Thinking 101: A Pause, A Reflection, And What Might Come Next
Killer Innovations with Phil McKinney
Twenty-one years. That's how long I've been doing this. Producing content. Showing up. Week after week, with only a handful of exceptions—most of them involving hospitals and cardiac surgeons, but that's another story. After twenty-one years, you learn what lands and what doesn't. You learn not to get too attached because you never know what's going to connect. But this one surprised me. Thinking 101—the response has been different. More comments. More questions. More people saying, "This is exactly what I needed." It's made me reflect on why I started this series. Years ago, I was in a...
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Mental Models - Your Thinking Toolkit
Killer Innovations with Phil McKinney
Before the Space Shuttle Challenger exploded in 1986, NASA management officially estimated the probability of catastrophic failure at one in one hundred thousand. That's about the same odds as getting struck by lightning while being attacked by a shark. The engineers working on the actual rockets? They estimated the risk at closer to one in one hundred. A thousand times more dangerous than management believed.¹ Both groups had access to the same data. The same flight records. The same engineering reports. So how could their conclusions be off by a factor of a thousand? The answer isn't about...
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Numerical Thinking: How to Find the Truth When Numbers Lie
Killer Innovations with Phil McKinney
Quick—which is more dangerous: the thing that kills 50,000 Americans every year, or the thing that kills 50? Your brain says the first one, obviously. The data says you're dead wrong. Heart disease kills 700,000 people annually, but you're not terrified of cheeseburgers. Shark attacks kill about 10 people worldwide per year, but millions of people are genuinely afraid of the ocean. Your brain can't do the math, so you worry about the wrong things and ignore the actual threats. And here's the kicker: The people selling you fear, products, and policies? They know your brain works this way....
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The Clock is Screaming
Killer Innovations with Phil McKinney
I stepped out of the shower in March and my chest split open. Not a metaphor. The surgical incision from my cardiac device procedure just… opened. Blood and fluid everywhere. Three bath towels to stop it. My wife—a nurse, the exact person I needed—was in Chicago dealing with her parents’ estate. Both had just died. So my daughter drove me to the ER instead. That was surgery number one. By Thanksgiving this year, I’d had five cardiac surgeries. Six hospitalizations. All in twelve months. And somewhere between surgery three and four, everything I thought I knew about gratitude…...
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Second-Order Thinking: How to Stop Your Decisions From Creating Bigger Problems (Thinking 101 - Ep 6)
Killer Innovations with Phil McKinney
In August 2025, Polish researchers tested something nobody had thought to check: what happens to doctors' skills after they rely on AI assistance? The AI worked perfectly—catching problems during colonoscopies, flagging abnormalities faster than human eyes could. But when researchers pulled the AI away, the doctors' detection rates had dropped. They'd become less skilled at spotting problems on their own. We're all making decisions like this right now. A solution fixes the immediate problem—but creates a second-order consequence that's harder to see and often more damaging than what we...
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Make Better Decisions When Nothing is Certain
Killer Innovations with Phil McKinney
You're frozen. The deadline's approaching. You don't have all the data. Everyone wants certainty. You can't give it. Sound familiar? Maybe it's a hiring decision with three qualified candidates and red flags on each one. Or a product launch where the market research is mixed. Or a career pivot where you can't predict which path leads where. You want more information. More time. More certainty. But you're not going to get it. Meanwhile, a small group of professionals—poker players, venture capitalists, military strategists—consistently make better decisions than the rest of us in exactly...
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You Think In Analogies and You Are Doing It Wrong
Killer Innovations with Phil McKinney
Try to go through a day without using an analogy. I guarantee you'll fail within an hour. Your morning coffee tastes like yesterday's batch. Traffic is moving like molasses. Your boss sounds like a broken record. Every comparison you make—every single one—is your brain's way of understanding the world. You can't turn it off. When someone told you ChatGPT is "like having a smart assistant," your brain immediately knew what to expect—and what to worry about. When Netflix called itself "the HBO of streaming," investors understood the strategy instantly. These comparisons aren't just...
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How To Master Causal Thinking
Killer Innovations with Phil McKinney
$37 billion. That's how much gets wasted annually on marketing budgets because of poor attribution and misunderstanding of what actually drives results. Companies' credit campaigns that didn't work. They kill initiatives that were actually succeeding. They double down on coincidences while ignoring what's actually driving outcomes. Three executives lost their jobs this month for making the same mistake. They presented data showing success after their initiatives were launched. Boards approved promotions. Then someone asked the one question nobody thought to ask: "Could something else...
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How to Improve Logical Reasoning Skills
Killer Innovations with Phil McKinney
You see a headline: "Study Shows Coffee Drinkers Live Longer." You share it in 3 seconds flat. But here's what just happened—you confused correlation with causation, inductive observation with deductive proof, and you just became a vector for misinformation. Right now, millions of people are doing the exact same thing, spreading beliefs they think are facts, making decisions based on patterns that don't exist, all while feeling absolutely certain they're thinking clearly. We live in a world drowning in information—but starving for truth. Every day, you're presented with hundreds of...
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Why Thinking Skills Matter More Than Ever
Killer Innovations with Phil McKinney
The Crisis We're Not Talking About We're living through the greatest thinking crisis in human history—and most people don't even realize it's happening. Right now, AI generates your answers before you've finished asking the question. Search engines remember everything so you don't have to. Algorithms curate your reality, telling you what to think before you've had the chance to think for yourself. We've built the most sophisticated cognitive tools humanity has ever known, and in doing so, we've systematically dismantled our ability to use our own minds. A recent MIT study found that students...
info_outlineI stepped out of the shower in March and my chest split open.
Not a metaphor. The surgical incision from my cardiac device procedure just… opened. Blood and fluid everywhere. Three bath towels to stop it.
My wife—a nurse, the exact person I needed—was in Chicago dealing with her parents’ estate. Both had just died. So my daughter drove me to the ER instead.
That was surgery number one.
By Thanksgiving this year, I’d had five cardiac surgeries. Six hospitalizations. All in twelve months.
And somewhere between surgery three and four, everything I thought I knew about gratitude… broke.
When the Comfortable List Stopped Working
Five surgeries. Three cardiac devices. My body kept rejecting the thing meant to save my life.
Lying there before surgery number five, waiting for the anesthesia, one question kept circling: What if I don’t make it this time?
And that’s when the comfortable list stopped working.
You know the one. Health. Family. Career. The things we say around the table because they sound right.
But when you’re not sure you’ll wake up from surgery… when your wife is burying both her parents while managing your near-death… when the calendar is filled with hospital dates instead of holidays…
You can’t perform gratitude anymore. You have to find out what it actually means.
The clock isn’t just ticking anymore. It’s screaming.
What Survives
And that’s when I saw it clearly. Not in a hospital room—at a lunch table with my grandson.
Last month, Liam sat next to me after church. He’s twelve. Runs his own business designing 3D models. And he’d been listening to my podcast episode about breakthrough innovations.
He had an idea. A big one.
“It would need way better batteries than we have now, Papa.”
So we went deep—the kind of conversation where you forget a twelve-year-old is asking questions most engineers won’t touch. He’s already thinking about making the impossible possible.
And sitting there, watching him work through the problem, I realized something: This is what survives when I’m gone.
My grandfather would take me to my Uncle Bishop’s tobacco farm in rural Kentucky. When we’d do something wrong—cut a corner, rush through it—we’d hear it: “A job worth doing is worth doing right.”
Almost like a family mantra.
I heard it on that farm. My kids heard it from me. Liam hears it now.
And that line will keep moving forward long after I’m gone. Not because of the accolades. Because of the people.
It’s Not Just Liam
But here’s what hit me sitting there with Liam: It’s not just him.
It’s you.
Every week for more than twenty years, I’ve been putting out content. Podcasts. Videos. Articles. Not for the downloads. Not for the metrics.
For this exact moment—where something I share gets passed forward. Where you have a conversation with someone younger who needs to hear it. Where you take what works and make it your own.
That’s what legacy actually is. Not the content I create. Not what’s on a shelf. The people we invest time in. The effort we put into helping them become who the future needs.
My legacy is Liam, yes. But it’s also every person who’s taken something from these conversations and shared it forward. That’s you.
That’s the reason the clock screaming doesn’t make me stop. It makes me keep going.
Because you’re going to pass this forward. And that’s what survives.
The Math
I turned sixty-five in September. Both my parents died at sixty-eight. The math isn’t encouraging.
So when people ask me why I keep pushing—why I’m still creating content when I can barely type, when I’ve had five surgeries in twelve months—
It’s because I finally understand what I’m grateful for.
Not my health. That’s been failing spectacularly. Not comfort. That ended in March.
I’m grateful I get to see what happens when you invest in people. I’m grateful Liam asks me about batteries over lunch. I’m grateful you’re watching this and thinking about who you’re investing in.
I’m grateful for what the breaking revealed.
What I’m Actually Grateful For
That morning when my chest split open? I was terrified. Thinking about everything that could go wrong.
Now? I’m grateful for what it forced me to see. Who shows up. What survives. Why it matters to keep going even when it would be easier to stop.
This week on Studio Notes, I’m telling the full story. The medical mystery that took five surgeries to solve. The conversation with Liam that changed everything. What my wife actually thinks about me writing a second book while recovering from all this. And what gratitude looks like when the comfortable list stops working.
Read the full story on Studio Notes: https://philmckinney.substack.com/p/what-im-actually-thankful-for-after
Your Turn
But here’s what I really want to know: When was the last time you were grateful for something that hurt you?
Not the easy stuff. Not the list you perform around the table. The thing that broke you open. The thing that forced you to see differently.
Drop it in the comments. Tell me what you found inside the breaking.
Because maybe that’s what Thanksgiving is actually for. Learning what gratitude looks like when everything breaks. And discovering that what survives isn’t what we thought.
Happy Thanksgiving.