Biography
about me
My very earliest lessons in systems came from the kitchen table. I have no idea how old I was when it started, but I've always remembered playing Magic: the Gathering with my older brother, memorizing the pictures and learning what the cards did and how they interacted before I could read. I played poker with my mom and learned how to weigh probabilities.
I played basketball through middle and high school. But most of the conversation around the game was detached from the court in a way that threw me off. Coaches, players, and even the media would explain the meaning of single possessions through effort, momentum, or toughness. They ignored (or pretended not to see) the repeatable, measurable factors that actually decide the outcome of a game.
It wasn't until a high school coach opened up a pregame talk with a few central ideas from Dean Oliver's Four Factors that the sport finally came into focus, for me. Beneath the motion and narrative noise of the game, there are four things you can measure that will usually tell you why a team is winning.
After that, I noticed how everything we practiced had a reason attached to it. Better hand-positioning and cleaner passes meant fewer turnovers. Particular footwork and jump-stops related directly to effective field goal percentage and free throw percentage. Boxing out became a matter of reading the miss early enough to reach the ball before your opponent.
Even now, I still carry that point of view into my work. The world is full of information, and inherited stories can too easily make people miss what it's saying. I studied Economics to understand human systems and Computer Science to build new ones, and I'm still drawn to finding structure inside the noise, figuring out what actually matters, and building from there.