Andrewjericho | Thoughts & Commentary

The Great Smart Bulb Revelation

For years, I was that person rolling my eyes at smart home everything. The friend who’d visit your place and watch you fumble with three different apps just to turn on a lamp. “Just flip the switch,” I’d think, smugly superior in my analog simplicity. Then my partner got us a starter pack of smart bulbs for the bedroom, and I grudgingly agreed to try them for two weeks.

That was eight months ago. Now I’m the person who dims the lights to 20% warm white at 9 PM without thinking about it. The person who realizes halfway to work that I can just check my phone to see if I left anything on. The conversion wasn’t dramatic, no lightning bolt moment. Just the slow recognition that some friction in my daily routine had simply disappeared.

The thing about being wrong is that it usually happens quietly. You don’t wake up one day and declare your previous self an idiot. Instead, you notice you’re reaching for your phone to adjust the bedroom lighting instead of stumbling around in the dark, and you think, “Huh. I guess this isn’t so ridiculous after all.”

When Calendars Started Making Sense

I used to be a notebook person. Bullet journals, paper planners, the whole aesthetic setup that looks great on Instagram but somehow never quite worked for real life. The problem wasn’t the system, it was me. I’d forget to write things down, lose track of which notebook I was using that week, or worse, remember I had something written down but have no idea where.

Digital calendars felt impersonal and overwhelming. All those notifications and color-coded categories seemed like productivity theater rather than actual help. But somewhere in the middle of 2023, I started putting everything in my phone’s default calendar app. Not because I had some grand revelation about digital organization, but because I was tired of missing things.

The shift happened when I realized the calendar wasn’t trying to optimize my life, it was just trying to remember things so I didn’t have to. Travel confirmations automatically populate from my email. Meeting links live right there in the event. Most importantly, it syncs with my partner’s calendar, so we both know when the other has that early morning call or late afternoon dentist appointment.

It’s not glamorous. There are no beautiful spreads to photograph or satisfying pen-to-paper moments. But I haven’t double-booked myself in months, and that’s worth more than any aesthetic points I was scoring with my paper planner.

The Surprising Usefulness of Voice Assistants

Let me be clear: I still think it’s weird to talk to a cylinder in my kitchen. The idea of having an always-listening device felt dystopian, and honestly, it still kind of does. But my housemate had one when I moved in, and I gradually discovered it’s actually useful for exactly three things.

First: timers while cooking. When your hands are covered in flour or raw chicken, being able to say “set timer for twelve minutes” without reaching for your phone is genuinely helpful. Second: unit conversions and basic math while following recipes. “How many tablespoons in three-quarters cup” gets answered instantly instead of requiring a Google search that somehow leads to reading about the history of measuring spoons.

Third, and this surprised me most: it’s become our household’s shared memory. “Add milk to the shopping list” works from anywhere in the apartment. “What did I tell you to remind me about tomorrow?” actually gets answered. It’s like having a very patient roommate who never forgets anything and doesn’t judge you for asking the same question twice.

I still cover it when we’re having sensitive conversations, and I’ll probably never be comfortable with the privacy implications. But I’ve stopped pretending it isn’t useful just because the concept makes me uneasy. Sometimes helpful technology comes wrapped in packages that feel complicated.

Password Managers: The Security Blanket I Didn’t Know I Needed

For someone who spent years using variations of the same password everywhere, trusting a piece of software to generate and remember completely random passwords felt backwards. What happens when the service goes down? What if I forget my master password? What if the company gets hacked and my entire digital life becomes vulnerable?

These weren’t unreasonable concerns, but they were keeping me stuck in a system that was objectively worse. I was using passwords I could remember, which meant they were simple enough for other people to guess. I was reusing them across multiple sites, which meant a breach anywhere could compromise everything. I was basically choosing familiar risk over unfamiliar security.

The switch happened gradually. I started by putting just a few accounts into a password manager, keeping my old system as backup. Slowly, I realized I was reaching for the manager first because it was actually easier than trying to remember which variation of my password I’d used for which site. The auto-fill feature meant I could use genuinely secure passwords without any extra mental effort.

Now I have no idea what most of my passwords are, and that feels like freedom rather than vulnerability. The cognitive load of managing dozens of login credentials has just vanished. When I need to access something, I open the app, authenticate once, and everything is there. The security is better, but the convenience is what made it stick.

Small Changes, Bigger Patterns

Looking back at these shifts, they all share something: I changed my mind not because someone convinced me with arguments, but because I gradually noticed the technology solving actual problems in my daily life. None of these tools transformed my existence or revolutionized my productivity. They just quietly made certain small frustrations disappear.

Maybe that’s what useful technology actually looks like. Not the flashy stuff that promises to change everything, but the boring solutions that work consistently in the background. The smart bulbs that eliminate the three-second annoyance of finding a light switch in the dark. The calendar that prevents the fifteen-minute panic when you realize you might have double-booked yourself.

I’m probably still wrong about plenty of other technology. There are probably tools I’m dismissing right now that I’ll be quietly adopting six months from now. That’s fine. Being wrong about technology isn’t a character flaw, it’s just part of figuring out what actually helps versus what just sounds impressive. What technology have you been skeptical about that turned out to be genuinely useful? I’m curious about the small solutions that snuck up on you when you weren’t looking.

My Guitar is Judging Me

There’s a guitar in my living room that I swear has developed a passive-aggressive personality. It sits there, gathering dust between my sporadic practice sessions, practically radiating disappointment. I bought it six months ago with the kind of optimism reserved for New Year’s resolutions and midnight Amazon purchases. The plan was simple: fifteen minutes a day, maybe learn some Bob Dylan, become the person who casually pulls out an acoustic at parties.

Instead, I’ve mastered exactly one and a half chords. The G chord is my nemesis, requiring finger contortions that seem to defy basic human anatomy. My calluses are pathetic. My timing makes a broken metronome seem rhythmically gifted. And yet, I keep coming back to it, fumbling through the same basic progressions with the persistence of someone who clearly hasn’t gotten the memo that they’re terrible at this.

Here’s the thing though: I’m starting to think terrible might be exactly where I need to be. We live in a world obsessed with optimization, with life hacks and efficient learning and being good at things quickly. But what if the point isn’t to be good? What if the point is to be magnificently, persistently bad at something you love anyway?

The Myth of Natural Talent

I used to believe in natural talent the way some people believe in horoscopes. It explained everything so neatly: why some people effortlessly picked up instruments while others (me) sounded like they were torturing small animals. It was a comforting excuse that let me off the hook for not trying harder or sticking with things long enough to push through the inevitable wall of incompetence.

But then I started paying attention to the people around me who were genuinely good at things. My neighbor who makes pottery that belongs in galleries didn’t emerge from the womb throwing perfect bowls. She spent two years making what she generously calls “expensive paperweights.” My friend who runs marathons started by wheezing through a quarter-mile jog around the block. The pattern was always the same: they were willing to be bad for longer than everyone else was willing to watch.

The uncomfortable truth? We’ve convinced ourselves that being naturally gifted makes you worthy of pursuing something. As if the universe has pre-selected who gets to play music or paint or write poetry, and the rest of us should stick to our assigned lanes. This is nonsense, but it’s seductive nonsense because it saves us from the vulnerability that comes with genuine effort.

The Beautiful Awkwardness of Beginning

There’s something almost sacred about being truly terrible at something you care about. It strips away all pretense, all the careful image management we do in other areas of our lives. When I’m struggling to transition from C to F without creating what sounds like a minor earthquake, I can’t hide behind competence or experience. I’m just a person with slightly sore fingertips, trying to make something beautiful happen against all available evidence.

This vulnerability is both terrifying and liberating. In my professional life, I’ve built a reputation for being competent, reliable, someone who knows what they’re doing. But competence can become a prison. It keeps you in the safe zone, doing the things you already know how to do well. Being genuinely bad at guitar reminds me what it feels like to be a beginner, to have no choice but to embrace the messiness of not knowing.

Last week, I managed to play through “Wonderwall” almost completely. Almost. It was probably barely recognizable to anyone who knows the actual song, but for about three minutes, I felt like I was touching something larger than myself. That’s the thing about learning badly: small victories hit different when they’re hard-won through genuine struggle rather than natural ability.

The Productivity Trap

Our culture has turned everything into a productivity challenge. Learn Spanish in 30 days! Master photography with this one weird trick! Get ripped with seven-minute workouts! We’ve gamified skill acquisition to the point where the journey itself has become secondary to the destination. But what gets lost in this rush toward competence is the actual experience of learning.

I’ve tried the efficient guitar learning apps, the structured lesson plans, the promise of rapid improvement. They all felt like trying to microwave a slow-cooked meal. Technically possible, maybe, but something essential gets lost in the translation. The apps don’t account for the meditative quality of repetitive practice, or the way muscle memory develops through patient repetition, or the strange satisfaction of gradually earning each small improvement.

When I let go of the timeline, when I stopped measuring my progress against YouTube tutorials promising I’d be “playing like a pro” in impossible timeframes, something shifted. The guitar stopped being a test I was failing and became a conversation I was slowly learning to have. Some days the conversation is stilted and awkward. Other days, for brief moments, it almost sounds like music.

Learning to Love the Process

Maybe the real skill I’m developing isn’t playing guitar at all. Maybe it’s learning how to stick with something while being obviously, objectively bad at it. Maybe it’s developing patience with my own limitations. Maybe it’s remembering what it feels like to do something purely for the joy of doing it, rather than for any external validation or achievement.

There’s a Japanese concept called “wabi-sabi” that finds beauty in imperfection and impermanence. My guitar playing is definitely imperfect, and at my current rate of improvement, any actual competence feels pretty impermanent too. But there’s something beautiful about showing up anyway, about being willing to sound terrible in service of something you love.

The guitar still sits in my living room, still probably judging me. But these days, I think I’m judging it right back. We’re both imperfect, both a little worn around the edges, both trying to figure out how to make beautiful sounds together. Some days we succeed. Most days we don’t. But we keep showing up, and maybe that’s the point.

What are you learning badly these days? I’d love to hear about your own magnificent failures and small victories. Sometimes the best conversations happen in the spaces between competence and aspiration, where we’re all just figuring it out as we go.

The One That Made Me Stop Pretending to Be Smart

I used to be one of those people who collected books like trophies. You know the type—shelves full of impressive spines that mostly went unread while I convinced myself that owning “Ulysses” made me intellectually sophisticated. Then I picked up “A Guide to the Good Life” by William Irvine, expecting some light philosophy to pad my resume of cultural consumption.

Instead, it completely dismantled my approach to, well, everything. Irvine writes about Stoicism without the usual academic stuffiness. Around chapter three, I realized I’d been performing intelligence instead of actually thinking. The book doesn’t just explain Stoic principles. It walks you through practical exercises that made me confront how much energy I was wasting on things I couldn’t control.

The shift wasn’t dramatic or Instagram-worthy. I just started noticing when my mind spiraled into worst-case scenarios about work deadlines or whether that text message sounded too eager. I’d catch myself and think, “Is this something I can actually influence?” Most of the time, the answer was no, and that tiny pause became a kind of mental reset button I didn’t know I needed.

When Fiction Made More Sense Than Reality

“The Left Hand of Darkness” by Ursula K. Le Guin landed in my hands during a particularly confusing period when I was questioning everything about relationships and identity. I thought I was picking up a science fiction novel. What I got was a master class in how gender shapes every interaction we have, told through the story of an envoy visiting a planet where people are ambisexual.

Le Guin doesn’t hit you over the head with her ideas. Instead, she builds this world where pronouns shift and assumptions crumble, and you find yourself examining your own biases without realizing it’s happening. I remember sitting in a coffee shop, three chapters in, suddenly aware of how differently I was interpreting the barista’s friendliness based on assumptions I didn’t even know I was making.

The book taught me that imagination isn’t just about escapism. It’s a tool for understanding reality from angles we’d never consider otherwise. I started paying attention to the stories I told myself about people, situations, even my own limitations. Most of them, I discovered, were pretty unreliable narrators.

The Uncomfortable Mirror of Everyday Cruelty

I almost put down “The Banality of Evil” by Hannah Arendt twice. Not because it was boring, but because it was making me deeply uncomfortable about human nature, specifically my own. Arendt’s analysis of Adolf Eichmann’s trial reveals how ordinary people become complicit in monstrous systems, not through malicious intent but through thoughtlessness.

This wasn’t a distant historical lesson. I started recognizing my own capacity for what Arendt calls “thoughtlessness,” going along with things that felt wrong because it was easier than questioning them. The times I’d stayed quiet during conversations that made others uncomfortable. The systems I participated in without examining their impact. The small compromises that seemed insignificant individually but added up to something I wasn’t proud of.

The book didn’t make me paranoid or self-flagellating. Instead, it made me more intentional about the choices I make when no one’s watching. It’s exhausting sometimes, this heightened awareness of complicity, but I’d rather be tired than unconscious.

Learning to Sit with Not Knowing

“The Tao of Physics” by Fritjof Capra probably sounds like the kind of book that belongs on a college dorm room shelf next to a lava lamp, but hear me out. Capra, a theoretical physicist, draws parallels between modern physics and Eastern mysticism, and reading it felt like someone had given me permission to be confused by the universe.

I’d always been uncomfortable with uncertainty, the kind of person who needed definitive answers and clear explanations. But Capra walks you through quantum mechanics and Buddhist philosophy with this gentle insistence that mystery isn’t a problem to be solved. It’s a reality to be experienced. The idea that particles can exist in multiple states simultaneously until observed started to feel less like a physics concept and more like a life philosophy.

Now when I don’t know what I think about something, I try to sit with that uncertainty instead of rushing to form an opinion. It’s made conversations more interesting and decisions less anxiety-provoking. I’m still figuring out what I believe about most things, and apparently, that’s exactly where I’m supposed to be.

The Ongoing Experiment

These books didn’t fix me or provide some dramatic before-and-after transformation. They just shifted something subtle but significant in how I move through the world. I notice more, assume less, and question the stories I tell myself about pretty much everything. Some days I forget these lessons entirely and revert to old patterns of thinking. Other days, something clicks and I remember why perspective matters so much.

I’m curious about the books that have quietly rewired your thinking. Not the ones you’re supposed to say changed your life, but the unexpected ones that shifted something you couldn’t even name until later. The ones that made you see familiar things differently or question assumptions you didn’t know you held. What’s sitting on your shelf right now, waiting to surprise you?

The Morning Productivity Theater

I used to wake up at 5:30 AM every single day, convinced that early rising was the secret sauce of successful people everywhere. There I’d be, bleary-eyed and resentful, forcing myself through a morning routine that felt like performance art nobody asked for. Meditation app open, journal ready, workout clothes laid out the night before like some kind of aspirational shrine.

The thing is, I’m not a morning person. Never have been. My brain doesn’t fully come online until around 10 AM, and trying to force it awake with artificial enthusiasm was like trying to start a car with a dead battery. Lots of noise, zero forward motion. I spent months feeling like I was failing at the basic act of being alive because I couldn’t sustain this routine that worked for exactly none of my actual rhythms.

Somewhere around March, I just stopped. Not the getting up part (unfortunately, jobs still require your physical presence at reasonable hours), but the elaborate morning ceremony. Now I wake up when my body wants to wake up, drink coffee like a normal human being, and save the deep thinking for when my brain actually wants to participate. Revolutionary stuff, really.

Chasing Every Networking Opportunity

Remember when everyone decided networking was the answer to everything? I sure do. I spent the better part of two years showing up to every professional meetup, industry mixer, and “coffee chat” that crossed my path. I collected business cards like they were Pokemon cards, had conversations that felt like elaborate performance pieces about mutual professional admiration, and came home exhausted from trying to be the version of myself that seemed most likely to advance my career.

The breaking point came at a particularly soul-crushing event where I found myself nodding enthusiastically at someone’s pitch for a blockchain-based dog walking app. Not because I thought it was brilliant, but because I’d trained myself to find something positive to say about everything, just in case this person might be useful later. That’s when I realized I’d turned networking into its own weird form of social media. All surface-level engagement and strategic positioning, zero authentic connection.

These days, I’m much more selective. I go to things that actually interest me, talk to people I genuinely want to talk to, and if something professionally beneficial comes out of it, great. If not, at least I didn’t spend an evening pretending to care about synergy and disruption. My career hasn’t collapsed from this approach, which tells you something about how necessary all that networking theater actually was.

Maintaining Friendships Out of Obligation

This one’s harder to talk about because it sounds callous when you say it out loud. But this year I stopped forcing relationships that had naturally run their course. Not the friendships going through rough patches or the ones requiring extra effort during difficult times. Those are worth fighting for. I’m talking about the relationships that had quietly shifted from genuine connection to social maintenance, where every interaction felt like going through the motions of a friendship rather than actually having one.

You know what I mean. The group chats that feel like obligation, the birthday dinners where everyone’s checking their phones, the friends who only surface when they need something or want to complain about the same problems they’ve been complaining about for years without any intention of changing anything. The relationships that leave you feeling drained rather than energized, where you find yourself making excuses to avoid hanging out.

It’s not about cutting people off dramatically or making grand statements. It’s about recognizing when you’re both just going through the motions and having the grace to let the friendship evolve into whatever it naturally wants to become. Sometimes that’s an occasional text exchange. Sometimes it’s nothing at all. Both can be okay.

Optimizing Everything

I used to track everything. Steps, calories, screen time, productivity metrics, reading goals, how many glasses of water I drank, which route to work saved the most time, whether listening to podcasts at 1.5x speed actually improved my learning retention. I had spreadsheets for my spreadsheets. I turned my entire life into a continuous improvement project, as if I were a small business trying to increase efficiency quarter over quarter.

The absurdity reached its peak when I found myself timing how long it took to make different breakfast options so I could optimize my morning routine. That’s when I realized I’d lost the plot entirely. I wasn’t optimizing my life, I was optimizing the life out of my life. Every moment had become data to be analyzed rather than experience to be lived.

Now I track almost nothing, and somehow I’m not less healthy or productive or informed. Turns out most of that optimization was just anxiety wearing a productivity costume. I still pay attention to patterns and try to make good choices, but I do it the way humans did before we had apps for everything: by noticing how I feel and adjusting accordingly.

The Quiet Revolution of Subtraction

Here’s what nobody tells you about stopping things: it’s harder than starting them. Starting feels productive, proactive, like you’re taking control. Stopping feels like giving up, even when the thing you’re stopping was making you miserable. We’re so conditioned to believe that more equals better that the radical act of less feels like failure.

But this year taught me that sometimes the most powerful thing you can do is nothing. Not starting a new routine, not taking on another project, not saying yes to every opportunity that presents itself. Just existing in the space you’ve already carved out and seeing what happens when you’re not constantly trying to improve it.

I’m curious about what you’ve stopped doing lately, and whether it felt like quitting or like finally coming up for air. There’s something comforting about realizing other people are also quietly opting out of things that don’t serve them, even when those things look perfectly reasonable from the outside.

The Pottery Wheel Humbled Me

Last month I signed up for a pottery class because Instagram convinced me I had hidden ceramic talents. You know how it goes – you see those satisfying videos of clay spinning into perfect bowls, and suddenly you’re convinced you’re one YouTube tutorial away from opening an Etsy shop. Three weeks and forty-seven dollars later, I had produced exactly one recognizable object: a lopsided mug that holds about three sips of coffee and tips over if you look at it wrong.

Here’s the thing though, that wonky mug tells me more about creativity than any of my actual successes ever have. It sits on my kitchen counter now, a daily reminder that the distance between vision and execution is where all the interesting stuff happens. Every time I use it (carefully, very carefully), I remember the specific moment when I realized my hands weren’t cooperating with my brain, and how that felt both frustrating and oddly liberating.

We’ve gotten really good at hiding our creative failures, haven’t we? Social media has trained us to document the highlight reel, the finished painting, the published story, the perfectly plated dinner. But what about the painting you scraped off the canvas three times? The story that sits in your drafts folder, stubbornly refusing to make sense? The dinner that looked like abstract art in all the wrong ways?

Failure Is Where the Learning Lives

I’ve been keeping a failure journal for six months now. Not because I’m a masochist, but because I noticed something: my biggest creative breakthroughs always seemed to happen right after my most spectacular flops. The journal started as a way to track patterns, and it’s turned into something unexpected, a record of everything I’m brave enough to try badly.

Last Tuesday’s entry: “Attempted to write a short story from the perspective of my houseplant. Made it two paragraphs before realizing plants don’t have opinions about Netflix shows. Also, apparently I know nothing about plant biology.” Two days later, that ridiculous experiment led to a poem about anthropomorphizing objects that actually works. The failure wasn’t a detour. It was the route.

This runs counter to everything we’re taught about productivity and success. We’re supposed to fail fast and iterate, sure, but we’re also supposed to minimize failure, optimize for wins, and definitely not celebrate the projects that crash and burn. But what if we’re getting it backward? What if the failures are actually the point?

The Permission to Be Terrible

There’s a specific kind of paralysis that comes from needing everything you make to be good. I see it in my friends who won’t show anyone their writing until it’s “ready” (spoiler: it’s never ready). I see it in people who buy expensive art supplies and then never use them because the first mark might be wrong. I definitely see it in myself when I spend more time researching the “right” way to do something than actually doing it.

But here’s what I’ve learned from my collection of creative disasters: terrible first attempts are not character flaws. They’re required features. You cannot skip them. You cannot hack around them. You have to make the bad thing before you can make the good thing, and pretending otherwise is like expecting to run a marathon without ever going for a jog.

My friend Sarah started learning guitar last year. For months, she practiced in her basement with headphones on because she was embarrassed by how she sounded. When she finally played for people, she was decent, not great, but decent. “I wish I’d started playing for people sooner,” she told me. “All that time I spent trying to sound good, I could have been getting comfortable with sounding human.”

The Unexpected Gift of Public Failure

This might be the most unpopular opinion of all: we should share our failures more openly. Not in a self-deprecating, look-how-quirky-I-am way, but with genuine curiosity about what went wrong and why. I started posting photos of my cooking disasters alongside the successes, and the response surprised me. People weren’t laughing at the failures. They were relieved by them.

Turns out, everyone has a drawer full of creative attempts that didn’t work out. Everyone has started projects they didn’t finish, had ideas that sounded brilliant at midnight and ridiculous by morning light. When you’re the first person in your circle to admit that sometimes you make things that are genuinely bad, you give everyone else permission to be human too.

My neighbor Tom showed me his wood shop last weekend. Tucked behind the beautiful cutting boards and jewelry boxes he’s been making for years was a shelf of what he called his “learning experiences”, early projects with crooked joints, uneven finishes, and questionable design choices. “I keep them,” he said, “because they remind me that everything I know how to do well, I once did terribly.”

Making Peace with the Messy Middle

Maybe the real problem isn’t that we fail at creative projects. Maybe it’s that we’ve forgotten how to fail interestingly. We’ve optimized failure out of the process, when failure might actually be the process. Those pottery wheels that don’t cooperate, those stories that refuse to make sense, those paintings that look nothing like what we imagined, they’re not obstacles to creativity. They’re creativity itself, in its raw, unpolished form.

I’m not saying we should aim to fail or celebrate mediocrity. I’m saying we should get curious about the gap between what we envision and what we actually create. That gap isn’t a bug. It’s where style lives, where voice develops, where we figure out not just what we want to make, but how we actually make things.

My lopsided mug has started growing on me. Not because it’s beautiful, it’s definitely not, but because it’s specifically mine in a way that a perfect mug never could be. Every crooked line tells the story of my hands learning something new, of the particular way I hold tools, of that exact moment when I decided to keep going even though I could see it wasn’t going to turn out like the Instagram videos.

What creative disasters are you hiding in your closets and hard drives? I’m genuinely curious, because I’m pretty sure your failures are more interesting than you think they are.