About

Hello, I'm Matt.

I like systems. More precisely: I like taking things apart, understanding why they work, and putting them back together better. That instinct has been the through-line of my life, and it's what this website is about.

The short version, in order

At 10, my grandfather taught me to strip down and repair his 1980s New Holland tractor. Leaky remotes, jerky hydraulics, corroded wiring, bad starters, sediment clogs, overheating. Find the fault, pull apart the system around it, fix it, test the fix, put it back together running better than before.

At 13, he taught me compound interest and used the stock market as the lesson. I bought my first stock that year. Compounding turned out to apply to more than money: strength training, learning, and building trust.

At 14, I built my own computer from parts because I couldn't afford one built to the specs I wanted.

At 20, after years of waiting tables, I was hired as assistant manager at a sand and gravel open-pit mining operation. A year later I was general manager of a business $150K in debt from gross mismanagement. Twelve months after that, we were $75K in the black.

At 25, I enlisted in the Army and served in Iraq as an airborne infantryman with the 82nd Airborne Division. When I got out, I wanted job security and the ability to serve others in a direct, tangible way, so I went back to school and became a registered nurse. Along the way, I taught myself Python through a paid internship at Harvard's Edwin Land Research Institute.

My final nursing role was, in part, building information systems for a surgical oncology team, one of the best in the country in my estimation, that still wanted to raise the bar on patient satisfaction and quality improvement. Good wasn't good enough for them. I respected that.

Today I'm building Promptolution, where I design structured workflows and automation systems, and build custom AI systems for business owners. It's systems thinking applied to a new domain.

The common thread

A tractor, a balance sheet, an infantry platoon, a hospital unit, an AI workflow. Different domains, same discipline. See the whole. Find the constraints. Fix the structure, not just the symptom.

That's what I write about here: systems thinking, applied to both my professional and personal life.

Letters to Miles

One more thing about this site. I'm sharing my belief system, ethics, and values as letters to my son, Miles, as a way to transfer what (little) wisdom I've attained. It's a repository of what matters to me, an access point for him, and for anyone else who might find value in these words.

Read my first post about how I applied systems thinking to the less obvious roles in my life →

Thanks for reading. Stay tuned for more posts by me, not AI.

Matt Piontkowski

“Not all those who wander are lost.” — J.R.R. Tolkien