Jake LaCaze

The writer of the ONLY newsletter for those who like a good think

The ultimate inbox zero system with Fastmail rules and labels

I recently discovered I’ve been doing the inbox zero system all wrong. How can that be so? Inbox zero1 simply means you have no emails in your inbox—so how can anyone mess that up? The mistake I made was in thinking that inbox zero meant I had no

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The profundity of personal post-punk philosophy

I’m no idiot, but I wouldn’t call myself a remarkably intelligent person either. If I’m being completely honest and letting go of any pressure to fake humility, then I have no problem saying I’m likely slightly above average intelligence. But, Jake, I can hear you say,

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Looking for my orange

One ordinary orange, one extraordinary moment of clarity, and a reminder that healing sometimes tastes sweet

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Maintaining personal equilibrium

The unexpected wisdom I found in economics: applying supply-demand principles to achieve balance in a life constantly pulling us in different directions

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How my kids inspire my art by managing upward

How children can inspire adults to reclaim creativity, wonder, and playfulness in their artistic pursuits

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What's a billion years really anyway?

Rather than being paralyzed by the incomprehensible scale of cosmic time, we should embrace and find meaning in our fleeting human lifespan.

Fiction

Don't Worry, I'll Catch You

My first piece of fiction on Substack—a vignette about parenthood, promises, and disillusionment

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Growth at all costs? The case for corporate efficiency

Growth is a hell of a drug. But at some point, businesses gotta come down. Is now one of those points?

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Solution-made problems and cash from chaos

While everyone's saying how you should focus on using new technology to increase efficiencies, what if the real opportunity lies in foreseeing the consequences of solution-made problems?

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Make no promises beyond intent

Promising results just might bite you in the butt.

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How sketching helps me get over perfectionism

I haven’t historically thought of myself as a visual artist. I’m a writer, not a sketcher or a painter. Or so I thought until a few months ago, when seeing my kids’ drawings inspired me to give the visual arts a try. Now, as someone who’s added

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Curiosity as a business asset

Curiosity is an underrated business asset. Because curious people ask questions. And questions lead to new answers. But businesses want to hire know-it-alls. Hiring know-it-alls is fine as long as you never run into new problems. (Old problems aren’t really problems; they’re routine. They’re familiar. They don’

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What inefficiencies drive your business?

Efficiency isn’t always the goal. (Any consultant or private equity bros reading my blog just scoffed and clicked away to something else.) Efficiency is worth pursuing, but we shouldn’t strive to be ruthlessly efficient in all things. Such emphasis is bound to lead to a lack of quality.

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Does quality belong in American efficiency?

In American business, efficiency typically emphasizes two points: 1. Do something as cheaply as possible. 2. Do something as quickly as possible. Quality is often an afterthought, if it’s a consideration at all. So, I ask: Where does quality fit into the American efficiency equation? This question has been

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Addicted to distraction

In the movie T2 Trainspotting, Mark Renton tells Spud: You’re an addict! So be addicted! Be addicted to something else. There’s something freeing about this admission. In a perfect world, we’d all be able to cure our tendencies for addiction. But for those of us who can’

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The truth you know vs. the truth you feel

Why do insecure people believe things they know not to be true? Why do they listen to that nasty voice in their head telling them they’re not good enough? These questions are just some I’m digging into as I’m on the fast track to middle age. Recently

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What gives generative AI its value?

How much is any one item worth? The simple answer: It’s worth whatever someone will pay for it. But what gives art value, whether that value be monetary or otherwise? Uniqueness can’t be the answer, because very little in the world is truly unique. Unique means something is

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Details are like salt

Details are like salt. A dash adds flavor. But too much kills the dish. Any time there’s confusion, the answer may seem to be more detail. But more details doesn’t guarantee clarity. In fact, more detail may lead to more confusion. Every detail is one more thing for

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Is this Bluesky's time?

Time was on Twitter’s side back in the network’s early days. Microblogging was novel and unestablished. And Twitter’s more ‘open’ approach in encouraging users to connect with strangers was a nice alternative to Facebook’s more closed approach of connecting with people you already knew offline. Twitter

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Education's role in business communication dysfunction

Business communication is broken. We send so much time talking and writing (emails, text messages, Slack and Teams, etc.) but we don’t really communicate; we don’t transfer information. How do we solve this? Through tech? We’ve kind of tried that. First, we revolutionized written communication with email,

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Creative vs. generative

What qualifies as creativity? How much work does one need to put into something before he can consider himself creative? How much of creativity can be automated or outsourced before it becomes something else entirely? Hiring someone on Fiverr to design your logo isn’t considered a creative act. (We

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Killing more trees faster

On this blog, I recently made the case for why writers should kill more trees. That sentiment doesn’t apply only to writers. It applies to artists too. Drawers. Sketchers. Whoever. Art can connect. Art can heal. Art can save. So we need more of it. And we need it

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Make art, not friends

We’re on the fast track to THE END. Or, so some people will tell you. Especially after the latest American presidential election. (To be fair, we’d be hearing the same if the other candidate had won. We’d just be hearing it from the other half of the

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Sam Bankman-Fried and the imperfect calculus of effective altruism

I recently finished listening to the audiobook version of Number Go Up: Inside Crypto’s Wild Rise and Staggering Fall by Zeke Faux. The subtitle tells it all: The book is about the craziness that was the first crypto bubble. (As Bitcoin’s price hovers around $70,000, another bubble

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Will either presidential candidate challenge Big Tech?

If I were a single-issue voter in 2024, I’d vote solely on how I felt the presidential candidates would handle antitrust cases against Big Tech, not because I think tech antitrust is America’s greatest issue but because it’s one of the few issues we have long-overdue positive