When I was younger, I had a difficult time understanding how people came to find “words to live by.” Little by little, and then suddenly I find myself forming my own words to live by, or in the parlance of more recent generations, words that live rent free in my mind. I now realize that guiding or first principles for ones life or work come through experience and when one lacks experience, they come from books, or more broadly in today’s content rich world, the written and spoken words of others.

I woke up this morning and chose anxiety. I have come to realize these past few years, that I do not like who I am when I interact with social media. My attention span shortens, my mood darkens, and most importantly the deluge of information about all the ways in which our world is crumbling around us triggers an existential crisis that seems to start and end with nihilism. As a result, I’ve been quite deliberate about trimming out social media from my life, ranging from setting timers to timebox app use to deleting my accounts. Inexplicably, this morning I started scrolling and during what could only be described as an out of body experience, I watched myself mindlessly consume content from the internet and feel a whole range of extreme emotions from joy to to outrage to despair. Some rational part of my brain banged on the door of the control room to my fingers and eyes to no avail. Rationality did prevail eventually and I stepped outside for a breath of fresh air to finally start my day on a positive note.

When I was working at DigitalOcean, I had the opportunity to write for an online publishing platform. Once I had selected a topic, I entered a frenzy of brainstorming, outlining, writing, soliciting feedback, rewriting, fear, uncertainty, doubt, and triumph. Thoughts in my mind ebbed and flowed and married and divorced and battled and clashed until by sheer force and repetition they were woven into a cohesive story. When the storm subsided, I submitted Keep Calm and Respond: A Beginners Heuristic to Incident Response. I was so proud of the first publicly published piece of my career that I sent it to an industry voice whose writing I diligently read and take to heart. I was thrilled when they responded and their feedback only added to my bubbling sense of accomplishment. With that feedback, they also gave me a gift: a warning.