Hey,
I haven’t published anything here in over a year. Here’s what happened.
I stopped hitting publish because I needed to let something emerge. I’d been consuming voraciously for fifteen plus years, reading, listening, watching, connecting dots across disciplines, and all of it was pointing at something I could feel but couldn’t articulate. I once heard Andrew Bird describe hitting a point where he switched from ravenous consumer to creator. He said he’d been eating since he was a kid and one day realized he was full, and it was time to become the thing he’d been eating. That’s the closest anyone has come to describing what I was feeling.
I needed to stop adding to the knowledge graph and start producing something original from it. That took over a year of sitting with everything I’d accumulated, turning it over, letting the connections form on their own schedule instead of brute forcing them out of me.
What emerged is a framework I’m calling the Unified Theory of Quality. UToQ. Nine parts. The argument, in short: quality is not just some opaque property. It’s not a talent, not a gift, not something you either possess or you don’t. It’s a literacy. A skill you can train. And I think it might be one of the most useful skills nobody is teaching or talking about.
The first piece is called The Burger Test. It’s coming soon.
Oh, one last thing. This feels vulnerable, in a good way. Everything I published here before was curation. This is mine. My ideas, built on the shoulders of my intellectual heroes, but synthesized and aimed in a direction I haven’t seen anyone else aim them.
This is effectively my life’s work up to the age of thirty seven and I’m excited about working on it for at least thirty more. I want quality literacy to become a real thing. I want it to help steer things, even slightly, toward something better.
More soon.
Andrew