Between Meetings & Meals — Episode 017

Lately, I’ve been thinking about how much of a good life gets shaped by what other people hand us.

Sometimes it’s a bottle someone recommends.
Sometimes it’s a tool someone built.
Sometimes it’s something much bigger, like an example you’ve been watching your whole life without fully realizing it.

And the older I get, the more I appreciate that some of the best things in life aren’t invented from scratch.

They’re passed down well.

The Pour

This week’s bottle was Del Dotto Caves Napa Valley Cabernet Sauvignon.

It’s the highest-rated wine I’ve scanned on Vivino so far, and thankfully, it absolutely lived up to it.

I got this bottle as part of my Father’s Day gift request during H-E-B’s Cabs for Dads promo. The deal was simple: buy 12 bottles and get 20% off, which made it a pretty good excuse to stock up and mix in a few nicer bottles I probably wouldn’t grab on a random week.

This was one of them.

And it delivered.

Definitely not an everyday bottle at this price point, which made opening it feel a little more special. But that’s part of what made it fun too. When you ask for wine for Father’s Day, and one of the bottles ends up being the highest-rated one you’ve ever scanned and actually tastes worthy of the hype, that feels like a win.

Also, shout-out to Chris and Eddie at H-E-B for always being incredibly helpful with wine recommendations and for being generous with what they know. I’m still learning, and a lot of my wine journey lately has come from people like them being willing to point me in the right direction and pass down a little knowledge along the way.

That’s been one of my favorite parts of this whole thing.

The Table

We celebrated Father’s Day a few different times throughout the weekend.

There was time celebrating my dad, and time with Anisa and the kids celebrating me. And somewhere in the middle of all that, I kept thinking about how lucky I’ve been to have the dad I do.

My dad is a man of few words.

And when he does say something, there’s a good chance it’ll be a funny jab at whatever’s going on.

That’s just him.

But the older I get, the more I realize that my dad has always loved through presence.

He shows up.

He showed up for me.
For my sister.
And now for the kids.

Not in a loud way. Not in a performative way. He’s just always been there.

And I think that’s probably shaped me more than I understood when I was younger.

Because when I think about the kind of father I want to be, that’s really it. I want to be like my dad.

my mom, my dad, and me circa 1985ish

I want to be present.

At the awards ceremonies.
At the games.
At the school events.
At the random moments when the kids want to play Marco Polo or ask if I want to go play pickleball.

A lot of fatherhood probably looks small from the outside.

But when I think about my dad, I’m reminded that being there over and over again is not a small thing at all.

The Edge

Lately, one of my favorite things in AI has been skills for Claude Code and Codex.

It sounds more complicated than it really is.

But once you understand what’s happening, it’s actually pretty simple.

People are constantly building and sharing skills online. A lot of them live in GitHub repos, which is really just a place where people publish code and projects for others to use.

And what I love is how many different kinds of skills people are building.

Some help with motion graphics.
Some help analyze finances.
Some help with SEO edits.
Some convert PDFs into clean, easy-to-read text.
Some are built for really niche workflows you wouldn’t think of until you see them.

They save a ton of time.

They save tokens, which means they make your AI usage cheaper.

And maybe most importantly, they come with a lot of thinking already built in.

A really good skill is basically a very well-thought-out prompt, workflow, and structure packaged up in a reusable way. So instead of starting from scratch every time, you’re starting from a much better place.

That’s what I’ve been loving about them.

It can be as easy as finding a skill someone shared, copying the link, pasting it into Claude or Codex, and saying, “I want to use this from now on.”

That part still kind of blows my mind.

I like them so much that I started a little thread where I paste the new skills I find online and catalog them into my own library.

Now, before I start a new project, I have my AI look through that library first to see which skills might fit the job.

It’s one of my favorite new workflows.

Not because it feels flashy.

Because it feels useful.

The Lesson

I think one of the strangest things about life is that you usually don’t realize what’s shaping you while it’s happening.

It’s only later that you start noticing what got passed down.

A taste for certain things.
A way of carrying yourself.
A standard.
A sense of humor.
A habit of showing up.
A willingness to share what you know.

That’s part of what’s been on my mind this week.

Chris and Eddie at H-E-B passing down wine knowledge.
People online building and sharing useful AI skills so the next person can start farther ahead.
My dad showing me, without ever needing a big speech, what steady love looks like.

I guess that’s the thing I keep coming back to:

A lot of what we pass on in life isn’t something we say.

It’s something we model.

And if that’s true, then it’s worth asking what the people around us are learning from the way we live.