The Think Big Blog
By default, we live in the now. We react — meeting each moment as it comes, doing what the situation in front of us seems to demand. It's how we survive, and most of the time it runs on its own.
Harder, and more worth it, is thinking across larger scales of time and space: stepping out of the reaction, forming a plan for what we actually want, and acting in service of purposes deeper than the urges of any single now. That shift — from reacting to authoring — is the subject of this blog.
Here we work out the fundamentals, one piece at a time: how we pay attention, decide, build things, and work alongside other people. The thinking grounds the mentoring in steamHouse's Goatrunner team, but none of it is really about robotics — it's about how any person, and any team, moves from autopilot to authorship.
Your Brain Has Shortcuts, and They’re Being Hacked
Why do rare things feel common and common things feel rare? A ten-second experiment shows the mental shortcut at work — and what's hacking it now.
Your sense of what's common in the world runs on a mental shortcut that served humans well for most of history. It still runs faithfully — but what's being fed into it has changed. A ten-second experiment shows you the shortcut at work.
Two Kinds of Doing Fine
Is your kid actually doing fine — or just performing fine? A teacher's confession about the two kinds, and which one the conference table was built to discuss.
Grades good, nobody calling home — one kind of fine. Something growing on the inside — the other kind. A teacher's confession about which one the conference table was built to discuss, and what robotics kids taught me about the difference.
The Long Answer
What is steamHouse, really? The founder's long answer to ten years of the question — why the thing was never a thing, and how the short answer arrived.
For ten years, people asked me what I was building, and I never had an answer that fit in a doorway. This is the explanation I owed them — why the thing was never a thing, and how the short answer finally arrived.