Written by: Matt Kurkjian
It’s Monday morning at 6:58 AM, and I can already smell it on me. Stress, and no ordinary kind. I know I’m about to fail epically. I’m imagining a context other than reality - and it feels real. The capacity for simulation is both a gift and a liability, and most of us are wildly missing the gift half.
In my free time, I volunteer with Call of the Sea, crewing aboard the brigantine Matthew Turner out of the Bay Area. We take students out sailing to experience the maritime environment, local history, and something increasingly rare in the classroom: learning by doing.
This year, I had the opportunity to blend my passion for sailing-driven education and my Ph.D. dissertation focus.
Reflection allows us to get more value out of experiences we’ve already “paid” for and is the key to discovering the foundations of our successes, failures, and ultimately our happiness. Let’s make sure we’re getting the most out of reflection by structuring it differently in 2026.
Your plans will fail you, but the act of planning will never. The value is the adaptable mind you build while planning. The journey, is in fact, the destination.
AI is making intelligence cheap. What now, if we, as a hiring and labor force with a focus on indicators of intelligence in candidates, must continue to make intelligent hires, if intelligence itself is so concretely and fervently being imitated? The currency of intelligence has entered hyperinflation.