-
I was wrong about audiobooks
In my 20s, I refused to listen to audiobooks. For starters, to me, it didn’t count as actual reading. I also loved, and still love, paper books. To experience an audiobook felt like a betrayal to this admiration. On top of all of that, I also thought it’d be incredibly slow, and I wouldn’t be…
-
Quantity? Quality?
My latest at Medium. I never would’ve imagined I’d know so much about this topic. It all just kind of happened!
-
My story on Pusha T in Trapital
If you read this blog regularly, you’ll know I’m a big fan of Pusha T’s work (exhibit 1, 2, 3). To me, Push is one of the few artists still focused on quality and on developing his category. Push isn’t afraid to sell fewer records; that doesn’t mean he’s making any less money, which is…
-
Creative Doing on the Ideas Into Action podcast
I had a great time a few weeks ago recording an interview with my friend Hamza Khan. Hamza’s a global keynote speaker and bestselling author of The Burnout Gamble and Leadership, Reinvented, and he hosts a podcast entitled Ideas Into Action. I actually joined him back in April 2019 for episode 11: And I was…
-
How is it priming your brain?
Our brains are easily primed, which then dictates our actions, which then changes how we think. Before we realize this, we’re just swimming in water without knowing what water is. Now that we’re aware of it, we can actively train our brains (we each only have one, so training it in one part can affect…
-
How to find a passed website with the Internet Archive
One special thing about the internet, for better or worse, is that few things ever really die. That’s largely not because websites don’t actually die—they do!—but because the Internet Archive does the really hard work of preserving them. I’ve written at length about digging up lost documents and how preserving them is like giving new…
-
Aesop (the business), on lists
In their excellent hardcover book titled after their company, Aesop authors Jennifer Down and Dennis Paphitis write about the power of lists in an essay entitled “An Inventory of All Things”: At Aesop, there are lists on how we open and close a store or office each day, lists detailing laboratory processes, lists describing how…
-
Make lists
Lots of them. List the moments and experiences that gave you energy, brought you confidence, and made you do what you do now. List the things you’ve done with your life. List the things you want to do with your life, and how you can do them (Can you do a smaller version of it?…
-
For productivity geeks, futility is a relief and a starting point
A fascinating thread started at Hacker News about Oliver Burkeman’s latest post entitled, “It’s worse than you think.” There are words like, “pessimism,” “nihilism,” and “futility,” floating around in the comments. I commented in there a couple of times (1, 2), feeling confident after my own submitted blog post gained a bit of momentum. I…
-
Say it your way, say it again (redux)
A few weeks ago, I came across one of my favorite diagrams. Sarah Arnold-Hall created it. But I wouldn’t have come across it if Steph didn’t share it through this very viral tweet. The image itself is original, but there’s an endless number of people who have written about showing up every day. Kishore Nallan…