“Call me Trim Tab” — An index of my writing

Mark Storm
20 min readSep 5, 2020

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Japanese design studio Nendo recreates the impossible world of M.C. Escher in an immersive exhibition at The National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne. (All photography by Eugene Hyland)

“I have gathered a posy of other men’s flowers, and nothing but the thread that binds them is mine own.” — Michel de Montaigne

Since I started using Twitter in 2012, I have created a library of 25,000 articles, thoughts and ideas on subjects ranging from cognitive science, developmental psychology and social anthropology to architecture, art, literature and philosophy. * It is, in the words of the French philosopher Michel de Montaigne, “a posy of other men’s flowers” with my meandering curiosity as “the thread that binds them.” The myriad connections and combinations become explicit in my weekly curations and through my work as an executive coach and leadership facilitator. This is where and how my thinking as a ‘comprehensivist’ flourishes.

* I quit Twitter in November 2022, shortly after Elon Musk took over, but you can still browse through my archive.

2024

2022

2021

In May 2021, just over a year into the Covid pandemic, I stopped writing my weekly Reading notes, only to revive them in March 2022 as Post scriptum.

2020

At the end of August 2020, after a year-long break from writing, I revived my weekly curation as Reading notes.

2019

Mid-April 2019, I took a break from writing that would last well into 2020.

2018

In 2018, Random finds experienced two lengthy breaks: from week 13 to 21 and 35 to 43.

2017

2016

Working Notes of a Practising Neo-Generalist

Miscellaneous writings

Thinking out loud about past, present and future

In 2018, while planning for a transformative learning program to help senior executives make better sense of themselves and the world, Eitan Reich and I shared some of our thoughts and ideas, and talked about our experiences. Our conversations resulted in the following stories. Sadly, the retreat itself never got off the ground.

Secrets of Silicon Valley

In August 2017, the BBC broadcasted a two-part series by tech writer Jamie Bartlett, The Secrets of Silicon Valley, in which he tried to uncover the dark reality behind Silicon Valley’s glittering promise to build a better world. Here are the complete transcripts of both episodes.

Field Notes on Innovation and Entrepreneurship

This is a series of columns written for Intrapreneurship World (rebranded in 2017 as Innov8rs) between September 2016 and January 2017.

“The human brain is a physical mechanism for storing, retrieving, and re-storing again, each special-case experience. The experience is often a packaged concept.” — Richard Buckminster Fuller, a man of timeless wisdom

“Something hit me very hard once, thinking about what one little man could do. Think of the Queen Elizabeth — the whole ship goes by and then comes the rudder. And there’s a tiny thing at the edge of the rudder called a trim tab. It’s a miniature rudder. Just moving the little trim tab builds a low pressure that pulls the rudder around. Takes almost no effort at all. So I said that the little individual can be a trim tab. Society thinks it’s going right by you, that it’s left you altogether. But if you’re doing dynamic things mentally, the fact is that you can just put your foot out like that and the whole big ship of state is going to go. So I said, ‘Call me Trim Tab.’

The truth is that you get the low pressure to do things, rather than getting on the other side and trying to push the bow of the ship around. And you build that low pressure by getting rid of a little nonsense, getting rid of things that don’t work and aren’t true until you start to get that trim-tab motion. It works every time. That’s the grand strategy you’re going for. So I’m positive that what you do with yourself, just the little things you do yourself, these are the things that count. To be a real trim tab, you’ve got to start with yourself, and soon you’ll feel that low pressure, and suddenly things begin to work in a beautiful way. Of course, they happen only when you’re dealing with really great integrity.” — Richard Buckminster Fuller

If you want to know more about my work with senior executives and leadership teams, please visit markstorm.nl or contact me at mark@markstorm.nl.

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Mark Storm

Helping people in leadership positions flourish — with wisdom and clarity of thought