February 2025
Books, articles, podcasts, and thoughts throughout the month
Books read:
📕 Do The Work: A guide to understanding power and creating change by Roxane Gay and Megan Pillow
📕 Feel Good Productivity by Ali Abdaal
📕 Atomic Habits by James Clear
📕 The 5 Types of Wealth: A Transformative Guide to Design Your Dream Life by Sahil Bloom
📖 Hell Yeah or No by Derek Sivers
📖 Broken Stars: Contemporary Chinese Science Fiction in Translation, Translated by
📖 The Hidden Girl and Other Stories by Ken Liu
📖 The Gene by Siddhartha Mukherjee
📖 The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle
📖 The Worlds I See by Fei-Fei Li
Posts published:
Videos posted:
February 28
📰 LLMs Are Dissolving & Creating Work by
Book sales dashboard
Experiencing this sudden ability to code has been jarring. It has made me realize how much our perception of work is shaped by completing tasks.
People talk about having “productive weekends” like it is their whole purpose in the world.
For the organization, as Ethan Mollick writes, it means shifting away from aiming for automation and to thinking about augmentation: > ”First, the focus needs to move from task automation to capability augmentation. Instead of asking "what tasks can we automate?" leaders should ask "what new capabilities can we unlock?" And they will need to build the capacity in their own organizations to help explore, and develop these changes.”
My advice: play with these tools. Experiment with them at least once a week. Try to do something you didn’t think you could do. See how it changes your perception of your own work and your future path. It might be jarring but it might be exciting.
Startups can gain massive cost advantages against established incumbents. They’ll still have to compete on other things like relationships and brand but the cost differentials are going to be hard to defeat.
There's both diminishing returns to "putting in the hard work" on a traditional path and much higher returns to doing it on work you deeply care about. Find your Good Work!
People with strong work identities will struggle. Authors who pride themselves on slow, grinding work and painful writing processes will not be happy about the millions that can write relatively close to their own level. This has essentially already happened to codes. Don’t identify too strongly with a task or role. You may need to reinvent yourself in the next 5 years. Remember, you’re just human.
📰 The Liberating Effect of Uncertainty by Anne-Laure Le Cunff
Psychologists call our ability to predict our future emotional states “affective forecasting” – and we’re surprisingly bad at it. Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert found that we routinely overestimate how happy or unhappy future events will make us feel, and for how long.
In reality, the data shows that the 40-year-old you will likely be as different from your current self as you are from your 20-year-old self. Your favorite music, your political views, your career aspirations – all are likely to shift in ways your current self cannot fully imagine.
The beautiful uncertainty of not knowing what we want isn’t something to overcome – it’s something to embrace. It’s the liminal space where curiosity lives. It’s what keeps us learning and evolving throughout our lives.
So the next time someone asks you where you see yourself in five years, the most honest answer might be: “I don’t know yet – and that’s exactly as it should be.”
📰 The YouTube Analytics Hack I Wish I Used Sooner by Tamara Gabriel
check the comments for questions or pain points your audience is sharing on videos with a high number of new subscribers.
Those comments give great ideas for your next videos, targeting that group who is already engaged.
📰 3-2-1: On the Secret to Self-Control, How to Live Longer, and What Holds People Back by James Clear
You get to pick a new career based on one factor: Your job is to do the activity that most frequently puts you into a flow state.
Flow state = you feel fully immersed in your work, you're in "the zone," time flies by without you realizing it, etc.
What do you choose?
📰 GPT-4.5 Won’t Blow Your Mind. It Might Befriend It Instead. by Every’s Dan Shipper and Alex Duffy
To be completely honest, we didn’t love 4.5 on the first day we used it: It felt slow, we encountered hallucinations, and it was harder to steer. But in subsequent testing, it grew on us. OpenAI said it’s more opinionated and less sycophantic than other models, and that tracks: You might hate opinionated people at first but grow to appreciate them over time.
4.5’s future. ChatGPT-4.5 isn’t the mind-blowing step up that we thought it might be, but it is an interesting new direction that takes some getting used to. That seems to be a newer pattern with later models, especially those that are a little bit less sycophantic. They require some prodding to learn how to interact with them in a way that feels good, so at first blush, you might not like it.
📰 Pure Independence by Morgan Housel
A simple formula for a pretty nice life is independence plus purpose.
I’ll tell you the takeaway: If you’re used to being assisted, supervised, mandated, or dictated, and then suddenly you experience the glory of independence, the feeling is sensational. Doing something on your own terms can feel better than doing the exact same thing when someone else is peering over your shoulder, telling you what to do, guiding you along.
Derek Sivers once put it a different way: All misery comes from dependency. If you weren’t dependent on income, people, or technology, you would be truly free. The only way to be deeply happy is to break all dependencies.
1. Independence is the only way to recognize individuality.
I read this great quote recently from an early Amazon employee: Jeff [Bezos] said many times that if we wanted Amazon to be a place where builders can build, we needed to eliminate communication, not encourage it. The idea is that if you want to do something great, you cannot have a group of people constantly telling you what you’re doing wrong and why it doesn’t mesh with their own goals. That’s not because those other people might be wrong; it’s because they might be playing a different game than you are.
2. Independence in thought, philosophy, morals, and culture are as important as financial independence.
Charlie Munger once listed three practical rules for success:
Don’t sell something you wouldn’t buy.
Work for people you admire.
Partner with people you enjoy.
I once heard a good litmus test: If I can predict your views on one topic by hearing your views about another, unrelated topic, you are not thinking independently. Example: If your views on immigration allow someone to accurately predict your views on abortion and gun control, there’s a good chance you’re not thinking independently.
Investor Ed Thorp once said: “It is vastly less stressful to be independent—and one is never independent when involved in a large structure with powerful clients.”
3. When you’re independent you feel less desire to impress strangers, which can be an enormous financial and psychological cost.
Speaking of hidden forms of debts: How much of what takes place in our modern economy is done purely for signaling reasons? It’s impossible to quantify, but you know it when you see it. And taking an action to impress other people is a direct form of dependence. It happens in many different ways:
Physical signaling (clothes, cars, homes, jewelry)
Clout-chasing (desperate for social media engagement)
Tribal signaling (political battles, status superiority, election bumper stickers)
Moral signaling (everything is us-versus-them)
4. Independence does not mean you don’t care what anyone thinks of you. It means that you strategically decide whose attention you seek.
I need the love and admiration of my wife, kids, and parents. I enjoy the presence and camaraderie of about five friends. I want to foster relationships with a small group of people I admire in my professional orbit. But you can see how this funnel keeps tapering off from there.
A related point here is that loyalty to those who deserve your loyalty is a wonderful thing. Family, genuine friends, companies who you deeply respect and admire – it can be so satisfying to offer your loyalty to someone who deserves it. But it’s rare, and only when you’re independent can you be honest about whether you’re being appropriately loyal or attached to the attention and money of people you secretly don’t admire.
5. Financial independence doesn’t mean you stop working.
This idea is related to the previous one: Financial independence is a wonderful goal. But achieving it doesn’t necessarily mean you stop working – just that you choose the work you do, when you do it, for how long, and whom you do it with. Those who retire early tend to come from one of two camps:
They hated their work but kept doing it to make as much money as they could.
They enjoyed their work but quit when they had enough money. To each their own, but both look like situations where money controls your decisions. The irony is that some people who think they’re financially independent are actually completely dependent on money, so much so that they spend their days doing things they’d rather not because money tells them they should. Rather than using money as a tool, the money used them.
6. Being independent doesn’t mean you’re accountable to no one. You become accountable to yourself, which is often when you do your best work.
In my profession: Writing for yourself is fun, and it shows. Writing for other people is work, and it shows. You do your best work when you’re doing it on your own terms.
February 27
📰 20 Ideas That Changed the Trajectory of My Life by
A great life is measured by whether you wake up peacefully each morning and can choose how to spend your one finite resource - time. By whether you can freely spend your days building, creating, writing, chatting, negotiating, deal-making, lazing, cooking, meandering, grinding, pushing, pulling or allowing. Or anything else, for that matter.
You’re not supposed to nail it on your first attempt, nor are you supposed to bypass the failed experiments and giant fuck-ups. You’re supposed to feel defeated, low, rejected, hurt, hopeless, hopeful, excited, disbelieving and triumphant. You’re supposed to experience the full spectrum of human emotion for the blink of an eye that you’re here.
Failure is not defined by what does or doesn’t happen in the moment, it’s defined by what you do next.
📰 This Week's Curation by
I rarely finish books, but The Silo Effect might be a strong contender.
It’s a book about bureaucracies and how cultural norms stifles innovation, creativity and men from dancing. What’s interesting is it uses an anthropology lens to study the topic.
📰 40 Thoughts on Turning 40, Skyscraper Mentality, & More by Sahil Bloom
"It’s not what you gather, but what you scatter that tells what kind of life you have lived."- Helen Walton
In the week ahead, think about the Skyscraper Mentality: Build something strong and adaptable capable of enduring whatever chaos life brings your way.
📰 1,000 True Users by Nate Gosselin
I see a similar pattern playing out across the broader Creator Economy. We’re in an exciting time, where entrepreneurs can build viable small businesses based around authentic connection rather than an endless chase of mass appeal. Not surprisingly, this moment has birthed a ton of tools for the digital creator’s menu. They can broadcast their expertise through content (newsletters, podcasts, videos), share it live (courses, coaching, workshops), or foster spaces for discussion (communities, Discord). But there’s a pattern here – everything either requires the creator’s real-time presence or becomes static the moment it’s published.
Kevin Kelly’s seminal essay on 1000 True Fans 1. The insight was beautifully simple: creators don’t need millions of casual followers to make a living—they need 1000 people who deeply value their work enough to pay $100 annually. His math was transformative, and unlocked a generation of creator businesses built on serving small, dedicated communities.
AI is changing that equation, ushering in what I like to call the 1000 True Users era.
I think this is why we’ll start seeing an injection of “traditional” product thinking into Creator Economy businesses. The key to adding a 1000 True Users channel to a creator business will be creating a product that helps the community practice the method or develop their taste *on their own terms*, powered by a model trained on the creator’s approach. To be successful, creators will need to deeply understand their users’ day-to-day journeys, identifying the best points to integrate their new tool or perspective.
We’re already starting to see this play out with some forward-thinking creators. Drew Binsky leveraged the audience from his travel blog to build a custom travel community app called Just Go3. Zach Pogrob is building on his “Obsession” personal development following by launching a fitness training app, Aura4. And Nat Eliason is publicly asking for (or teasing?) a Strava-for-writers product within his writer community5. I don’t think we’re far from seeing David Perell launch a Write of Passage app, or Tiago Forte build a productivity experience. This space is fertile ground for creators who have already built an audience around their expertise.
📰 We Nearly Scrapped This Video Idea… by Team Ali Abdaal
Tip - We always try to make sure our titles are 52 characters or less, otherwise YouTube will cut off the last part and this it makes it hard for viewers to see exactly what the video is about.
📰 Typewriter Interview With Ross Gay by
Do you have any hobbies? (The more trivial the better, IMO.) Do you collect anything?
I'm a big fan of "silly rituals." (I 'smoke' a cigarette pencil when Im writing.) What's the most embarrassing thing you do when you're working?
Do you see yourself as part of an artistic lineage? Who would you put in your creative family tree?
📰 We Should Own the Economy by
This is no longer Adam Smith’s economy—he could not have foreseen how wealth would consolidate into the hands of a few.
We need to expand Adam Smith’s model for future generations—to create an elevated vision for capitalism in which everyone gets richer from capital, not just the few who got in decades ago. If we can shift our wealth imbalance, we can shift our power imbalance—creating an economy owned and operated by us, and a democracy that better represents our interests.
📰 My Projects, Questions, and Intentions for 2025 by Tiago Forte
I’m also asking bigger questions: How can I make irreversible decisions that simplify my life? What kind of experiences do I want to have with my kids while they’re young? And what does my jealousy of others reveal about what’s missing in my own life?
📰 Stop Being a Philistine and Read Some Good Books by
Henry's Reading List for Philistines:
For first-time Jane Austen: Pride and Prejudice ("It's delightful. It's not difficult.")
For a taste of Tolstoy without the length: The Death of Ivan Ilyich (short but "a little miserable")
For surprisingly relevant 19th century lit: Fathers and Sons by Turgenev (featuring the nihilistic character Bazarov)
George Eliot's masterpiece: Middlemarch ("some people think is the best novel written in English" and is "basically a NIMBY novel" according to Matt Yglesias)
Recent standouts: Catherine Lacey's Biography of X and The Mobius Strip; Helen DeWitt's The Last Samurai ("she's an actual genius")
For fantasy fans: Diana Wynne Jones's Howl's Moving Castle and the Chrestomanci series
A 90s gem: Norman Rush's Mating (1991)
Short and weird: Susanna Clarke's Piranesi
📰 I Created a Hacker News Simulator to Reverse-Engineer Virality by Every’s Michael Taylor
Imagine walking into that sales meeting for the 50th time (the first 49 were virtual), ready to handle every objection. Or sending that marketing email to 100 AIs first, to catch any mistakes before you roll it out to your 100,000-person email list. Whether it’s your advertising, website copy, or social posts, there are real-world consequences to getting your messaging wrong. Why not practice on an AI audience first?
Mad Men-era marketer David Ogilvy estimated that five times as many people read a headline as the article itself. Even small changes to the headline can boost your chances of going viral, to which the results attest. AI coding tools like Cursor make it quite easy to write custom software, so I wrote a script that scraped the comment history from the profiles of 81 Hacker News users who had commented on the first few stories that day in order to build relevant personas for each of the profiles of people who had commented. Then I fed this audience into Rally and ran queries against this virtual Hacker News audience.
📰 Photo Insider: The Harsh Truth About Photography by Cody Mitchell
If you want local recommendations, ChatGPT is a great tool. I created a little ad-lib prompt you can use: “As a photographer in (enter where you live here), I am bored by the things around me to photograph, especially (enter the biggest obstacle that’s in your way of shooting good photos where you are). Can you recommend some places I should explore to try and put myself in front of more beautiful local subjects??”
📰 Some Reads Are Worth the Reps by
When my life rhythm is unsteady, I have an equation that keeps me grounded: [workout + read, then write]
When I get on the elliptical machine at the gym, read a Kindle book, and then write about that book and the insights gleaned from it, everything in life feels less wobbly.
📰 I Wonder What My Older Self Would Think of Me. by
I would really hate for my 85 year old self to look back on the person I am today, with regret or pity.
We all have things we wish we could go back and tell ourselves with what we know now. “Prepare for later” would be the top of my list.
Every older woman I know has gifted me so much with their company. They’re funnier, smarter, more mischievous, unapologetic, potent in their counsel, bolder, and most notably…foreboding in their warnings of regrets.
Even I, as I approach 40, feel this involuntary call to arms, to warn younger women of the pitfalls of allowing the insecurity we are doused in from before puberty, to drown them.
📰 4 Principles to Create More Luck by Sahil Bloom
4 Principles to Create Your Lucky Break There are four key principles underlying my crazy story that anyone can apply to create their own lucky break:
1. Increase Your Luck Surface Area
It's hard to get lucky watching TV at home. It's much easier to get lucky when you're creating motion in the world. Remember the Luck Razor: When choosing between two paths, choose the path that has a larger luck surface area.
2. Work Hard in the Darkness
3. Shoot Your Shot
4. Follow Through
My lucky break wouldn't have happened if I hadn't followed up to stay in touch over the intervening two years. Find simple ways to stay in the game...
Share occasional updates on the progress on your end
Send the person an article/book/podcast they might find valuable
Mention work they've done that you've enjoyed (for example: if you listened to them on a podcast, highlight a particular idea they shared that you appreciated) ...and then, when the time comes, deliver on the big thing as promised.
📰 How to Turn a YouTube Video Into a Banger Email Newsletter in 20 Minutes or Less by
andIf you (or your client) already create content on YouTube, you’re sitting on a goldmine of newsletter material. The trick is knowing how to repurpose it efficiently—without losing the original voice or spending hours rewriting.
Here’s the exact five-step process I use to turn a YouTube video into an email newsletter in 20 minutes or less.
Step 1: Pick Your YouTube Video
Start by choosing a YouTube video that you (or your client) want to turn into a newsletter. There are three main approaches here:
Repurpose your own content: If you already have YouTube videos, this is an easy way to double-dip on content without creating something from scratch.
Use a client’s video: If you’re ghostwriting, pick a video that aligns with their audience and messaging goals.
Curate another creator: If you’re already watching videos, this is a simple way to share your takeaways with your audience.
Step 2: Focus On One Topic
One mistake people make when repurposing YouTube content is trying to cram the entire video into an email. That’s a recipe for an overwhelming, unfocused newsletter. Instead, identify the most compelling, actionable, or thought-provoking part of the video—something that:
Sparks curiosity or debate
Teaches the audience something useful
Reinforces a key message your client wants to push
if you’re ghostwriting, ask your client: “What’s the #1 takeaway you want people to remember from this video?” That helps you zero in on the right section.
Step 3: Pull The Video Transcript
Step 4: Use AI To Extract the Key Points
Now comes the fun part—turning raw transcript data into a structured newsletter outline. For this, I usually use Claude, but ChatGPT or Gemini work too.
Here’s the exact prompt I use to extract the most important insights: Hey Claude, I want your help drafting an educational email newsletter based on the transcript of a YouTube video [I/my client] created recently (which I'm attaching to this message). Now, I would like this email to be focused on the first topic/principle [I/my client] covers in the video: [Insert topic] So, here’s what I would like your help with: I want you to extract everything [I/my client] says about this topic using their exact words. Please share each sentence as a bullet point so it’s easy to skim. And just to make sure I’m making myself clear:
Extract everything they say on this topic, word for word.
Do not summarize or paraphrase.
Format each point as a bullet.
Three final guidelines:
1. Do not use quotation marks around each blurb.
2. Capitalize the first letter of each bullet for readability.
3. Share the entire relevant transcript section at once (no piecemeal responses). Thanks!
Step 5: Edit & Polish (The 15-Minute Refinement Step) Now that AI has done the heavy lifting, your job is to refine and shape the content into a great newsletter. Here’s my fast workflow for this step:
1. Copy the AI output into a Google Doc. This makes it easier to edit, rearrange, and tweak.
2. Refine for flow and clarity. Remove any redundant or awkward phrases. Add smooth transitions between key points. Make sure it reads like a conversation, not a transcript. (Use a follow up prompt to get your first draft done faster.)
3. Write a strong hook. Your email needs to grab attention immediately. Click here to get my 6-Figure Subject Line Swipe File for FREE!
4. End with a call-to-action (CTA). Every email should prompt the reader to take action—whether it’s clicking a link, replying, or applying a lesson. For example, *“Want me to break this down in more detail? Reply ‘YES’ and I’ll share an example.”* This entire final step—from polishing to adding a hook and CTA—should take 15-20 minutes max.
February 25
📰 Zone 2 Training Is the Slow Highway to Longevity by
Your body needs three things to produce energy efficiently:
*Pristine* blood vessels to deliver oxygen and nutrients (think fuel lines)
*Efficient* mitochondria to convert that oxygen into energy (think engines)
The ability to use different fuel sources (think hybrid capability)
Fortunately, there’s a training zone that acts like a master switch, optimizing all these systems simultaneously—referred to as Zone 2
Zone 2 refers to a specific level of exercise intensity where your body can work *steadily* without building up fatigue.
📰 The Price of Mass Amusement by Jon Haidt
Fordham University philosophy professor Nicholas Smyth’s “Smash The Technopoly!,” our first post on the great media theorists of the 20th century. Smyth discussed the ideas of Marshall McLuhan and Neil Postman, with a focus on Postman’s book *Technopoly*. He summarized the central idea of that book like this: > In *Technopoly*, Postman distinguishes between a tool-using culture and a technopoly. All cultures have tools, but some cultures have moral resources necessary to constrain and direct the uses to which tools are put.
Today, we bring you an essay on what is probably Postman’s most influential book, *Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business.* In this book, Postman argues that the rise of television and its accompanying show-business norms brought about a widespread loss of both moral and intellectual resources, transforming American society from a technology-using culture to a technopoly in which our tools become our masters. If Postman was right—that television ushered in a technopoly—then this concern becomes even more pressing for social media today, and what is coming with AI.
📰 AI Turned Me Into a Content Agency of One by Every
AI hasn’t just helped me produce content faster—it has fundamentally changed the scale of what I can do.
(For those wondering, my exact stack is:
taking the time upfront to train AI on the specific elements that matter. For me, that’s resources like:
A style guide. Not just grammar rules and brand colors, but voice, tone, and key personas. AI needs to know *who* it’s writing for and *how* to sound.
Example content. A collection of past content that captures the structure, style, and level of detail I want. AI does best when it has real-world references.
Messaging. Since this is marketing, every piece needs to align with the brand’s core perspective. AI can’t just generate copy; it has to reinforce strategy.
Step 1: AI as a 'second brain': Ideation and strategy I start by feeding ChatGPT the brand’s positioning, audience personas, and past content. Then, I ask targeted prompts like:
What’s missing from this content strategy based on our goals?
Which audience personas are underserved in our current content?
What’s an underutilized angle we could explore?
Step 2: AI as a thought partner: Outlining and structuring Based on the strategic insights, I use Claude to generate an outline. AI ensures the structure is logical, aligned with brand messaging, and covers all key points.
Step 3: AI as a first draft factory: Drafting I dictate rough ideas into the AI-powered word processor Lex, which expands them into structured paragraphs. This eliminates blank-page syndrome and speeds up the process.
Step 4: AI as a first set of 'eyes': Editing and refinement AI helps me audit my work before I send it off. For example, I’ll prompt:
Is there anything missing from this content inventory based on the funnel strategy?
Are we reinforcing the right brand messages?
Does this align with our example content?
Step 5: AI as content multiplier: Repurposing and distribution Once the piece is done, I use Spiral to turn it into a LinkedIn post, an email, and a Twitter thread—all in the brand’s established voice.
Step 6: AI as a product manager: Packaging and scaling Once the project is complete, I have ChatGPT bundle everything into a reusable framework including deliverables, workflows, and even pricing and packaging options. This way, I can apply the same process to future clients without starting from scratch, turning one-off work into a scalable system.
economist John Maynard Keynes predicted in the 1930s that technological progress would lead to a 15-hour workweek.
February 24
📰 How to Unlock the Magic of Pixar’s Storytelling Rule #4 With AI by
andThe Story Spine is a series of eight sentences that create a dramatic story.
Like all good stories, the formula first sets up the background and introduces the inciting incident. Then it dives into the consequences before moving to the climax, resolution, and ultimately the long-term implications.
Prompt: I want you to create a Story Spine for my topic. Topic = {TOPIC} You are master of dramatic storytelling. You embody the creativity and energy of Pixar. Please write 1 sentence for each of the following sentence stems for my topic: 1. Once upon a time... 2. Every day... 3. One day... 4. Because of that... 5. Because of that... 6. Because of that... 7. Until finally... 8. And ever since then...
February 23
📰 Read Like an Artist! by
There’s a good profile of creator Mike White in *The New Yorker*, but what I really love is this 10-year-old video of him talking about his creative process, how it’s half an “open” mode that doesn’t look like he’s doing much, and half a “closed” mode where he’s deep in work on a project.
📰 Fast Cash vs. Slow Equity by
A cash business can have quick linear growth, whereas an equity business will have slower but exponential growth.
February 20
📰 The Multiplier Effect of Collective Curiosity by
At his school in ancient Athens, Aristotle encouraged everyone to walk through the gardens while discussing ideas, rather than sitting quietly for lectures. Teachers and students would explore questions, challenge each other’s thinking, and build on each other’s insights. This tradition of walking and wondering together became so successful that it continued for centuries, influencing how knowledge was shared throughout the ancient world. Yet today we rarely create space for such collective curiosity. While we have unprecedented access to information, we’re often too busy, too distracted, or too preoccupied with immediate results to engage in shared exploration. Plus, our education and workplaces usually prioritize individual achievement over collaborative discovery.
The Wright brothers didn’t invent flight in isolation; they extensively corresponded with fellow aviation enthusiasts. The Human Genome Project, which successfully mapped our genetic code, wasn’t the work of a single brilliant mind, but rather a massive collaborative effort where thousands of scientists shared their questions, challenges, and discoveries.
Take walks with colleagues where you share what you’re working on and what questions you’re wrestling with.
Start a newsletter about what you’re learning or host “Curiosity Hour” sessions where people share their work in progress. When we openly share our uncertainties, it creates psychological safety for others to do the same. It also creates opportunities for unexpected paths as others can spot patterns you might have missed.
📰 Re-Noted: Martin Luther King Jr.'s Organizational Systems by
Reading is a great prompt for writing. If you’re inspired by what you read, just start writing—even if it’s in the margins of a book.
📰 Frictionless Outlining With ChatGPT by
andThis approach works for any type of content—newsletters, YouTube scripts, landing pages, and more. Instead of asking, *“What should I create today?”* Start by asking, *“What questions can I answer for my audience?”* Then let ChatGPT help you structure your ideas, remove friction, and speed up your workflow. Try it out this week with this simple prompt template: I'm creating a [content type] breaking down [subject matter]. I want to answer valuable audience questions for each [component/section]. Here are my current questions: {Insert your list of questions.} Please help me: Generate additional audience-focused questions specific to this [content type]. Organize all questions in the most logical sequence from the audience's perspective.
📰 the Most Overlooked Part of YouTube by Team Ali Abdaal
because Ines (my Head of Content) is super organised, she always selects a more refined list of videos to talk about in our meetings, and the first thing we do is rate each idea based on how well we think it’ll perform on the channel.
finalising two solid titles ideas (which we then A/B test against each other after the video goes live) is just incredibly difficult at the moment. We find ourselves asking questions like:
Who are we trying to reach here?
Does my audience resonate with this topic?
Does the title align with what the video is actually about?
Does it make you want to click on the video?
And has the title been overused?
📰 Gen Z and the End of Predictable Progress by
during times of uncertainty, people tend to retreat to the edges. With AI, we're not just watching an economic transformation, we're witnessing the birth of entirely new ways of understanding who we are and how we fit into the world. For better or worse, the rise of figures like Andrew Tate alongside the growth of democratic socialist movements among young people are competing narratives about how to make sense of a world where traditional economic stories no longer work. I mean Argentina (the country) launched a $4b memecoin that thousands of people lost millions of dollars on and the President is now trying to back out of responsibility for. Of course nothing makes sense anymore.
The key takeaway isn't just that Gen Z is shifting politically, but that their engagement with politics is being shaped by a digital-first reality. And now we are seeing what is happening when people decide they don’t like that reality, as shown below. Immediate gratification makes it harder to understand long-term consequences. The world of algorithms and AI can be designed to suit one’s every desires, but when reality comes into focus, we can’t scroll away from it.
The Normal Trap My former professor Dr. Chhachhi said "the opposite of rationality isn't irrationality - it's being normal”. He captured something really important. He didn’t mean this exactly, but I am extrapolating - the "safe path" (corporate job, 401k) might be the riskiest bet.
While Gen Z has adapted by finding alternative paths to success - from trades to creator economies - institutions are struggling to keep pace. Universities experiment with modular education, corporations are rethinking credential requirements, and policymakers push for reforms, but these changes are often too slow and too limited. The challenge isn't just modernization, it's legitimacy, right? When people say the government is "broke," they're not just talking about finances, they're talking about trust.
What looks like a conservative shift among young voters might actually be something more fundamental: a generation's attempt to navigate a world where institutions promise stability they can't deliver, where algorithms offer opportunity without security, and where the very nature of work and worth is being redefined. It’s constantly evolving, and it’s not just politics - it’s the very nature of self being called into question.
Anne Applebaum is a staff writer at The Atlantic and a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian. Her latest book is Autocracy, Inc., The Dictators Who Want to Run the World.
Eoin Higgins is a reporter with IT Brew who covers cybersecurity, IT jobs, and government tech. He's just published a book called Owned, how tech billionaires on the right bought the loudest voices on the left.
Ryan Mac is a New York Times reporter who covers corporate accountability across the global technology industry. His book is Character Limit, How Elon Musk Destroyed Twitter. And it's required reading if you want to understand what Musk is doing to the federal government right now.
🎧 The Lasting Impact of Citizens United, How to Ask for a Raise at Work, and When Is It the Right Time to Have Kids? - Prof G Pod
Instead of directly asking for more money, ask your manager what you need to do to increase your likelihood of a promotion or raise. If you don't receive the expected compensation, express your disappointment. People who switch jobs every three to five years tend to make more money on average.
Instead of saying, I want more money, saying, what do you think I need to do to increase the likelihood that I'll be promoted or register an increase in compensation? And if you don't get the compensation you want, I think it's okay to say, I'm disappointed. I was expecting more. I was hoping for more. Also, at the end of the day, and there's evidence that shows this, the people who typically make more money on average are people who switch jobs every three to five years
Check in with your boss to discuss your performance and career goals. Express your desire for a promotion and raise. Ask for advice on how to achieve these goals. If your request isn't met, express your disappointment and consider exploring other job opportunities.
What are we going to do? We're going to check in with our boss and see how you're doing. You're going to lay out your expectations and say, or your desires that you want to get promoted and you want an increase in salary and ask for advice. How can I make sure I'm tracking for that? And if you don't get the compensation of the promotion in a very thoughtful, civilized way, saying, well, I got to be honest, I'm disappointed. And at the end of the day, you have to show a willingness to leave. And that is start doing a market check. If you feel you're being unfairly compensated
There's no perfect time to have kids. You just need a few base pillars:
A competent partner you can envision being with for at least 18 years.
Some economic security and professional trajectory so you're not strained.
A support group, like family or other young parents. If you have these, err on the side of having kids sooner. While there are advantages to being a young parent, having kids later offers more economic security and allows for more thoughtful parenting. If you're at 70-80% ready, don't let perfect be the enemy of good and just go for it.
I'm not sure there's ever a perfect time to have kids. I would argue that it's very kind of base pillars you need in place. One is you have to have a partner that you think is competent and that you can see being with for the next 18 years at least. Because once you have kids, you're in each other's lives for 18 years. Even if you get divorced, you're in each other's lives. Some semblance of economic security. You don't have to be rich, but not strained. If you're strained now and you throw a kid into the mix, wow, that's a lot of stress. So having a little bit of economic security and some professional trajectory. If you have those things, I would err on the side of doing it because there is never a perfect time to bring this little thing into your life that's going to demand constant attention, Additional cost, and a lot of unknowns. There's never a time when it's like, okay, this is definitely the time. And there really is an advantage, I think, to being a young parent. Having said that, I had kids later. It was nice to have some economic security. I was a little bit more thoughtful. Again, really personal decisions. Do you have a support group around you? Do you have family or young parents that could be involved in the kids' lives? One of my biggest blessings is that our in-laws are fairly young, and they've played a hugely positive and supportive role in raising our children. So that's been a real factor. So I think there are a variety of things, but if you get to what I call 70 or 80%, don't let perfect be the enemy of good. And what I mean by that is if you're mostly kind of there, then I would just go there and start procreating. I just don't think there's ever a perfect time. And I have found, I was sort of wandering. I don't think you have to have kids to be happy. I don't think kids are the right decision for everybody. But I know that for me, having kids has been the first time I've ever felt a sense of purpose. So anyways, what am I saying? Get on it. Get on it. Make sweet, sweet love. Procreate. Have progeny. That's right. Progeny? That's right.
📰 Book Polygamy by
Our speed-first culture has also influenced our reading habits. There are about a dozen book summary apps and services, like *Blinkist,* which has become the *SparkNotes* of the iPhone era. The gist is now worth more than the prose.
If you *actually* have to read a book, good luck having the attention span to finish it.
It was because of my slow, intentional reading that I went down the rabbit hole of legendary designer Milton Glaser; immediately started reading Esther Perel's *State of Affairs* after reading her interview; and took a drawing class from cartoonist Lynda Barry after being inspired by her words. This new way of reading alkalinizes my life, bringing a chemical balance to the speed by which I experience the world. Part of reading intentionally has been a departure from treating books as levels in video games to be completed in a sequence, but different views of a kaleidoscope offering new insights and wisdom. I’ve come to embrace my book polygamy as a way to experience the world more richly.
I'm also reading slowly and interacting with the text. I fill the pages with post-its and annotations, and keep notebooks where I write down quotes, passages, and summaries of what I learn.
📰 Everything Is Tuberculosis Press Release: Out March 18th 2025! by John Green
Everything Is Tuberculosis will be the first book published by Crash Course Books, a new imprint devoted to publishing nonfiction for students and lifelong learners.
Crash Course Books will debut two new series in Fall 2025: Crash Course Revolutions and Crash Course Lit, with additional titles to follow in Spring 2026.
February 19
🎧 Spotify’s First Year of Profitability + Is Google Losing Its Edge? - Prof G Markets
Taylor Swift gets more listen time than all of classical music now. Taylor Swift is bigger than classical music or jazz, the entire genre.
📰 3 Tricks for Self-Editing by
Once I finish a draft, I have a series of tricks that help me self-edit before I hand it over to anyone else.
1. Time is the best editor. If you have it, time is the easiest trick for self-editing. Simply put your manuscript away long enough so when you come back to it you can see it with fresh eyes.
2. Print out the manuscript and edit with a pencil. I spend almost all my time with a book in the word processing window on my computer, so printing the thing out — going from digital to analog — immediately makes it look and feel differently.
Every young writer should be gifted a box set of The Paris Review interviews
3. Read it out loud. When you have to read something out loud, all the flaws, bad transitions, and unnatural rhythms of the text are revealed. One of the things I learned from recording an audiobook for the first time is that everybody should try to record the audiobook before they turn in the manuscript. So that’s exactly what I do now: I put on my trusty headphones and get out my fancy podcasting microphone and pretend I’m recording the audiobook. Every time I hit a snag, I stop and I fix it. This can take days and days, but it works.
That’s it for the big tricks, but here are 3 more, just as a bonus:
Don’t kill your darlings, relocate them! I create a separate document and call it something like darlings.doc and have it open when I’m working. Whenever I have to cut something, I just dump it in the darlings document. I’ll probably never ever go back to it, but it eases the cutting, because all my little darlings are saved in the other document.
Start a fresh document for each draft. My books are 20,000 words are less, so this is a bit easier for me, but when I start a new draft, I like to retype everything from scratch instead of cutting and pasting, because it makes me think about every single word and how stuff is flowing.
Don’t change the structure in the middle of a draft. I break this rule all the time. Things go much more smoothly if you just stick to the structure you’ve chosen for this particular draft, and wait to switch things around until the next draft. Otherwise, you’ll just spend all your time shuffling things around and not writing. (More on this topic in the book The Clockwork Muse.)
📰 Do Laws Even Matter Anymore? Creamy Broccoli Soup, and an Epic Cookbook Club. by Korean Vegan
In February 2024, Stephanie Lau set out to create a cookbook club, those eponymously lovely excuses to host a dinner party themed around one book.
I’d like to introduce a concept I call “selfish software.” Selfish software refers to writing code for yourself without any external customers in mind. This practice might sound niche or individualistic, but there’s no need for it to be.
When you create selfish software, there’s nowhere to hide. You can’t gloss over a clunky interface or excuse an awkward feature. The feedback loop is immediate and brutally honest, because your audience is just yourself. You’re forced to refine every detail until it works. Once you have something that genuinely solves your own problems, you may be surprised by how many others it helps—even if you haven’t developed a grand plan for profit. But the profit isn’t the point. The point is the fun, creativity, and excitement you’ve had along the way. And it’s easier than ever with AI.
📰 My Reading Routine by
I most recently finished two books: The Sense of an Ending and Niels Lyhne. They were both about 200 pages long, but The Sense of an Ending took me two days and Niels Lyhne took me two months. While The Sense of an Ending was an enjoyable meditation on aging and lived experience, Niels Lyhne might be one of my favorite books ever. It’s an aesthetic, haunting yet beautiful story of a failed artist, which captures a range of human emotion that I’ve yet to experience in any other novel.
1. What was the best thing that happened yesterday?
When Michael Bungay Stanier was working on his new Do Something That Matters Journal, he asked me if I would write an introduction about the power of journaling, and I sent him these weird pages that I actually wrote as an entry in my diary
📰 Systems Over Syntax by Nate Gosselin
we defined a concrete size that Cursor could successfully implement 95% of the time: a change that touched no more than 2-3 files and 100-200 lines of code.
📰 Departing the New York Times by
“Words,” John Maynard Keynes once wrote, “ought to be a little wild, for they are the assault of thoughts on the unthinking.” That was always my attitude toward opinion writing. Newspaper columns *should* be controversial, rubbing some people the wrong way, because the main point is to get people to rethink their assumptions. I used to say, only half-jokingly, that if a column didn’t generate a large amount of hate mail, that meant that I had wasted the space.
in today’s wide-open information (and misinformation) environment, boring writing just vanishes without a trace.
📰 Literary Culture Can't Just Dismiss AI by
One reason for Sally Rooney’s popularity is that she can write about phones and the internet in a way that doesn’t sound false and hollow.
📰 Phone Free Weekend by
My friend recently told me about their family’s phone free weekend. They dumped their phone in a box, left it in the laundry room and spent the weekend disconnected.
📰 Are You Struggling With Your Own Screen Time? by
It also can be useful (if upsetting) to calculate how much time you’re currently spending on your phone, and to consider both how this total compares to the amount of time you’re spending on the things you just said you wanted to pay attention to, and what the consequences will be if you continue with your current habits. Here’s a calculator that can help.
1 hour per day ≈ 15 full 24-hour days per year
2 hours per day ≈ 1 month per year
3 hours per day ≈ 1.5 months per year
4 hours per day ≈ 2 months per year
5 hours per day ≈ 2.5 months per year
6 hours per day ≈ 3 months per year
If you’re awake for 16 hours a day and spend 4 hours a day on your phone (which is pretty typical), that means you’re spending 25% of your waking life on your phone. ... This also means that if you were to compress your whole year’s worth of screen time into one chunk, starting on January 1st (in other words, if you were to do nothing but sleep and stare at your phone), the rest of your “life” wouldn’t start until just after April 1st.
the more fun you’re having in real life, the less time you’re going to *want* to spend on your smartphone.
📰 Who Wins the AI Agent Battle? by Every’s Evan Armstrong
the correct way to think about AI is as the world’s simultaneously smartest and dumbest intern. It’ll blow your mind at what it can accomplish and shock you with its failures.
📰 The Dangers of Trying Not to Yawn by
For storytelling - CODE acronym.
Create tension
Open their heart
Delight their senses
Engage them with novelty and surprise
📰 What Was It Like for You? by
What was it like for you the last time someone you love brought up any of the following: An accident. A challenging moment. Fear. Frustration. Confusion. Getting stuck. Burnout. Losing a loved one. A painful mistake. Being layoff. A breakup. A divorce. A regret. An argument left unresolved. ... This is what I am going to say by default: *“What was it like for you?”
This is what I am going to say by default: “What was it like for you?”
📰 Sharing My Letter From Love by
A few months ago, Elizabeth Gilbert reached out to ask if I’d be interested in contributing a letter to her Substack, Letters from Love. ... If you’re not familiar with a “letter from love,” Liz describes it like this: > Open up a notebook (I find it’s most intimate to write this by hand, but you can use a laptop if you like) and write down this one question: Dear Love — What would you have me know today?
📰 I Was Terrified. I Did It Anyway. And Here’s What Happened. by Izzy Sealey
the only difference between fear and excitement is a smile. Physiologically, fear and excitement are actually very similar, and I’ve found that transforming fear into excitement is easier that trying to wholesale neutralise the feeling. Maybe try finding the exciting angle of this opportunity, opening up your body language, taking a deep belly breath—and maybe even cracking a smile. 😁
Refer to your Bank of Evidence. When feeling fearful, referring to a mental bank of all the times you’ve faced fear in the past and handled it. 💪
📰 What Tweens Get From Sephora and What They Get From Us via Jia Tolentino
Our Founding Fathers probably wore makeup at some point—in eighteenth-century America, upper-class men and women both did. Then, in the Victorian era, a broad moral skepticism about cosmetics took hold, an attitude that dominated until the early twentieth century, when putting on a face began to be seen as daringly cosmopolitan, and the makeup industry as we know it was born. By the end of the Second World War, makeup had become wholesome, even patriotic, albeit decidedly feminine. Cosmetics companies began marketing directly to teen-agers, and by the time I was in elementary school, in the nineties, a series of cheap drugstore brands—Bonne Bell, Wet n Wild, Jane, CoverGirl—offered a smooth, normalized ride from Dr Pepper-flavored lip balm, in third grade, to frosted blue eye shadow at the eighth-grade dance.
flick of my finger - nice term for “scrolling”
adults have largely moved on from all that; no one is fooling anyone by quoting Audre Lorde in blog posts about lip balm anymore.
Botox and fillers are intended to make a person look younger. But, if they’re deployed by people in their twenties, or younger—in 2023, almost forty-four thousand people aged nineteen or under got Botox or filler from plastic surgeons—injectables often make people look older. In trying to halt the aging process, or maybe just mimic the look that is now associated with being rich and on camera, heavily injected twentysomethings bring on the future they were attempting to prevent. It is a dire ouroboros
Not quite twenty years ago, Nora Ephron, at the age of sixty-five, published a book of essays titled “I Feel Bad About My Neck: And Other Thoughts on Being a Woman.” In one essay, she wonders why people write books claiming that it’s better to be older than to be younger, when, she insists, this is clearly not the case. At her age, she writes, your memory sucks, you can’t ride a bike very far, you’re irrelevant at work, and, if you’re having sex at all, it is not the sex of your dreams. “Plus, you can’t wear a bikini,” she adds. “Oh, how I regret not having worn a bikini for the entire year I was twenty-six. If anyone young is reading this, go, right this minute, put on a bikini, and don’t take it off until you’re thirty-four.”
📰 Today Will Ever Be by
Today is the youngest we will ever be.
“children want to look like tweens, tweens want to look like teenagers, teenagers want to look like grown women, and grown women want to look like ten-year-old girls,” writes Jia Tolentino—completing a cycle in which vanity collides with mortality and our most primal pathologies are laid bare.
📰 Chesterton's Fence, Secrets From MrBeast's Leaked Playbook, Underrated Marketing Strategy by Cam Houser
🤖 Clever way to use ai to get real, authentic info: search outside of English language, i.e. "Find me a good tempura recipe. Please do all the searches in Japanese and translate it to english once you find something very authentic." source.
My take is that he's not doing this entirely because he's lazy. MrBeast leaves these errors in the doc to signal what he actually cares about: action over aesthetics.
📰 It's About Effort. by Matt D’Avella
if you have zero subscribers, create like you have a million. And if you have a million subscribers, create like you have zero.
📰 The Dream Achieved, Ultimate Life Hack, & More by Sahil Bloom
A few weeks ago, a dear friend told me about a brilliant mental model from the Hoffman Institute for creating transformation: It's called *Be, Do, Have*.
The traditional line of thinking is *Have, Do, Be*:
I need to *have* X.
Then I can *do* Y.
Then I will *be* Z.
A classic example: I need to *have* more money and fancy things, then I can *do* the things I want, then I'll *be* fulfilled. The reality: The conditional approach—if I have X, then I'll be Y—never works.
Be, Do, Have flips this traditional thinking on its head:
I will be Z.
Then I can do Y.
Then I will have X.
In the context of our example: I will embody the *state of being* of a fulfilled person, then I can *do* the actions of a fulfilled person, then I will *have* the things I desire.
📰 The Simple Formula for Success on YouTube by
When stuff works, do more. When stuff isn’t working, experiment.
📰 Small P Podcasting by
I believe in small p podcasting.
I think podcasting, like blogging, will become increasingly mainstream. It will be completely normal to have a podcast intended for a small audience or just for you and your friends. Having a podcast isn't implicitly claiming superiority or aspiring to fame. Instead, it's simply a new modern medium that we as a society have yet to fully utilize.
My young mother, was either incapable of standing up to him, or, still traumatized by the recent death of her husband, was so invested in her own search for happiness and stability that she could not see the deleterious effect he had on us.
My mother quickly sold the 1965 red convertible Volkswagen Beetle in which we rode with the top down to the Duck Pond in Roslyn Harbor, or Jones Beach or even as far away as Montauk to fly kites and picnic on the dunes. She didn’t know how to drive a stick shift, so, For Six-Hundred-Fifty dollars it became a memory.
The American flag, neatly folded into a tight triangle that draped his coffin before he was lowered into the ground at the Holy Rood Cemetery in Old Westbury, Long Island, stayed on a table for a while and then disappeared like everything else.
I needed that reminder, as the rest of my childhood, adolescence and teenage years was dominated by a man I never loved and who was incapable of loving me.
📰 Call Me Charlie issue 256 by
I don’t know how or when but I’m certain these Memoir Snob deep dives will lead me to my publisher. So I still have to write a fantastic book, I still have to publish weekly so that I can connect with my true fans, and equally, I have to record more deep dives and share them with the authors, editors, and publishers.
📰 5 Things on My Mind by
I found out this handy fact about Google Docs: it will spit out a fairly decent .epub that you can export to your e-reader! File menu > Download > EPUB Publication (.epub) ... I think this will really change how I edit myself in the future: spit out an .epub, load it up on the Kindle, and read it like somebody else wrote it.
The family was sitting around in the living room the other night and I made a series of blind contours — drawing without looking at the paper — of everything and everyone in the room. I realized that if I scanned all the drawings into the computer, I could push them around in Photoshop and they’d resemble something like a scene. I like this idea of taking all the pressure off and drawing little pieces in analog, and then stitching them together digitally into a new drawing. (It’s that analog/digital dance I mentioned in my last Friday letter.) Which reminds me: Kate Bingaman-Burt said she uses an online vector program called vectorizor.io on her drawings. I need to look into this.
📰 This Is How You Reset Your Second Brain by Forte Labs
I've just finished reading The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper by Roland Allen, a book that moved and inspired me deeply. ... You should pick it up if you have any interest in notetaking, knowledge management, creativity, productivity, thinking, the human mind, or history, because the notebook has been and continues to be integral to all of those to a degree I didn't truly appreciate until I read it myself.
📰 The Case for Reading Fiction by
“That’s what trauma does—it bookends the chapters of your life. It perforates your story with pauses. It demarcates the Before and the After. Part One and Part Two.” This is from my wife Allison Sweet Grant’s debut novel, I Am the Cage, which is out today. It’s inspired by her experience with childhood medical trauma, but it’s not a memoir—it’s a work of fiction.
What’s unique about reading novels is that they invite us to imagine ourselves as the characters. When Katniss Everdeen, Harry Potter, or the March sisters are on a screen, you’re observing them. When you read their stories, you become them. Slowly but surely, that builds your capacity to see perspectives that aren’t yours and feel compassion for people who aren’t like you.
📰 How Language Models Work by Every’s Dan Shipper
Language models are only as good as the way we use them. Learning to use them well is a skill, and an art. That should be exciting to anyone who wants to use them for creative work.
📰 Covers and Much More by
Garinafins morph into airships in a tessellation. Isn’t that the best way to summarize silkpunk?
February 18
📰 What Is Social Media Good For? by
Mind you, I don't think there's anything wrong with making your life look beautiful, as long as viewers understand the art of photography is composition.
The completion of a social network is to return from the universal back to the personal. From the vague infinite to the voluptuous finite. That's the final stage of the Network State. Find your tribe of people online but then co-locate in a physical community. Or, more easily, go and meet them in real life! Because, in the end, real life is what counts.
📰 Re-Noted: Eminem's Boxes of Notes by
Eminem describes several methods for identifying crucial lyrics. > I used to circle lyrics that I thought I might use. Or write them in a different-colored ink. “Y’all act like you never seen a white person before.” I went back and dug that line out for “the Real Slim Shady.” Love might be a battlefield, but rap is a puzzle.*
He also returns to lyrics multiple times on a single page to try out different combinations as he does here with rhymes that show up in “Lose Yourself.”
Eminem refers to collecting rhymes as “stacking ammo”—these are the basic elements of his craft. My version of “stacking ammo” looks different: I collect quotes from my reading. Every craft has basic components. It’s worth spending some time thinking about your own “ammo” and how you’re collecting it.
📰 Coming to a TV Near You: Creator Apps by
Authentic, lo-fi content continues to win on YouTube (see also: Sam Sulek)
📰 Adults Throw Tantrums Too by
Immature adults will throw tantrums, communicate events through a idealized lens and present unrealistic demands as “normal” or “standard” to themselves. Basically, incessant selfish demands projected on to you to accept as gospel. Instead of interpreting all of this literally, think about them symbolically and relationally.
If someone is overreacting, hyper dramatizing or being irrational, try to see their inner child doing their best to communicate how they feel and what they care about.
Get ready for pushback, though. Someone throwing a tantrum actually gets more out of you reacting than you not reacting. Setting a boundary makes the other person check themselves and not control the chaos that ensues when they throw the tantrum. Stay grounded, stay strong, stay consistent. It will be painful doing this but it will be more painful being reactive and letting all hell break loose. Know your limits.
How to respond to a tantrum
Maintain a calm, patient tone when speaking as well as in your overall presence.
Stay in dialogue until the tantrum begins.
Set a boundary in response to the tantrum. This is the most complex part. It requires you to think through your goals, limits and desires *before* entering a conversation. This will inform when, how and how firmly you set the boundarie(s). Questions to ask: “at what point do I need to end the conversation? How do I let that person know this is too far/too much? What language, tone and emotion do I want to use?
If the person does not respect or recognize the boundary after multiple attempts, state that the conversation needs to end and can (hopefully) pick back up when you are both ready to dialogue in an appropriate and mature manner.
📰 I'm Really Empathetic and Totally Burned Out by
Empathy to me feels like taking a trip to someone else’s emotions. And just as in real life, I typically need a vacation from my trip when I return.
Maybe empathy is standing close to the fire, feeling their emotional heat with them so they’re not alone. Maybe compassion is watching the fire from a useful distance, so you can keep your wits about you to start a water brigade. Maybe we need both, all the time. Maybe with practice, we know when to call on what.
the first step to sharing openly isn’t posting online. It starts with oversharing with yourself.
Not everyone needs to start a Substack. Writing isn’t for everyone, but self-expression is.
🎧 Scott Galloway: The BIGGEST Money Mistake That’s Keeping You Broke! - On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Put yourself in rooms of opportunity, even virtually, to become the person others praise behind your back.
The best way to get ahead is to put yourself in a room of opportunities, even when you're not in that room physically. You want to be the guy or gal that people talk shit about positively behind your back
Scott Galloway coaches young men by helping them reclaim 8-10 hours a week typically spent on their phones (Robinhood, Twitter, etc.). He suggests reinvesting that time in activities like physical fitness.
I coach a lot of young And typically what I do on the first meeting is I tell them to unlock their phone. And I say, I'm not going to judge you. You know, I'm on TikTok. I watch porn. I'm not, you know, I'm not easily offended here. And we're going to find eight to 10 hours a week out of your phone. And it's ridiculously easy with young men to find eight or 10 hours in their phone between Robin Hood, Twitter, what have you. And we reinvest it. And the first thing is we got to figure out, okay, for me, it's physical fitness right away. We're going to spend two to four hours a week getting strong, especially I coach mostly young men.
Use AI to find the most tax-advantaged forced savings mechanisms you can participate in early.
Go on AI and say, what forced savings mechanisms are most tax advantaged that I can participate in at an early age?
I don't care how talented you are. Beyonce works her ass off.
Your 20s are for exploring different career paths. Don't be afraid to try new things and ask for help. Focus on the basics: be punctual, polite, and kind. Seek certifications to improve your skills. Once you find something you're good at and can excel in, dedicate yourself fully.
Your 20s are for workshopping. Forgive yourself, but keep trying. Reach out to people for help. Show up. Get the easy shit right. Show up early. Be courteous. Be kind. Think about how do I get more certification? And then the moment you lock in on something that you're good at and could become great at, go all in on it.
Scott Galloway dedicates four hours weekly discussing financial well-being, tax strategies, and investment opportunities with others.
I spent four hours a week probably talking to other people about my economic well-being, what tax loopholes there are, where I should be investing. I have a lot of real estate when interest rates come down. At what point do interest rates get low enough where I should be pulling a second out and putting it in the market, knowing if I have a 10-year mortgage over 10 years, the market's usually Up about 7% to 9% a year? Does that make sense, right? Think about it all the time. You're the average of your five friends.
Be open and honest with your partner about your finances. Discuss spending habits and be transparent with each other about your financial situation.
This is what's going on with us financially and go through kind of spending and just being very transparent with each other
Young people need feedback to discover their talents. Try various roles and surround yourself with people who'll give honest feedback. You won't discover your skills unless you try. Keep experimenting and refining your abilities based on the input you receive.
What young people need is feedback. If you are in a position as a boss to say, you know what? You're great with new employees. You make them feel welcome. Well, should I consider a career in recruiting or HR? You're great with clients. Jesus Christ, can you sell? You like to drink. You're ridiculously obnoxious in a funny way. People want to go out with you when they're in town. Boss, you should be in sales. You should be selling, and you got a decent IQ. You should be selling database software for Oracle or CRM software for Salesforce because you're going to make a half a million bucks by the time you're 30, taking people out and establishing Relationships. Get feedback, workshop stuff, but you'll start to absorb stuff. But you're never going to find out you're good at cricket unless you pick up a mouth. You're just not going to find out. So try as many things as possible. Surround yourself with people and give you an honest feedback and keep workshopping stuff. Don't be afraid.
If you want to score above your weight class economically or romantically, get out a big spoon and get ready to eat shit.
Jay Shetty's team created personalized letters and videos for 100 desired podcast guests, but they all declined in the first year.
We sent personalized letters and videos to a hundred people that we've really wanted on the show. And every single one of them said no in year one.
After a big win, whether professional or personal, it's easy to get overconfident. Try to stay humble and grateful, and remember that luck likely played a part in your success.
You're never more prone to a big mistake professionally or personally than after a big win because you start believing it's you. And the time when you have a great investment, you have great relationships, what you want to do is try and pull in your horns a little bit and be a little bit humble and as grateful as you Can be recognizing luck has been on your side.
If you have a side hustle, it should be a temporary way to explore something that could become your main focus. True wealth and security come from finding a professional activity you're good at, becoming great at it, and fully committing to it. Success isn't just about the last 10%; it's about giving 100% effort, which leads to faster promotions, better opportunities, and ultimately, greater financial success.
If you're in a side hustle, that means a side hustle is a temporary means of investigating something else should become your main hustle. The way you get wealthy in economic security is you find a professional activity that you're good at, that you become great at, and you go all in on it. Because the difference, success isn't the last 10%. So the guy or gal that applies 90% versus the guy or gal that applies 100%, the latter is going to get promoted faster, get options awards, just make more money, have recruiters calling Them. Success is that extra oomph.
Scott Galloway shares that he's made the most money when he's stressed, working constantly, neglecting his fitness, and struggling in relationships. He acknowledges this isn't something he's proud of, but notes the marketplace is competitive and demands a lot.
I'm not proud of this, but especially in my early years where stressed out, working all the time, hard on my fitness, hard on my relationships. That's when I'm usually making money. The marketplace is competitive. It demands a tremendous amount of you.
Living in expensive cities like LA, New York, or London requires a significant level of success. There's no inherent right to live in these places.
LA, living in New York, you're just going to have to be relatively successful to stay here. You don't have a birthright to live in Los Angeles or New York or London.
Money is simply a tool, like ink in a pen, that enables you to write new chapters in your life. It allows certain experiences to be more vibrant, but it's not the story itself.
The money's just ink in your pen. And it can help you write new chapters. It can make certain chapters burn brighter, but it's not your story.
February 17
📰 confidence is feeling at home in yourself by
Confidence isn’t being the best in the room. It’s sitting in a room full of talented people and feeling okay about your own abilities. It’s joining a gym where everyone seems fitter than you and still showing up in your worn-out leggings.
Confidence isn’t feeling at home in whichever room you enter. Confidence is feeling at home in yourself - your body, mind, and spirit.
📰 4 Fears Holding Everyone Back by
Corey says there are only four types of fear:
Fear of Failure – You’re scared to mess up, so you don’t start.
Fear of Ridicule – You’re scared of what people will think, so you stay quiet.
Fear of Uncertainty – You’re scared of what will happen, so you stay in your comfort zone.
Fear of Success – You’re scared of big changes, so you hold yourself back.
He calls these The Four Horsemen of Fear. Each one holds you back from doing one big really important thing. Trying.
Many good things in life come down stream of an attempt.
📰 How the Founder of RadReads Finds ‘Extreme Simplicity’ via Every
One of our family’s values is “simplicity over complexity.” It shows up in so many decisions and actions. For example, we prefer renting over owning a home, and we automatically only buy into one index fund, to limit decision-making fatigue.
I use Claude and Claude Projects to understand and replicate my voice for much of my social media presence. I also use it to manage and deconstruct my coaching sessions. I use OpenAI’s GPTs predominantly with o1 as a strategic partner when I'm trying to organize big projects—either for my business or creative purposes.
📰 One Lesson and One Puzzle From Running My First Writing Workshop by
How should they tie their diffuse ideas together? How do they know which ideas to develop further? How do they pin down their main point?
The Strategic Questions for writing nonfiction
Why are you 🫵 of all people writing this piece now?
What do you believe about this topic? [which I suggest writing as a series of “I believe…” statements]
How do you want the reader to respond?
February 14
🎧 The Trouble With Tariffs + Why Palantir Could Dominate AI — Ft. Aswath Damodaran - Prof G
Some of the lowest-cost ETFs we found here. One is VOO. That's Vanguard's S&P 500 ETF tracker. The expense ratio is 0.03%. SPLG is another one at 0.02%. Those both track the S&P 500. If you want a total stock market ETF that is also very, very low cost, 0.03%, try VTI or ITOT. These are all extremely low cost ETF options. But the point here is you need to look at the expense ratio. You need to be checking the expense ratio before you buy. And you also need to be checking the expense ratio as you own. You just want to make sure that those expense ratios aren't going up, in which case you need to start looking at another ETF. But definitely go with the lowest cost ETF possible, and those examples are some good ones that you can go with.
📰 How Do I Cut Through the Clutter? by
There has always been clutter and competition. That was true even when you had to knock on the art director’s door and leave off your portfolio. But remember (Theodore) Sturgeon’s Law, that “90% of everything published is crud.”
Good stuff will rise through the clutter and get noticed. This follows closely on the last point. If you do striking, original work that speaks to human universals, discerning people will find you and celebrate you. So will the algorithms of YouTube, Instagram, an other social media.
If you create digital art, you’ve got to face AI. Inevitably if you create work on a computer and share it on a computer, your output will be buried by AI slop. To stand out, you’ve either got to join the AI arms race or head off in the opposite direction. You might want to explore options in the world of handmade and analog.
📰 Does OpenAI’s Deep Research Put Me Out of a Job? by Evan Armstrong
On one hand, this is a story of technology's might. The cotton industry was initially small—about 1 percent of British GDP in the 1780s—and rose to 7–8 percent in 1813. Imports of cotton matched that increase, jumping from 26 million pounds to 300 million pounds in 1831-1835. Despite this growth, real wages for cotton weavers peaked in the early 1800s and plummeted to a quarter of that level by 1830.
It is tempting to say automation is either good or bad for labor. The reality is something more nuanced. Technology may decrease costs and increase economic output. But whether the labor captures any of that benefit—or even if they escape the economic destruction of their profession—is dependent on a range of political and socio-economic factors that go beyond the technology itself.
Here’s one more thing that makes me nervous about deep research (and AI generally): The vast majority of examples of technologies that have automated labor, from the automobile to silicon transistors, have required on-site hardware. A machine had to be transported to a factory in order to be utilized. With AI, each user adds relatively small marginal costs for providers and zero distribution costs. ChatGPT is just another tab on your internet browser. When deep research was announced in early February, 125,000 ChatGPT Pro subscribers instantly had access to it. We simply don’t have any economic models or historical precedents for this.
It does not mean that the tasks of a writer goes away! But it does mean that the bundle of tasks that writers traditionally handle are receiving downward pricing pressure from these technologies. The things that used to make me unique in the marketplace are now a purchasable good.
Our company structure is designed to support this bundling of capabilities. Still, as these models improve month by month, my contract as “lead writer” will look more and more overpriced if my responsibilities remain static.
📰 Benefits of a Traditional Publisher by
A good publisher should offer the following:
A willingness to work with my design ideas (I compose my books in design programs, such as Indesign or Affinity).
A good royalty structure and no deep discounts.
A sales team who "gets" the book and understands my community.
A willingness to keep a book in print and in stock as long as it keeps selling.
Writer and programmer
on the value of effort: "If you make lists of lofty goals, it can be easy to leave them to accumulate, as happens sometimes, into a mountain of to-do's and notes and half-forgotten plans. Dreaming alone is seductive, even a little sweet, since it lacks the pain of trying. So it feels proper to prize attempts more than dreams. You should have ideals, but you cannot only love an idealized future, you must cultivate a love of effort, too. If you really want something, then the soul must make demands of the body." Source: Efforts and Goals and Joy
February 13
📰 Castles in the Sky's Seven Most Underrated Essays by
I found pieces that “flopped” back then or feel tonally different from what I write now—but that I still love rereading. Now that my audience is bigger, I wanted to share these essays again and see what resonates.
📰 February 2025 Letter by
Even if I don’t have a niche, I need to have an overall ethic. This point was inspired by Celine’s essay. I’ve been experimenting with what ethic feels most aligned with myself. So far, the best I’ve come up with is building a life that excites you.
📰 Practice Analytically, Perform Intuitively by David Perell
Charles Dickens’ famous line from Great Expectations: “Take nothing on its looks; take everything on evidence. There’s no better rule.”
You don’t reach a state of mastery when you know everything. You reach it when you’ve absorbed the knowledge so deeply that it becomes a part of you.
By practicing like a scientist, he can play like an artist.
Anthropic’s data says AI is primarily used for coding → “The tasks and occupations with by far the largest adoption of AI in our dataset were those in the ‘computer and mathematical’ category…The second largest category was “arts, design, sports, entertainment, and media” (10.3% of queries), which mainly reflected people using Claude for various kinds of writing and editing.
📰 The Antidote to Imposter Syndrome by Sahil Bloom
I learned a trick to fix it from my friend Alex Hormozi: Have a coaching session with yourself. I use email—an email chain with myself—but any tool works. Here's what my conversation looked like:
A few key lines that really helped:
"Let's deconstruct this a bit. What specifically is causing the fear?"
This forced me to actually articulate the fear, break it down into real component parts, to understand its roots.
"Most importantly, it means you CARE. It means you're doing something meaningful to you."
This reminded me that the fear is grounded in something positive.
"Look back on your life and remember that every single transformation you've gone through has come on the other side of a brief, intense confrontation with this exact feeling."
This reminded me that my track record for getting through this is good, and that transformation follows.
If you're going to do one of these self-coaching sessions, a few prompts that might help:
Deconstruct: Ask yourself to deconstruct the fear or feeling.
Zoom Out: Ask yourself to zoom out and see the bigger picture.
Question Assumptions: Ask yourself whether the stories and assumptions are true, or if they're just embedded.
A coaching session with yourself may seem like a crazy idea at first—but trust me, it works.
📰 A Visit to Madam Bedi: A Personal History by Tara Westover
If Sukrit’s presence at Cambridge had a whiff of inevitability, my own presence there was nearly absurd. I was out of context, a hayseed blowing among the Gothic spires and ornate marble statuary.
My father said that those who follow the Lord will be shunned. He said that it was our privilege to be shunned by the world. He was an ideologue, a sectarian, wholly devoted to his singular religion. The government was corrupt. Public education was brainwashing, a satanic instrument of a fallen world. Modern medicine—doctors and hospitals and pharmaceuticals, what he termed the “medical establishment”—was profane and godless. People of faith relied on herbalism, Dad said, so my mother brewed tinctures of black cohosh and blue vervain, oat straw and blessed thistle, what Dad called “God’s pharmacy.” He was opposed to antibiotics. Once, when I was seven or so, my father told me that if I swallowed a single tablet of aspirin, my children’s children would be deformed in the womb. “God visits the sins of the fathers on the children,” he said.
There were lines etched into her face; she was not young, but her features were stately.
She was one of those people who inspire that wish in others, who give the sense of having lived with great intensity, and of being able to contain the things that have happened to them.
📰 Jia Tolentino on Joan Didion’s “everywoman.com”
But the pairing—more accurately, a doubling—is unrepeatable: one mononymous perfectionist analyzing another, one carapace reflecting another’s gleam. Didion’s Stewart exegesis, in which most glosses of the subject could also apply to the author, is an ur-text on contemporary feminine ambition disguised only partially by style—on the will and the discipline, the persistence of misinterpretation, the unmentioned polestar of whiteness, the victory and the price.
By 2015, Didion had become consumer shorthand, her face appearing in a Celine ad and on the back of a twelve-hundred-dollar leather jacket.
Success like Stewart’s—like Didion’s—always provokes outrage: the question of who this woman actually is versus who she’s pretending to be.
In Didion’s eyes, Stewart had “branded herself not as Superwoman but as Everywoman.” Stewart’s innovation was the idea that an Everywoman could in fact become Superwoman—and that, once she did, she should still pretend to be Everywoman, more or less. Around the time of the Didion Celine ad, we developed a name for this type of figure: the girlboss. And, soon enough, the Internet was overrun with Everywomen attempting to become Superwomen, then pretending, if they reached that echelon, to have been Everywomen all along.
🎧 How Nat Eliason Made $200,000 in a Week Teaching AI - Ep. 48
Every good software can kind of be replaced by Excel at a certain, it has to reach a certain level of pain to graduate from Excel
Start a new Composer window when working on a new feature, a new part of the app, or when Composer gets stuck fixing a bug.
Transcript:
Dan Shipper
When do you start a new composer window?
Nat Eliason
So I start a new window whenever I don't want the previous context in the conversation.
Dan Shipper
Right. But how do you know that you don't want the previous context? Like, why did you do it just then?
Nat Eliason
The way I think about it is if I'm working on a new feature or some new part of the app, I'll start a new window. Or if it's getting stuck fixing a bug and it can't seem to figure it out, I'll start a new window.
Really what you have to learn is troubleshooting. You don't have to learn syntax anymore. You you get to a point where it really starts struggling, then you have to start thinking about code organization and being dry and all those things. But it takes a while to get to that point. And by the time you get there, you already have a decently functioning app. So you're a lot more motivated to figure out how to push through those challenging issues.
The thing that has me really excited about being able to build these tools with AI is that I love the idea of the kind of like hyper prolific solo creator business, because I've done building A business, I've done hiring employees. It's not something that I'm really aspiring to get back into. What I really want to be able to do is to predominantly write and do and talk about things that I'm interested in, but have a pretty robust business around that with as few people to manage As possible. And the ability to do that has just increased dramatically now, right? Like having this podcast tool for me and Nathan's podcasts, like I don't need to hire someone to do a good chunk of this, like editing and management anymore. Cause it's so fast for me to just use my tool to do it. And I think I'm going to be able to use it for creating shorts and things like that in the relatively near future as well. And so that, that whole level of additional management that I need is just kind of like gone while still being able to tap into these marketing channels.
I wrote this article like two years ago called, um, AI in the age of the individual. Um, and, and that's like, that was the promise that was like originally like so excited to me is at every, for example, like we've got 10 people now, um, 10 full-time people and like a bunch Of contractors. Right. But I have to pay a lot of people to do that. Um, and so I have to be at a certain level of like income and and money raised or whatever in order to do that. And you see that with a lot of writers who are way, way, way more successful than me. Like Ryan Holiday, he has a whole team and that's how he does all the stuff that he does. To some degree, any solo writer can get the leverage of having a big team with this stuff. And I think that that is so fucking amazing. It's so valuable. And the editing thing is I feel that pain so much right now because it's a bottleneck for us. We have so many different services. We publish an essay every single day. Then we have three different products that we run all internally that send emails and have product copy and whatever. We want everything to have this same every feel to it. And then we've got new writers. And so I feel like I'm repeating myself all the time. And I'm not even the main editor. And so I just want a tool to make this better
I found that o1 is the best at giving editing feedback. And the reason is because it's good at finding all instances of something in a piece of text, whereas Claude will only find two.
It's worth building a personalized tool for the thing that's most important for you. So for me, it's like, okay, I'm very focused on the husk and the subsequent books. And the better this tool gets, the better, like all of those books are going to be potentially, you know, definitely three, maybe six or more books, right? It's just like, it, it's going to be useful for years and years, the better it gets. And I do think that you're just not going to be able to compete nearly as well as a novelist in the next few years if you aren't learning how to use these tools to either make your work better, Produce your work faster, extend your work into other mediums. There's going to be a lot of ways it could be useful, but it's worth investing and figuring it out now so that you aren't playing catch up in a year or two, but it wouldn't be worth me making Like a super robust tool for YouTube thumbnails or something. Right. Cause like the, the stuff I can make on Canva is good enough.
You named your app Prolific, right? The best way to be a great writer is to be prolific. And there's no tool that has been better for making writers prolific than AI ever, in my view.
James Patterson doesn't really write most of his books he has assistants and he has ghost writers who are trained on his style who know how to write like him and he's as i understand it Doing as much approving of things as he is putting actual pen on paper i think it's sort of how we're all going to be doing it.
You'll totally be able to just raw dog it if you want to, the way you can go like shoot film photography, right? But for most people, you're going to be using an assistant kind of like this. And in, to some degree, your competitive advantage will be, will still be the strength of your voice and your ideas and your creativity. But you'll have an assistant helping you get them onto the paper much faster and probably closer to like the best of your ability. Because every everyone has had this experience when you're in the flow. And what you're making is just like awesome. And it's top 1% of what you're able to do, you're going to be able to do that top 1% of you all the time. And I think that's what the assistants are really going to help bring out.
🎧 The Future of AI and How It Will Shape Our World — With Mo Gawdat - Prof G
If you look back just 150 years at the, you know, king or queen of England, they had a much worse life than what anyone today has. You know, anyone in any reasonable city in the U.S. Today has air conditioning, has transportation, has clean water, has hot water, has sanitation. To the point where more doesn't actually make any difference anymore.
I made it but then if you drive a real sports car and you know how annoying and fucking broken they are and you know how they you just eventually go like i don't need any more of this the problem Is it the game of billionaire or multi multi multi millionaire is wonderful okay it's a it's a nice game but it has no significant impact on gains that you can achieve as a human. You'll still sleep in one bed and you can make it as fancy as you can, but it's still one bed. You can still drive only one car. There could be 600 other cars, 600,000 other cars in the garage, but you're still driving only one. And by the way, when you're a billionaire, you're not really driving it comfortably anyway, because you're targeted all the time.
We remember the times when if you had an MBA, you were like a highly educated post-grad, and, you know, now everyone has an MBA. And then if you had a PhD, you know, you became the special one, and now everyone has a PhD, you know, many have many. And the idea here is there is an inflation to the value of something that you acquire, right?
Most of us know that a good 80 to 90 percent of all of the efficiency that you bring to any job that you do is done within 20 percent of the time but yet you know part of your ego is i'm going to Fill the other 20 you know the you know the other 80% of the time was 20% work. That's taking a lot of toll on me because it basically means I'm driven. It basically means, you know, that I am maximizing my, my, my performance, maximizing my deliveries between waking up in the morning at 5 AM to run an Ironman, and then, you know, going In the evening to attend, I don't know what, and flying all over the world and so on and so The truth of the matter is this is a self-perception, a form of ego that says, I am doing amazing. Okay. But it isn't. And I think the biggest challenge we have is that we believe that the world stresses us. The world does not stress us.
Burnout to me is a question of a weekly review. Literally every Saturday, you sit with yourself, you write on a piece of paper everything that stressed you last week, and you scratch out the ones that you commit that you will not allow In your time, in your life anymore. You can either remove them from your life or make them more enjoyable. So if you have to be stuck in a commute or a long flight, take some good music with you, be healthy, and so on and so forth.
Panic is a question of time, right? And panic really is the stress, you know, the threat is imminent. It's approaching me too quickly. And so accordingly, when you feel panicked, don't work on solving the problem. Don't work on addressing the threat. Work on giving yourself more time. You know, find someone to help you or delay the, you know, the presentation time or, you know, or cancel a few meetings so that you have more time for whatever it is that you need to focus On.
February 12
📰 40 Thoughts on Turning 40 by
Blowing up my life and walking away from a successful career to embark on something much more uncertain was the most important decision in my 30s. It led to so many great things. At the time, it felt scary and foolish. Now I wish I had done it earlier.
rewriting of scripts and rewiring of your nervous system takes much longer than you would ever expect.
I’ve never looked back and regretted being more adventurous with my life. Assuming this is true still now it means I can probably be more adventurous than I feel comfortable with right now too.
There are many rules worth paying attention to but many more are negotiable. We live in weird times and thriving in life likely requires weird approaches. If you aren’t shaking things up in random ways, you are missing out.
More people should try self-employment or freelancing for at least a year of their adult life. Having to make money “on your own,” and understanding how to be productive and motivated without a boss and other subtle coercive forces is immensely valuable. They also give you “eff you” courage, being able to walk away or dismiss any absurdity at work if you return to such an environment in the future.
Defining success on your own terms will create tension with those around you who don’t value the same things. It is easier to succeed like those around you but more satisfying to make progress against your own secret mission over the long-term.
Money is one of the most powerful forces in the world. Never underestimate its role in shaping all of your decisions as well as everyone around you.
Money fears are the home of the deepest anxieties of life: dying, belonging, being loved, and being accepted. The happiest people I know have decided to tango with these fears directly. The upside to being able to exist with your fear, uncertainty, and discomfort and not needing to make it go away is the ultimate path to freedom
the best advice is to find someone who you are excited to world-build with.
There is a state of alignment you can reach in which magical things will start happening to you.
Leisure and deep rest, the kind that recharges our soul is a practice, one that is incredibly hard to commit to in a world that celebrates, hustle, action, and achievements.
Writing is one of the most powerful acts in the world. It’s never too late to start. But beware of its power in exposing you to what you truly desire.
This notion that I'm entitled to [welfare], no, you're not. It's a tax. People who need it are entitled to it.
🎧 Ramit Sethi Shares 3 Rules for Personal Finance - Three Rules by Matt D’Avella
We are so obsessed with $3 questions when we really should be focusing on $30,000
How to bring up money with partner for the first time
I realized that when we talk about money, the energy isn't going where I want it to go. I want us to feel really good about money. And I realized that in the past, I've been a little overbearing with money. I haven't been as open on my end. And I don't think I've been fair about it. So I'd like to change that. Would you be open to that? That's the first step. And that really is about sharing what you want and vulnerable. Being vulnerable with something you may have done. Because all of us have something that we're not perfect at. Next, how I feel about money. Right now, when we talk about money, I feel scared. I feel lonely. I don't feel in control. How about you? Notice here that I am tossing the ball to my partner. Third, how I want to feel about money. I want to feel competent. I want to feel confident. I want to feel connected. How about you? And fourth and finally, when should we talk about money next? That's it. That's a positive conversation for many couples.
One key question everyone should be able to answer is how do you know if you can afford that? Whether it's a $2,000 mattress, a $45,000 car, or a $500,000 house, how do you know? That answer better have a number in it. For example, if you're buying a house, you better know what percentage of it is your gross income. Is it 28% of gross? And I'm talking total expenses.
You've got to look at your money as teammates. That means both of you have got to be involved at least every single month. You've got to each own at least one number in your relationship and you've got to both be participating, talking about money and actively managing it.
It would have been much easier for me to just manage our money and our relationship. I'm good at it. But to go through that process with my wife, to watch her become incredibly competent and confident with personal finance, and now for us to have fun talking about where do you want to Travel? Oh my God, this is a benefit that we both get for the rest of our lives.
📰 Resolve to Live a Deep Life by Scott H Young
Focus is a skill that must be practiced, and therefore, most people are not very good at it. ... At any given point, you should be able to describe your current cognitive calisthenics routine just as you might describe your current exercise routine.
Deep work wields your attention like a well-honed tool. To be serious about this craft you need to be serious about how you treat your attention, much like professional athletes are serious about their physical health.
📰 21 Limiting Beliefs Holding You Back From YouTube Success by
you only need a few thousand views per video (sometimes less) to make $100,000s of profit per year.
if your product is good, then people will get more value from results than it costs them in payment. The best customers will even shout from the rooftops about it.
you can find great editors for $50 - $200 per video
You can get to at least $100,000 in profit with long form YouTube videos alone.
2-4 videos per month is enough to change your life.
It’s too late to start a YouTube channel - adding this last one here in case anyone reading hasn’t started and is feeling this. It’s not too late. There’s still so much opportunity. Just start, no one really cares (I say that with love).
February 11
📰 A New Way to Read by Naveen Naidu Mummana
Reading hasn't changed much since Gutenberg. Sure, we've moved from paper to pixels, but we still primarily consume text linearly, making highlights and notes just as readers did centuries ago. Digital reading platforms have mostly focused on distribution—making books more accessible through devices and online libraries. But the core activity of understanding what we read remains largely unchanged.
This search led me to Mortimer Adler, a philosopher and educator best known for his work on the Great Books movement, a project aimed at defining the essential works of Western civilization. In 1940, Adler published How to Read a Book, a guide to deeper reading that has remained influential for decades.
four levels of reading
Elementary—Basic comprehension. You’re just trying to understand what the words mean and follow along.
Inspectional—A strategic skim. You get the gist by scanning the table of contents, reading a few key sections, and figuring out whether the book is worth a deeper dive.
Analytical—Slow, deliberate reading. You break down the author’s argument, question their assumptions, and engage critically with the ideas.
Syntopical—Reading across books. You pull in perspectives from multiple sources, compare arguments, and piece together a bigger picture.
AI didn't just translate the words—it bridged the 2,000-year gap between Aurelius’ world and ours.
📰 The Nuns Trying to Save the Women on Texas’s Death Row by Lawrence Wright of The New Yorker
Born in the West Indies, Linda is a British national entitled to support from the British consulate; no attorney ever told her this, though. After her conviction, the British government, which opposes capital punishment, asked a Houston firm to pursue appeals. All failed.
His assignment was to help her live until she had to die.
The wire grate on Melissa’s barred door was so fine that only fingertips could touch through it.
The nuns knew nothing about the women’s crimes. They also knew little about one another. The sisters seldom speak, and the lives they’ve left behind are rarely discussed. It’s a kind of forced naïveté, in which gossip and news are replaced by prayer.
In the past half century, the number of Catholic nuns in America has dropped by eighty per cent, to about thirty-six thousand, and the average age is eighty. The Sisters of Mary Morning Star are much younger—the average age is thirty-eight. They split off from the Sisters of St. John, in France, in part because they felt that it was overly controlled by priests. Pope Francis allowed the breakaway nuns to start a new order, headquartered in San Sebastián, Spain. That was in 2014, the year that Deacon Ronnie first visited death row. Since then, the order has grown to three hundred nuns in thirty convents around the world.
He’d noticed on other wards that female prisoners needed community in a way that men typically didn’t, and they often formed family-like units.
If they were a family, they were a broken one.
Prison officers were prepared for the visit, but some were disquieted by the nuns, who represented an alternative authority.
Both groups were surprised that they had so much in common. The condemned women were astonished that the nuns had *chosen* to live a life nearly as confined as their own, in rooms that they, too, called “cells.”
asked the sisters if they’d ever experienced violence in their lives. They said no. It occurred to me: if a nun and a condemned woman could exchange their past lives, might the nun be on death row and the condemned woman in the convent?
“I remember scrubbing the blood-soaked carpet as he sobbed beside me and wishing he would go into the other room,” Brittany wrote to me. “I know all too well the grief that comes from such sudden and horrible loss. I watched it destroy my dad’s family completely. I watched the anger eat them alive.”
after a death sentence is given élite lawyers sometimes take over, working pro bono. The difference in expertise is often shocking, which is one reason so many appeals cite incompetent representation. “With a death-penalty case, you’re going to get the best of the best,” Ronnie observed.
Though delays are almost universal, it’s formidably difficult to *reverse* a death-penalty conviction, even where there’s significant doubt about guilt, because of institutional reluctance to question a jury verdict. Once appeals begin, the burden of proof shifts to the defendant. Instead of establishing reasonable doubt of guilt, the defense lawyers essentially must find overwhelming evidence of innocence or constitutional violations. In Texas, if appeals run out, the case lands back with the district attorney, who requests a death warrant. The machinery of death then moves swiftly.
There aren’t many miracles in Texas politics, but one took place when a majority of a bitterly divided Texas House of Representatives signed the letter.
whatever the nuns’ motive, on the eve of an execution they had entered the realm of politics.
ach of the women on death row is a mother, and this fact has played a decisive role in nearly all their lives
In Texas, at least, we should have a word other than “justice” for a system so profoundly flawed.
Films can shift the way people think and feel. And this movie, I think, is able to shift the way people feel and think. And there are people, anyone who doesn't want to shift or think or feel or change the way they see things, it's just simply, I think, afraid of what it looks like on the other side if they Have to look at the mirror and go, oh, maybe I've been wrong.
I dress for me because clothing for me is like a love language. And that's everything from my piercings to the nails to what I put on my body to my jewelry. Everything I wear, buy, whatever that is, is because it speaks to me and who I am as a person and the style I want to express. Some people are more sedate with what they wear. I'm just not. I've been this way for a really long time. It's just people can see it a lot more now. And I guess I'm a rebel in that, that I just sort of, I'm not really afraid about whether people like it or not.
📰 5 Ideas That Changed My Life by Sahil Bloom
I've come to realize that balance is much better found and understood on the macro seasonal basis.
The reality is that life is filled with challenging, painful tradeoffs and sacrifices, and if you want extraordinary results, you need to be willing to contribute extraordinary inputs.
You will have seasons of unbalance that are a necessary cost of entry for the future seasons of balance on the other side.
February 10
📰 A New AI World by Scott Galloway
The ironies of DeepSeek are pretty rich. The biggest is that, as Jon Stewart pointed out, AI stole AI’s job.
📰 The Art of Asking Smarter Questions by Harvard Business Review - Arnaud Chevallier, Frédéric Dalsace and Jean-Louis Barsoux
“Question-storming”—brainstorming for questions rather than answers—is now a creativity technique.
strategic questions can be grouped into five domains: investigative, speculative, productive, interpretive, and subjective
Investigative: What’s Known?
The process can be fueled by using successive “Why?” questions, as in the “five whys” sequence devised by managers at Toyota. Successively asking “How?” can also help you transcend generic solutions and develop more-sophisticated alternatives. Investigative questions dig ever deeper to generate nonobvious information. The most common mistake is failing to go deep enough.
Speculative: What If?
To reframe the problem or explore more-creative solutions, leaders must ask things like “What if…?” and “What else…?” The global design company IDEO popularized this approach. It systematically uses the prompt “How might we…?”—coined by Min Basadur when he was a young manager at P&G—to overcome limiting assumptions and jump-start creative problem-solving.
Productive: Now What?
In the 1990s the CEO of AlliedSignal, Larry Bossidy, famously integrated a focus on execution into his company’s culture. He insisted on rigorously questioning and rethinking the various hows of executing on strategy: “How can we get it done?” “How will we synchronize our actions?” “How will we measure progress?” and so on. Such questions can help you identify key metrics and milestones—along with possible bottlenecks—to align your people and projects and keep your plans on track. They will expose risks, including strains on the organization’s capacity.
Interpretive: So, What…?
Interpretive questions—sensemaking questions—enable synthesis. They push you to continually redefine the core issue—to go beneath the surface and ask, “What is this problem really about?” Natural follow-ups to investigative, speculative, and productive questions, interpretive questions draw out the implications of an observation or an idea. After an investigative question, you might ask, “So, what happens if this trend continues?” After a speculative question, “So, what opportunities does that idea open up?” After a productive question, “So, what does that imply for scaling up or sequencing?” Interpretive questions come in other forms, too: “What did we learn from this?” “How is that useful?” “Are these the right questions to ask?” In an interview on The Tim Ferriss Show, Daniel Ek reflected on what he considered his chief role as the CEO of Spotify: “It’s almost always back to purpose—like, Why are we doing things? Why does it matter? How does this ladder up to the mission?”
Subjective: What’s Unsaid?
Volocopter’s CEO, Dirk Hoke, once told us, “When we fail, it’s often because we haven’t considered the emotional part.” ... The notion of people issues as a competitive advantage gained prominence in the aviation industry in the early 1980s. Herb Kelleher, then the CEO of Southwest Airlines, recognized that the customer experience could be dramatically improved by putting employees first and empowering them to treat people right. SAS’s CEO, Jan Carlzon, transformed the Scandinavian airline by “inverting the pyramid” to support customer-facing staffers in “moments of truth.” (See “The Work of Leadership,” HBR, December 2001.) In both cases the role of managers became to coach and support—not monitor and control—frontline staff. They learned to ask their internal customers, “How can I help?”
Adjust your repertoire. Having established which types of questions you are most and least comfortable asking, you need to create a better balance. One way to begin is to remind yourself of the five categories before your next decision-making meeting and ensure that you’re considering all of them. The CHRO at a large tech company we worked with had us display the framework throughout an important company program.
📰 Please Jailbreak Our AI by Alex Duffy
Agentic research won’t stay exclusive for long. There’s a near-future where anyone can access an “AI research sidekick” for little to no cost—which will inevitably be used both for positive discoveries as well as nefarious purposes.
Try deep research if you can; we wrote an in-depth piece on why you should. If that’s out of range for you, you can spin up a free trial of Gemini Advanced for an idea of the state of the art. Watch it pull together data you would’ve spent hours scouring for on your own.
📰 Some Thoughts About Life Design & Feeling Behind by
So here's what I'm thinking: maybe the secret to falling asleep with a full heart and waking up with excitement isn't about having a crystal-clear vision of the destination. Maybe it actually risks taking us down the wrong path.
The traditional vision-board method asks us to think like engineers. But - as Bill Burnett and Dave Evans argue in their book Designing Your Life - living a great life is a design problem, not an engineering problem.
treat life as a design problem
I. Reframing the problem
Treating life like a design problem rather than an engineering problem changes how we frame the challenge. If I had approached the internship as a design problem instead, I would have asked different questions: What environments energize me? What kinds of problems do I enjoy solving? What parts of economics light me up? The “problem” wouldn’t have been "how do I become successful in the policy world?” but rather “what sort of work feels more like play than work?”
consider someone in their mid 40s contemplating a career change. An engineer would focus on minimizing risk and loss: calculate the salary hit, estimate years to catch up to current income, weigh pension implications. A designer would ask: What skills bring me alive? What problems do I want to solve? What does "security" really mean to me at this stage? The solution might not be a traditional career change at all, but rather a creative hybrid that combines existing expertise with new pursuits.
what if life is more like creating art than running a race?
📰 These Books Changed How I Think About History by Ryan Holiday
The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration and Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents by Isabel Wilkerson This is one of my absolute favorite books about American history (it’s also the book club book for The Painted Porch this month). It’s a beautiful, painful and eye-opening look at the Great Migration through biographical sketches of individuals who left the Jim Crow South for a chance at a better life in California, in Chicago, in New York City. Wilkerson’s other book, Caste, is another one of my favorite books. There’s a great analogy at the center of Caste that I think works as both an approach to life and to learning. In order for a doctor to cure you of your ills, Wilkerson writes, you have to give them a medical history. If you’re ashamed of something or in denial of something and you hold back, you’re not helping anyone. In fact, you’re hurting yourself. Our own history–in America or anywhere in the world–is not a list of the things we’re proud of. It is a list of the things that happened. To get better, to improve, to get closer to ‘a more perfect union,’ we have to gather and put up for review an unflinching history. It’s not always fun…but it’s the only way.
Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison I picked this book back up in 2020 in light of the killings of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor and George Floyd. It’s a book with police shootings, race riots and agitators trying to exploit the crises on both sides for political gain. It was terribly sad to read a book originally published in 1952 and think how little has changed. It’s not an easy read, but it’s essential. I learned more about what’s relevant today by picking this back up than through any trendy, virtue-signaling book that might be topping the best-seller lists in recent years. Do yourself a favor and read this one instead. It’s not going anywhere because it is timeless.
Waging a Good War: A Military History of the Civil Rights Movement, 1954-1968 by Thomas E. Ricks If Caste is the shadowy lower part of American history, the higher and more transcendent part is revealed in Ricks’ book *First Principles*, which is about the deep influence the Greek and Roman philosophers had on the American founders. Waging a Good War is about what he calls the greatest war in American history led by what he describes as the greatest generation in American history—the leaders of the Civil Rights Movement. It was Martin Luther King who came to Washington in 1963 to ‘cash a check,’ to redeem that promise first made in the Declaration of Independence. We’re still trying to do that nearly 60 years later today. I will say, this book does not have a good subtitle but please don’t let it deter you. This is a brilliantly written book about how those leaders of the Civil Rights Movement effectuated so much change and what we can learn—strategically, tactically, philosophically, culturally—from them. Listen to my conversation with Ricks here.
James: A Novel by Percival Everett What a wonderful idea for a novel–to tell the story of Huckleberry Finn and Jim from Jim’s perspective! That Everett can take this much darker and tragic perspective and still make it funny? That’s a task worthy of Mark Twain. It’s also deeply moving and I think an important look at how slavery actually was (Twelve Years a Slave is also an incredible book). It reminded me of two other books I loved: Wicked River by Lee Sandlin (an absolutely incredible book about the history of the river) and Life on the Mississippi by Rinker Buck (about a guy who recently traveled it in his own raft, not too dissimilar to the one Huck and Jim were on). In Right Thing, Right Now I talk about the work of abolitionist Thomas Clarkson–again we want to study the past to figure out how to improve the present–and Adam Hochschild’s book Bury the Chains is an inspiring look at how someone managed to see slavery as it was in the 18th century and do something about it.
📰 Celebrating 2 Years With My Girlfriend by
after every date night we write down where we went and what we did. Now we have loads of cute diary entries of our date nights :)
📰 Symbolrich by Jonathan Gheller
The biggest project of our times is the self. We are constantly called to be authentic: find our true selves, love ourselves, maximize our potential, and be all we can be. As they say, you do you.
At other times, the village, the church, or the worker’s union guided people. ... People were not asked to be authentic or to bring their true self to work; they were called to belong and do their part.
Technology allows us to change the world as we please; this, in turn, erodes the notion of a stable outside and opens the perspective of reality as a blank slate.
One good first step out of the trap of the self could be returning to the value of time and seasons: we need to celebrate, mourn, and suffer together. And we need to do it with a deep sense of belonging, and courage, sacrifice and honor. We need times to rest, and times to be active, times to go on our own, and times to band together. There is a lot of wisdom in ancient symbols and in how they help us organize time, not unlike how technology has helped to organize space.
a birthday, a rite of passage or a funeral as houses made to shelter our time: similarly to the way we make a clearing in the ground and raise a house so there is a space to be together, we can make houses in time: that is, moments to meet in shared rituals and traditions which make time to be together.
February 8
📰 Here's What Jane Austen Taught Me About Smartphones by
In addition to cutting up Life and National Geographic like every other collage maker does, I decided to cannibalize my newspapers to create new “stories” from its pages, leaning on my experience with newspaper layout at The Sentinel. The only rule I had was that each collage needed to be from a single edition of the paper.
It’s been a few years since I’ve made what I called an “In the News” collage, but looking back at these, it’s the perfect exercise for an entry point into collage and art-making in general:
No skill or experience is required.
Newspaper is cheap, ephemeral, and intentionally both.
The only materials needed are newspaper, scissors (or an x-acto knife), glue and a sketchbook (or even just a piece of paper).
It’s loose and messy by default. You can’t get too caught up in aesthetics or craft when you’re cutting out headlines from newsprint, so you don’t even need to worry about it. Just make something.
Searching through the newspaper to make one of these teaches you to look for relationships and juxtapositions in your materials—a practice that is at the heart of collage making and, I’d argue, art and design in general.
📰 AI Journaling Changed My Life by Dan Shipper
I tried asking GPT-3 to become a bot that’s well-versed in Internal Family Systems—a style of therapy that emphasizes the idea that the self is composed of many different parts or sub-personalities, and that a lot of growth comes from learning to understand and integrate those parts. It turns out, GPT-3 isn’t bad at that:
“You are the best Internal Family Systems chat bot in the world. Please help me identify, talk to, and work with different parts of myself. You can start the conversation however you feel is best.
I also tried asking it to be a psychoanalyst and a cognitive behavioral therapist, both of which were interesting and useful. I even asked it to do Jungian dream interpretation
Another thing I tried is asking GPT-3 to help me increase my sense of gratitude and joy—like a better gratitude journal
You’ll notice it starts by acting like a normal gratitude journal, asking me to list three things I’m grateful for. But once I respond, it probes about details of what you’re grateful for to get you past your stock answers and into the emotional experience of gratitude.
There is something innately appealing about building a relationship with an empathetic friend that you can talk to any time. It’s comforting to know that it’s available, and it’s exciting to think about all of the different prompts you can experiment with to help it support you in the way you need. There is also something weird about all of this. Spilling your guts to a robot somehow cheapens the experience because it doesn’t cost much for a robot to tell you it understands you.
people felt like getting a response from GPT-3 wasn’t genuine and ruined the experience.
📰 How Yancey Strickler ‘Scrolls’ Offline by Scott Nover
We’re also all remote, which sparked some other new ideas about how to work together. The most meaningful for us being metablogging, or having an internal blogging system where we all share deeper thoughts and explorations of what we’re working on, and which we use as our collective brain to debate priorities, build on each other’s ideas, and maintain alignment on a deep level. Metablogging has made bringing on new people much easier as, just like with scrolling, they can do a real-time exploration of the journey that got Metalabel where it is today.
I’ve found AI to be very helpful as a research assistant. The other day I was looking to find language in a specific piece of legislation, but couldn’t remember the particulars. Google was no help. Claude gave me the exact passage immediately. As a writer and entrepreneur, the researching ability is exceptional. As a thinking companion, however, I think AI hinders our thinking more than we realize. I’ve found myself on day-long Claude benders where I get its thoughts about everything. And at the end of those days my thinking feels like mush. There’s nothing retained. No bone structure to build on.
It’s similar to how you don’t learn a sense of direction if you’re using Google Maps. Instead of learning, we follow. We think we’re automating work but we’re really automating ourselves.
This is the kind of misalignment and distraction that creative people should be wary of. Don’t outsource your thinking. Don’t reduce yourself to being another model. You possess the most important ability of all: to create life, with our bodies, our spirits, and our minds. Don’t squander it.
February 7
📰 How Much Money I Made in January by
Unless you do reviews, news or entertainment, your niche is not your bottleneck.
It’s certainly easier to charge higher prices when you are helping people make more money, but you can hit $1m profit and beyond in almost any niche. It doesn’t matter what your channel is about. If you build an audience that trusts you and values your information, the sky’s the limit.
February 5
📰 How I Grew This Newsletter From 0 to 18K in One Year 🎉 by
The game-changer for me was the book Smart Brevity.
In the early days, when your subscriber count is low, you need to go all-in to build momentum. Get from 0 to 10,000 as quickly as possible.
Not being afraid to put yourself out there: I pitched myself to podcasts, spoke at conferences, and networked like hell. I knew that the more people I reached = the more subscribers I’d attract.
I knew my target audience was already subscribed to other marketing / growth newsletters, so I focused on getting in front of them through: 1. ✍️ Guest posts: I pitched (and sometimes got invited) to write guest posts for my favorite newsletters, including Elena Verna, Kyle Poyar and Aakash Gupta. Whenever I had an idea for an AAA article, I’d offer it to other newsletters instead of publishing it on my own. The credit is worth everything.
I made it my mission to mention the MarketingIdeas.com waitlist whenever possible:
🎤 Guest speaking gigs
🎙️ Podcast interviews
📱 Social media posts
📝 Blog articles
🤝 Networking events
Tactic #4: Hire Reddit ambassadors One of my secret weapons has been using Reddit as a growth channel. But it’s not how you think. Here’s how it works: I have a small group of MarketingIdeas.com superfans who are active on relevant subreddits like r/marketing, r/startups, and r/growth. I hire them as personal assistants on Upwork/Fiverr to act as my ‘Reddit Ambassadors’. 👉 Whenever they come across a discussion where one of my articles could add value, they’ll drop a link in the comments.
I regularly hit up my biggest fans with special requests: "Upvote this post", "Connect with me on LinkedIn", "Fill out my survey", etc. I sometimes even specifically mention that this email is going out to the top X% of subscribers. And you know what? They happily help because they feel like VIPs.
2. 🗺️ Pin a “Start Here” post to the top of your homepage: Probably my #1 tip for improving your newsletter’s reader experience: Add a “Start Here” post to the top of your Substack homepage.
This post should include:
A brief ‘About’ section
Links to all your published articles (like a table of contents / index) Countless readers have told me my
Tactic #7: Get feedback from superstars Lastly, you should know this: Your favorite authors, entrepreneurs, and speakers are much more accessible than you think. You just need to know where to look… 🤫 The secret → Many of them run raffles or contests where you can win a chance to pick their brain. That’s exactly how I scored 1:1 chats with Morning Brew’s Alex Lieberman and AppSumo’s Noah Kagan.
The cherry on top: When you’ve got their attention (after you win), ask for honest feedback on your content. If they liked it - you should ask if you can quote their praise. Those endorsements are marketing GOLD.
🎧 Project Stargate & the Rise of Oracle + Scott’s Stake in La Equidad Football Club - Prof G Pod
The U.S. Is 5% of the world's population. It's a third of the GDP. And right now, if you look at the stock market as a proxy for asset values, it's half the world's value. So I think it's reasonable to assume when you say, well, Scott, that's just the publicly traded stocks, but you could also probably extrapolate that to private assets too. So this is how crazy things have gotten. Basically, the markets are saying that the U.S. Is worth as much as the rest of the world. And I don't think that's true.
February 4
🎧 A City of Extremes - Beautiful/Anonymous
And I would argue for anybody who goes just don't open a bottle or don't pick up a can. That's the end of a process. That bottle getting cracked open, that can. You might think that's the beginning of a process. That is the end of a process that reflects a mental state that I would not wish on anybody. And that I would say, fuck you for anybody who wants to judge it as simple or, or a moral failing that's just don't open the bottle. The amount of choices, the amount of self hate the amount of healthy options you have intentionally passed on and kicked yourself for along the way before you even opt into your addiction? Are already brutal and damaging and shameful and things you want to hide. So fuck anybody who judges whether they work in a facility. Whether they met you yesterday, whether they're a family member. And I can hear from your reaction that there's some truth to it of like, fuck, I know I'm smarter than this. Also, fuck, I'm getting away with this screw them like I know that feeling better than people know. Brutal. It's rude. And you give a piece of yourself away and those in those moments is what you feel like. Yeah. And it's sad and it's empty and it's hollow and it's fucking lonely. And you certainly did make a lot of mistakes it sounds like but it also sounds like it's a very real, very real thing that's probably, probably goes back further and deeper than we can Get to on an episode of Beautiful Anonymous.
📰 The Problem With AI That's Too Human by Rhea Purohit
the urge to couch early motor vehicles in forms that were familiar to people at the time is an example of a design principle known as skeuomorphism. And it persists to this day in cars: Tesla designs its vehicles with showy front grilles—typically needed to prevent engines from overheating—even though electric cars don't need them.
We assume that AI will do what humans do. That’s why the impact of AI is often spoken of in terms of how much of the labor force will be automated, its intelligence is measured in terms of human IQ, and its uses are modeled around human roles like the personal assistant, copywriter, and developer. While many of these use cases are admittedly helpful, this way of thinking is limiting. If we assume that AI is like us, we risk failing to explore what AI is uniquely suited to do.
Instead of asking how AI can do human tasks better, ask what AI can do that humans never could.
February 3
🎧 Episode 53: Good Prose: The Art of Nonfiction by
When you separate yourself from the shame, the reader can no longer sympathize or relate to that person because you are shitting all over that person and condemning them. And then also by doing this, it's an attempt to plead with the reader. I swear I'm better now. I'm good. I'm wise. I figured it all out. Keep reading this book. Okay. But it has the opposite effect.
It’s okay to include some present knowledge, but not if it means you are celebrating your present self.
A new writer should proceed cautiously with a trusted agent's counsel, bearing in mind that the potential editor is primarily a reader for whom the best marketing plan may well be 20 Or 30 pages of good prose. So this is saying the writing speaks for itself. Maybe I don't need a marketing plan. Maybe I just need a really fucking well-written book.
🎧 A Transformative Guide to Design Your Dream Life — With Sahil Bloom - Prof G Pod
The box status test. Before buying something, you ask yourself, would I buy this thing if I couldn't tell anyone about it? If I couldn't take a picture of it, if I couldn't show it to anyone else, would I still want the thing? And usually that'll cut through the noise of whether you're doing it as an attempt at bot status or if it is something that truly provides utility and happiness in your life.
You are in much more control of your time than you think.
📰 Do What You Can't by
Information abundance is a modern miracle but it's also an impediment to agency. And it happens to be much more fun and freeing to be out in the world just doing stuff, stumping around and humming merrily, expanding my zone of competence, than sitting inside on a screen watching someone else do stuff. Knowledge is rarely the bottleneck. To start almost anything, you need to know nearly nothing.
The world is full of lovely rewards for little effort.
📰 The Most Valuable Thing I Own by
more often, what we really want is more memories per unit of time.
Psychologist Linda Henkel's research shows a fascinating paradox about photography and memory - what she calls the 'photo-taking-impairment effect.' She found that people remembered fewer details about museum objects when they photographed them compared to when they just observed them. It was as if we were outsourcing our memory to our cameras, leading to 'digital amnesia'.
When journaling, focus on sensory details and emotions rather than just events
📰 A Dream Job Doesn't Mean It's My Dream by
a dream job doesn't mean it's my dream
February 2
📰 Do You Put in a Fake Email? by Kevon Cheung
I make awesome lead magnets that look just like any paid products so that people come to me and say "This is amazing. Why aren't you charging this?" Yes, you'll likely need different lead magnets to capture visitors in different situations. But you only need 1-2 signature lead magnets that create such a reaction in people.
February 1
📰 The New Opportunity Test, Progressive Overload, & More by Sahil Bloom
I want to share another simple, powerful system for making decisions around new professional commitments. I call it my New Opportunity Test (3 steps):
Step 1: Does this opportunity fall within my list of professional priorities? If no, say no. If yes, proceed to Step 2.
Step 2: Is this a "Hell yeah!" opportunity? Writer Derek Sivers famously proposed this simple rule: If something isn’t a "Hell yeah!" then it’s a no. If it is, proceed to Step 3.
Step 3: Assume this opportunity takes twice as long and is half as rewarding/profitable than you expect it to be, would you still want to do it? We tend to be overly optimistic when taking on something new. Force a degree of rationality into the decision. If the answer is no, say no. If the answer is yes, take it on.
Here’s my attempt at defining an essay that has no adjectives: > essay (n.): a short, standalone work of nonfiction; it is an author-centered, linear exploration through an ideascape, crafted for readers across time; compositionally, it unifies literary devices across genres; culturally, it makes specialized experience universal.
📰 Three Books That Just Might Help by
Take Daemon. The daemon in Daniel Suarez’s story isn’t a conscious, sentient AI. It’s a *program*—a self-sustaining background process designed to operate autonomously. But in the world of this novel, that’s close enough to wreak havoc, death, and destruction. Written in 2006, the book follows the daemon’s mission as it carries out the wishes of its deceased creator.
🎥 What Comes Next by Lilly Singh
The first time my therapist said to me, "Lilly, your identity is not what you do," for the entire hour I was like, "What do you mean?
I don’t even understand what you’re talking about. What do you mean my identity is not what I do? Is it wrong to want to be remembered for how I make people feel? Well, no. I think that’s the perfect goal. Why, after a conversation with you, most people feel way smarter.
These fears and beliefs manifest in the following ways: need for control, high expectations, testing people, loneliness, rigid thinking, and obsession with productivity. Welcome back to L VL. We hope the heart of part two is here. Right now, it took me so long to understand this idea, but now I get it. And so I’m here to tell you, as we get rid of all of these props and costumes, I’m actually not losing a part of myself. Because the reality is, I am not all of the things I’ve done. I am not Manjeet and Paramjeet now; I am not my YouTube sketches. I am not the vlogs I made. I am not the tour I did; I am not the book I wrote or the second book I wrote.
The awards I've won — I'm not the late night host. Actually, it doesn't say host; it says late night. What them late night? H — obviously, my control freakness is like, "How did you make a typo in your reflection?" Those are just really cool things I've gotten to do. Who I actually am is that hustler; that girl who's like, "No, I believe that I can do anything." I believe if I have a dream, I can work so hard to accomplish it. I believe that if I fall down, I can get up again. I'm the girl that's silly, weird, and mildly unhinged. I am the person who believes in giving back and being of service, and though I'm not perfect, I try my best. That is who I am.
Supply chain was run for lowest costs, full stop. How do we eke out more and more costs? And it ended up we had absolutely no slack, meaning any interruption at all and everything from your refrigerator to your garage door, they couldn't find parts and the whole thing just Kind of collapsed on itself.
Book a call: Have a bite-sized creative project? Let’s give you a starting line boost a la Mario Kart - https://calendly.com/beckyisj/
Some links are affiliate links, meaning that I may receive a commission if you make a purchase through the links at no cost to you.
1. thank you for the shoutout!
2. this is an absolutely insane amount of stuff