Occupants
“Perfectionism is the voice of the oppressor, the enemy of the people. It will keep you cramped and insane your whole life, and it is the main obstacle between you and a shitty first draft. I think perfectionism is based on the obsessive belief that if you run carefully enough, hitting each stepping-stone just right, you won’t have to die. The truth is that you will die anyway and that a lot of people who aren’t even looking at their feet are going to do a whole lot better than you, and have a lot more fun while they’re doing it.”