January 2025
Books, articles, podcasts, and thoughts throughout the month
Books read:
๐ Steal Like an Artist by
๐ Year of Yes by Shonda Rhimes
๐ The Best Girls by Min Jin Lee
๐ Keep Going by
๐ The DOSE Effect by Tj Power
๐ The Hidden Girl and Other Stories by
๐ The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle
๐ The Gene by Siddhartha Mukherjee
Posts published:
January 31
๐ฐ DeepSeek Shockwaves, Nvidia's Plunge, and Target's DEI Rollback - Pivot Pod
Everything eventually goes Walmart, Tiffany
๐ฐ James Smith Shares 3 Rules for Life - Three Rules by Matt DโAvella
I kind of look back to earlier stages of my life and weirdly, I think that I was happier at 100k than I was at a million.
If we turn this into a fat loss perspective, people say, oh, I need to lose 10 kilograms. I'm like, oh, well, how about we try and lose one kilogram and do it 10 times? Don't deny yourself wins ahead of you because ultimately they are going to feel the same.
I love to distinguish happiness and pleasure so if i go get in the car that's pleasure but happiness is more so in good relationship with your partner maybe good exercise routine waking Up without hungover on a sunday pleasure is spending money going business for classes doing the things that you know having a big night out with your friends maybe going to a festival Could be unprotected sex, I don't know, whatever it is. But if you go to Southeast Asia, you go to Thailand, Indonesia, you see people that don't have pleasure, but they have an abundance of happiness. You look at them with broken flip-flops and a moped, living in a hammock, go, fuck, you're happier than me. But they have happiness, maybe not quite so much pleasure. Whereas if you look at multi-millionaires that are depressed, it's often because they don't distinguish the two and they try and fill their cup where they're seeking happiness with More pleasure. It's more cocaine, more nights out, more Louis Vuitton. And that's a bad place to be in. So when we say to people, hey, high paying job you don't like, take a pay cut, start your own thing. You're actually saying, let's trade some pleasure for happiness.
Let's trade some pleasure for happiness.
I think it's important that you don't try and appeal to everyone
From a personal training background, when I began, when I tried to be professional and wore a polo shirt and had my iPad, I attracted the wrong people. When I started swearing a bit more on my content, the people that arrived were like, you know what? You swear a lot. We're going to get on. And I sometimes joke and I say, if I try and polarize really hard, I end up with an audience, albeit smaller, people that I'd have a beer with. And I think it's important that you don't optimize the wrong audience.
Never spoke to again i'm not bothered about it if someone was like oh you know jonathan he used to be your best mate and now you haven't spoken in 20 years i don't care but yet when some random Person on the internet followed you the non-followed you take it personally
You will be terrible the first time you do anything.
Whilst other people maybe were learning other things, you were learning the thing that was right for you. And there is a real slow gradual improvement over time. And people just need to appreciate they're somewhere on that. The lessons are in the things that so many people are avoiding. And if people would just appreciate they're going to suck they're going to be shit and i said look even if you bomb a video no one's going to see it because that's what bombing is the algorithm Is going to know pretty soon this is shit because they're going to look at the way that people interact with it people just aren't willing to do that
January 30
๐ฐ Unseen Art of Thomas Kinkade by
His mother subscribed to Time Magazine during the 1970s, and he cut off and saved all the painted portrait covers, which we used to wallpaper the ceiling of our dorm room.
He once told me "instead of cursing the darkness, I'd rather celebrate the light.โ
I often wondered if his desire to celebrate the light made him unable to appreciate the beauty and mystery of shadows, and even the necessity of shadows to make the light possible. I find myself wishing Tom had found a way to allow more of his weird, dark, and impulsive side to be part of his official, public persona.
January 27
๐ฐ John Dillinger by
Every portrait is an attempt both to study the mask and to see beyond the mask, because every subject is trying to project a personaโ at least if theyโre aware of being drawn.
๐ฐ Career Agency: The Unspoken Weapon for People With Unconventional Careers by
3 core things that anyone in an โunconventionalโ career can do to tilt the risk-reward profile in our favor.
(1) Be Strategic About Skill Development ... this blog post by author and cartoonist Scott Adam (creator of the Dilbert comic strip).
if you want something extraordinary, you have two paths:
(1) Become the best at one specific thing.
(2) Become very good (top 25%) at two or more things.
The first strategy is difficult to the point of near impossibility.
The second strategy is fairly easy. Everyone has at least a few areas in which they could be in the top 25% with some effort.
Traditional careers are much more like path (1) than path (2).
I guess what I wish I knew earlier is this: Get clear on which two areas where you're going to aim to be in the top 25%. Then claim those areas. Make yourself rare and invaluable by combining two or more โpretty goodsโ until no one else has your mix.
(2) Write Your Job Description
Your job description should outline:
Core tasks/roles that you're responsible for doing (which part(s) of the workflow do you own and when do you hand off to someone else?)
How often do you do those tasks (daily? weekly? monthly?)
Key metrics or outcomes you're responsible for (ideally, these are quantitative metrics that you can put a number on - e.g. revenue)
When you're writing this up, it's really important to make it about your employer/client - not about you! Think of your employer or client as someone who's hired you to solve specific problems. Your job description should show precisely how you can solve these problems with minimal fuss and maximum impact.
(3) Maximize Your Network Surface Area
I think there are two main mistakes when it comes to maximizing your network surface area: (a) not doing enough of it (I fall into this category) (b) not doing it in the right way
๐ฐ A Ten Minute Typography Lesson by
if you learn and follow these five typography rules, you will be a better typographer than nearly every writerโand even most graphic designers.
start every project by making the body text look good.
In print, the most comfortable range for body text is 10โ12 point. On the web, 15โ25 pixels.
Line spacing is the vertical distance between lines. It should be 120โ145% of the point size. In word processors, use the โExactโ line-spacing option to achieve this.
Line length is the horizontal width of the text block. Line length should be an average of 45โ90 characters per line (use your word-count function) or 2โ3 lowercase alphabets
In a printed document, this usually means page margins larger than one inch (a typewriter habit). On a web page, it usually means preventing the text from flowing to the edges of the browser window.
The fastest, easiest, and most visible improvement you can make to your typography is to ignore the fonts already loaded on your computer (known as system fonts) and the free fonts that inundate the internet. Instead, buy a professional font (like those found in font recommendations).
๐ฐ Do I Really Have to Read the News? by
You donโt need to be informed *all* the time. โIssue fatigueโ is real. ... Pick deliberate times to check the news (say, before and after work) and limit yourself to a few sites. ... our grandparents, despite receiving the news once a day, did just fine.
๐ฐ Smooth Operator via Alex Duffy
a recent survey conducted by newsletter writer Lenny Rachitsky revealed that the most widely adopted tool across 6,500 tech professionals was not Slack or Gmail, but ChatGPT.
๐ฐ The Reading List Email for January 26, 2025 by Ryan Holiday
Didion and Babitz by Lili Anolik โI forget where I saw this one but given all the Didion books Iโve read and recommended over the years (including The Year of Magical Thinking, Blue Nights, and South and West), I had to read this one. Eve Babitz was a famous writer, socialite and model in the 1970โs in LA (you may have seen the famous photo of her playing chess with Duchamp). She was friends, rivals, and in a way, polar opposites, with the smaller, mousier and more conservative Joan Didion. This was a fun, gossipy read that also pairs well with The Big Goodbye, which I recommended two years ago. Lili, the author, is an unabashed Eve partisan, I will say (itโs rare you read a book where the authorโs love for the subject is so overwhelming). I didnโt mind it but to me, it meant she missed the fact that Eve was a far more tragic than heroic figure, a person whose obvious addictionsโdrugs, alcohol and obviously sexโdeprived the world of her literary and artistic talents. Joan Didion didnโt โwinโ because she was more calculating and cold, as Lili seems to think, Didion won because she worked harder and had more discipline.
๐ฐ Are Oil Paintings Just the Selfies of Yore? by
To a generation that has already seen everything on their screens, what is the purpose of art in a museum? What sets apart the physical confrontation?
an essay by Walter Benjamin - The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. And that gave me many things to think about.
๐ฐ How I Set Goals by
From Brian Tracey
Imagine yourself in December 2025, sitting at dinner with a great friend.
List the 10 most important things you would love to have achieved by December, but in the present tense. E.g. I can run a 25 min 5k, I earn 20% more, I have 5,000 followers on Instagram etc
Ask yourself โIf I could wave a magic wand and have anything on this list within the next 24 hours, which of these would have the greatest positive impact on my life?โ
Thatโs your goal. Forget the other 9 for now.
Write down your one goal.
Set a date you want to achieve it by.
Write down the 5 main things you need to do to achieve that goal.
Look at your goal daily.
Track your progress weekly.
I loved the idea so much I set it up so that it appeared in my email inbox every 2 weeks.
๐ง How David Perell Uses ChatGPT to Write for Millions - Ep. 6 With David Perell - AI and I
Use ChatGPT to articulate who you admire and why. It can give you more depth and insight, helping you discover people you might not know and synthesizing what you like about them.
One of the things that I think will be fun to try just going right into chat GPT is I think it's really great at, you know, you can do a really good job of articulating who you like, who you Look up to and why and what that says about you. And I think chat GPT is really good for giving you more depth and clarity and insight into that stuff. So one thing that we could try is taking some of the people that you mentioned. So like maybe a Tyler Cowen or Michael Phelps writing into chat GPT like what, who you like and why you like them to some degree and then seeing if we can push it a little bit to maybe find Some more people that you might not have heard of or maybe give you a little bit more depth of synthesis on what are the things you like about them and then we can see where that goes.
Running a creator-led media business differs greatly from a software company. In the former, the creator must actively create content, while in the latter, the CEO's focus is on hiring, fundraising, and vision.
With Every, for example, I tried to run it like a software company for a long time and it's not really a software company. It's a media business. It's a creator led media business. And so the way that you run a creator led media business is if I'm like one of the top creators, I got to make stuff. I got to be in this room with you like making podcasts or writing or doing all that kind of stuff. But if you're the CEO of a software business like you don't make the stuff, you hire the people to make the stuff and you raise the money and you hold the vision and whatever. I had to like learn that lesson a lot because it's such a different way of thinking about what to do and how to build a company.
Questions to ask GPT
Here's a list of my heroes and why like their personality and writing.
Can you summarize the vibes of these people?
One of the things I like to have it do is when you ask it to just summarize the vibe, what it will do is it will sort of like expand from the name into more about like, about that person. So for each person is saying like Peter Thiel, known for his curiosity and boldness. And what we're going to do is take that and then compress it down into something that like finds a lot of the overlaps and synthesizes it. But it's helpful to like have it in expanded form first. Yeah. Speaker 1 Yeah. Interesting. So what you're trying to do is you're trying to get as much information onto the page, basically give it a lot of receptors.
Can you help me synthesize these? I want to try to find the underlying overlaps and commonalities between these people. So then what I did is I said limit one paragraph. That's good. Then share the four core bullet points, then summarize in one sentence.
Run multiple queries with the same prompt to get a better understanding of the AI's response space. This can help you see different perspectives and uncover more comprehensive insights.
Why don't you hit the redo button? I just want to see like, if you do it again, like, if you get anything different.
Is that this one? Yeah.
Well, that's one of the things I really like to do is, and it's actually come out of some of these interviews is I interviewed Linus Lee a couple of weeks ago. He's a researcher who works at Notion on their AI team. And he just does like four of them for each response just to sort of like get the lay of the land.
David Perell, an Enneagram 3w4, works best with direct communicators (like 8s) and information synthesizers (like 5s), as they complement his core weakness: hesitancy to express his truth due to fear of judgment.
What do you want to know about yourself right now from having read this?
I want to know the kinds of people I would work well with and who I need around me in order to. Yeah. That's what I'm curious about. And one of the things that we might want to plug in is some of my weaknesses. And I've noticed that I work very well with people who are integramates and they tend to be very direct. And I also work well with people who are integram fives because fives are all about information, synthesis and knowledge. So some of my weaknesses are basically all my problems in life come down to one thing. And if you even want to write down the sentence, it could even be interesting, which is there's the truth that I know. And I'm worried about expressing that truth and saying what I need to say because I'm worried about how it's going to make me look. That's my core weakness in life. So I work really well with people who the eights tend to be conflict forward and they say what they mean and they mean what they say. So I'm curious to know, given my integram three tendencies, I'm a three wing four, who then do I need around me in the work world?
Want to understand your inner conflicts better? Try a motivational interview with ChatGPT. Start a new chat and tell it, "I want you to do a motivational interview with me." Focus on a specific behavior or tendency you'd like to change. It's helpful to add, "Please ask me one question at a time" to avoid getting overwhelmed.
Start a new chat. And ask chat GPT, I want you to do a motivational interview with me. And motivational interviewing is a technique in psychology that's about unpacking the sort of conflicting forces within you that produce ambivalence or a behavior that you don't Really like and helping you to like move into a better understanding of those forces so you can integrate them and do things differently. So I want you to do a motivational interview with me. I'm thinking about my tendency to know a truth and be worried about expressing that truth and saying what I need to say. Specifically I'm worried about how that's going to make me look. I want to try to understand that that better where that and where that comes from. Please do a motivational interview and ask me one question at a time. One thing I've noticed is chat GPT is just like it will spew like 10 questions and then it's like you can't answer 10 questions at once. And so the one question at a time is really good.
๐ฐ The Audacious Roundup by
Debbie and I gave some dating and relationship advice for Hinge. This was a fun thing to do together and the photographer was lovely. And like ten years old but thatโs okay. We are all young until we arenโt.
January 26
๐ฐ Cruel Admiration by
Somewhere along the way, honest admiration turned to fervent fixation, and fervent fixation twisted into unhealthy obsession. The gap between who I was and who I wanted to be was torture.
If we go a level deeper, admiration is a mirror: it reflects the edges of my ideal. I can get a sense of what my ideal is, at least its outline, by examining patterns in the people I admire. Put a different way, my admiration is a window into my subconscious value structure.
When I encounter people who reflect fragments of that ideal, fireworks go off. A voice in my brain whispers, "Yes, move closer to that". It's almost like who I could be in the future already exists, somehow, and beckons back to me in the present, to steer my choices.
Iโve learned if I ask enough people for advice, it all cancels to zero. In the same way, if I look to enough people to tell me how to live (meaning how *they* live) my head will spin till it pops off. I have to decide for myself. There is no formula. It feels stupid to type that sentence, but there isn't. Perfect execution is a myth.
๐ฐ TikTok, Trump, and Thriving in Uncertainty by Team Ali Abdaal
The most effective productivity systems are those that can pivot. Theyโre diverse, flexible, and designed with disruption in mind. For instance:
Platforms come and go, but email lists endure. Creators whoโve built direct lines of communication with their audience โ beyond any single platform โ have a safety net that no ban or algorithm change can touch.
Tools may fail, but habits persist. A strong habit of prioritisation or focus can carry you through, even if your favourite productivity app vanishes.
Plans may shift, but principles remain. When you anchor your efforts to core principles โ like deep work, intentionality, and consistency โ you can recalibrate quickly when external factors change.
January 25
๐ฐ A Place Where Knowledge Is Ours for the Taking by
Reading Open Socrates is not going to give anyone an easy way to respond to the personal aspects of Callardโs life. She is almost absent from this book (though she is very present, quite movingly, in the chapter about death, which I have now read twice).
Like Callard, I am not a Platonist, but a Socratist. (Oh! the luxury of mediocrity! to think that I can pick between genius!
๐ฐ The Cease-and-Desist of Winter by
โYou just have to be able to notice when you are boring yourself.โ My 3 tips for self-editing.
๐ฐ The Right Now Test, Lessons From a Late Father, & More by Sahil Bloom
When deciding whether to take on a new commitment, ask yourself, "Would I do this right now?" Think of right now as today or tomorrow. The aim is to eliminate the future time distortions observed by psychologists; by pulling the event into the present, you make a more clear, rational decision.
If the answer is no, say no.
If the answer is yes, take it on.
๐ฐ Why Is Jensen Huang $120 Billion Richer Than You? by Evan Armstrong
Nvidiaโs culture was well-suited to the market it was attacking. I call this concept culture-market fit. Culture-market fit (CMF) is the intersection of an opportunity in the market with a culture that can execute on said opportunity. CMF occurs when an organization matches with an opportunity, and the organizationโs culture enables the right strategies and processes to blossom, allowing it to capture said opportunity.
A companyโs culture is a vibe, an ethos, that permeates every slide deck, every product decision, every analysis. When there is no clear right answer (which is always), culture-market fit drives decisions.
This narrative is kind of, sort of, a Texas Longhornโs first cup of coffeeโaka bullshit.
Iโve read dozens, if not over 100, books on the history of successful companies. The most recent was The Nvidia Way: Jensen Huang and the Making of a Tech Giant by Tae Kim. Kim did an exemplary job portraying the central characters, the risks they took, and the multiple near-death experiences this company had. It is an important read because Nvidia is one of the most important companies in history.
What separates the great founders from those who merely do okay is what they do with that capital afterward. They donโt rest on their laurels; they use that initial success to play a bigger game.
In some ways the book is poorly timed. If Huang has his way, the previous 30 years will look like a footnote.
๐ฐ Grappling With the Big Questions by
These are the big questions Iโm grappling with and hope to answer over the span of my โcareer.โ
๐ฐ Human AIgency: On Becoming More Human in the Age of AI by
In writing this Substack, Iโd found my way in crafting creative nonfiction and memoir narratives, but increasingly, I felt drawn to write with more intellectual rigor, exploring ideas that piqued my personal curiosity and were grounded in empirical research.
๐ง Musk vs. Altman, Trump Admin's DEI Crackdown, and Netflix Stock Surge - Pivot Pod
Scott: How would you summarize the difference between the U.S. And the U.K.? And the way I would summarize it is, my mom and dad in the late 50s at the age of 19 and 23 got on steamships from Glasgow and London and came to the U.S. With like $300. And I say, everyone here, referencing people who are in London, you're the ones that decided to stay.
Kara: it's the same with people who stop in Pennsylvania and don't go to California. I always think about that. Who stopped and who kept going?
Scott: It's because we are willing to make these types of, take these staggering risks.
๐ฐ No One Can Stop You From Being Happily Married by
We are literally only still together because of the words we have utteredโthe values we have shared, the appreciations we have voiced, the confessions we have exchanged, the fighting words we have volleyed and withstood, and the deeply nourishing silences weโve embraced.
Marriage can only happen after you admit that you matter.
What will you withhold? What will you deliver? There can be no marriage without your willingness to express who and what you are, not with another person, and certainly not with the thing we call life.
January 24
๐ง Conversation With Anger Professor Dr. Ryan Martin โ The Science of Anger - Prof G Pod
Ultimately, if we think about emotions from an evolutionary perspective, which is how I tend to think about them, then they exist in us because they solved some sort of adaptive problem. And the same way sadness alerts us to loss and fear alerts us to danger, anger alerts us to injustice. And it provides us energy that we can use to confront that injustice.
Whether or not your anger is good or is bad in some ways has to do with the consequences of how you use it.
Anger is the most viral emotion online, that people are much more likely to share things that make them angry than they are to share things that make them happy, especially if they don't Know the person who shared it.
๐ฐ Cash Is Oxygen for Your Channel by
If youโre posting educational videos on YouTube, I firmly believe doing 1:1 coaching/consulting is one of the highest leverage things you can do with your time. Especially in the early days.
Itโs as close to a hack for your YouTube business as there is. Youโre literally earning money while understanding the pain points of your audience and customers better. This information will help you make better videos, write better emails and create better products. Aka, the holy trifecta of YouTube entrepreneurship.
Put a Calendly link in your video description with a stripe integration to charge for a call. Make the price something youโre comfortable with, and start low. Between $30-200 per hour are all good places to start, depending on your audience size and experience level. Then mention it at some point in the second half of your videos and at the bottom of your weekly email (if you send one, and if you donโt, you should). The *worst* thing that will happen is no one books, and you learn whether people want your help or not. In that case, keep experimenting until they do. Or, if you donโt want to charge up-front, offer free 15-30 minute calls (this was my preferred approach when I started YouTube consulting). Have a quick chat and see if you think you can help them, then charge for more calls.
๐ฐ Your Brain on Uncertainty by Ness Labs
next time you face uncertainty, donโt ask โWhatโs the right answer?โ Instead, try approaching the question like a scientist, asking: What could I learn from this experience?
three evidence-based strategies that work with your brainโs natural responses to uncertainty. You can think of them as three interlocking โgearsโ working together.
The cognitive gear. The Plus Minus Next method is a simple metacognitive tool to help you observe your thoughts without getting stuck in them. By examining whatโs working (Plus), what isnโt (Minus), and what to try next (Next), you create an actionable framework for processing uncertain situations.
The emotional gear. Studies show that naming your emotions helps you better manage them. When you label your feelings about uncertainty โ whether itโs worry or confusion โ you activate your prefrontal cortex and reduce amygdala activation. This simple practice turns overwhelm into a more manageable experience.
The relational gear. Connect with others facing similar uncertainties. Learn in public by sharing your experiences and decisions with other people. This will give you new perspectives by helping you tap into collective wisdom.
๐ฐ OpenAI Launches Its Agent by
2025 will be a breakout year for agents: tools that use computers on your behalf, working across different apps to perform multi-step operations just like humans do.
in the most ambitious AI agent launch to date, on Thursday OpenAI announced Operator: an AI agent that can browse the web and take actions on your behalf. In a live demo on Thursday morning, CEO Sam Altman and three of his coworkers showed some of what Operator can do: shop for groceries on Instacart, hunt for concert tickets on Stubhub, and booking a reservation at a local restaurant through OpenTable.
thereโs nothing that impressive about generating a list of London walking tours: there are many such lists all over the web, and the free version of ChatGPT will also give you a good list even faster than Operator. But thereโs still something striking about telling a computer to do something and then watch it open a browser tab, type queries, click on buttons and present you with a report.
Operator also performed decently well on a task that I borrowed from Ethan Mollick, an associate professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, who had used it to test Anthropicโs agent: โput together a lesson plan on the Great Gatsby for high school students, breaking it into readable chunks and then creating assignments and connections tied to the Common Core learning standard.โ
Operator took about eight minutes to complete the task, but when it finished it presented me with a curriculum that seemed to satisfy all the requirements. As with the TripAdviser example, though, I found that the free version of ChatGPT answered it just as well โ and did so more quickly.
For the moment, then, if your question is โwhat can Operator do better than existing tools?โ the answer is not clear. It can take action on your behalf in ways that are new to AI systems โ but at the moment it requires a lot of hand-holding, and may cause you to throw up your hands in frustration.
The experience revealed to me one of Operatorโs key deficiencies: it can use a web browser, but it cannot use your web browser. This matters a lot, because your browser is already set up for you to use the web efficiently. Youโre already logged in to the services you use most, and many of those services are further modified to reflect your personal preferences and make using them more efficient. Open a browser on a different computer, and every single time youโre starting from scratch.
Dan Shipper, who has been testing Operator for a few days, found that it often cannot access websites because they have blocked OpenAI from crawling it. So if your dreams of using Operator involve doing things with YouTube, or Reddit, or Figma, youโll find yourself out of luck.
๐ฐ How to Journal Like a Stoic Philosopher - The Daily Stoic
Thereโs a great book called "The Notebook" that I read recently by Roland Allen.
January 23
๐ฅ Dua Lipa in Conversation With Ocean Vuong, Author of on Earth We Are Briefly Gorgeous
Look, we shouldn't be here; we made it here. We already won, so whatever you make of your life, if you try hard enough, that's the whipped cream. It's just extra. Like, right now, Iโm in the whipped cream of my life. I've been lucky to be living in it the past 10 years. I'm living in the whipped cream right, because that was not expected of me. I did not have a path to it. I was not handed an education, money, none of that.
๐ฐ Photo Insider: A Thing of Beauty Is a Joy Forever - Cody Mitchell
why are we taking photos in the first place? โ For me the answer is simple: to preserve moments of my life as a gift to my future self.
What our everyday life actually looks like. The things we take for granted that we never think to photograph. โ The way the light filters in through your window when the sun is low. Your pet napping in their favorite spot. Your parents enjoying their favorite activity. The mug you drink from every morning. The cozy clutter of your workspace. Your reflection in the mirror, just as you are today.
One way to know that an industry is probably about to go into decline is to look at the most popular industry out of amongst second-year business school students. Why is that? Because they're going, typically, second-year business school students are rearview-looking, rearview-mirror and that is they look at what's hot now. Well, okay, when something's hot now, that means it's probably peaked and may eventually go into its own cyclical decline.
๐ฐ How to Stay Relevant and Have More Friends by
levelling-up from creator to curator is, I think, a fantastic opportunity for artists.
๐ฐ 22 Happiness Hacks I Wish I Knew at 22 by Sahil Bloom
Itโs a bad trade to be special rather than happy. Thatโs what people are doing when they choose the fourteenth hour of work before the first hour with their children. Remember that.
Record a video interview with your parents. Ask them questions and have them tell stories about their childhoods, adventures, hopes, dreams, and fears. Our time with them is finite, but we often fail to recognize that until itโs too late.
Tell your partner one thing you appreciate about them daily. This is the single most important piece of relationship advice I have ever received. Lack of appreciation is where loving relationships go to die. Vocalize appreciation daily and watch your relationship flourish across the seasons of your life.
Approach disagreements with your partner not as a โmeโ but as a โwe.โ "Me" creates an adversarial dynamic. "We" creates a collaborative one. If you view disagreements as an opportunity to collaborate to address the shared problem, you will find more success and harmony.
When it comes to love, expand your time horizon. A question I often ask myself: How would I show up in this relationship if I knew I was going to be around this person for the next 50 years? It strips away any short-term tendencies and reminds you that an investment in your relationships compounds just as well as any financial investment.
When someone is going through hell, saying, โIโm with you,โ is the most powerful thing you can do. Advice, perspectives, or offers to help are minimally impactful. The notion that someone is with you is 10x more powerful. Be the โDarkest Hour Friendโ to those you love.
The best things in life dance on a razor's edge. You can't have the joy of the good without exposing yourself to the pain of the bad. That's the beauty of life.
Stop trying to be interesting and focus on being interested. Interested people give their deep attention to something to learn more about it. They open up to the world; they ask great questions and observe. Being interested is how you become interesting.
Treat fighting like exercise. It will be painful, sure, but you shouldnโt be unhappy about doing it regularly, because it makes you strongerโยญespecially if you do it in a spirit of growth, not contempt.
๐ฐ Itโs About the Promises You Make to Yourself - Daily Stoic
great biographies of Theodore Roosevelt (two favorites are The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt and Mornings on Horseback)
๐ฐ Art With Agenda by
On the bus ride to and from the studio, I have been reading John Bergerโs Ways of Seeing. It is not simply a book about how to look at art, but about the nature of art-history and business, and also the business of art-history. A couple of years ago, I enjoyed Walter Benjaminโs The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, and there are strong resonances between these two works that are otherwise 36 years apart.
๐ฐ No, I Don't Want to Hop on a Call by
You canโt escape the work of thinking. As a knowledge worker, you are paid for your good judgment.
January 22
๐ง Exploring the Meaning of Work - Not Overthinking with Ali Abdaal and Taimur Abdaal
Living off of interest
Derek Sivers: Have you done that thing where if you see that if you took your savings and just stuck it into those conservative ETF funds, it will just earn you on average 8% per year. Is that enough to live on?
Ali: No, not quite. And that's where the money thing still comes in. Because it's not that sort of official freedom number where I really don't care about money. It's at the level where I'm like, okay, I would live a pretty reasonable life in a world where I would purely living off the investments. But it's not the life I would want to live, essentially. So there is still some kind of, I want to make some money component.
Future you will look back at current you and be like โyouโre just getting startedโ
So I like this idea that future Ali in 20 years will look back and see your current self at age 30 as like just barely getting started. You know, sometimes when you're surrounded by YouTube success, it can feel like I've arrived. I'm the man. All these people are so happy. And it's interesting to think of a bigger picture world where current you is actually very small. And what would that be? It could be intellectually. It could be financial. It could be, I don't know, spiritually, or some way where the current you is just barely getting started. Do you ever think in those terms?
Chris Anderson, who is the owner, as far as I know, of Ted, was already a huge success in magazines. I think he ran or owned a couple magazines that were like some kind of like entrepreneur small business magazine. I don't know somebody I'm just doing this off the top of my head. Somebody else can find the actual facts. But I believe that it's like he sold the magazine for a ton of money, felt like a huge success and was also feeling this feeling of what's next. And at the time, the TED conference was just a private little once a year event in California that was not televised. And he had this vision like, hmm, hold on, I think I can maybe take this conference and grow it much, much, much bigger. And so it's like his, what previously had seemed like a giant success in running and selling the magazines now was just like his entry ticket to do the much bigger thing
Derek Sivers: All of my heroes currently are these writer, speaker, thinker, author type people. People like Malcolm Gladwell, Seth Godin, I don't know, Sam Harris, Oliver Berkman. These are my heroes right now. I was like, what if I could be one of them?
A good goal is one that makes you take action in the current momt
The definition of a good goal is not one that sounds impressive to other people. A good goal is only one that makes you take action in the current moment. If an idea comes to mind and you don't say, yeah, that'd be nice, but you say, oh yes, oh my God, right now, here's what I'm going to do to make this happen. That to me is a good goal.
Whatโs the definition of โThrowing awayโ / thinking too small?
Throwing away is actually the business coasting and generating a million a year. And you assuming that whatever you do next won't really make any money, even though it probably will.
Maybe sticking with what you know is thinking too small.
Brilliant minds are expected to constantly change and explore, avoiding stagnation.
You expect any artist who's got a brilliant mind is supposed to keep changing and keep exploring and not just stay on the same rut. So, yeah, you've got a bright mind. You're not the rut type.
Jamie [Dimon]'s super smart, super insightful, and has no fucking idea like the rest of us.
๐ฅ Brain Tumor Survivor Simone Giertz Eats Her Last Meal
Form factor of the fork? I donโt think they should exist at all. And in fact, they didnโt exist, as you probably know, they didnโt exist in this form until really the mid 18th century and before that they were seen as like an effeminate Italian affectation. The Roman Catholic Church actually banned the use of forks in England for hundreds of years. And it was only thanks to Catherine de Medici, who helped actually codify a lot of different things, but who brought forks into the modern table setting.
January 21
๐ง LA Fires, Trump Trades, TikTok, and Legacy Mediaโs Fate - Prof G Markets
Andrew Ross Sorkin: I still think that journalism is the core of everything I do. Interviewing people, talking to people, reporting into the night, working the phones last night on the TikTok story and trying to talk to insiders who are involved. I still think that is, for me, the coin of the realm. And that's where I learn the most. And that ultimately infuses any kind of side project, whether it be a book or a TV show or this or that. So, you know, to me, that is always in my career, I think going to be the core. You a decade ago that, you know, the entertainment space seemed like that's where the riches of the business might be because, you know, folks who were producing movies or television Shows, you know, there was back end points and this and that and all sorts of things. I don't know whether I think given streaming and just what's happened to that whole business, I'm not sure economically that that is, you know, that Jerry Seinfeld, they say is, you Know, made a billion dollars or whatever it is. I don't think that can be accomplished in the same way that it used to be. I think potentially that the news business could actually, especially with AI, I know everybody's scared of AI in the news business, and maybe it'll accrue only to a sort of a winners And losers cast. But I actually do think that there's still huge opportunity in journalism, especially because of this trust question. Because the trust question exists, I think it represents an opportunity from a business perspective and hopefully from a national discourse one, too.
๐ง Sorelle Amore Shares 3 Rules for Life - Three Rules with Matt DโAvella
You have to allow your ego to be damaged a little bit when you see people around you that are just killing it at life. And they've got everything that you want. You want that you're jealous but if you just acknowledge that it's just not your time right now
๐ง TikTok's Future, Big Tech at Trump's Inauguration, and Biden's Final Warning - Pivot
My analyst, Mia Silverio, reminded me that nuclear can't really be online. They can't handle a third of the incremental demand by like 2050 because there's latency in building a nuclear power plant. She said it's going to be all about liquid natural gas. We get a lot of LNG from Canada.
๐ฐ A Lesson From Inglorious Basterds, Babe Ruth, a Visual From Janis Ozolins - Cam Houser
Learn the language of your target industry.
Want to kill your chances of closing a major deal before you even start? Just use the wrong industry terminology. It's like that famous scene in Inglourious Basterds, where an undercover operative gives himself away by ordering three drinks. He holds up his index, middle, and ring fingersโwhile a true German would have used his thumb, index, and middle fingers, a uniquely German cultural gesture. That tiny detail ignites a bloodbath in the tavern.
Walk into an insurance company and talk about "users" instead of "lives," and you might as well be walking yourself out the door. Tell a banker something increased by "0.25 percent" instead of "25 basis points," and watch their interest in you evaporate. In multifamily real estate, referring to "units" instead of "doors" tells everyone at the table you're not someone they want to do business with.
๐ฐ 3 Years Ago, I Quit My Consulting Job by
I also mainly stuck to Canva because Photoshop felt overwhelming. I felt a bit like a fraud because I knew Photoshop was for โrealโ designers, but Canva was easier.
๐ง Put Your Phone Away: Yondr CEO on the Philosophy Behind Phone-Free Spaces - On with Kara Swisher
I fell down a rabbit hole years before reading people like Kierkegaard and Heidegger and a lot of people who had been examining the question of technology for hundreds of years.
Kara: I read all those same people, including Camus and Sartre and everybody else.
The closest analog I had in my mind was kind of like creating a system of national parks inside a society, you know, recognizing that there are no more frontiers. You've read the postmodernists and you get that. So how are we going to carve out these spaces that allow people to experience life temporarily kind of outside the pull and tug of, you know, our modern lifestyles.
Young kids are becoming information retrieval machines, and that's not critical thinking. And no matter where we think we're going as a society.
Paul Virilio, he's my favorite of these philosophers that you should read him. He's a French philosopher. He said, the ideals of technological culture remain underdeveloped and therefore outside the popular culture and the practical ideals of democracy. This is also why society as a whole has no control over technological developments. And this is why one of the gravest threats to democracy, it's one of the gravest threats to democracy in the near future. It is then imperative to develop a democratic technological culture. And he predicted in a 1994 interview that virtuality will destroy reality, which was an astonishing thing.
When I moved to San Francisco, I got to know Hubert Dreyfus, who was one of the original critics of artificial intelligence. And then I actually got to know Albert Borgman, who is a philosopher of technology in Montana, like a Heidegger protege. These people, like you said, people have been thinking about this for a while.
If you think about the things you absolutely enjoy doing most in your life, if you then apply the idea of doing it faster, quicker, easier, cheaper, does that concept even make sense? And almost invariably, the answer is no, because those things are not enhanced by that process. And I think those things are what ground people and root them in their life
January 20
๐ฐ How I Give High-Quality Feedback Quickly by
As a founder, I chose to invest heavily in feedbackโabout 15 hours per week, which comes out to 3 hours/day.
Here are four ways to make your feedback both high-quality AND fast.
1. Give feedback on one thing that will make the biggest difference.
Give feedback on the 20% of work output that will make the biggest impact.
2. Donโt jump straight into line edits.
Hereโs why: if you start with line edits, you might trim entire paragraphs laterโso your line edits are wasted. Take a step back to see if the underlying premise and strategy itself might be off-base.
Notice how I didn't give line edits. I gave one round of high-level feedback first, which can take as little as 5 minutes. This is better for me because it saves time. Itโs better for my direct report because they get the right level of feedback at the right time.
3. You donโt need to write out all your feedback.
Giving written feedback is giving feedback on hard mode. It might take 30 minutes to write coherently what you can say in 3 minutes out loud.
Fun fact: many Maven employees are in the top 10-15% of Loom users. One employee is in the top 3% of Loom users. We have an intentionally asynchronous company culture, so tools like this are super helpful for sharing high-fidelity feedback while allowing recipients to review when it's convenient for them.
๐ฐ Gouache Car Ads From the 1960s by
Fitzpatrick said: โIโve always maintained that a picture of a car moving doesnโt mean a thing. They all move. You have to convey something about the car psychologically. Itโs all about image. Thatโs the reason people buy cars.โ
Fitz and Van were so successful that their car ads changed the fortunes of major car companies in the 1950s and '60s.
Fitz knew that what interested potential customers was a ticket to the "good life," with romantic possibilities, affluent leisure, and no kids.
One cardinal rule was never to have anyone looking at or admiring the car.
Getting a white car to look shiny was the hardest challenge because you're already starting at white. They found it worked best to park the car in shadow, and that's what they did for the 1968 Bonneville. To make sure it was clear that the car's surface color appeared white, they had just a couple spots of light on the front.
These observations come from the book by Rob Keil called Art Fitzpatrick & Van Kaufman: Masters of the Art of Automobile Advertising. Keil assembled the book over more than a decade of exhaustive research, which included meeting and talking with the the artists and their descendants. The book is full of technical insights and biographical details and fine reproductions, mostly taken from the rare original paintings that have survived.
๐ฐ You Won't Grind Your Way to Aliveness by
Despite the fact that the days I spent grinding away all blurred together, I couldnโt shake the notion that meaningful work came above all else.
After a career of early morning meetings, I became fiercely protective of my mornings. When I finally made my schedule my own, I found it deeply nourishing to reserve my mornings for meditating, journaling, and writing. I basked in the morning stillness. Slowly, I pushed my โmorningโ hours further and further into the day. I became militant about no โdistractionsโ until early afternoon. The restrictions I once needed to recover from having no time to myself expanded to constrain the rest of my day. What was meant to create space and flow became rigid and stifling.
The irony of optimizing our lives is that the nature of optimization is rooted in a lack of self-trust.
๐ฐ Why I Love to Judge You by
we all judge. The instinct to mock someone who strays from the lines of nonconformity is practically in our DNA. But if thereโs one thing Iโve learned the past couple of years, nobody judges you quite as harshly as the person upset that you permitted yourself to do something theyโve denied themselves.
Those Who Judge Arenโt in The Arena
๐ฐ The Santa Anas by Joan Didion
To live with the Santa Ana is to accept, consciously or unconsciously, a deeply mechanistic view of human behavior.
Los Angeles weather is the weather of catastrophe, of apocalypse, and, just as the reliably long and bitter winters of New England determine the way life is lived there, so the violence and the unpredictability of the Santa Ana affect the entire quality of life in Los Angeles, accentuate its impermanence, its unreliability. The winds shows us how close to the edge we are.
๐ฐ ๐ My Recommended Reading List for 2025 by Ali Abdaal
โจ๏ธ Productivity
โAtomic Habits by James Clear - Transform your life with tiny changes in behaviour, starting now
โGetting Things Done by David Allen - The Art of Stress-free Productivity
Make Time by Jake Knapp and John Zeratsky - How to focus on what matters every day
The 4-Hour Work Week by Tim Ferriss - Escape the 9-5, Live Anywhere and Join the New Rich
โThe Motivation Myth by Jeff Haden - How High Achievers Really Set Themselves Up to Win
๐จ Creativity
Crush It! by Gary Vaynerchuck - Why NOW Is the Time to Cash In on Your Passion
โKeep Going by Austin Kleon - 10 Ways To Stay Creative In Good Times And Bad
โShow Your Work! by Austin Kleon - 10 Ways to Share Your Creativity and Get Discovered
โSteal Like An Artist by Austin Kleon - 10 Things Nobody Told You About Being Creative
โThe War of Art by Steven Pressfield - Break Through the Blocks and Win Your Inner Creative Battles
๐กEntrepreneurship
โAnything You Want by Derek Sivers - 40 Lessons for a New Kind of Entrepreneur
โOriginals by Adam Grant - How Non-conformists Change the World
โOverlap by Sean McCabe - Start a Business While Working a Full-Time Job
The E-Myth Revisited by Michael Gerber - Why Most Small Businesses Don't Work and What to Do About It
โThe Minimalist Entrepreneur by Sahil Lavingia - How Great Founders Do More with Less
โTraction by Gino Wickman - Get a Grip on Your Business
๐ฅ Marketing
โ1 Page Marketing Plan by Dib Allan - Get New Customers, Make More Money, And Stand out From The Crowd
โDifferentiate or Die by Jack Trout - Survival in Our Era of Killer Competition
โOversubscribed by Daniel Priestley - How to Get People Lining Up to Do Business with You
โPrimal Branding by Patrick Hanlon - Create Zealots for Your Brand, Your Company, and Your Future: Create Belief Systems that Attract Communities
โThe 22 Immutable Laws Of Marketing by Al Ries & Jack Troutโ
โThe Mindset Behind Crafting a Content Strategy by Gary Vee - How to Grow and Distribute Your Bandโs Social Media Content
โ๏ธ Storytelling
โJab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook by Gary Vaynurchuk - How to Tell Your Story in a Noisy Social World
โStoryworthy by Matthew Dicks - Engage, Teach, Persuade, and Change Your Life through the Power of Storytelling
๐ฐ If You Only Read a Few Books in 2025, Read These by Ryan Holiday
Walter Mosley: โIโm not saying that you have to be a reader to save your soul in the modern world. Iโm saying it helps.โ
2025 will be crazy and weird and tough. But probably not any more than the year 1925. Or the year 25 AD. That means there are lots of books, lots of ideas, lots of history that can help us with what lies aheadโฆbecause it will rhyme with what lies behind us.
Slow Productivity: The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout by Cal Newport
When Cal came on the podcast (watch here), we talked about this idea of Festina lenteโmake haste slowlyโthat is my philosophy for the most
The Choice: Embrace the Possible by Dr. Edith Eva Eger
Dr. Eger is a complete hero of mine. At 16-years-old, sheโs sent to Auschwitz. And how does this not break a person? How do they survive? How do they endure the unendurable? And how do they emerge from this, not just not broken, but cheerful and happy and of service to other people? The last thing Dr. Egerโs mother said to her before she was sent to the gas chambers was that very Stoic idea: even when we find ourselves in horrendous situations, we can always choose how we respond to them, who weโre going to be inside of them, what weโre going to hold onto inside of them.
Dr. Eger quotes Frankl, who she later studied under
Montaigne by Stefan Zweig
There are two kinds of biographies: Long ones which tell you every fact about the personโs life, and short ones which capture the personโs essence and the lessons of their life. This biography is a brilliant, urgent and important example of the latter. It is what I would call a moral biographyโthat is, a book that teaches you how to live through the story of another person.
Itโs the biography of a man who retreated from the chaos of 16th-century France to study himself, written by a man fleeing the chaos of 20th-century Europe.
The Years of Lyndon Johnson by Robert A. Caro โAs much as I love those short, moral biographies, there is nothing I love more than door-stopper biographies.
If you want to try one of those this year, start with Robert Caro. Just these four books alone could tie you up for the whole year, and that alone would be well spent. Itโs unquestionable to me that Caro is one of the greatest biographers to ever live. His intricate, complicated, sprawling investigation into Lyndon Johnson will change how you see power, ambition, politics, personality and justice.
power doesnโt only corrupt. Thatโs too simple. What power does is reveal
A Calendar of Wisdom: Daily Thoughts to Nourish the Soul, Written and Selected from the World's Sacred Texts by Leo Tolstoy
Tolstoy said that his most essential work was not his novels but his daily read, A Calendar of Wisdom. Before he wrote it, he dreamed of creating a book composed of โa wise thought for every day of the year, from the greatest philosophers of all times and all peopleโฆ Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, Lao-Tzu, Buddha, Pascal.โ As he wrote to his assistant, โI know that it gives one great inner force, calmness, and happiness to communicate with such great thinkersโฆ They tell us about what is most important for humanity, about the meaning of life and about virtue.โ
Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male Is Struggling, Why It Matters, and What to Do About It by Richard Reeves
Bright Shining: How Grace Changes Everything by Julia Baird โSo when I was in Australia, I sat down with Julia to talk about her new book, Bright Shining, which is all about the idea of grace (watch that episode here). We are wicked people living amongst wicked people, Seneca said, thatโs why we need to be patient with each other, why we need to forgive each other.
The Children by David Halberstam
It tells the story of the early days of the Civil Rights Movement from the perspective of the young activists who played pivotal roles in the struggle for racial equality and grew up to lead the movement.
Parting the Waters: America in the King Years 1954-63, Pillar of Fire: America in the King Years 1963-65, and At Canaan's Edge: America in the King Years 1965-68 by Taylor Branch โAnother long biography seriesโฆI was blown away by Taylor Branchโs epic three-part biography on Martin Luther King Jr. when I first read it back in 2020โit was truly life-changing for me.
Same as Ever: A Guide to What Never Changes by Morgan Housel
In a world that seems to change faster every year, this book reminds us of the things that stay the sameโand why they matter.
The 48 Laws of Power by Robert Greene โSpeaking of things that never changeโthere are some awful people and awful movements on the march around the world.
It Canโt Happen Here by Sinclair Lewis โOne of my reading rules is: If you want to understand current events, donโt rely on breaking news. Find a book about a similar event in the past. Itโs also true that fiction helps us understand the human heart and the events of history more than nonfiction can. This book will make you so uncomfortable youโll probably pick it up and put it down several times.
Address Unknown by Kathrine Kressmann Taylor โThis is another timely book to pick up this year. Itโs a short but important read about a series of letters between two business partners (one Jewish, one not) during the rise of Hitler in Germany.
I first read Address Unknown years ago, but I was reminded of it again when I read 84, Charing Cross Road by Helene Hanff last summer which is about a New York TV writer and a British bookseller exchanging letters in the aftermath of WWII. Read Address Unknown and then follow it up with 84, Charing Cross Road
The Expanding Circle by Peter Singer
โEven though Stoicism is a ruggedly individual philosophy, at the core of it is this idea of โthe circles of concern.โ Our first concern, the Stoics said, is ourselves. Then our family, our community, our country, our world, all living things. The work of philosophy is to draw these concerns inwardโto learn to care about as many people as possible, to do as much good as possible.
Atomic Habits by James Clear โ
A perennial favorite because it works. Itโs when things are chaotic and crazy, when the world feels like itโs falling apart, that we most need to develop good habits.
Bushido: The Samurai Code of Japan: With an Extensive Introduction and Notes by Alexander Bennett by Inazล Nitobe
โI canโt remember which subscriber emailed me about this book, but I really liked it. Written in 1905, Bushido: The Samurai Code of Japan was the first book written for a Western audience about the code of conduct that governed the lives of Japanโs ruling class.
How to Think Like Socrates: Ancient Philosophy as a Way of Life in the Modern World by Donald Robertson
โI remain as ever a big fan of Donald Robertson. His biography of Marcus Aurelius is one of the best books Iโve read and I loved his other book on Marcus Aurelius, How to Think Like a Roman Emperor.
Meditations by Marcus Aurelius
โThis will always be my ultimate book recommendation.
Pick 3-4 titles that have had a big impact on you in the past and commit to reading them again.
๐ฐ Making notebook maps by
this is just about kind of letting your subconscious take over
i've been thinking a lot about how left brain right brain stuff affects drawing there's a great book by betty edwards called drawing on the right side of the brain so you can see how this starts happening right like how you just kind of start letting your mind wander and there's something about having the list like broken out into space that all of a sudden you can start to like sort of see connections
๐ง Mel Robbins: Your Life-Changing โLET THEM!โ Tool for the New Year - We Can Do Hard Things
Life is very challenging and things are very overwhelming, there's only one thing to do. It's to remember who you are, that you are a supernova, that you are a force of light and good. And whenever the world feels dark, your only job is to glow.
You've got three things you can always control: 1. Your next thought 2. What you do (or don't do) 3. How you process your emotions in the moment. Those are the only cards you have to play in life.
Let people be who they are. It can improve relationships. It's an act of love to allow people, like Abby, to be themselves, even if their actions might seem embarrassing from another's perspective.
Transcript: If what is going to make Abby feel better is her helping, let her. 100%. And notice Glennon kind of rolled her eyes because it's embarrassing to Glennon and she doesn't think Abby should do that. But this is the thing about the let them theory. The more you let people be who they are, the better your relationships get. So true. It's actually an act of love to allow and let Abby be Abby.
People only change when the pain of staying the same outweighs the pain of changing. The anxiety spiral has to become more painful than the work required for growth.
Adults only change when they feel like changing. And until you get to a point in your life where the anxiety spiral is no longer achieving the result that you want, that it's more painful to stay in the anxiety than it is to do the work to Change, you'll never change.
Recognize situations or people that negatively impact you. Don't allow them to control your life. Prioritize your mental health and peace.
Transcript: You're an adult. You get to choose whether or not you live your life that way. And so when you say let them, you're just recognizing that there's a situation or a person that's impacting you negatively. And you're recognizing it and you're not going to allow it because you value your mental health and you value your state of calm and peace.
Before responding, consider how you'll respond. You can control whether you respond at all. Silence can't be misquoted, and if you leave a conversation, it's over.
Transcript: Whether or not I'm going to respond at all, because obviously your silence can't be misquoted. And if you remove yourself from a conversation, conversation's over.
Liz Gilbert is one of my best friends and she always says to me, honey, you're never stuck. You have a credit card and a driver's license. You are never stuck anywhere, Glennon.
When something doesn't feel right, remember you're an adult with agency. You can leave uncomfortable situations. You have the power to choose your responses, even if there are consequences.
All the work is about in each moment where I'm in, when something doesn't feel right, remembering that I am an adult with agency and I can actually put down the groceries and walk out. I can stand up at a table and leave. I can say, fuck off if I want, and then deal with the repercussions of that, that I am not five years old.
Adults aren't inherently emotionally matureโit's a learned skill. Since most parents weren't taught emotional regulation, they couldn't teach their children. It's the caregiver's job to help children learn to regulate their emotions.
I choose to go through life believing that every adult that I see is an eight-year trapped in a big body. Amanda Doyle Absolutely. Glennon Doyle Because being an adult and what that word means is that you actually are emotionally mature and nobody is. And the reason why nobody is is because our parents work. And it's a skill that you learn. You're not born emotionally mature. Children cannot regulate their emotions, which is why it is critical that if you're the caregiver or the teacher, that you understand that it's your job and responsibility to help A child regulate their emotions. And because our parents were never taught how to do it, we were never taught how to do it.
Empathy isn't just the ability to understand someone; it's the desire to step into their shoes and truly seek to understand their perspective.
You'll have more authority and power in a toxic system by being calm, loving, and grounded than by being the toxic person.
Giving people space to be themselves can create an environment where they're more open to changing and moving closer to you.
People generally do well when they have the capacity to. If someone isn't doing well, they're likely missing a skill.
People generally perform well when they're capable of doing so. This insight from psychologist Dr. Stuart Ablon emphasizes understanding and supporting individuals based on their abilities.
Someone struggling is already aware of their struggles and hard on themselves. Additional concern or worry from others adds more weight and evidence of their perceived failure.
Your pressure or your desire for somebody to change actually is more judgment. And somebody who's struggling is so hard on themselves. And so people know when they need to lose weight. People know when their drinking's a problem. People know when they're not doing so well at work. People know when they're hitting the snooze button six, seven times in a morning, and God, they wish they could get up and have one of those morning routines that make people seem very Happy. People know when their depression is consuming them. And if you really think about what I'm saying, that somebody who's struggling knows it and they're in a battle with themselves. And the second that they feel now your concern and your worry, now this is even more weight and more evidence that they're failing at something that they wish they could succeed at.
We're wired to avoid difficulty. Pressuring someone makes you the 'hard' thing they avoid, so they shut down and move away.
Transcript: We are naturally wired to move toward anything that feels good and easy. That is how the brain is wired. And we are also wired to move away from anything that feels hard. And so if you start pressuring somebody, if you're now walking up the stairs to see if they're off the video games and they're actually working on their homework, do you feel like the Kind of person that's easy and fun or very hard? Hard. So they shut down and move away from you.
When you hear something you don't want to hear or disagree with, the part of your brain that absorbs new info shuts down. That's why trigger warnings and scary pics on cigarette packs are ineffective.
If somebody is telling you something you don't want to hear, or if somebody is saying something that you disagree with, the part of the brain that actually absorbs new information turns Off. This is why trigger warnings don't work. This is why the scary photos on cigarette packages don't work, because literally the part of the brain that processes that information, not working.
Sometimes, a certain degree of pain is necessary for people to want to improve themselves.
Back off and give people space to change. They're more likely to change if they feel it's their own idea, not driven by pressure or judgment.
To encourage behavior change in others, model the desired behavior yourself and make it appear enjoyable.
Disappointment when someone doesn't show up, whether it's business or personal, can be a sign that they love you. It shows they want you to feel disappointment, as opposed to apathy or relief.
Isn't disappointment when somebody doesn't show up, whether it's at a business meeting or at a family thing, a beautiful thing, it's a sign that they love you? Isn't that what you want people to feel? What's the alternative? Thank God that bitch isn't coming.
Love is consideration (keeping someone in mind, like using their preferred milk) and admiration (seeing admirable qualities in someone, even if you disagree with other aspects). Families teach us how to love even when there's conflict, allowing others to have their emotions honors their ability to process them.
Love, in my definition, is two things. It's consideration and it's admiration. And consideration just means you have someone in mind. Making somebody a cup of coffee and using the oat milk is an act of love because you are considering them. Admiration is the ability to look at somebody and see something about them that you admire. And you might admire their loyalty to family and you hate their political opinions. You might admire their commitment to public service, but you hate their tone of voice. The reason why we have families is to teach you how to love somebody you hate at times. That's really what it's about. And learning how to hold space that two things can be true. Your parents can be disappointed that you're not coming home. Your kids can be disappointed that you can't make it to the game this weekend. Let them be disappointed. Because when you let somebody have their emotions, you're actually showing them that you believe in their ability and strength to process those emotions. And you're honoring their experience without needing to step in and change it. And then you go to the let me part. Let me decide what I'm going to do.
Don't change your plans out of guilt. Do it because it makes *you* feel good. When you prioritize your own feelings, you retain your power instead of giving it away to others.
Do not change your plans because of guilt. Change your plans because it makes you feel good about you. If I'm going to change my plans, it's not so that my parents think I'm a good daughter. It's so that I think I am. Yes. And what happens when you do that is that you hold on to your power. Instead of turning your parents or your adult kids or whomever into the villain
Love means letting others grow and change at their own pace.
Constantly rescuing people by shielding them from consequences stunts their maturity. It prevents them from learning from life's lessons. Instead of rescuing, offer support.
Transcript When you constantly allow someone to avoid the natural consequences of their actions or inactions, whether it's because you keep paying for their life or you cover for them by lying About where they were, which is, you know, and they can't make it to work when they're actually hung over and they were out with their friends last night. You are delaying somebody's maturity. And you are also allowing them to avoid one of the most important teachers in their life, which is life and the consequences of either making a decision or not. And every time you do that, you're basically teaching somebody you're not capable and you need to be rescued. And people don't need to be rescued. They need support.
Instead of directly intervening, focus on creating a supportive environment where others can succeed on their own. Facilitate their growth by setting the stage for them to achieve their goals.
How do I create an environment for somebody to do better? Not that I'm jumping on the field and running the ball down the field, but if I can create an environment where they could actually catch the ball and run down the field themselves, what Does that look like? And this is deeply personal. This is deeply personal.
You can't want someone's healing more than they do, and you can't do the work for them. But you can create a supportive environment. Think about what they might need. Open the curtains for sunlight, play uplifting music, pick them up for activities so they're more likely to go. These small things can make a difference.
If you've got somebody that's struggling with profound depression, on one hand, you do have to let them because you can't want someone's healing more than they do. And you can't do the work for them, but you can create an environment where it's easier. You know, you can like have an agreement that you're going to walk in in the morning and pull open the curtains so the sunlight comes in. You can have music playing in the house so that their spirits are lifted. You can pick up your friend on the way to the yoga class instead of meeting them there so that you know that they'll come. These are ways to create an environment where somebody can get better. And you start doing that by sitting down and saying, how do you feel about this? And a lot of people don't know what they need, but you can think about what are things I can do.
๐ฐ A Lifetime of Reading Taught Min Jin Lee How to Write About Her Immigrant World via the New York Times
I still read promiscuously โ across genres, fields and media. However, I remain vulnerable to a certain kind of book, whatever its cultural origin, that embodies the ethos of American rugged individualism and the Korean quest for knowledge.
January 19
๐ฐ How to Find Your Competitive Edge by
The first step in finding your competitive edge is to understand which slices make up your generalist pie. To do this, you must mine your past. I suggest turning on do not disturb, grabbing a cuppa and writing your career story from first gig to present day. Answer the following questions:
Where did you work?
What industries have you been in?
What did you do?
What were your responsibilities?
What results did you deliver?
What did you learn?
What did people say you were good at? Within your stream-of-consciousness ramblings, try to identify your specific capabilities, experiences, projects and areas of expertise.
Hot tip: feed your career story into ChatGPT, ask it to identify your slices and see what comes back.
๐ฐ โ๏ธ 4 Surprising Things I Learned From Writing My Book by Ali Abdaal
Book - The Underachieverโs Manifesto: The Guide to Accomplishing Little and Feeling Great by Ray Bennett. A very short, quite funny read. Hereโs the ending of the introductory chapter: In these pages youโll learn how to live life to the minimum and love itโฆ When you picked up this book, maybe you were feeling a little guilty about your halfhearted effort at work; or perhaps youโve given up on an exercise regimen because you just canโt pound the pavement like you did in high school. You feel like you should be doing more, or doing something better, or, more likely, doing it all better. But youโll soon get over that and enjoy the contentment that results from giving less than your very best. Itโs all about the right balance, the right amount of effort, which is probably a lot less than youโve been led to believe. In our overachieving society, a little underachievement is the necessary corrective. So relax, read this book, and put your potential back in the lockbox. Turn everything down a notch. Lower the bar. Discover the laziness that has so far eluded you. No matter who you are, thereโs something youโre trying too hard at.
๐ฐ The Hollywood Slog That Led Adam Scott to โSeveranceโ by Rachel Syme of The New Yorker
One morning, while walking into work, Erickson had a thought: What if I could skip ahead to the end of the day, and my work would magically be done? During his lunch breaks, he began turning this idea into a pilot for a high-concept workplace thriller called โSeverance.โ The result was part โThe Office,โ part โEternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.โ A sinister corporation called Lumon Industries has invented a microchip brain implant that can bisect a personโs consciousness into an โinnieโ and an โoutieโโan office self and a home self.
๐ฐ Bull Encounter by
I made this drawing on February 14, 1975 when I was sixteen. Back in those days I would take a bottle of ink and a set of dip pens around with me in a canvas backpack. I had no art teachers and no one told me that sketching with dip pens wasnโt the best idea.
๐ฐ The Great Creator Reset by
While the majority of news content creators across the social media landscape are conservative men, a recent study found that TikTok is the only platform where left-leaning news influencers outnumber right-leaning ones. TikTok also has more than double the concentration of news content creators who identify as LGBTQ+ or advocate for LGBTQ+ rights, and 73% of teens who identify as Democrats or lean left use TikTok, compared to 52% of teens who identify as Republican, according to Pew Research.
January 18
๐ฐ What Vision Boarding Taught Me About Self-Sabotage & the Power of Being Unrealistic by Izzy Sealey
avoiding owning our big dreams makes success less likely.
The very process challenges all these limiting beliefs that tell us to hold ourselves back. That hesitation to include something that you actually really want on your board? Thatโs a sign youโve hit a mental roadblock, and maybe just discovered one of those hidden, self-sabotaging thoughts that try to limit us by telling us weโre not good enough, smart enough, or deserving enough. Maybe ask yourself, where is this resistance coming from?
๐ง Conversation With Mel Robbins โ The โLet Them Theoryโ and How It Can Change Your Life - Prof G Pod
You write about how to stop wasting energy on what you can't control and start focusing on what truly matters. It feels a little stoic.
The reason why the let them theory and these two words, let them, and then the second part is let me, and that's the more important part, the let me part, the reason why this is taken off Is that it doesn't stand on its own. Like, it has extraordinary roots in stoicism, detachment theory, radical acceptance, Buddhism, all these therapeutic modalities.
I simply put out a reel on social media and it was the single most viral thing I've ever put out. It's like 15 million views in 24 hours. And so then I naturally just did a podcast episode about it. And so I did one podcast episode in late 2023, and it became the fifth most shared episode on all of Apple for the entire year. And that was with like a runway of four months. And so when you have that much data and feedback from the world that something hits, I then turned it into a research project.
You can only control three things: 1. Your thoughts about something. 2. Your actions (or inactions) in response to it. 3. How you process the resulting emotions.
Transcript: Mel Robbins There's three things in life, only three things you can ever control. That's it. Number one, you can control what you think about something. Number two, you can control what you do or don't do in response to it. And we forget that we always have control because we get to choose what we do or don't do. And number three, you get to choose how you're going to process the emotions that rise up. Are the emotions going to run you over and cause you to rage text or scream at people or withdraw? Or are you going to let the emotions rise and fall and process them in a way that's responsible?
Responsibility is just the ability to respond.
Let them allowed me to detach from things I can't control, which then protects my time and energy. And so I'm no longer feeling drained by life because I'm letting people be who they are and letting them be who they're not and recognizing my power is not in managing them. My power is in managing me. And then when I say, let me, I'm cueing myself to the truth about life and relationships. And that's that you always are in control and you always have the power.
It's a beautiful thing to want something more for someone else. It's a wonderful way to love somebody, to see their potential, and to be concerned that they're not reaching it or they're sabotaging their happiness or their health or they're dating Some loser that treats them like garbage. Wanting more for the people that you care about isn't the problem.
It's this approach where you're with them instead of at them. (Time 0:21:17)
You can't change people, but you can influence them. If you're in a standoff with someone (e.g., about their weight, grades, job, finances, mental health), use the ABC loop: Apologize, then ask open-ended questions.
Robbins's example: After nagging her son and realizing it wasn't working, she apologized for being a nag and promised to stop.
Transcript: Mel Robbins You can never change another person. But I never said you couldn't influence them. And so the ABC loop summarizes all of this incredible research from all these super smart people. And here's what you're going to do. If you're in a standoff with somebody about their weight or their grades or their job or their finances or whatever it may be, or their mental health, start with A. Apologize and then ask open-ended questions. And if you really stop and think about it, when I stop and think about the situation with our son, I had been nagging this kid forever. Hadn't worked. Hadn't motivated him. But I continued to do it. And so when I finally apologized, dude, I'm really sorry. It must be a giant pain in the ass to have me constantly nagging you. I'm really sorry about that. I'm going to stop doing that.
Here's the most important thing. It doesn't matter what they say, Scott. Like Oakley was like, fine, and shrugged his shoulders. And then you just say, okay, well, what's fine about it, hon? And it doesn't matter what he says. He might be like, I don't know. And then you're going to drop the really big question. This comes from Dr. Abiland's research. You just say, well, have you thought about what you might want to do about it? Now, have you noticed there's zero pressure there? Have you thought about what you might want to do about it? Now, this is what Dr. Abilene calls the with them approach.
After you've expressed your opinion ('A'), back off for 3-6 months ('B'). People need to feel in control and like change is their own idea. Then model the change (โCโ).
Transcript: Mel Robbins And then you're going to move to B, which is back off. You've got to back off for three to six months. Because again, come back to control, Scott. For anybody to want to change, they have to feel like it's their idea. Then the final thing is C, which is you got to model the change.
Tell them you're just proud of them. So proud of you. I know this isn't easy. I'm really proud of you. Because that affirms their agency over themselves and their ability to change on their own.
There is a corresponding level of pain that is required in a human being's life to organize the internal drive and motivation to say, enough. I don't know how I'm going to change. I just know that the way that I'm living my life is so painful that I got to do something.
Number one, try to never forget who you married. Because they're in there. Like, I think we see the good in somebody, and we know there's good intent, and then your relationship becomes a death by a thousand cuts of things that build up that shield you from recognizing That that person is still in there.
If you think about your relationship like a seesaw, right, on a playground, there are going to be times where one of you is up, the other is down, times when you're up, the other one's down, And then lots of times where you're in balance. And the simple secret is don't get off the seesaw.
In a relationship, your behavior has an impact on other people. And that might not be your intention to impact somebody that way. But if a person that you care about comes to you and explains that your behavior is impacting them a certain way, you get to choose whether you're going to clean that up or not.
What tips and insights would you have for other entrepreneurs and creators?
Number one, being good on the mic is the cost of entry.
Half of my episodes are solos, no interviews, and they are the most successful by far. And here's the huge tip that I will give you. Every business and every podcast is one-to You will never hear me say the word us. You will never hear me name my audience as some big community. I am only ever talking to one person. They are in their car or they are in their home or they are taking me on a walk. And the fact that a human being has not passing time, Scott, but they have chosen to make time to spend with me. I take that as one of the deepest and most important privileges in the world.
๐ฐ A Relationship Cheat Code, How to Live Longer, & More by Sahil Bloom
โDo you want to be Helped, Heard, or Hugged?โ
Helped: Deconstruct the problem and identify solutions.
Heard: Listen intently and allow the other person to vent.
Hugged: Provide comforting touch.
This Yale University study found that people who read books had a 20% reduction in all-cause mortality vs. non-book readers, even when controlling for factors such as education, wealth, marital status, and more. The researchers proposed that the act of reading books created a cognitive engagement that was a beneficial to healthy aging and survival.
The Pygmalion Effect says that we rise to the level of expectations that people have for us.
๐ฐ Photo Insider: The Power of Rating by Cody Mitchell
Hereโs my super simple rating method.
โญโญโญโญโญ - Portfolio worthy
โญโญโญโญ - Great. Worth Sharing
โญโญโญ - Good, but probably wonโt post publicly. Personal photos
โญโญ - Keeping for memoryโs sake, but not a particularly good photo
โญ - Reject. Bad. Delete these
The keyboard shortcut to do this in Lightroom is literally just the number of stars. For example, press โ5โ if you want to rate the image โญโญโญโญโญ, press โ1โ if you want to rate it โญ.
January 17
๐ฐ Elle by
Victor Hugo. His work is philosophical but also lyrical, and wow those characters and storylines. Les Miserables truly has everything. Also I relate to Jean Valjean.
Imagine this writer was standing right in front of you and you can ask one question, what would you ask? I'm not sure he could tell me anything relevant to today, but I'd love to be a fly on the wall during his office hour sessions every afternoon. Did people really just stop by his house in the afternoons to talk to the author?
๐ฐ Knock, Knock, Knock by
The hardest part of this journey is getting from $0 to your first $100,000. During this phase, you have to crack the code to get traction. You likely have multiple small pivots. You go through ups and downs.
๐ฐ Mark Blames Sheryl by Casey Newton
Mr. Zuckerberg blamed his former chief operating officer, Sheryl Sandberg, for an inclusivity initiative at Facebook that encouraged employeesโ self-expression in the workplace, according to one of the people with knowledge of the meeting.
๐ฅ 9 Years of Photography Knowledge in 15 Minutes by Cody Mitchell
What makes one piece of art one photograph more nutritious than any other the nutrient value of any piece of art is directly tied to the amount that that piece of work speaks to you
The human hand is incapable of making a perfect copy start copying what you love copy copy copy copy at the end of the copy you will find yourself. - Yoshi Yamamoto
Photography is basically just capturing the way we see the world around us
What is something here I've never actually looked at?
How would I have to look at the world differently to shoot something like this?
Deliberate practice - I wasn't just walking around with the intention of around and finding out I was going out with the intention to apply what I had learned to try and take the best images I could.
Let's say I come upon a scene that strikes my eye what beginner Cody would have done is he would have just snapped a photo of it and moved on but in order to improve I needed to be a bit more thoughtful than that now I wouldn't just stare at the scene and think hm what is the best way to photograph this no I I'd start an experiment I'd Wander over here and shoot an angle I'd try an angle over here I'd try one zoomed in try one zoomed out a little bit I what if I brought a little bit more of the foreground in what if I made it more about the background and then after I shot a few options I'd take a moment to review and see which one struck me the most the key here is allowing yourself be free of judgment while you're shooting don't get caught up thinking is this good or not just try different compositions try different things and then take a moment to evaluate how you did obviously this works better on a digital camera and not so great on a film camera so when shooting film if you want to do this exercise I recommend using a viewfinder app on your phone this app in particular allows you to put in your camera and your focal length and then you can experiment with different compositions on your phone before you actually commit one of your film exposures to it then I'd get the shot move on
App: Mark II Artist's Viewfinder
January 16
Moons that have lined up
Okay, Lyle from California. First, I want you to do the following. I want you to take pause and realize that at the age of 28, at the age of 28, you're in the 98th, somewhere between the 98th and the 99th percentile of income earning households. My brother, you are killing it. So I hope you take the time as I did not do and have not done until I was in my 40s and 50s to register your blessings and your achievements and not only feel good about yourself, but realize Just how incredibly fortunate you must be to be in that position about how many moons have lined up
To be an effective manager:
1. Demonstrate excellence.
2. Hold people accountable: Be a player-coach, showing them how to improve.
3. Demonstrate empathy: Learn what matters to your team and align your actions accordingly.
๐ง The DOJโs Landlord Lawsuit + Can Trump Buy Greenland? - Prof G Markets
The average investor, when they go stock picking, they will actually spend less time deciding which stock to buy than they will on deciding which clothes to buy when they go online shopping.
January 15
๐ง Zuck's Masculine Energy, Bannon vs. Musk, and Wildfires Misinformation - Pivot Pod
Masculine traits
Scott Galloway: The thing that makes it true masculinity is being around, surrounded by smart people who create nuance, who create concern, who create care, and who create nurturing, usually women. The most masculine men in the world had very strong feminine influence. The most masculine men in the world have really wonderful relationships with their mother.
Feminine energy is protective
Kara Swisher: I think feminine energy is protective, too. Like, I can't think of a stronger energy than a mother's energy, for example. I would kill people. I'd fucking kill them.
The 1989 Film Always
Kara Swisher: There's a movie that you will like, Scott. It's called Always, and it's with Richard Dreyfuss and Holly Hunter, along with Audrey Hepburn. And it's a 1989 film about an aerial firefighter who risks his life in fighting forest fires. That's a true sign. You should watch it. He does not make it, but it's all about that. And it's a wonderful movie. John Goodman's in it. I think you need to watch that tonight if you can. It's called Always 1989. I love this movie. It's a wonderful movie. And it's about just this topic. And there's a lot of technical stuff in it about aerial firefighting, which is really incredibly hard, astonishingly risk taking and for the service of others, as you said.
๐ฐ What We Lose When We Let AI Hold the Pen by
Outsourcing writing from our lives wonโt just make us poorer writers. It will make us worse thinkers.
๐ฐ Real Life by
Real life is here and now. Or it's nowhere at all.
Real life is all the hours writing in your journal and long meandering walks and time spent reading novels and poetry and dead people's diaries.
real life does *not* happen on a screen. It's nowhere to be found on an Instagram page or YouTube video or Twitter feed. Your real life is here, in this body, this skin.
Real life is full of friction and imaginary fears and envisioned futures. Everything feels half-complete, there are so many things you are behind on, so much more you want to do. Miles to go. I'm right there with you.
๐ฐ An Honest Review of My 4th Year as a Freelance Writer by
Instead of pushing yourself until you feel dead inside, try not to exceed an 80% limit. Itโs more sustainable in the long run.
When you operate from a place of confidence and self-respect, it radiates through every part of your business. Case in point: I kindly told Every I donโt do unpaid test assignments. Their response? โWeโre happy to pay your hourly rate.โ ๐ก Freelancing Tip: If you *do* decide to do an unpaid test assignment (we all start somewhere!) tell the client what your typical rate is beforehand. This saves you from the unfortunate scenario of spending hours on a test only to realize the client canโt afford you.
๐ฐ Go Into the Studio and Play by
Despite all the tech money and toxic bros, one positive thing about my ever-growing city is that people I like are always passing through
๐ฐ Quiet Compounding by Morgan Housel
Nature is not in a hurry, yet everything is accomplished,โ said Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu.
I like the idea of quietly compounding your money. Just like in nature, itโs where youโll find the most impressive results. Every few years you hear a story of a country bumpkin with no education and a low-wage job who managed to save and compound tens of millions of dollars. The story is always the same: They just quietly saved and invested for decades. They never bragged, never flaunted, never compared themselves to others or worried that they trailed their benchmark last quarter. They just quietly compounded.
I try to keep in mind that there are two ways to use money. One is as a tool to live a better life. The other is as a yardstick of success to measure yourself against other people. The first is quiet and personal, the second is loud and performative. Itโs so obvious which leads to a happier life.
Quiet compounding means four things to me:
1. An emphasis on internal vs. external benchmarks. Always asking, โWould I be happy with this result if no one other than me and my family could see it, and I didnโt compare the result to the appearance of other peopleโs success?โ
2. An acceptance of how different people are, and a realization that what works for me might not work for you and vice versa.
3. A focus on independence over social dunking. Once you do things quietly you become selfish in the best way โ using money to improve your life more than you try to influence other peopleโs perception of your life. Iโd rather wake up and be able to do anything I want, with whom I want, for as long as I want, than I would try to impress you with a nice car.
4. A focus on long-term endurance over short-term comparison. A lot of people want to be long-term investors but struggle to actually do it.
Note: [[essay idea]] don't talk about your investments. get caught up in trying to compare returns & new investment ideas. instead just let it sit and quietly compound.
๐ฐ The Tao of Cal by Cal Newport
Knowledge Work
Treat cognitive context shifts as โproductivity poison.โ The more you switch your attention from one target (say, a report youโre writing) to another (say, an inbox check), the more exhausted and dumber you become.
The biggest source of context shifts is digital communication. Move as much collaboration as possible out of chains of ad hoc, back and forth messaging and into something more structured.
Focus is like a super power in most knowledge work jobs. Train this ability. Protect deep work on your calendar. Support these sessions through special rituals and spaces.
You need specific systems to track all of your commitments. You need specific system to manage your time and attention.
Personal Technology
Use Your phone should be used as a tool, not a constant companion. To accomplish this: (1) keep your phone plugged into the same spot when at home (instead of having it with you); and (2) remove all apps from your phone where someone makes more money the more you use it.
Itโs not enough to stop using problematic apps and devices, you must also aggressively pursue alternative activities to fill the voids this digital abstention will create: read books, join communities, develop hard hobbies, get in shape, hatch plans to transform your career for the better.
The Deep Life
In building a meaningful and fulfilling life, itโs usually better to work backwards from a broad vision of your ideal lifestyle than it is to work forward toward a singular grand goal (e.g., a โdream jobโ or radical location change) that you hope will make everything better.
The best way to improve your professional life is to get good at something the market unambiguously values, and then use this โcareer capitalโ as leverage to shape your work in ways that resonate. No one owes you a great a job. You have to get great first before you demand it.
The Internet and Future Technology
When it comes to the internet, small is usually better than big. Niche online communities are more meaningful and less harmful (in terms of both content and addictive properties) than massive social platforms.
๐ฐ The Message by Ta-Nehisi Coates by
In Between the World and Me, Ta-Nehisi Coatesโs 2015 epistolary work addressed to his son, he writes of his youthful act of reclaiming both his body and his powerโthe same power that animated his ancestorsโthrough books.
Coatesโs newest essay collection, The Message, is a continuation of this haunting, but here, the haunting transforms. In this collection, Coatesโs first audience is his students; he opens by speaking of his innate love of language and the lyrics of one of his favorite MCs: I haunt if you want, the style I possess/I bless the child, the earth, the gods and bomb the rest.
๐ฐ The Art of Wintering: How to Find Strength in Slowing Down by Anne-Laure Le Cunff
Wintering was initially a term used in biology to describe how certain animals and birds survive cold seasons.
This biological concept was translated to our human experience by Katherine May in her 2020 book Wintering, where she showed how humans, just like wintering animals, need periods of retreat to survive lifeโs difficult seasons. In essence, just as nature moves through cycles of activity and rest, humans too need periods of pulling back and recharging.
๐ฐ Drawing Through the Holidays: Ideas and Inspiration by
Drawing Tips & Reminders
Break all subjects into shapes. Once you begin to see even the hardest subjects as relative shapes, everything becomes more approachable.
Convert images to black and white.
๐ฐ The Questions Every Good Conversation Partner Should Ask by Jay Shetty
Asking follow-up questions leads to being more liked by your conversation partner.
Try to ask open-ended questions. Keywords what and how will encourage them to go into more detail.
How did that make you feel?
What does that mean for you going forward?
When trying to get a clearer picture of what theyโre saying, ask for examples
Whatโs an example of this going on?
Can you think of another time that happened to you?
The guiding light is your curiosity.
๐ฐ 3 Rules for Life. by Ryan Holiday
Ryan shared the three rules that helped shape his career, his approach to writing, and his ability to navigate the pressures of life.
Always Be Reading: Ryan emphasizes the importance of continually learning.
Seek Out Mentors:
Surrounding yourself with people whoโve already walked the path youโre on can offer invaluable guidance and save you TONS of time. These mentorsโwhether you meet them in real life or discover their wisdom in booksโcan help you navigate challenges and keep moving forward.
Say Yes. Then No: When youโre just starting out, say yes to opportunities that help you grow and gain experience. But as you progress, itโs equally important to embrace the power of saying no.
๐ฐ Photo Insider: The 35ยฐ Window by Cody Mitchell
โLight makes photography. Embrace light. Admire it. Love it. But above all, know light. Know it for all you are worth, and you will know the key to photography.โ - George Eastman, founder of Kodak.
When higher than 6ยฐ but lower than 35ยฐ, the sun accentuates the natural colors present. It creates pleasing directional light with soft shadows and warm tones. It makes things pop, in a beautifully subtle way. Next afternoon you go shoot, try starting when the sun's at 35ยฐ. Observe how the light changes as it gets lower in the sky.
๐ฐ My Number 1 Productivity Hack by
there's very few industries that you can't absolutely win by 1 p.m.
๐ฐ In Praise of California by
California, in particular, pays a lot in federal taxes because itโs so much richer and more productive than most of the rest of America.
High productivity in California (and New York, also included) plays a significant role in making America richer; the nation excluding these powerhouses would have about 6 percent lower GDP per capita.
California makes an especially large contribution to U.S. technological dominance. As I noted a month ago, 8 of Americaโs top 9 technology companies โ all of them if you count pre-Cybertruck Tesla โ are based either in Silicon Valley or in Seattle. And while Hollywood doesnโt dominate films and TV the way it once did, Los Angeles still plays a major role in Americaโs cultural influence (and still generates a lot of income.)
an American city and an American state desperately need all the help we can deliver. It shouldnโt matter whether theyโve earned it.
๐ฐ Mental Rehearsalโtrain Your Brain Through Intentional Imagination. by Charlotte Grysolle
Mental rehearsal is heavily associated with athletic performance, making regular people like us less likely to consider it for everyday scenarios like public speaking, job interviews, high-pressure scenarios and daily tasks.
You can direct your Reticular Activation System (RAS) Your conscious brain can only process 0.000001% of input. Everything else gets processed by your subconscious. The RAS is a neural network in your brain responsible for deciding what information is brought into your conscious awareness. It filters out irrelevant information and only allows into your consciousness what (1) will keep you safe and (2) is of interest to you. (This filtering mechanism helps explain why youโll hear your name in a crowded room.)
๐ฐ Thoughts From Inside the LA Wildfires and How You Can Help. by the Korean Vegan
I read a quote by Mr. Rogers, one shared by Maria Shriver, that I found extremely powerful:
"When I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news, my mother would say to me, 'Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.'"
๐ฐ The TikTok Ban Shows America Is at War With Itself by
TikTok likely has some sort of national security risk. But it seems like our tools to try and manage that risk (a ban) arenโt working in a world where digital platforms are fundamental in how people connect and work.
if you read Derek Thompson's cover story for The Atlantic (congrats Derek!!) on the Anti-Social Century, itโs like well... hmm... and then if you talk to teachers about the problems the phones are creating in classrooms, itโs another hmm.
Our attention has become the ultimate commodity. When we log on to the internet, we are immediately exposed to thirty different thingsโ from gut-wrenching to wonderousโ in the span of one minute. This can lead to cognitive dissonance, especially when we define ourselves through the lens of the content we consumeโ be it TikTok videos or Instagram reelsโ which places artificial limits on our self-conception.
The problem is that itโs an addiction. We are addicted to being informed, which makes complete sense, because we are little animals. If the rabbit could know exactly what danger it could or will face, it would be all over RabbitTok. Our little brains love knowing exactly what is up, and we love being nosy. These platforms haven't created these desires - they've just monetized them with unprecedented efficiency. But itโs making us inhumane. And like blah blah, we already know this! I hate that this dumb ban is in the news again.
There are two roads out.
The first is fundamental reimagining - not just of apps, but of how digital spaces serve democracy and human development. This might mean:
Building platforms that optimize for understanding rather than engagement
Creating digital spaces that strengthen rather than fragment social cohesion
Developing algorithms that reward depth over virality - focusing on content that encourages reflection, critical thinking, and deeper engagement instead of rewarding shallow content that capitalizes on emotional triggers.
The second road is learning to navigate existing systems more consciously. This means:
Teaching digital literacy that goes beyond privacy concerns to understand attention dynamics and how you might be getting trapped by your preferences
Developing cross-platform resilience for creators and businesses โข Creating ways to archive and preserve digital culture independent of any single platform (like Internet Archive, which is now under fire with copyright lawsuits)
Create international agreements around data privacy and platform governance, so platforms are held to consistent standards across the globe
But both roads require something we seem to be losing - the ability to act collectively toward shared goals. The TikTok ban, and our fragmented response to it, suggests we might need to rebuild that capacity before either solution becomes possible.
Thatโs what those who lose it all, gain - perspective. And I think thatโs what we lose on social media. TikTok and the other scroll sites create a warped sense of self. They know exactly what you hate. So you get shaped into an algorithmic self that makes you lose that perspective, makes you lose sight of what really matters.
๐ฐ Living in Process by
The word lifestyle evokes imagery of houses, cars, and material goods, while design implies a level of control and predictability that simply doesn't exist in life.
What I'm advocating for instead is living in process, an approach that emphasizes being present-oriented and adaptive rather than fixated on specific outcomes.
First is the power of direct experience
Second is what I call strategic simplicity
Third is maintaining empty space for spontaneity and reflection.
Fourth is cultivating genuine relationships that go beyond just maintaining a social circle.
Finally, there's the practice of establishing non-negotiable routines that keep you grounded.
Current Experiments in Progress
Removing iMessage from my laptop to curb constant text-checking during morning reading and writing.
Iโve stopped drinking regular coffee, and instead, opt for decaf coffee pour-over style, tea, or nothing.
Social media friction: Signing out of all platforms on my laptop. The login barrier creates space to catch myself before mindlessly opening tabs out of compulsion.
๐ฐ You Need to Come Out to Yourself Right Now by
By coming out to yourself, I mean accepting some truth thatโs gurgling beneath the surface in your life, demanding to be heard
๐ฐ The Care and Keeping of a TBR by
With this system, the inbox is only for stuff that need to be read before the end of the month. On the 1st, everything gets deleted again, which should (hopefully, pray for me) keep it sane and useful.
๐ฐ Steven Farmerโs Animal Spirit Guides recommendation via
๐ง Laverne Cox on Meta, Conservatives and the Battle for Trans Rights - On with Kara Swisher
So much of my work in the public eye has been about trying to change the narrative around trans people away from surgery and transition, because that necessarily dehumanizes us.
The ability be able to go through life and be cis assumed actually creates more safety for trans people.
January 14
๐ง Why Is the Media Coverage of Luigi Mangione So Bad? - A Bit Fruity with Matt Bernstein
Luann de Lesseps moment
Transcript:
Taylor Lorenz
It was Luanne de Lisep's review on her cabaret.
Matt Bernstein
Talk to Luanne.
Taylor Lorenz
Okay, listen, here's... Wait, sorry, I just have to get this right. Because this is... I feel crazy. The New York Times and the rest of the mainstream media, they are pulling a Luanne Deleceps because this was, this was the actual New York times review of Luanne's show. They said tickets to the first performance went on sale and quickly sold out, inspiring Miss Deleceps to add a second date. Now she took the word inspiring and plastered it all over her posters as if that was descriptive of the show. This is what has happened to me in the mainstream media.
Elite legacy media outlets
These places exist to prop up institutional power. These are for-profit businesses at the end of the day. They are for-profit businesses. They don't exist just for sunshine and rainbows to hold power to account. They exist to package news and information for an elite audience. The audience of places like the New York Times and other elite media is wealthy
๐ง โLittle Goalpostsโ | Resolutions - More Better with Stephanie & Melissa
Display your work successes in your office space. This creates good energy and serves as a reminder of your accomplishments, especially during moments of low inspiration.
Transcript:
Melissa Fumero
I've done it for so long, but I read something a long, long time ago that it's like really good energy to have your work, successes sort of displayed in a space, like usually an office, To have a space that reminds you of all the great things you've done or the high points, the successes, especially when you're feeling low or you're feeling uninspired. And I always try to make sure our office has that.
๐ฐ Minimum Levels of Stress by Morgan Housel
As the world improves, our threshold for complaining drops.
In the absence of big problems, people shift their worries to smaller ones. In the absence of small problems, they focus on petty or even imaginary ones.
Most people โ and definitely society as a whole โ seem to have a minimum level of stress.
Things previously considered normal are redefined as risks. Like a child being bullied at school, or mild anxiety being diagnosed as mental illness.
Less severe instances of a risk are recast as major risks. Like having to delay retirement from age 65 to age 67.
the best definition of progress is when youโve knocked out the major issues and are left dealing with lower, less-sever ones.
The dumber the disagreements, the better the world actually is.
๐ฐ Before the World Needs Me by
in Mexico, the sunrise is the only thing thatโs ever on time.
๐ง 208. The Four Tendencies: Rebels, Upholders, Obligers and Questioners - Build a Wealth Spirit with Sammie and
The Four Tendencies are Upholders, Questioners, Obligers and Rebels. They are broken down below:
Upholder: Meets outer expectations, meets inner expectations
Questioner: Resists outer expectations, meets inner expectations
Obliger: Meets outer expectations, Resists inner expectations
Rebel: Resists outer expectations, Resists inner expectations
๐ฐ I Went Viral, but I Don't Really Care by
more views isnโt the goal. More of the right views is the goal.
๐ฐ Inviting You to a Thing! by
Did you know it takes approximately 15 minutes and 9 seconds to feel the mental health benefits of movement? (To release the happy chemicals in your brain.) And yet most people donโt engage with exercise at all because the culture around exercise is so dogmatic.
๐ง Why Fei-Fei Li Is Still Hopeful About AI - On with Kara Swisher
The Turing test
A Turing Test was proposed by computer scientist Alan Turing where he uses that as a, um, is a test to symbolizes that computers can think like humans to the extent it can also, you know, Make you believe it is a human behind the curtain. If you don't know, it's a, it's a piece of a machine.
AI development should be guided by human concerns to ensure a positive impact on society. This approach is called human-centered AI.
Transcript: Speaker 2 In 2018 you wrote, I worry, whoever the enthusiasm for AI is preventing us from reckoning with this looming effect on society. You're one of the first, I paid attention when you wrote this piece. Despite its name, there's nothing artificial about this technology was made by humans intended to behave like humans and affect humans. So you want to play a positive role in tomorrow's world. Must be guided by human concerns. And you call it human centered AI.
Kara Swisher notes that Fei-Fei Li and Geoffrey Hinton have played similar roles in advancing AI, although their contributions and career paths differ.
Transcript: Speaker 2 Let's talk about Jeffrey Hinton. You have similar roles in moving AI forward, though you have different contributions and timelines.
No American university alone has the compute resources to train a ChatGPT-level model.
Transcript:
Speaker 1
Not a single America university today can train a chat GPT model. I actually wonder if you combine all the compute resources of all universities in America today, can we train a chat GPT model?
Speaker 2
Because which where it used to be, this is where it used to be.
Speaker 1
Exactly. When I was a graduate student, I never, you know, drooled over going to a company to do my work. But I think there should be healthy exchange between academia and industry. But right now the asymmetry is so bad.
๐ฐ How to Make A.I. Thatโs Good for People by Fei Fei Li
Despite its name, there is nothing โartificialโ about this technology โ it is made by humans, intended to behave like humans and affects humans. So if we want it to play a positive role in tomorrowโs world, it must be guided by human concerns.
โhuman-centered A.I.โ It consists of three goals that can help responsibly guide the development of intelligent machines.
First, A.I. needs to reflect more of the depth that characterizes our own intelligence.
Making A.I. more sensitive to the full scope of human thought is no simple task. The solutions are likely to require insights derived from fields beyond computer science, which means programmers will have to learn to collaborate more often with experts in other domains. Such collaboration would represent a return to the roots of our field, not a departure from it.
Younger A.I. enthusiasts may be surprised to learn that the principles of todayโs deep-learning algorithms stretch back more than 60 years to the neuroscientific researchers David Hubel and Torsten Wiesel, who discovered how the hierarchy of neurons in a catโs visual cortex responds to stimuli.
ImageNet, a data set of millions of training photographs that helped to advance computer vision, is based on a project called WordNet, created in 1995 by the cognitive scientist and linguist George Miller. WordNet was intended to organize the semantic concepts of English.
Reconnecting A.I. with fields like cognitive science, psychology and even sociology will give us a far richer foundation on which to base the development of machine intelligence.
๐ฐ AI reading list for 2025 by
โComputing Machinery and Intelligenceโ by Alan Turing (1950)
โPrograms with Common Senseโ by John McCarthy (1959)
โPerceptronsโ by Marvin Minsky (1969)
โLearning Representations by Back-Propagating Errorsโ by David Rumelhart (1986)
โParallel Distributed Processing: Explorations in the Microstructure of Cognitionโ by David Rumelhart (1986)
โGradient-Based Learning Applied to Document Recognitionโ by Yann LeCun (1998)
โImageNet Classification with Deep Convolutional Neural Networksโ by Alex Krizhevsky (2012)
โAuto-Encoding Variational Bayesโ by Diederik Kingma (2013)
โHuman-Level Control through Deep Reinforcement Learningโ by Volodymyr Mnih (2015)
โAttention Is All You Needโ by Ashish Vaswani (2017)
โLanguage Models are Few-Shot Learnersโ by Tom Brown (2020)
โChain-of-Thought Prompting Elicits Reasoning in Large Language Modelsโ by Jason Wei (2022)
โPaLM: Scaling Language Modeling with Pathwaysโ by Aakanksha Chowdhery (2022)
โGPT-4 Technical Reportโ by OpenAI (2023)
January 13
๐ง Meta Ends Fact Checking, Trump Tries to Redraw the Map, and the Los Angeles Fires - Pivot Pod
Ablutions: the act of washing oneself (women)
Scott
When I'm in New York, I do all of my acupuncture chiropractic. All of your ablutions.Kara Swisher
They're called ablutions. Your ablutions. Is that what it is? Yeah, it's a word. It's a big word. You can look it up if you need to. That's amazing.
Kara: I recommend everyone read Joan Didion's classic essay about the Santa Ana's and what they do to people.
January 12
๐ฐ My Lifetime Reading Plan by
Click link to see Tommyโs pictures of reading log & how he annotates his books!
Although sometimes demanding or difficult, it's never taxing. I often close a book more energized and centered than when I opened it.
When I sit down to read in the morning with a hot cup of coffee, a few Pilot G2s, and a good book, it's pure joy.
My reading habit is driven by an intense longing to live well.
A true education unfolds over a lifetime. It must be taken into one's own hands.
It's partly inspired by Ted Gioia's lifetime reading plan, still one of my favorite posts on Substack.
Life is too short to read something I am not enchanted by. There are simply too many other worthwhile works to read.
I should be intentional about batching books to read *around* a great work.
I will start with the greatest works of the past before moving to the present.
You can see the whole reading plan in detail here.
Always with a pen in hand, leaving copious notes in the margins of books, and tend to read sentences two or three or four times until Iโm sure I understand the idea the writer is developing.
January 11
๐ง A Dot Dot Dot Moment - Beautiful/Anonymous
A book club but to try diff restaurants/bars
My roommate and I have talked about doing, she wants to call it a book club, which I like that name, but it's like a book club for food. I started calling it the Yum Yum Club, and then she was like, I hate that. And I was like, it does sound silly, but it's also kind of fun. Where basically we have like standing plans on one day of the week just try a new restaurant, try a new cafe, try a new bar, or something like that. And then if we meet random people, whether that's like at work or out and about or whatever, we can be like, you know, hey, you want to come to the Yum Yum Club? Or the book club? I feel like we're probably going to say the book club because it's a little less cheesy.
Speaker 1
It's tough because a book clubs and then we invite these random people. Like a restaurant club, like Yum Yum Club means like, we'll go out will try new food will hit up different neighborhoods in town that does sound way more fun, but yum yum club is a name no Offense is slightly. Disgusting
๐ง Beautiful Follow-Ups: Love Is Everywhere - Beautiful/Anonymous
Heidi is now a parent beyond what she experienced (as a child) and has the honesty to tell her kids โactually I dunno what to doโ
Chris: And I've met you and it's like, yep, you're like, you're very regular person. And then every once in a while you get on this stupid show, I invented and then you go, you know, I never had maternal influence for big stretches of my life. But what I can do is look my kids in the eye and tell them that I'm not certain how this goes. Let's figure it out together. And then I sit here trying to figure out how not to cry. Because that's one of the most honest and beautiful things I've ever heard. And I sit here and I go that in its own right is breaking a cycle where you look back at so many of my parents, generation feeling like they could never admit that vulnerability, could never Admit that they didn't have the answers. And how sometimes looking someone in the eye and going, yeah, I'm your safety net.
January 10
๐ฐ Stoic Lessons From a Life Well-Lived - Daily Stoic
โMake time every day for study and reflection. Even when he became President, Carter was disciplined about creating space for self-awareness and preparation. Just days into his term, he asked his aides to delay meetings so he could dedicate an hour to reading, prayer, and thoughtโa habit rooted in his boyhood practice of rising early. โI need more time alone early each morning,โ he wrote to his team, ensuring he approached each day with clarity and focus.
๐ง Money for Couples โ Ft. Ramit Sethi
Couples never talk about money. They actually only have four substantive conversations about money in their entire relationship.
if they choose to buy a house.
if they have children, number three,
if one of them gets laid off because they are forced to,
when they get close to retirement
Use natural milestones, like a first trip together, to initiate conversations about money.
The best time to talk about money are these natural, pivotal points, such as the first time you travel together. This is what you do. You go and you say, look, I wanted to just shine a light on something I've been thinking about. This trip that's coming up, I'm super excited. How are you thinking about the money part of it? I've got an idea, but I'd love to hear from you and talk about it. Now, what we did in just that simple script is, don't give away your power. Don't simply say, what do you think? Because that is how you start to let your partner dictate the financial terms of the relationship. Don't do that. You need to know your own numbers. You need to be confident through competence, but you also need to bring the topic up.
Combine finances in a joint account for better relationship outcomes and less fighting.
There's good research showing that combining your money produces better relationship outcomes, fewer fights, but more importantly, you're just team. And truthfully, most couples, they're not particularly adept at managing the flows of money. So they have an orphan 401k here, an old IRA over there, and they're struggling. And what ends up happening is they do these very peculiar ways of managing money. So they get together, typically a little bit later in life nowadays. And so they have their own bank account, checking, savings, whatever. And what they'll do, instead of combining, because it seems like a lot of work, one person will go, I'll take the rent. You take the car payment. And what ends up happening is total misalignment. Almost always, mom will be paying way more for kid stuff, which is outrageous. It's totally ridiculous. There's no reason for that. Next, if one person starts making more money or less, they won't adjust their spending. And so you'll end up seeing people way out of whack. A much better way is to set your accounts up like this. All the money goes into a joint account. You pay your joint expenses, any investments you have, and then you each have a certain amount of money go to your own individual accounts. No questions asked. You want to spend it on golf, nails, guy's trip, girl's trip, whatever trip. It's yours. And your partner doesn't even have access to it. But importantly, it's your account. It's private, but it's not secret. Each of you knows what's going on and you are unified with your accounts.
Remember the philosophy: "Our future is together."
There's a philosophy that I want every couple to remember. Our future is together. That's really important. If you truly internalize that, then you're making decisions together, your accounts are set up together, and you probably want to be putting more money towards your joint guilt-free Spending than your individual guilt-free spending. It's like when I think about my money with my wife. I'm an entrepreneur. I make money from my business. So is my wife. She does the same. And of course, we want to have our own money for our own personal expenditures. But our future is together. And when I get excited, I don't think about my individual stuff. I get excited about us taking trips, experiences, restaurants together.
Double your wedding budget estimate. Add 50% to your vacation budget estimate. When buying a house, add 50% to the house price to account for additional expenses.
I have these sort of guidelines about how much you should add to the budget. And for weddings, you know, take the number you come up with and basically double it. That's your safe bet for how much you're going to spend. Take a vacation you're planning, add 50%. That's about how much you're going to spend. Same thing for buying a house. Take the house price, add 50%. That's when you're factoring in phantom costs.
When discussing money with your partner, start by exploring each other's hopes and fears around money. Discuss potential future scenarios, both positive and negative, such as accidents or separation. Only after these discussions should you delve into specific numbers.
Start off by saying, when you think of money, what comes to mind? What are your greatest hopes? What are your greatest fears? If we are really successful together, where will we go? What can we do together? And then, hey, let's talk about what if things go wrong? What are some ways things might go wrong? I might get hit by a bus. We might get separated. Something horrible might happen. Let's talk about it. Let's shine a light on this instead of letting it lurk in the shadows. And then and only then would we have gotten to the numbers. That same principle applies when you talk about money with your partner now.
๐ฐ WTF Is Creator Gravity? by
A โcreatorโ is anyone who shares their ideas onlineโwhether through newsletters, YouTube videos, TikToks, LinkedIn posts, a blog, whatever. โGravityโ is a commanding online presence.
Combine the two, and you get โcreator gravityโโthe distinct magnetic force around a creator that allows them to captivate an audience and pull in opportunities through delivering high-quality, authentic content.
A creator with gravity has three pillars:
1. Purpose: There is a clear mission.
2. Health: The content is "nutritionally rich."
3. Energy: The work is undeniably theirs.
Gravity is
Gravity is the Substack creator with 3,500 subscribers who happily pay him $8 a month to read his thoughts.
Gravity is the CEO who shares her ideas on LinkedIn and attracts new investors who believe in her mission.
Gravity is the software developer sharing coding tips on Instagram and landing high-paying job offers without ever applying.
Gravity is the freelance writer who starts posting on Twitter and suddenly has writing opportunities flooding her inbox.
beginners have a story people can get emotionally invested in. Of course, subject matter expertise is one way to command gravity (Dr. Huberman, anyone?) but a beginner sharing their journey piques our story-hungry brains. We need to know: Will they succeed? Face-plant spectacularly? Pull off the unfathomable? Just like how itโs near impossible to quit a Netflix episode halfway through, we canโt ignore the heroโs journey.
๐ฐ More Output, Less Effort by Everyโs Evan Armstrong
I use Coral AI to help find specific passages or explain arguments that I missed. I buy physical copies of all of my books, as most studies find comprehension is highest that wayโand then, having ensured that the author is sufficiently paid, I sail the salty seas, digitally pirate the book, and upload the file to Coral. (For any Feds reading this, Iโm joking.) The application gives you an exact page-number reference for any section you are looking for, lets you do a semantic search, and returns a summary of arguments in the text. Itโs difficult to measure the total effect, but I can guarantee that my comprehension has improved. This process was so fun that I read 42 books last year.
I landed on Copilot Money. It is beautifully designed, has handy AI features, and integrates tons of quality-of-life improvements. Think of it as a financial planning hub on top of a budgeting app. I track my stock portfolio, manage my cash flow, and make sure I donโt have any unwanted subscriptions that keep charging my credit cards. My wife and I now actually enjoy our weekly budget reviews, where we go over transactions on the app and make sure our spending isnโt out of control.
๐ฐ 110,000 People Registered for This Workshop: Here's What We Learned
โ๏ธ 2024 Reflections
We started Day #1 off with a visualisation exercise to re-experience the year, and feel into the most salient moments of 2024. There was a few minutes of this, with some vibey music. Then, we spent 3 minutes on the following prompts.
1. ๐ Major Milestones - What were the most significant events or achievements in 2024 for you? How did these impact your life?
2. ๐ Gratitude - What are you most grateful for in 2024? Think about people, experiences, or opportunities that enriched your life.
3. ๐ช Challenges - What were the biggest challenges or obstacles you faced in 2024? How did you overcome them, and what did you learn from these experiences?
4. ๐ Professional Growth - How did you progress in your career / work in 2024? What were the key learnings and how have they shaped your future aspirations?
5. ๐ฑ Personal Growth - In what ways have you grown or changed as a person over the past year? Consider changes in your beliefs, attitudes, and behaviours.
6. โ Unfulfilled Aspirations - Were there goals or aspirations you had for 2024 that you didnโt achieve? Reflect on why they were not met and how you feel about it.
7. ๐ฅ Relationships and Connections - Reflect on your relationships in 2024. How have they evolved? Were there new relationships that had a significant impact on you?
8. ๐ Looking Forward - Based on your experiences in 2024, what would you like to do differently in 2025?
1. What would you like to continue doing?
2. What would you like to start doing?
3. What would you like to stop doing?
๐ชฆ Write your Own Eulogy
We then moved into a morbid-at-first-glance-but-really-useful exercise involving visualising your own funeral (in a world where you live to be 100 years old in great physical and mental health), and imagining what youโd like different people to say at your funeral.
Today, we gather to honour the life and legacy of [name]
[Name] was aโฆ
In his personal life, heโฆ
Those closest to him remember him asโฆ
In his professional life, heโฆ
His work will be remembered for its contribution toโฆ
He was an inspiration to others becauseโฆ
The story of his life teaches us thatโฆ
Heโll always be remembered as someone who lived withโฆ
Finally, if [name] were here with us today, heโd remind us thatโฆ
Philosopher and writer Friedrich Nietzsche on enjoying the process: "The end of a melody is not its goal." Source: The Wanderer and His Shadow
๐ฐ Imagine Your Brain Operating at Its Peak by
taking care of my brain.
when you put your brainโs health first.
But hereโs what works bestโespecially for high-performers: Small, consistent changes add up over time.
1. Minimising toxins
Hereโs the hidden elephant in the room: environmental toxins. Found in everyday items like plastic containers, unfiltered water, and personal care products, toxins can silently sabotage your brainโs performance.
Start small:
Use glass or stainless-steel containers.
Filter your water.
Swap conventional personal care products for non-toxic alternatives.
2. Eating for brain health
Your brain thrives on nutrient-dense foods.
3. Exercising for brain health
4. Prioritising sleep
5. Managing stress
Stress is inevitableโbut manageable. Try the โName, Tame, Reframeโ technique:
Name the emotion.
Tame it by acknowledging it without judgment.
Reframe the situation with a new perspective.
6. Rely on your close relationships
Surround yourself with people who create bandwidth for constructive reflectionโnot just venting.
๐ฐ How to โEat Real Foodโ by
foods that your brain will thank you for:
Mushrooms - rich in zinc, copper, iron, phosphorous and potassium - are all critical for brain health and cognitive function.
Organ meats - the most nutrient-dense food humans can eat (eg liver, heart and kidney). Liver, for example, is 20x more nutrient-dense than beef, eggs and milk.
Fibre - Fibre not only feeds you but feeds your gut bacteria, too. Prebiotic fibres, like those found in alliums (onions, leeks, garlic), asparagus, bananas, chicory root, artichokes, oats) are great for your beneficial gut bacteria, which in turn helps brain cognition by regulating blood sugar levels and elevating neurotrophic factors, like BDNF.
Green leafy vegetables - they contain nutrients that protect against cognitive impairment by reducing oxidative stress and neuroinflammation.
Tocotrienols - this is one type of Vitamin E that is a potent antioxidant for the brain, and can protect against oxidative damage that drives brain disorders.
Dark Chocolate - aim for >70% cocoa content, and you'll benefit from the cocoa flavonoids that enhance human cognition by increasing BDNF, blood flow in the brain and blood glucose regulation2.
Eggs - a great source of choline and DHA.
January 9
๐ง Running a Food Pantry - Beautiful/Anonymous
Volunteering is a good third-space that crosses generations
I think it's really good for people. And it's really fun. Like I see multi-generational relationships in my work. You know, I see ninth graders who come in and volunteer, get to know retired seniors and build friendships. And there's not very many places where I think that those sort of environments still exist. And it's really neat. It's very special to be around.
Identify local resources to help neighbours/your own community. This is civic engagement
Identify local resources like food pantries. Share this information with friends, family, neighbors, and coworkers, as word-of-mouth referrals are highly effective in connecting those in need with support services.
Transcript:
Speaker 2
The first one is go and look up your local resources. Part of the messaging that we use at our organization is friends, families, neighbors, and co-workers are more likely to get a new guest to come in and use our services. The word-of is really important. And so to figure out what those resources are, when they're open, and then keep your eyes out for folks who are in need and knowing that that might not look the way you think it might, or Should, air quotes around how you think it should look. But yeah, so spread the word. If you know of a good resource and you know someone who might be struggling, you need to tell them. You're more likely to get somebody in and the help that they need than any of the radio ads or social media posts, newspaper articles, you name it. That is way more successful. So that's something that everyone can do. Figure out where your resources are and tell people who might need them about them. That's the biggest thing I always tell people. Just know your community.
Speaker 1
Understand what your community has to offer and be ready to talk about it.
Speaker 2
Yeah, I think that's, you know, a part of what being a citizen is, you know, being civically engaged. That's kind of what I would consider as civic engagement.
๐ฐ She Finally Said โNoโ by
Before Jane learned to show up with presence, she was like the first fishermanโalways chasing, reacting, trying to prove herself. But once she embraced a different way of showing up, her energy shifted.
How you show up is shaped by two key factors:
Your lifestyle A well-rested, nourished, and regulated body gives you the foundation to show up at your best. Good sleep, movement, and nutrient-dense meals fuel mental clarity and emotional balance. Foundational habits like these also prevent burnout and sustain your energy, especially in high-pressure roles.
Your mindset Cultivating a mindset built on awareness, acceptance, and intentional action helps you create space to respond thoughtfully rather than react impulsively
๐ฐ You Can Wake the Dead - The Daily Stoic
when the filmmaker Ken Burns was on the Daily Stoic podcast recently (a must-listen episode!), he shared that someone once pointed out to him just how mind-blowing his job really is. โLook what you do for a livingโyou wake the dead.โ If youโve ever watched one of his documentaries, this makes perfect sense. Through the photos that he slowly pans across, through the diaries he has voice-actors read, through the historians he interviews, Burns brings the Civil War back into the present moment. He puts us in the ring with Jack Johnson, puts us with Da Vinci in Florence. He wakes them from the dead.
Every time we open a book, watch a documentary, or listen to the words of someone long gone, weโre waking the dead. Weโre bringing them back into the present, giving them voice, allowing their experiences and wisdom to shape our lives. And in doing so, we become part of something eternalโa chain of memory and meaning that stretches across time. Through this superpower, we ensure that the dead are never truly gone, and that their lessons continue on.
๐ฐ The Ghost of Banking Panics Future by
Bank runs were quite common before the creation of FSLIC and the FDIC โ audiences when the movie came out in 1946 still had vivid memories of the huge bank runs of the 1930s.
In particular, we know that Donald Trump has a thing about the 1890s, when men were men, tariffs were high, businesses were free to pollute the air and water, and nobody knew what went on in meatpacking plants. But you can bet your Bitcoin that heโs never heard of the Panic of 1893, a huge wave of contagious bank runs that was catastrophic for industrial production and employment
๐ฐ What I Wrote in 2024 by
I want to be confident enough to take stands, even at the risk of upsetting people or being wrong. I think this is an important prerequisite to the discovery of truth.
And I want to write more foundational essays. Ideas that become an ethos, engrained in my character, cornerstones for how I live my life.
๐ฐ Do Not Mistake Retirement for the End Goal by
Retirement is worst-case scenario insurance.
๐ฐ May I Be Excused From These Old Family Dynamics? by
In a conversation with my mom, she shared that boundaries can be hard when the human in front of you used to be a baby in diapers.
Lately, when I part ways with my parents, Iโm haunted by Tim Urbanโs The Tail End โ a sobering reminder that assuming we spend 10 meaningful days with our parents a year in adulthood, by the time we graduate โfrom high school, [we have] already used up 93% of [our] in-person parent time. [Weโre] now enjoying the last 5% of that time. Weโre in the tail end.โ
๐ฐ Productivity Spark Key Takeaways by Team Ali Abdaal
1๏ธโฃ Future Sketch Workshop with Izzy This session was all about designing your dream life, and Izzy (@izzysealey on YouTube and Instagram) guided us through some incredible exercises to help us clarify our vision and create actionable steps toward our ideal future. Hereโs what we covered:
1. The 10-Year Dream - Write down all the big, exciting dreams youโd love to achieve in the next decade. They can be as wild and as ambitious as youโd like.
2. 3-Year Sketch - Create a compelling 3-year vision by asking yourself, where would you like to be by 2028? Izzy had us think through key areas like health, career, personal development, and relationships.
3. The Wheel of Life - The Wheel of Life exercises was a brilliant way to evaluate where we currently stand in different ares of our life (health, relationships, finances, etc.), so we have a way to properly evaluate where weโre making progress and where weโre falling short. You can complete your wheel of life and track your progress weekly using Izzyโs tool.
4. Create a Vision Board - To make your vision tangible, Izzy showed us how to create a vision board. Using Pinterest for inspiration and Google Slides for organisation, we gathered images that represent our goals, categorised them by life areas, and made them easily visible (as wallpaper or even printed out).
2๏ธโฃ Design Your Most Productive Year Ever with Ali In this session, we created our Quarterly Quests - the 90-day (ish) goals/projects that weโre committed to achieving. And, ideally, we should have just ONE main Quest each for work and life for the quarter.
1. Set a Work Quest - In WORK, whatโs the single most important goal or project for you to accomplish in the next 3 months? Recommended approach:
2. Set a Life Quest - In LIFE, whatโs the single most important goal or project for you to accomplish in the next 3 months?
3. Hereโs a useful framework for defining Quests:
Clear statement of the quest (โMy main Quest is toโฆโ)
Why itโs the most important thing this quarter (โThis is the single most important thing for me to accomplish this quarter becauseโฆโ)
Objective completion criteria by March 31st (โTo complete the Quest, I commit that by 31st March 2025, Iโll have done A, B, and Cโ)
Why it feels exciting and compelling (โThis feels really exciting and compelling for me becauseโฆโ)
Specific actions to ensure completion (โTo make sure I complete the Quest, Iโm going toโฆโ)
๐ฐ Getting Better at the Wrong Thing by
If we werenโt lucky enough to go to Eton or another school that has that kind of culture and that level of resources, how can we reclaim that right and that personal power for ourselves *now*? How can we create the time and space needed for a project of our own? How can we develop a sharper sense of what truly interests us?
๐ฐ Here Are Some of the TikTok Rabbit Holes Iโve Tumbled Down, Pleasurably Wasting Hours and Hours of Time. by Roxane Gay
โJust how many people are going to offer their variation on the theme of the day?โ
The internet age has afforded us a great many things, and primary among them is the ability to expose ourselves, without a filter. This exposure has created its own inscrutable economy where a few lucky creators rocket to fame (sometimes niche, sometimes mainstream) and earn massive amounts of money while the rest of the creative class tries and fails to re-create the alchemy fueling the bright shining stars.
On TikTok, anything and everything can be content. For those who are willing to play that particular game, they can film and share and monetize every mundane or salacious aspect of their lives. Nothing is sacred and everything is scalable.
If you do not want your data to be exploited online, you must remain vigilant, and even then, protecting your privacy is difficult. It becomes something of a Faustian bargain, because our online habits and behaviors are carrion for tech vultures. As we scroll, they feast.
Itโs striking that TikTok, on the surface, prizes individuality but what truly sustains the platform is imitation and repetition and the all-too-human desire to be just like everyone else.
While many of the platformโs critics are rightly focused on the appโs many serious privacy issues, the unsavory content deserves equal opprobrium.
๐ฐ Book 2 Cover Test Shots? And an Excerpt From My Current Writing Project... by Joanne Molinaro
The best way to get good at anything is to do it and to do it a lot. It's how I got good at running. It's how I got good at cooking. It's how I got good at photography. And it's how I'll continue to get good at writing.
Sarang was rarely used to convey affection.
the Korean people preferred to keep their ardor in check, contained within the sturdy confines of less dangerous words: I like you, I miss you, I am lonely without you.
๐ฐ โLooks Good to Meโ Is a Lazy Default: Why Managers Should Give Feedback on Work Output by
Pick your poison. In the short term, giving feedback takes a bit longer. In the long term, training your team eventually makes your life easier and energizes your high performers.
๐ฐ When Mark Zuckerberg Wins Over Trump, We Lose - The New York Times by Julia Angwin
This is what it looks like when a mature business runs out of ideas and instead seeks to continue its dominance through money and political power. It is terrible for our information environment and our democracy.
Itโs also a sign that Meta is vulnerable to competitors offering the next big idea. And I am very much looking forward to the future beyond it.
๐ง How to Scale Yourself, the Future of Prof G Media, and Scottโs Advice to Interns - Prof G Pod
George Hahn runs half of Scottโs social media
I have somebody very talented, George Hahn, who helps me with my social. I do about half the postings. He does about half. We take it very seriously. We film video. We have a firm we pay $10,000 a month to that does these mashups of my content or speeches and turns them into cool little 60-second videos that we then snake through LinkedIn, YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, Reels, you know, we hit all of these things.
A German companies demand that the CEO take at least four weeks off every year. And if the company goes to shit when they're gone, they fire the CEO because they need an enterprise. They don't need a practice.
How to show value as an intern:
Arriving 10 minutes early and staying 10 minutes late.
Face time
Every week, trying to at least have one or two ideas and say to someone, can I help you do this? Or I was thinking of putting together a list of potential clients or outreach, or I was thinking about putting together, show initiative. And they might say, no, that's a bad idea. Don't do that. But see if you can't come up with some ideas that aren't a part of your job description and then ask people, would it help if you did something? If you can save, if you can spend four, six, eight hours making someone senior to you, save them at 30 or 60 minutes, they're going to want you back. People are selfish. This kid gave me an extra hour every week, right? Hire him.
Listen a lot
You're going to be very personal, very nice, very supportive of other people. Whenever you work on anything, immediately thank other people for their help. You're going to show up early. You're going to stay late and you're going to try and find little projects that might help other people. And it's going to be your idea and you're going to pitch them to people.
Network
Get off your heels and on your toes. You want to walk into offices or send people an email saying, would you be willing to have coffee with me? Would you be willing to have lunch with me, right? So you're going to network.
Deliver professional work
You're going to focus on attention and detail around your work. The work doesn't have to be breakthrough or even right, but it has to be professional. No typos, right? Attention to detail.
๐ง Kara's Washington Post Bid, Trump's TikTok Plans, and Tesla's Sales Drop - Pivot Pod
Would recommend just for people that don't know, there's a really great CNN documentary called Jimmy Carter Rock and Roll President. And it's all about his music, his how he used the Allman Brothers and Willie Nelson. And he affiliated with them, even though there was criticism around their weed smoking and things like that at the time, which was shocking at the time. But it's a wonderful way to listen to music and learn about the heart of this man. I think you would love it, Scott. It's called Rock and Roll President.
๐ฅ Show and Tell #321: Austin Kleon
Lynda Barry
linda linda barry has a couple of exercises using three color yes um overlays and linda is who i stole the whole concept of writing with a brush from because one of the things that linda teaches is that by slowing down and really paying attention to your letter forms that's sort of like you that's your left hemisphere right that's
like your laser brain like that that's your laser focus left hemisphere you give that hemisphere something to do and then it frees up the right hemisphere to kind of bring stuff to you as your as you're writing and that that's what i learned from linda
Writers read more than write
i thought writers wrote all day and then they might read like for an hour and then i realized like no actually it's more like writing for like stephen king like writing in the morning and then reading all afternoon right right right right ratio of input has to be
like like multiples of what your actual output is sure yeah that took me a long time as a young person to to figure that out right right right yeah and and also the ratio of uh um rest or slack to efficiency or productivity is is um it's not a hundred percent i mean it's like it's crazy it's it's that's you know that's you're gonna know dies into the ground at 100 but that ratio of how much time you take off
and don't work at all versus working is another interesting ratio
big chunky date stamp
this bad boy the trodat professional 50 30. this is like industrial this was 20 bucks like you can get this on like amazon or wherever but this is like this is like a big chunky
badass bait stamp i love that this is like big as your face
January 8
๐ฐ Archivistโs Top Ten Tips by
Get art and books out of the basement and attic. This reflects the dangers of heat and humidity extremes.
Store paper flat and unfolded. Paintings, of course, can be stored vertically.
If you must use commercial tape, remove it as soon as you can. Tape designed for museums is a whole different animal.
Put paper works in acid-free folders. And if you have a sketch or document on paper thatโs toxic to its neighbors, copy it, shoot it, and isolate the original.
Photocopy thermal faxes. Or anything thatโs likely to be fugitive.
Sign and date each piece, even sketches. This tip is really from the curator, the person who is more the art historian and writer who puts it all in context.
Use pencil rather than pen or marker. Do a test. Youโll be surprised.
Keep art out of direct sun. If it must be in or near sun, use UV glass.
Shoot your art and store the shots elsewhere.
Back up your computer work. And thereโs no telling whether digital or analog storage will be most stable in the long run.
๐ฐ My 4 Notebooks by
My reflections:
Shift "what I'm doing yesterday" to a log-book. Plotter is kind of a log-book
Update: bought daily log book
Pocket Notebook - can have one that's tiny and can have another one (my plotter?) for more active note-taking
Commonplace diary - this is my Roam
Diary / Morning pages - I already do this. Maybe I can be more intentional if I already have logs? IDK
If youโre interested in starting a notebook habit, I encourage you to just buy a notebook or The Steal Like an Artist Journal and write or draw in it every day.
Update: also bought
I do not endorse any brands, but if youโd like to try out what Iโm currently using here are links to my logbook, pocket notebook, commonplace diary, and diary.
letโs start with the notebook Iโve written the least about: my pocket notebook.
I try to have this nearby all the time, whether Iโm in the house, in the studio, or out and about in the world. Itโs basically just a โwaste bookโ for scribbling and doodling ideas.
One weird thing Iโm starting to do is to clip things out of the newspaper and glue them in the pocket notebook. In this way, it functions more like a really messy commonplace book.
Occasionally, I will use the pocket notebook for taking more detailed notes, like this spread I doodled while listening to an interview with Four Tet.
I think all the time about how we emphasize the importance of keeping notebooks and sketchbooks but we almost never talk about the importance of revisiting them and re-reading them. I have found a weekly review hugely helpful: just once a week, sit down and re-read your notebooks and see if thereโs anything you can use.
Next up, Iโll show you a spread from the notebook Iโve kept since 2008: my logbook.
Note: Functions like my Plotter
Next up is my commonplace diary. This is a weird little 5-year-diary I started in 2021, but with quotes I read instead of things that happen to me. (View Highlight)
Note: This is my Roam
You can see on this page that sometimes I clip things out of print and paste them in the book:
the last notebook Iโll show you is the one Iโve shown you the most over the past 3 years of these Tuesday letters: my diary.
I write in this notebook every morning with a cup of coffee and I fill at least 3 pages. Iโve done this since 2017, when I fell in love with Thoreauโs journals and wanted to keep my own.
January 7
๐ฅ The Most Hated Camera Ever Made - Cody Mitchell
To overexpose by one stop on an SLR it's very easy you just kind of twist the ISO knob to reflect half of the sensitivity of the film that you actually put in the camera
gets the pastel-y colours that people love for film
๐ง Justin Narayan Shares 3 Rules for Life - Matt DโAvellaโs Three Rules
Journaling refines writing + storytelling skills
Transcript:
Justin Narayan
I've never been one to be like a big writer or anything or big reader but i never really saw myself like that but i think after doing this practice for a long time like i am a i'm a writer like I write every day like this is i'm like a storyteller writer this is one medium i can do that in i i hadn't really ever drawn that connection between a daily journaling practice how you're
Matt D'Avella
Actually developing a skill yeah you're building your skill as a writer as somebody who can curate interesting ideas
๐ฐ January 2025 Letter by
the chapters themselves negate one another. For example, in career plans I assert that one of my main priorities should be to find a new job. But then in writing I acknowledge the value and associated freedom that comes with career stability. And everything comes full circle in where I live when I try to muster up the courage to quit everything, move, and then figure career out.
I wish to be the mastermind capable of figuring myself out as soon as possible, but Iโd be equally content with leaning into the mess and just floating my way to my answers.
2024 will be forever cemented as the year I bunkered down and taught myself about myself.
We are still not allowed to leverage GenAI in our day-to-day work. Iโm immensely frustrated by this, and thus, I rant.
My bet is in human connection. Individuals who can create platforms and spaces that facilitate community will be hailed as geniuses of the new age.
January 6
๐ฐ America the Addicted by
about those apps: if it has become ever harder to be a smoker, it has become ever easier to be a gambler.
๐ฐ This Model Was the Key to Unleashing My Son's Potential by
Iโd add one more thatโs not in the research, but Iโve found true for my boy. Flo is a result of momentum.
My son rarely learns smoothly after a break. Learning, as a skill, is a muscle, and when itโs not exercised it atrophies. It gets a little bit harder to get into that flow state. The gears turn a little bit slower. But after we get back in the groove of things, he does much better. Hell, I do much better. Itโs easier to get into flow when weโve been closer to flow recently.
๐ฐ Best of 2024, Award Ceremony Photodump, Well-Built Software by
โTella, a talking head screen-sharing software (similar to Loom) has always been on my radar. But I went a year without using it. In that year, they leveled up the product in a major way. Big fan.
Best Piece of Software โForms are so boring. Yet the makers of Tally, a form-building software tool, somehow found a way to create the most well-built, impressive piece of software I used all year. Using this software feels like using a fridge from the 1960s: solid and well-crafted.
Best Way to Read a Book โDan Shipper reads a book with ChatGPT in voice mode on so he can verbalize questions out loud while reading. This is the kind of educational technology people would drool over ten years ago.
Best Scifi Book โSeth Dickinson's Exordia is scifi that will stretch your brain in a good way. It starts slow but when it picks up, it really picks up.
๐ฐ Whatโs Your 2024 Story? by Jay Shetty
as 2024 comes to a close, Iโm giving you seven questions to ask yourself while you begin to envision what 2025 could look like for you.
1. What is a challenge you overcame this year?
What did that challenge teach you? Look at what you learned from it, and how that can inform what you want to achieve in 2025.
2. What is a surprise you dealt with?
3. Whatโs something you bought in 2024 that you love?
4. Whatโs the best book you read or podcast you listened to this year?
5. What are your blind spots for next year?
6. What made you the happiest in 2024?
7. Whoโs the person you couldnโt have gotten through this year without?
๐ฐ Let the References Speak by
The Reference Check
Instead, here are some questions that actually work (courtesy of Graham Duncan and some smart folks at Chick-fil-A):
1. "If [candidate's] number comes up on your caller ID, what does your brain anticipate they're calling about?" (This is secretly a genius question because it reveals the candidate's pattern of behavior and impact on others)
2. "If you were coaching them, how would you help them take their game up?" (Notice how this sneakily gets at weaknesses without triggering the reference's defensive instincts)
3. "Rate them from 1-10... No, 7s aren't allowed." (This is like the verbal equivalent of pushing someone off the fence they're sitting on)
The Secret Sauce: Learning to Listen Like a Detective Here's the thing most people miss: Reference checks aren't just about the words being said โ they're about HOW they're being said. Did they:
Hesitate before praising the candidate's "leadership skills"?
Light up when talking about their problem-solving abilities?
Use specific examples or vague corporate buzzwords?
Sound like they were reading from a script or speaking from the heart?
๐ฐ What Do You Do When You Have Nothing to Do? by Daily Stoic
Over on the Daily Stoic podcast, we were talking to James Clear about one of the challenges of the New Year New You Challenge (which we donโt want to spoil but you should join usโit starts on Jan. 1) and it prompted him to say something really interesting. โI like the idea of having good defaults,โ James said, โThe way I sometimes phrase it is, What do you do when you have nothing to do? For a lot of people, when they have nothing to doโwhen theyโve got a ten second break while they're standing in line at the store, or when they have five minutes in between a meetingโwhat they do is they scroll on their phoneโฆThatโs the default mode that they go into when they have nothing to do. And what I've really tried to doโI'm still working on this, I definitely don't have this figured outโis have a better answer to, what do I do when I have nothing to do?โ
๐ฐ The Best Thing for Your Productivity. by Matt DโAvella
Iโve gotten really clear on what gives me energy and what drains it.
Things that drain my energy:
Managing employees
Being on camera
Endless meetings
Giving people feedback
Conducting interviews (especially over 1+ hours)
Giving interviews
Things that give me energy:
Being alone
Working independently
Lifting weights
Writing
Editing
Spending time with people I love
Long walks
It sounds obvious, but seeing it written out was like flipping a switch. Once I realized what drains me, I worked to cut it back. And when I saw what fuels me, I doubled down.
So hereโs your challenge: Grab a piece of paper, open a blank doc, whatever works for you. Make two lists: what drains your energy and what gives you energy. Then, make one small change this week. Cut back on one energy vampire (you might not be able to fire your boss, but maybe you can set better boundaries). Add in one energy boost (like a workout or a creative project just for you).
๐ฐ Another Year on the (Note)books by
Roland Allenโs The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper, a book that felt like it was written just for me.
Non-fiction: Elisa Gabbertโs outstanding essay collection, Any Person Is the Only Self. Ted Gioiaโs How to Listen to Jazz. Timothy Snyderโs On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century. Brian Dillonโs book of essays about essays, Essayism. Jesse David Foxโs Comedy Book. John McPheeโs Oranges. Katherine Rundellโs Why You Should Read Childrenโs Books. Nick Hornbyโs Dickens and Prince: A Particular Kind of Genius. Bassist Stuart Davidโs memoir In the All-Night Cafรฉ: A Memoir of Belle and Sebastian's Formative Year. Psychoanalyst Marion Milnerโs A Life of One's Own, a very strange and interesting book published in 1934, about her using seven years of diary writing to investigate what she really wanted out of life. Timothy Deneviโs Freak Kingdom: Hunter S. Thompson's Manic Ten-Year Crusade Against American Fascism.
Oliver Burkemanโs Meditations for Mortals. (Oliver supplied me with the most helpful question of the year: โWhat would it mean to be done for the day?โ)
Matt Bucherโs The Belan Deck โ a mediation on A.I. and powerpoint and life that reads like David Marksonโs commonplace notecard novels meets Nicholson Bakerโs The Mezzanine.
John Hendrixโs graphic novel biography about the remarkable friendship of C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien, The Mythmakers.
๐ฐ Creator Gravity: How to Pull People Into Your Orbit by
What is Creator Gravity? Have you ever binge a personโs stuff right after finding them online? Itโs like youโre sucked into their content ecosystem and need more. Following them is a no brainer. Thatโs gravity. A creator with gravity has three values: 1. Health 2. Purpose 3. Energy
A creator with gravity cares about your health. They put out โnutritiousโ content, stuff that leaves you better off after ingesting itโyou feel inspired, smarter, motivated, pensive, enlightened, etc.
Brain Vitamins ๐
Vitamin A - Aha (โI never thought of it that wayโ)
Vitamin C - Clarity (โI get it nowโ)
Vitamin D โ Delight (โI find this hilariousโ)
Iron - Intelligence (โI feel smarter after reading thisโ)
B Complex (B1) - Truth Bomb (โI was waiting for someone to say thisโ)
2. Purpose
This is where purpose comes inโa clear signpost that tells people where youโre headed and why it matters. A creator cannot have gravity if they donโt have a purpose people can buy into.
3. Energy
If a creatorโs online presence feels forced, flat, or fake, youโll subliminally absorb those net-negative emotions and scroll away. But a creator with gravity has energy. Itโs similar to what judge Potter Stewart said in 1964 when he refused to define obscenity: โI know it when I see it.โ
Building gravity takes a long timeโyears, evenโas you figure out your voice and hone your content creation skills. But here are some prompts to get you started:
1. Purpose
Whatโs something you wish you saw more (or less) of?
What problems do people naturally keep coming to you for help with?
When do you find yourself saying, โSomeone should really change or fix thisโฆโ? Side note: Your purpose doesnโt need to be as ambitious as closing the pay gap or fighting the patriarchy. The goal is to just figure out which way youโre facing.
2. Health
How is your content providing value? (Refer to the brain vitamins scale!)
The Dinner Party Test: Would you genuinely repeat your posts to a stranger at a dinner party? If you wouldnโt, it might be because your ideas are half-baked, shallow, or riddled with cliches.
Have you ever seen the content youโre creating before? Is it something you wish you had in the past?
3. Energy
Whatโs a topic that riles you up that you could talk about for hours? (If you have ChatGPT, ask it to find patterns based on your old conversations.)
Send three articles to your closest friends or familyโtwo from other authors, one from youโand ask them to guess which one is yours. Then ask them to explain why.
Record yourself talking about the topics youโd like to explore for three minutes. Where does your voice naturally get louder or faster? Thatโs a signal of an energy spike.
If people start using words such as โbinge read,โ โrabbit holeโ or say they โnever miss anything you write,โ when they reply to you, youโre on the right path.
๐ฐ What I Learned From Will Burrad-Lucas by
Will Burrad-Lucas
His hunt for the black leopard is a thriller in itself. Iโll let you read it in his own words here.
โThe greatest accomplishments are often recognised when the margin between success and failure is at its narrowestโ.
๐ง New Year, New Phase of the Hobby by Tokyo Inklings
Jacob woke up early to see the Hatsu Hinode (first sunrise of the year) on his morning walk.
๐ง 2025 Predictions on AI, Podcasting, and the IPO of the Year - Pivot Pod
If your child isn't listening to you, have a trusted friend talk to them. Children sometimes listen to a friend of a parent, which can be helpful.
๐ฐ My Favorite Reads of 2024 by
I found joy in reading for pure pleasureโto laugh, gasp, feel heartbreak, rage, swoon, and feel alive. Here are the books that took me there.
10. Heartburn by Nora Ephron (1983) Heartburn is a fictionalized version of how Nora Ephronโs high-profile marriage exploded in the public eye after his husband had an affair while Ephron was seven months pregnant with their second child.
9. Young Mungo by Douglas Sturart (2022) There are some books you remember not only the story but the experience of reading them, and this one is one of those. Young Mungo is a family drama, a sweet love story between two fifteen-year-old boys and a coming of age set in a macho and homophobic Glasgow of the 1980s.
8. I Who Have Never Known Men by Jacqueline Harpman (1995) I reviewed this book in November, and was quite harsh, giving it a mixed review. Why is it here then? Well, the book simply stayed with me. I kept thinking about it; its themes kept popping into my head unannounced, and its characters felt like real people. So, Iโm giving it its credit. This dystopian novel follows forty women held captive in a cage without remembering how they got there (or why). It is told through the eyes of the youngest, a girl raised without societal norms, culture, or inherited knowledge.
6. In The Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado (2019) > โI speak into the silence. I toss the stone of my story into a vast crevice; measure the emptiness by its small sound.โ This book excels in terms of writing style and quality. In The Dream House is a memoir written in fragmented form.
5. Funny Story by Emily Henry (2024) Emily Henry's Funny Story was one of my most anticipated reads of the year. She and Abby Jimenez are the authors who make romantic comedies right: believable, funny, and with great characters.
4. The Color Purple by Alice Walker (1982) I finally read The Color Purple. And even though it was sometimes difficult to read, I loved it. We follow Celie, a poor girl in rural Georgia who is married to an older man and forced to share her life with a harsh and brutal husband. It explores race, spirituality, toxic masculinity, the long-lasting effects of abuse, identity, family, female friendships, and more.
3. Prophet Song by Paul Lynch (2023) Prophet Song shows us a democratic society (Ireland, in this case) that becomes a totalitarian state and a mother who fails to flee while she can because she cannot envision how easily things fall apart. The book screams. I could feel the tension, despair, and grief.
2. Malibu Rising by Taylor Jenkins Reid (2021) I have yet to rate a Taylor Jenkins Reid book less than five starts. I love how her books are stand-alone yet share a universe and have character cameos and easter eggs. She positions the story she is telling in a way that makes sense for her fans and people who have read all her other work (Like me!)
1. In Memoriam by Alice Winn (2023) I wish I could erase this book from my memory and read it again for the first time.
๐ฐ 2025 Predictions by Scott Galloway
The next set of winners will be firms that capitalize on service-as-a-software, i.e., taking human-intensive services and putting a thick layer of AI on top to scale with less labor. This is a fancy way of saying there will be more consumer-facing AI applications. The real cabbage, however, is in routinizing back-office functions (e.g., accounting, compliance, customer service, etc.).
Radar, jet engines, nuclear power, GPS, and blood banks were all developed during wartime. Thereโs something about war, and the potential loss of a civilization, that inspires creativity.
Last year, YouTube, which spends zero dollars on content โ it shares revenue with creators instead of paying them โ became the first streaming platform to reach 10% of all television viewing.
If your son is in the basement vaping and playing video games, you donโt really care about trans rights or Ukraine, you just want change, i.e., chaos and disruption.
๐ฐ Seventieth Anniversaries. 1955 Was a Very Good Year. by
There will be a lot of attention in 2025 for the centenary books: Carry On Jeeves, The Great Gatsby, The Trial, Mrs Dalloway.
The book I love most from 1925, naturally, is Virginia Woolfโs Common Reader. Itโs also a big anniversary for Jane Austen, who deserves all the praise she gets and then some.
But, as I wrote last year, there are many splendid seventieth anniversaries this year too. The 1950s was a vintage decade for literatureโfiction and non-fiction. It is the decade of James Baldwin and Ralph Ellison, Patricia Highsmith and Truman Capote. It is the time of The Hundred and One Dalmatians (1956) and The Borrowers (1952), of The Organisation Man (1956), The Cat in the Hat (1957), Things Fall Apart (1958), and Atlas Shrugged (1957).
๐ฐ That Time I Almost Blew It With a Billionaire, Jay Z, Secret Metrics | Issue 235 by Cam Houser
Jay-Z never felt intimidated when he walked in a boardroom with a bunch of highly-educated business types: โThey read a bunch of words, Iโve lived a bunch of life. It evens us out, whether they know it or not.โ
an investor recently who said her favorite metric for gauging product traction was the amount of activity on that product's community slack and/or discord channels. Funny how indicators of a startup's investment potential keep shifting over time.
January 5
๐ฐ Siddhartha Mukherjee: โI Donโt Like Writing as if I Donโt Existโ via The Guardian
Some of the stories in the book are very personal โ you open with one about a friend dying from cancer. What made you decide to include these stories, and were they difficult to write? Not difficult to write, but I think essential. I donโt like writing as if I donโt exist. The tone that comes most naturally to me floats somewhere between memoir and history and science. Occasionally a poem will creep in, or a fragment of an essay. It all goes into the mix. If you can convince a reader to come on the journey with you, then you can combine memoir with science writing.
Youโre an assistant professor, an oncologist, a researcher. How do you find time to write? My time is pretty regimented: I have time to do one thing, then another, and then I take a break. Itโs not like Iโm running around the hospital one minute and then dashing off to write a sentence. Itโs funny, because I donโt really pace myself, which is to say that itโs not always 10 pages a day. Some days I can write 50 pages, sometimes Iโll be stuck for days not being able to write at all. So I follow the thread of a thought, and let it rest. What helps is realising that this [thought] is not the comprehensive end of everything.
Where do you write? Famously, I write in bed. I only say โfamouslyโ because people make fun of it all the time. But I love writing in a small place. I donโt have a writing studio or anything like that. I like to snuggle up with my computer. What part of the writing process do you most enjoy? Bizarrely, I love editing, and I love being edited.
I have two kinds of readers and I use them very differently. One kind I call a champion, and I give them the book first because they are likely to say: โItโs all good, keep going.โ A second kind of reader is a critic who says: โWait a second, we need to think about this book differently, here are the problems.โ I think itโs really important to sequence them correctly, because in the early stages a book is very fragile and you donโt want it to be beaten down. Later on, itโs a tougher object and has the capacity to withstand challenges and critiques.
What have you been reading lately? I just read Jennifer Eganโs novel The Candy House. Every time she comes out with a new book, itโs a new narrative trend or trail, and I love that about her writing. I finished, after a long delay, Katherine Booโs book Behind the Beautiful Forevers, about life in a Mumbai slum. I loved it. The Lives of Artists by Calvin Tomkins is a nice series of essays. Zadie Smith has a very slim essay collection thatโs great, called Intimations.
What kind of reader were you as a child? In India it was generally hard to buy books. My father made a deal with me that every birthday, I would get the number of books to match my age. So at 14, I got 14 books, and so forth. I read pretty widely. I read Orwellโs Nineteen Eighty-Four in 1984. Midnightโs Children was an immense book for me, as it was for tens of thousands of readers in India, and as I grew up, I read more of Rushdieโs work. Suketu Mehtaโs book Maximum City, which I read as a young adult, was very influential, both in terms of style and the way he puts together memoir and history. I loved reading poetry too, and still do โ and thatโs how poems find their way into my books.
๐ฐ Bookshelf by
Writers repeat themselves, telling the same story in different disguises. But, you only notice the understory by immersing yourself in a collection of their works. So I try to read around an author. Walk around in their worldview a while. First a novel, then a short story or short work, then another novel, maybe an interview or article, then a biography.
The best books are the ones you reread. Reading is good. But rereading is sublime.
The Bible (ESV). For someone living in the West, The Bible is the one book you need to read. Especially Genesis, the four gospels, and the Letters of Paul.
Homer (Robert Fagles translation). The Illiad is good, but The Odyssey is divine. Itโs a smashing good story about adventure, suffering, and coming home.
F. Scott Fitzgerald. Fitzgerald is probably my favorite American author. I've read The Great Gatsby three or four times and even copied out the first 50 pages by hand, to get a feel for how Fitzgerald wrote. He captured the American Dream in a way no one else did. This collection of short stories is also excellent.
J.D. Salinger. The Catcher in the Rye is another book I continue to reread, almost every year. Partly for the laughter, but partly because everyone feels a little like Holden Caulfield. I also adored Franny and Zooey.
Jane Austen. While Pride and Prejudice gets the most attention, Persuasion is Austenโs masterpiece.
Austen influenced basically every writer who followed her, especially Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, and Proust.
Oscar Wilde. Iโve read The Portrait of Dorian Gray several times and spent time with The Importance of Being Earnest.
Bohumil Hrabal. I Served the King of England had a profound impact on me when I first read it. Immediately after, I read both Too Loud a Solitude and Closely Watched Trains, which are equally excellent short works. Hrabal might be the best writer no one talks about.
Others come to mind but not everyone would enjoy them. Don Quixote by Miguel Cervantes and The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas are longer works but are worth every second. The Quest of the Simple Life by William Dawson captures my exact desire to escape the city and retreat to the quiet countryside. I underlined almost every other sentence in Nihls Lyhne by Jens Peter Jacobsen, but I expect some will find it too flowery or poetic for prose. I continue to revisit Zorba the Greek by Nikos Kazantzakis as a reminder to get off the sidelines and into the joy of "being".
History The Lessons of History by Will Durant. Durant was one of the best historians of the 20th century. Here, he compressed four decades of work into 100 pages. I underlined nearly every other sentence.
๐ฐ Using a Notebook in the New Year by
I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. โJoan Didion, โOn Keeping a Notebookโ
Why did I write it down? In order to remember, of course, but exactly what was it I wanted to remember? How much of it actually happened? Did any of it? Why do I keep a notebook at all? The impulse to write things down is a peculiarly compulsive one, inexplicable to those who do not share it, useful only accidentally, only secondarily, in the way that any compulsion tries to justify itself. โJoan Didion, โOn Keeping a Notebookโ
An archivist colleague of mine once said that this will be the leastโrecorded period in human history.
His point was that so much of the information about individuals today is digital, mediated, and owned by (or licensed to) tech companies and corporations.
Each new month receives a spread. One page contains boxes dedicated to tasks, events, and projects for the month, while the other lists each day of the month, leaving room for one written line to sum up that day, and four column slots for tracking meditation, walks, and alcohol and coffee consumption.
The Commonplace Book I use my notebook to write notes and quotes from what I am reading, watching, or listening to. If I want to remember anything specific, I usually need to do this. After, I transfer distilled and relevant quotes to a digital file that I can then access on my phone at any time. When I remember to do so, that is.
The Sketchbook My notebook is also the central hub for all of my creative projects. I sketch thumbnails for book covers, create collages, and make drawings. Pages can get ugly, and books can get thickโand that is a good thing. The sketchbook is my place to explore ideas and make โbadโ things that are necessary stops on the road to making something good.
January 4
๐ฐ Social Development > Self-Development by
And the world doesnโt need more self-interested people. It needs more helpful people.
if we want to be better people we have to focus on others, not ourselves.
Chris Fraser says in his book The Philosophy of Mozi. Instead, they devote nearly all of it to how we can make life better for others. It wasnโt, โwe should meditate.โ It was: โWe should build the economy so we eradicate poverty.โ It wasnโt, โwe should study philosophy.โ It was: โWe should convince rulers not to war against neighboring states.โ
Iโve found a lot of purpose in this life, but as Iโve learned more about the challenges facing the world, Iโve also found myself wondering whether I should do more to solve them.
as I approach my 40s I find โthe worldโ Iโm trying to save has become much smaller. Now when I think about how I can be of service, I think about moving to where my sisters live so I can pick their children up from school and babysit them throughout the summer.
As Hasan Minhaj joked in his recent standup special: Therapy is like a haircut. You canโt tell me about it, I have to notice the difference.
๐ฐ December Reflections โข Pauses & Pivots by
This annual pruning of relationships is perhaps the hardest part of personal growth.
So I started with the simplest thing I could control โ a blog to pour out the jungle of thoughts from all the reading, podcasts, and deep conversations swimming in my head.
The maddening thing about choosing your own path is the silence.
Naval Ravikant puts it perfectly: > Meditation isn't about clearing your mind. It's about sitting with the chaos until it exhausts itself, about letting your thoughts run out of energy to distract you.
๐ฐ Why People Didnโt Used to Fear Death by
Philippe Ariesโ โThe Hour of Our Death: The Classic History of Western Attitudes Towards Death Over The Last Thousand Yearsโ.
Death used to stalk the everyday. It was an expected, accepted, and embraced part of life, which an ordinary person would come into contact with frequently, making the unknown of today rather ordinary.
Stories like that of Madame de Rhert, a matriarch from eighteenth century France, were common. Mme. de Rhert organised her funeral, had Masses said for her soul ahead of time, put all her earthly belongings in order and organised help with all the tasks she performed in the household. She then died on the day she had indicated. This level of clairvoyance wasnโt afforded to everyone, but nearly all had some premonition as to when death was near.
๐ฐ Answering Your Personal Questions. by
I say this as someone who has been slim most of my life, and in and out of health emergencies from the malnutrition of starving myself and over exercising, who developed a shitty immune system, bone density issues, gut problems, and kidney issues to name but a few, due to maintaining an aesthetic that the outside world approved of as โhealthyโ and was congratulated while I was slowly killing myself. (Cries in heroin-chic.) Under-eating and obsessing over food is psychologically and physiologically stressful.
It feels important to note, that I am in some physical decline right now, because my decades of restriction, lead to absolute chaos and rebellion in the other direction. Diet culture encourages a life of extremes.
My blood test results, pain and vitality are all that I care about. Dear reader, if youโre worried about your healthโฆ start and finish with these markers. They will protect you in the long term, and make you happier.
๐ฐ About a Book by
I took Tom a pack of 100 4โ x 6โ notecards and suggested that any story that he may have, no matter how big or small, should make its way onto a notecard in a few sentences or bullets. For the Proteasโ Performance Coach, I dusted off the cricketing analogy of โbuilding an innings with ones and twosโ and said something to the effect of, โTrying to write a book is too big of a project to get your head around. What I would do before trying to โwrite a bookโ is to try and notch up a century of these notecards with stories and anecdotes.โ
After about his 30th notecard, we shelved the notecard system altogether in favour of voice notes which we felt had more texture and โstoryโ to them.
We then started recording an hour-long video call a week, and Tom sent me the recordings of his calls with his assistant coaches, the chairman of the club and other key personnel. I started working through the transcripts of these calls, whittling away at them and a picture of what the book might look like started emerging.
While I always secretly harboured the dream of writing one or more books, I didnโt think that this year would be the year that it would happen.
๐ฐ a Simple Question That Changed My Perspective on Time by Ali Abdaal
This one comes from the YouTube channel / podcast Graham Cochrane. I first came across Grahamโs videos 8+ years ago when I was first getting into trying to become a music YouTuber. The first few videos I ever made were of me and my friends singing covers of popular songs, and Grahamโs YouTube channel Recording Revolution was helpful in teaching me about microphone positioning, audio engineering, mixing and the like. Fast forward many years, and now Grahamโs pivoted into being a (rather good) business coach instead of โthe audio tutorial guyโ. I binged a few episodes of his podcast over the holidays and loved this simple question he posed in one of them:What would you do differently if you didnโt feel you were running out of time?
What would you do differently, in your work and/or life, if you didnโt feel like you were running out of time?
๐ฐ ...The "Anything" Gym... by
Itโs been about two years and two months since I began hosting a weekly gym for writers. Every Monday at 9AM PDT word nerds from around the world gather for an hour to write, join in group discussions, spar on ideas, assist in research, edit and give feedback on works in progress.
๐ฐ Iโm Building a Cooperative Media Ecosystem by
P.S. If you are interested in getting involved, Iโm currently looking for pitches on the following topics:
โข Terraforming the Earth
โข The Blueprint for a Better Business
โข A World of City States
โข A Utopian Short Fiction Anthology
Donโt send me a complete essay, just send me a pitch about what you want to write about at elle@elysian.press
January 3
๐ฐ School Is Not Enough by
Readers (and some biographers) tend to fixate on the celebrity itself, the inflection point when people achieved fame. But their early lives often contain something more revealing than their successes. Before you grasp, you have to reach. How did they learn to reach?
Many a modern story opens with a workerโan office worker usuallyโwho is so inert that he scarcely notices the passage of time until he becomes blindsided by a sudden yank of reality that forces him out of this inertia. Since we do not live in stories, we have to ask: How can we make that pull ourselves?
Agency is the capacity to act. Gaining agency is gaining the capacity to do something different from the rigid path of events that simply happen to you.
Remarkable people typically go off-script early, usually in more than one way. Carnegie becoming a telegraph message boy is one opportunity; asking how to operate the telegraph is another. He was handed the first one, but he had to ask for the second. Da Vinci had plenty of small-time commissions, but he quit them all in favor of offering his services to the Duke of Milan.
No one is asked to write a book, or start a company, or stage a play, or seek invention and excellence in the unknown. These acts are very contrary to the default script.
Conservation of Agency In these old biographies I find it interesting just how early and varied the avenues were that allowed promising adolescents to pivot off-script, and do something different than everyone else. For a 13-year-old today, what is the equivalent of being a telegraph office boy where one can learn technology while contributing? What about for a 16-year-old? What is todayโs equivalent of becoming Verrocchioโs studio apprentice at 14? Where are the studios, anyway?
We have a public imagination that cannot conceive of what exactly to do with children, especially smart children. We fail to properly respect them through adolescence, so we have engineered them to be in storage, and so they shuffle through a decade of busywork. Partly, the length of schooling has increased simply because it couldโbecause we no longer need children to work, yet need them to do something while the adults go do theirs.
The time sink of school is a kind of opportunity suffocation, it makes it more difficult to imagine what good opportunities might even exist for most children.
the longer we disallow children from having the agency to act on the world, the harder it becomes for them to visualize it in the first place. The result is that we have young adults who have a difficult time adjusting once their life-script changes even a little bit, or once it simply ends past college. The path is rigid, yet brittle.
Modern schooling began as a track to be left as soon as you found something worthwhile to do with your life. But it has since morphed into an attempt at systematizing as many years of a childโs life as possible, extending well into their adulthood.
systems at scale must function with and cater to the lowest common denominator, and the process of standardization loses all sensitivity to context.
in having so many years of life monopolized, people come to inadvertently believe that skill and knowledge transfer are primarily the domain of school rather than a normal consequence of meaningful work.
it seems that the more you ask of people and the more you have them do, the more they grow into to the task of doing it on their own.
We are not looking for a job but opportunities for mastery: learning and practice beyond the depth one would find along the common path, which demands no such thing.
A close look at social media reveals ample opportunity for self-apprenticeship.
The ultimate mentor is always the parent, and the resources are broader than ever.
๐ฐ the Magic Lamp Question by Ali Abdaal
Graham Weaverโs last lecture at Stanford Business School (from 2 years ago) titled โYour Life as the Heroโs Journeyโ.
Wish instead for something that gives you meaning. Wish for what makes you come alive.โ
writing is the foundation of nearly every technology and innovation because we have to record what we know before we can build upon it (View Highlight)
Writer Susan Sontag on finding the courage to change this year: "I must change my life so that I can live it, not wait for it." Source: Reborn: Journals and Notebooks
๐ฐ Reading Jane Austen via
Austen is the great genius who invented the modern English novel, whose innovative narrative techniques have been justly compared to the inventions of Flaubert and the modernists, and whose prose is a globally recognised gold standard of English usage.
January 2
๐ง Mark Manson Shares 3 Rules for Life via Matt DโAvellaโs Three Rules
Fault is generally external and it's past tense. Responsibility is always present in future tense.
In fact, actually one of the most depressing periods of my life happened right after Subtle Art hit number one on the New York Times list. Like, and it partially happened because I had had all these dreams and goals for my entire adult life. And, and I, once I hit them all, I had no idea what to do with myself. I was like, oh shit, I'm 31 and I've peaked. And like that took me to a very dark place quickly. I'm like, wow, there's, I don't know what to do. Like I had no plan for anything after this, you know? So yeah, I sat on the couch and drank a lot of wine and played a lot of video games. And so yeah, it never goes away.
January 1
๐ฐ Start a Big, Ambitious, Inspiring Project via
We decided to tackle a big project. And we decided it shouldnโt just be a big project. No, it should be a once in a life-time project. Those types of projects you look back upon fondly and tell your grandkids about. The kind that you brag to random strangers in line at the barbershop while waiting for them to open the doors because itโs 27 degrees outside and before long youโre new friends.
๐ฅ Inside Inventor Simone Giertzโs Small Los Angeles Home, 58sqm/630sqft
I love working on jigsaw puzzles, but I don't like how much table space it takes up. So I was thinking, like, can I make a table where I can switch between two tabletops?
I think the mantra that I've had for myself is I'd rather have weird than boring and ugly than boring. So it's like, even if I make a custom light switch, that's not like the most beautiful, or at least it's not going to be boring.
๐ฐ The Key to Making a Resolution Stick by
That night, I began to understand something profoundly powerful: in rejecting who I had been, in pushing that person away, I was caught in a resistance that would do nothing but recreate Old Me.
๐ฐ Resist Summary by
There exists lots of good summary, itโs mostly a question of quantity. And some of it really is compelling. Will Durantโs Story of Civilization is a giant, sweeping summary. But it is most worthwhile when read with a mind to record some threads to follow deeper, later. The workโs value is not just in the bare facts, but in presenting you several hundred doors. You may be rewarded sooner, in fact, if you pick a door and explore it for some time on your own before returning to his grand narrative. Perhaps you become so pleasantly lost that you never return to the summary.
You cannot read a summary of Anna Karenina and somehow stockpile its pleasures and charms. Narrative resists compression.
I think one should write as much as they can with their own empiricism, their own senses, giving the reader their own characterization of life or events.
The opposite of summary is attention to detail.
๐ The Hidden Girl and Other Stories by
A good story cannot function like a legal brief, which attempts to persuade and lead the reader down a narrow path suspended above the abyss of unreason. Rather, it must be more like an empty house, an open garden, a deserted beach by the ocean. The reader moves in with their own burdensome baggage and long-cherished possessions, seeds of doubt and shears of understanding, maps of human nature and baskets of sustaining faith. The reader then inhabits the story, explores its nooks and crannies, rearranges the furniture to suit their taste, covers the walls with sketches of their inner life, and thereby makes the story their home.
โI am not my father,โ she said. โAnd youโre not your parents. Family is a story that is told to you, but the story that matters the most you must tell yourself.โ
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Thanks for the roundup! There's lot of good stuff to read in here (no i'm not saying that because you linked mine ahah)
Wow, props and thank you for even putting this all together ๐คฉ