Welcome back to the Burning Salt – Jaka Cultural Exchange Archive. One of the most enjoyable parts of writing these companion pieces has been exploring ideas that would have slowed the pace of the novel. In Burning Salt, you’ll encounter the Royal Caste, but the story doesn’t stop to explain why an ancient civilization that values consensus, specialization, and continuity would still maintain what humans would call a monarch. I hope you enjoy the next entry from the archives. Matthew…

The Fear of Failure When I wrote Unlearning What Worked, I thought I was writing about failure. Looking back, I don’t think I was. I think I was writing about the fear of failure. For much of my life, I believed the safest decision was to avoid situations where I might fail. If I wasn’t reasonably confident I could succeed, it often felt easier not to try at all. That mindset influenced far more than my career. It affected friendships, leadership opportunities, public speaking, and countless…

Welcome back to the Burning Salt – Jaka Cultural Exchange Archive. One of the things I’ve enjoyed most about writing Burning Salt has been exploring not only how humans would misunderstand an ancient alien civilization, but how that civilization might misunderstand us in return. Every archive entry is an attempt to bridge that gap by presenting the Jaka’s own explanations of their history, culture, and society through documents prepared after first contact. This time, we turn to a subject…