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615 days of blogging for the hell of it
Whiona writes: Why is that the end goal of blogging? Of writing? Just to make money and grow our followers? To increase our traffic so we can expose our visitors to 300 repetitive ads that take up their entire phone screen? To “convert” our readers into our customers, because them reading and enjoying what we…
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Swoopers and bashers
“Swoopers write a story quickly, higgledy-piggledy, crinkum-crankum, any which way. Then they go over it again painstakingly, fixing everything that is just plain awful or doesn’t work. Bashers go one sentence at a time, getting it exactly right before they go on to the next one. When they’re done they’re done.” Kurt Vonnegut Thomas Basbøll…
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To balance out overthinking, ask yourself, “How hard can it be?”
Recently, Acquired.fm asked Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang what company he would start today. Jensen says: “I wouldn’t do it, and the reason for that is really quite simple (ignoring the company that we would start—first of all, I’m not exactly sure). The reason why I wouldn’t do it—and it goes back to why it’s so…
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Keep faith in the end, accept inconvenient facts
I recently came across Admiral Jim Stockdale, who Jim Collins describes as, “the highest-ranking United States military officer in the “Hanoi Hilton” prisoner-of-war camp during the height of the Vietnam War. Tortured over twenty times during his eight-year imprisonment from 1965 to 1973, Stockdale lived out the war without any prisoner’s rights, no set release…
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Create a lot of value, extract a small part of it
Ryan Holiday writes in his lessons from writing The Daily Stoic for seven years: Give a lot of value away and capture a small percentage. I mentioned that we’ve essentially published seven books for free through the Daily Stoic email. On top of that, over the years, we’ve essentially created the largest Stoic library in…
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The point of taking notes isn’t to take notes, it’s to think more effectively
When I first started digitizing my paper notes, I was on the fence choosing between Roam and Notion. It felt like a paralyzing choice; if I made the wrong move now, I experienced this sense of fear that I’d eventually be bogged down by the legacy architecture. I ended up choosing Notion, and that was…
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Whenever you’re stuck, write down 10 ideas
A few friends have recently told me that the most useful creative prompt they got from my book was, “Write down 10 ideas.” This goal energized them to dig into their files and archives, or to jog their memory for possibilities. Sometimes they stopped before 10, because they found the idea they needed. Make lists!
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2.5 hours with Rising Green
The other day, I spent almost 2.5 hours at The Met with Lee Krasner’s “Rising Green.” The experience felt much less like looking at the work, and more like reading it. I took many notes, and eventually fewer, as the chatter in my brain quieted. I slept very well that night. This experience was prompted…
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Meme as spine (continued)
The strength and weakness in audiobooks is how passive the experience is. For me, it’s easy to forget where and how I heard something; one trick seems to be in remembering the associated time and place where I listened to an interesting point, a scene that I was seeing at the time. In any case,…
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The little poster that Steve Jobs made famous
Millions of people—including me—found out about the Whole Earth Catalog when Steve Jobs closed off his Stanford commencement speech with it. A new archive of it just went online, along with this ad that Steve quotes: Making memorable things. Share it with people. It’ll all be worth it somehow.