About

I’m Ehsan Shirkhani.

I’m a civil engineer, program manager, creator, and someone who is probably a little too interested in understanding why we think, choose, work, and live the way we do.

My career has taken me through technology, engineering, infrastructure, leadership, and public service. Along the way, I’ve worked on complex projects, managed teams and programs, changed careers, immigrated, started over more than once, and learned that some of the most important lessons in life rarely come from having everything figured out.

They usually come from questioning what we thought we already knew.

That curiosity eventually became the foundation of my content.

I talk about decision-making, resilience, creativity, change, work, ambition, uncertainty, and personal growth, but I’m less interested in giving people another list of “5 things you should do.”

I’m more interested in looking at familiar ideas from an unfamiliar angle.

Why can not knowing something sometimes make you more confident?

Why can collapse be the beginning of growth?

Why is being excellent different from being perfect?

Why do smart people still make terrible decisions?

And why do some of the things that look unproductive turn out to be incredibly valuable?

Those are the kinds of questions I like exploring.

Parantez Baz

I’m also the host of پادکست پرانتز باز,  Parantez Baz, where I take ideas that seem simple on the surface and open a parenthesis around them.

We talk about psychology, work, creativity, decisions, life experiences, and the strange contradictions that come with being human.

The goal isn’t always to arrive at one definitive answer.

Sometimes the better outcome is simply leaving with a better question.

My background

Before creating content became an important part of my life, most of my career was built around solving technical and organizational problems.

My background spans engineering, infrastructure planning, project and program management, and public-sector leadership. I hold a graduate degrees in Infrastructure Planning and Management from University of Washington which changed the way I look at systems, natural or built by humans.

Those worlds may seem very different from the topics I talk about today, but to me they’re connected.

Engineering taught me to understand systems.

Management taught me to understand people.

Starting over taught me to understand uncertainty.

And creating has taught me how powerful an idea can become when you communicate it simply.

What I’m trying to build

I don’t want this website to be a place where I pretend to have life figured out.

I want it to be a place for ideas worth thinking about.

A place to question assumptions, explore different perspectives, learn from stories, and occasionally reconsider something that once seemed obvious.

Because sometimes changing the way we see something changes what we do next.

Think less automatically. Live more intentionally.