Blog
Keep It Simple: Another Lesson from the MIT Baseball Team
My Dad taught me and my brother, “There is no premium for complexity.” He emphasized the value of ...
Cybersecurity Simplified: Best Practices to Reduce Risk
After delivering the keynote at AgWest Farm Credit’s “2023 Forest Products Summit” in Portland, I parked myself in ...
Brooks on Books: Interested in Tennis?
Books are magical and the most powerful of technologies. The fact that lines of ink on flattened pulp can transmit ...
Four Qualities of Effective Coaches
A friend of mine, a former professional baseball player, recently asked, “who is the best coach you ever had?” I ...
How to Conduct Analysis and Think for Yourself
Recently, I wrote a two-part series at Forisk on “Forest Products and the Economics of Timber Markets.” It focused ...
Ode to Weighted Averages
Several years ago, in the essay Average is the Enemy, I wrote about the “false shortcuts offered by averages” for ...
Learn from Others and Tie Your Camel
After watching then New England Patriot quarterback Tom Brady at practice, former Indiana basketball coach Tom ...
Clean Over Current
As leaders, parents, investors, and coaches, we often make decisions with imperfect and incomplete information. ...
Errors are Opportunities*
My baseball coach at MIT, Fran O’Brien, reminded us that we will all make errors. The ball will go between ...
Four Ways to Strengthen Non-Fiction Writing
This post introduces an essay on improving the clarity and power of blogs, essays, and articles.
My go-to ...
Brooks Writes Stories: How Did It Go in 2022?
In mid-2017, I started submitting and tracking my fiction writing, and have since posted updates ...
How to Write a Blog Post: Zero to 500+ Words in One Hour
You wake at 5:40 in the morning to write for an hour before the family circus starts. Several ideas fight for ...