I have a little saying about encryption that I think you might like.

Dance like no one is watching.
Encrypt like every one is.

I hope its insight full and whimsical enough to make an appearance in the tomb of wisdom

Sometimes, a Github issue is just a way to say, “I love you.”

Thank you Merlin for, as I like to say, "learning out loud"

As you have been working on this in collaboration with your co-hosts, I have been refining my own thinking about advice and stuff that works for me. I am sincerely grateful for your example as a person working out their personhood in public. Thanks!

p.s. Something that came to me as I followed along is the idea of an identity stack. You may have said something close to this or this exactly, but this is now saved in my clipboard manager:

"What's my #IndentityStack? You didn't ask, but here's mine:
I’m a
Spouse
Parent
Youth Sports Coach
Faith Community Member
Remote Work Advocate…
…all before I’m a worker, and my profession is in service to those other identities."

Your conversations especially with Alex Cox and John Siracusa inspired this "identity stack" concept. Not sure it works for you, but as you say...

Hi Merlin! Thanks for putting this up on Github, it's an interesting document.

Reading this document sparks lots of ideas, and in a McLuhanist way, seeing it in the context of a Github page makes me feel like I am encouraged to share those thoughts via pull request. But… am I? It's not totally clear whether this is intended to cultivate a community consensus of wisdom or whether this is exclusively Merlin's wisdom document. It might be nice to have a brief paragraph in the README explaining something like "If you like it and have more ideas feel free to make your own fork and make your own wisdom document" or "pull requests for [purposes] are welcome, but if you want to change [some core thing] it might be better to keep your own fork" (or even just "please don't").

(I suggest this not because I think my own ideas are particularly pressing, no promises that I'd ever even send a PR, but rather it might be very annoying to have not set these expectations before this hits the front page of some website that draws a few tens of thousands of potential PR-senders who may not have this restraint.)

Is it right for me?

"Don't ask a Coke machine for relationship advice. You might get what you think is an answer, but it's probably not going to be a good answer. Just get a Coke." -Merlin Mann

Forget "emotional intelligence". It's emotional physics. Emotions make perfect sense when you stop demanding rationality, and start accepting physicality. When you push someone off an emotional ledge, you must catch them, emotionally. If you don't, they will die, emotionally. It doesn't matter whose "fault" it was. What matters is who did the pushing, and whether they also did any catching. Physics.

"Half the power. Twice as long."
I repeat this multiple times a day as I stare into the darkness and radiation washes over me.