Life moves pretty fast. It is hard to believe that 15 years ago today, I published Lucept’s first post.

I’m proud of my work envisioning the future of lighting and digital media for architectural interiors. Want to see my major posts from over the years? I’ve organized them at “the future of lighting series”.

At some point I also started writing about managing tough innovation projects based on my personal experiences across a variety of different companies. I’ve organized them at “innovation management”.

Over the past several years, I’m particularly proud of 4 conference sessions envisioning future trends, in which I received tremendous praise from hardened industry professionals – the highest I could hope for. These included Every Surface a Screen: Now What?; Specifying a Brighter Future: Decarbonizing and Detoxifying Lighting Systems; Six Disruptive Trends in Lighting for the Next Decade; and The DC-Powered Building.

Of those, The DC-Powered Building has had the most profound impact: Over 4 years later, I continue to have countless industry professionals stumble across that video and then eagerly reach out to me looking to advance DC power systems in the market.

I typically read ~35 books a year, and for those of you looking for books on historical innovation projects, biographies of entrepreneurs, and the creative process, you should peruse my book list.

For the 10th anniversary of Lucept, I recounted how Lucept was going to be my LED lighting startup. Setting up a blog was just the du-jour marketing approach. The startup never happened but the blog survived. So what does 15 years of slow-but-steady niche blogging get you for stats? Here are the cumulative numbers:

Will Lucept survive another 15? Who knows. Blogs lost a lot of their impact as social media sites drowned people in junk content, crowding out more thoughtful long-form writing. I personally don’t believe anyone reads anything other than headlines anymore.

I know that I’ve slowed my posts to Lucept the past couple years. The irony is that I’m writing now more than ever – but in my personal, private notes. There is sadly a strong asymmetry to blogging or writing on social media: There seems to be little upside to posting something profound and well thought-out, but enormous downside towards angering fervent fools. So my best thinking – the stuff that would be most profound and therefore probably “controversial” – remains safely unpublished!