January 2025
Books, articles, podcasts, and thoughts throughout the month
Books read:
📕 Steal Like an Artist by
📕 Year of Yes by Shonda Rhimes
📕 The Best Girls by Min Jin Lee
📖 The Hidden Girl and Other Stories by
📖 The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle
📖 The Gene by Siddhartha Mukherjee
📖 Keep Going by
Posts published:
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.
🎧 The DOJ’s 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
🎧 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.
📰 What We Lose When We Let AI Hold the Pen by
Outsourcing writing from our lives won’t just make us poorer writers. It will make us worse thinkers.
📰 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.
📰 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. It’s 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 don’t do unpaid test assignments. Their response? “We’re happy to pay your hourly rate.” 💡 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 can’t afford you.
📰 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
📰 Quiet Compounding by Morgan Housel
Nature is not in a hurry, yet everything is accomplished,” said Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu.
I like the idea of quietly compounding your money. Just like in nature, it’s where you’ll 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. It’s 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, “Would I be happy with this result if no one other than me and my family could see it, and I didn’t compare the result to the appearance of other people’s success?”
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 – using money to improve your life more than you try to influence other people’s perception of your life. I’d 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.
📰 The Tao of Cal by Cal Newport
Knowledge Work
Treat cognitive context shifts as “productivity poison.” The more you switch your attention from one target (say, a report you’re 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.
It’s 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, it’s 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 “dream job” 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 “career capital” 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.
📰 The Message by Ta-Nehisi Coates by
In Between the World and Me, Ta-Nehisi Coates’s 2015 epistolary work addressed to his son, he writes of his youthful act of reclaiming both his body and his power—the same power that animated his ancestors—through books.
Coates’s newest essay collection, The Message, is a continuation of this haunting, but here, the haunting transforms. In this collection, Coates’s 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.
📰 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 life’s difficult seasons. In essence, just as nature moves through cycles of activity and rest, humans too need periods of pulling back and recharging.
📰 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.
📰 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 they’re saying, ask for examples
What’s an example of this going on?
Can you think of another time that happened to you?
The guiding light is your curiosity.
📰 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 who’ve already walked the path you’re on can offer invaluable guidance and save you TONS of time. These mentors—whether you meet them in real life or discover their wisdom in books—can help you navigate challenges and keep moving forward.
Say Yes. Then No: When you’re just starting out, say yes to opportunities that help you grow and gain experience. But as you progress, it’s equally important to embrace the power of saying no.
📰 Photo Insider: The 35° Window by Cody Mitchell
“Light 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.” - George Eastman, founder of Kodak.
When higher than 6° but lower than 35°, 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 35°. Observe how the light changes as it gets lower in the sky.
📰 My Number 1 Productivity Hack by
there's very few industries that you can't absolutely win by 1 p.m.
California, in particular, pays a lot in federal taxes because it’s 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 America’s top 9 technology companies — all of them if you count pre-Cybertruck Tesla — are based either in Silicon Valley or in Seattle. And while Hollywood doesn’t dominate films and TV the way it once did, Los Angeles still plays a major role in America’s 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 shouldn’t matter whether they’ve earned it.
📰 Mental Rehearsal—train 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 you’ll hear your name in a crowded room.)
📰 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.'"
📰 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) aren’t 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, it’s like well... hmm... and then if you talk to teachers about the problems the phones are creating in classrooms, it’s another hmm.
Our attention has become the ultimate commodity. When we log on to the internet, we are immediately exposed to thirty different things— from gut-wrenching to wonderous— in the span of one minute. This can lead to cognitive dissonance, especially when we define ourselves through the lens of the content we consume— be it TikTok videos or Instagram reels— which places artificial limits on our self-conception.
The problem is that it’s 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 it’s 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 • 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.
That’s what those who lose it all, gain - perspective. And I think that’s 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.
📰 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.
I’ve 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.
📰 You Need to Come Out to Yourself Right Now by
By coming out to yourself, I mean accepting some truth that’s gurgling beneath the surface in your life, demanding to be heard
📰 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.
📰 Steven Farmer’s Animal Spirit Guides recommendation via
🎧 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
🎧 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
🎧 “Little Goalposts” | 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.
📰 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 – and definitely society as a whole – 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 you’ve knocked out the major issues and are left dealing with lower, less-sever ones.
The dumber the disagreements, the better the world actually is.
📰 Before the World Needs Me by
in Mexico, the sunrise is the only thing that’s ever on time.
🎧 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
📰 I Went Viral, but I Don't Really Care by
more views isn’t the goal. More of the right views is the goal.
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 don’t engage with exercise at all because the culture around exercise is so dogmatic.
🎧 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.
📰 How to Make A.I. That’s Good for People by Fei Fei Li
Despite its name, there is nothing “artificial” about this technology — it is made by humans, intended to behave like humans and affects humans. So if we want it to play a positive role in tomorrow’s world, it must be guided by human concerns.
“human-centered A.I.” 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 today’s 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 cat’s 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.
“Computing Machinery and Intelligence” by Alan Turing (1950)
“Programs with Common Sense” by John McCarthy (1959)
“Perceptrons” by Marvin Minsky (1969)
“Learning Representations by Back-Propagating Errors” by David Rumelhart (1986)
“Parallel Distributed Processing: Explorations in the Microstructure of Cognition” by David Rumelhart (1986)
“Gradient-Based Learning Applied to Document Recognition” by Yann LeCun (1998)
“ImageNet Classification with Deep Convolutional Neural Networks” by Alex Krizhevsky (2012)
“Auto-Encoding Variational Bayes” by Diederik Kingma (2013)
“Human-Level Control through Deep Reinforcement Learning” by Volodymyr Mnih (2015)
“Attention Is All You Need” by Ashish Vaswani (2017)
“Language Models are Few-Shot Learners” by Tom Brown (2020)
“Chain-of-Thought Prompting Elicits Reasoning in Large Language Models” by Jason Wei (2022)
“PaLM: Scaling Language Modeling with Pathways” by Aakanksha Chowdhery (2022)
“GPT-4 Technical Report” by OpenAI (2023)
January 13
🎧 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
Click link to see Tommy’s 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 I’m sure I understand the idea the writer is developing.
January 11
🎧 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
🎧 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 “actually I dunno what to do”
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
📰 Stoic Lessons From a Life Well-Lived - Daily Stoic
Make 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 thought—a habit rooted in his boyhood practice of rising early. “I need more time alone early each morning,” he wrote to his team, ensuring he approached each day with clarity and focus.
🎧 Money for Couples — 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.
A “creator” is anyone who shares their ideas online—whether through newsletters, YouTube videos, TikToks, LinkedIn posts, a blog, whatever. “Gravity” is a commanding online presence.
Combine the two, and you get “creator gravity”—the 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 it’s near impossible to quit a Netflix episode halfway through, we can’t ignore the hero’s journey.
📰 More Output, Less Effort by Every’s 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 way—and 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, I’m 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. It’s 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 don’t 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 isn’t out of control.
📰 110,000 People Registered for This Workshop: Here's What We Learned
✍️ 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. 🏆 Major Milestones - What were the most significant events or achievements in 2024 for you? How did these impact your life?
2. 🙏 Gratitude - What are you most grateful for in 2024? Think about people, experiences, or opportunities that enriched your life.
3. 💪 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. 🎓 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. 🌱 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. ❌ Unfulfilled Aspirations - Were there goals or aspirations you had for 2024 that you didn’t achieve? Reflect on why they were not met and how you feel about it.
7. 👥 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. 🚀 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?
🪦 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 you’d like different people to say at your funeral.
Today, we gather to honour the life and legacy of [name]
[Name] was a…
In his personal life, he…
Those closest to him remember him as…
In his professional life, he…
His work will be remembered for its contribution to…
He was an inspiration to others because…
The story of his life teaches us that…
He’ll always be remembered as someone who lived with…
Finally, if [name] were here with us today, he’d remind us that…
Philosopher and writer Friedrich Nietzsche on enjoying the process: "The end of a melody is not its goal." Source: The Wanderer and His Shadow
📰 Imagine Your Brain Operating at Its Peak by
taking care of my brain.
when you put your brain’s health first.
But here’s what works best—especially for high-performers: Small, consistent changes add up over time.
1. Minimising toxins
Here’s 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 brain’s 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 inevitable—but manageable. Try the “Name, Tame, Reframe” 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 reflection—not just venting.
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
🎧 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.
Before Jane learned to show up with presence, she was like the first fisherman—always 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
📰 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. “Look what you do for a living—you wake the dead.” If you’ve 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, we’re waking the dead. We’re 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 eternal—a 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.
📰 The Ghost of Banking Panics Future by
Bank runs were quite common before the creation of FSLIC and the FDIC — 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 he’s never heard of the Panic of 1893, a huge wave of contagious bank runs that was catastrophic for industrial production and employment
📰 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.
📰 Do Not Mistake Retirement for the End Goal by
Retirement is worst-case scenario insurance.
📰 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, I’m haunted by Tim Urban’s The Tail End — a sobering reminder that assuming we spend 10 meaningful days with our parents a year in adulthood, by the time we graduate “from high school, [we have] already used up 93% of [our] in-person parent time. [We’re] now enjoying the last 5% of that time. We’re in the tail end.”
📰 Productivity Spark Key Takeaways by Team Ali Abdaal
1️⃣ 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. Here’s what we covered:
1. The 10-Year Dream - Write down all the big, exciting dreams you’d love to achieve in the next decade. They can be as wild and as ambitious as you’d 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 we’re making progress and where we’re falling short. You can complete your wheel of life and track your progress weekly using Izzy’s 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).
2️⃣ Design Your Most Productive Year Ever with Ali In this session, we created our Quarterly Quests - the 90-day (ish) goals/projects that we’re 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, what’s 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, what’s the single most important goal or project for you to accomplish in the next 3 months?
3. Here’s a useful framework for defining Quests:
Clear statement of the quest (”My main Quest is to…”)
Why it’s the most important thing this quarter (”This is the single most important thing for me to accomplish this quarter because…”)
Objective completion criteria by March 31st (”To complete the Quest, I commit that by 31st March 2025, I’ll have done A, B, and C”)
Why it feels exciting and compelling (”This feels really exciting and compelling for me because…”)
Specific actions to ensure completion (”To make sure I complete the Quest, I’m going to…”)
📰 Getting Better at the Wrong Thing by
If we weren’t 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?
📰 Here Are Some of the TikTok Rabbit Holes I’ve Tumbled Down, Pleasurably Wasting Hours and Hours of Time. by Roxane Gay
“Just how many people are going to offer their variation on the theme of the day?”
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.
It’s 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 platform’s critics are rightly focused on the app’s many serious privacy issues, the unsavory content deserves equal opprobrium.
📰 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.
📰 “Looks Good to Me” 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.
📰 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.
It’s 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.
🎧 How to Scale Yourself, the Future of Prof G Media, and Scott’s Advice to Interns - Prof G Pod
George Hahn runs half of Scott’s 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.
🎧 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.
🎥 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
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 that’s toxic to its neighbors, copy it, shoot it, and isolate the original.
Photocopy thermal faxes. Or anything that’s 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. You’ll 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 there’s no telling whether digital or analog storage will be most stable in the long run.
📰 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 you’re 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 you’d like to try out what I’m currently using here are links to my logbook, pocket notebook, commonplace diary, and diary.
let’s start with the notebook I’ve written the least about: my pocket notebook.
I try to have this nearby all the time, whether I’m in the house, in the studio, or out and about in the world. It’s basically just a ”waste book” for scribbling and doodling ideas.
One weird thing I’m 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 there’s anything you can use.
Next up, I’ll show you a spread from the notebook I’ve 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 I’ll show you is the one I’ve 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. I’ve done this since 2017, when I fell in love with Thoreau’s journals and wanted to keep my own.
January 7
🎥 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
🎧 Justin Narayan Shares 3 Rules for Life - Matt D’Avella’s 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
📰 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 I’d 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. I’m 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
📰 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.
📰 This Model Was the Key to Unleashing My Son's Potential by
I’d add one more that’s not in the research, but I’ve 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 it’s 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. It’s easier to get into flow when we’ve been closer to flow recently.
📰 Best of 2024, Award Ceremony Photodump, Well-Built Software by
Tella, 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 Forms 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 Dan 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 Seth 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.
📰 What’s Your 2024 Story? by Jay Shetty
as 2024 comes to a close, I’m 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. What’s something you bought in 2024 that you love?
4. What’s 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. Who’s the person you couldn’t have gotten through this year without?
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 — 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?
📰 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 don’t want to spoil but you should join us—it starts on Jan. 1) and it prompted him to say something really interesting. “I like the idea of having good defaults,” James said, “The 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 do—when they’ve got a ten second break while they're standing in line at the store, or when they have five minutes in between a meeting—what they do is they scroll on their phone…That’s the default mode that they go into when they have nothing to do. And what I've really tried to do—I'm still working on this, I definitely don't have this figured out—is have a better answer to, what do I do when I have nothing to do?”
📰 The Best Thing for Your Productivity. by Matt D’Avella
I’ve 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 here’s 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).
📰 Another Year on the (Note)books by
Roland Allen’s The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper, a book that felt like it was written just for me.
Non-fiction: Elisa Gabbert’s outstanding essay collection, Any Person Is the Only Self. Ted Gioia’s How to Listen to Jazz. Timothy Snyder’s On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century. Brian Dillon’s book of essays about essays, Essayism. Jesse David Fox’s Comedy Book. John McPhee’s Oranges. Katherine Rundell’s Why You Should Read Children’s Books. Nick Hornby’s Dickens and Prince: A Particular Kind of Genius. Bassist Stuart David’s memoir In the All-Night Café: A Memoir of Belle and Sebastian's Formative Year. Psychoanalyst Marion Milner’s 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 Denevi’s Freak Kingdom: Hunter S. Thompson's Manic Ten-Year Crusade Against American Fascism.
Oliver Burkeman’s Meditations for Mortals. (Oliver supplied me with the most helpful question of the year: “What would it mean to be done for the day?”)
Matt Bucher’s The Belan Deck — a mediation on A.I. and powerpoint and life that reads like David Markson’s commonplace notecard novels meets Nicholson Baker’s The Mezzanine.
John Hendrix’s graphic novel biography about the remarkable friendship of C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien, The Mythmakers.
📰 Creator Gravity: How to Pull People Into Your Orbit by
What is Creator Gravity? Have you ever binge a person’s stuff right after finding them online? It’s like you’re sucked into their content ecosystem and need more. Following them is a no brainer. That’s 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 “nutritious” content, stuff that leaves you better off after ingesting it—you feel inspired, smarter, motivated, pensive, enlightened, etc.
Brain Vitamins 💊
Vitamin A - Aha (“I never thought of it that way”)
Vitamin C - Clarity (“I get it now”)
Vitamin D – Delight (“I find this hilarious”)
Iron - Intelligence (“I feel smarter after reading this”)
B Complex (B1) - Truth Bomb (“I was waiting for someone to say this”)
2. Purpose
This is where purpose comes in—a clear signpost that tells people where you’re headed and why it matters. A creator cannot have gravity if they don’t have a purpose people can buy into.
3. Energy
If a creator’s online presence feels forced, flat, or fake, you’ll subliminally absorb those net-negative emotions and scroll away. But a creator with gravity has energy. It’s similar to what judge Potter Stewart said in 1964 when he refused to define obscenity: “I know it when I see it.”
Building gravity takes a long time–years, even–as you figure out your voice and hone your content creation skills. But here are some prompts to get you started:
1. Purpose
What’s 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, “Someone should really change or fix this…”? Side note: Your purpose doesn’t need to be as ambitious as closing the pay gap or fighting the patriarchy. The goal is to just figure out which way you’re 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 wouldn’t, it might be because your ideas are half-baked, shallow, or riddled with cliches.
Have you ever seen the content you’re creating before? Is it something you wish you had in the past?
3. Energy
What’s 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 family–two from other authors, one from you—and ask them to guess which one is yours. Then ask them to explain why.
Record yourself talking about the topics you’d like to explore for three minutes. Where does your voice naturally get louder or faster? That’s a signal of an energy spike.
If people start using words such as “binge read,” “rabbit hole” or say they “never miss anything you write,” when they reply to you, you’re on the right path.
📰 What I Learned From Will Burrad-Lucas by
Will Burrad-Lucas
His hunt for the black leopard is a thriller in itself. I’ll let you read it in his own words here.
“The greatest accomplishments are often recognised when the margin between success and failure is at its narrowest”.
🎧 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.
🎧 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.
📰 My Favorite Reads of 2024 by
I found joy in reading for pure pleasure—to 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 Ephron’s 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, I’m 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) > “I speak into the silence. I toss the stone of my story into a vast crevice; measure the emptiness by its small sound.” 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.
📰 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. There’s something about war, and the potential loss of a civilization, that inspires creativity.
Last year, YouTube, which spends zero dollars on content — it shares revenue with creators instead of paying them — 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 don’t really care about trans rights or Ukraine, you just want change, i.e., chaos and disruption.
📰 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 Woolf’s Common Reader. It’s 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 literature—fiction 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).
📰 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: “They read a bunch of words, I’ve lived a bunch of life. It evens us out, whether they know it or not.”
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
📰 Siddhartha Mukherjee: ‘I Don’t Like Writing as if I Don’t Exist’ via The Guardian
Some of the stories in the book are very personal – 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 don’t like writing as if I don’t 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.
You’re 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. It’s not like I’m running around the hospital one minute and then dashing off to write a sentence. It’s funny, because I don’t really pace myself, which is to say that it’s not always 10 pages a day. Some days I can write 50 pages, sometimes I’ll 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 “famously” because people make fun of it all the time. But I love writing in a small place. I don’t 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: “It’s all good, keep going.” A second kind of reader is a critic who says: “Wait a second, we need to think about this book differently, here are the problems.” I think it’s really important to sequence them correctly, because in the early stages a book is very fragile and you don’t want it to be beaten down. Later on, it’s a tougher object and has the capacity to withstand challenges and critiques.
What have you been reading lately? I just read Jennifer Egan’s novel The Candy House. Every time she comes out with a new book, it’s a new narrative trend or trail, and I love that about her writing. I finished, after a long delay, Katherine Boo’s 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 that’s 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 Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four in 1984. Midnight’s 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 Rushdie’s work. Suketu Mehta’s 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 – and that’s how poems find their way into my books.
📰 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. It’s 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 Austen’s masterpiece.
Austen influenced basically every writer who followed her, especially Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, and Proust.
Oscar Wilde. I’ve 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.
📰 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. —Joan Didion, “On Keeping a Notebook”
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. —Joan Didion, “On Keeping a Notebook”
An archivist colleague of mine once said that this will be the least–recorded 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 thick—and that is a good thing. The sketchbook is my place to explore ideas and make “bad” things that are necessary stops on the road to making something good.
January 4
📰 Social Development > Self-Development by
And the world doesn’t 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 wasn’t, “we should meditate.” It was: “We should build the economy so we eradicate poverty.” It wasn’t, “we should study philosophy.” It was: “We should convince rulers not to war against neighboring states.”
I’ve found a lot of purpose in this life, but as I’ve learned more about the challenges facing the world, I’ve also found myself wondering whether I should do more to solve them.
as I approach my 40s I find “the world” I’m 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 can’t tell me about it, I have to notice the difference.
📰 December Reflections • 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 — 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.
📰 Why People Didn’t Used to Fear Death by
Philippe Aries’ ‘The Hour of Our Death: The Classic History of Western Attitudes Towards Death Over The Last Thousand Years’.
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 wasn’t afforded to everyone, but nearly all had some premonition as to when death was near.
📰 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 “healthy” 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 you’re worried about your health… start and finish with these markers. They will protect you in the long term, and make you happier.
📰 About a Book by
I took Tom a pack of 100 4” x 6” 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 Proteas’ Performance Coach, I dusted off the cricketing analogy of ‘building an innings with ones and twos’ and said something to the effect of, “Trying to write a book is too big of a project to get your head around. What I would do before trying to ‘write a book’ is to try and notch up a century of these notecards with stories and anecdotes.”
After about his 30th notecard, we shelved the notecard system altogether in favour of voice notes which we felt had more texture and ‘story’ 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 didn’t think that this year would be the year that it would happen.
📰 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 Graham’s 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 Graham’s YouTube channel Recording Revolution was helpful in teaching me about microphone positioning, audio engineering, mixing and the like. Fast forward many years, and now Graham’s pivoted into being a (rather good) business coach instead of “the audio tutorial guy”. 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 didn’t feel you were running out of time?
What would you do differently, in your work and/or life, if you didn’t feel like you were running out of time?
It’s 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.
📰 I’m Building a Cooperative Media Ecosystem by
P.S. If you are interested in getting involved, I’m currently looking for pitches on the following topics:
• Terraforming the Earth
• The Blueprint for a Better Business
• A World of City States
• A Utopian Short Fiction Anthology
Don’t send me a complete essay, just send me a pitch about what you want to write about at elle@elysian.press
January 3
📰 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 worker—an office worker usually—who 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 today’s equivalent of becoming Verrocchio’s 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 could—because 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 child’s 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.
📰 the Magic Lamp Question by Ali Abdaal
Graham Weaver’s last lecture at Stanford Business School (from 2 years ago) titled “Your Life as the Hero’s Journey”.
Wish instead for something that gives you meaning. Wish for what makes you come alive.”
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
📰 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
🎧 Mark Manson Shares 3 Rules for Life via Matt D’Avella’s 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
📰 Start a Big, Ambitious, Inspiring Project via
We decided to tackle a big project. And we decided it shouldn’t 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 it’s 27 degrees outside and before long you’re new friends.
🎥 Inside Inventor Simone Giertz’s 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.
📰 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.
📰 Resist Summary by
There exists lots of good summary, it’s mostly a question of quantity. And some of it really is compelling. Will Durant’s 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 work’s 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.
📖 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.
“I am not my father,” she said. “And you’re not your parents. Family is a story that is told to you, but the story that matters the most you must tell yourself.”
Some links are affiliate links, meaning that I may receive a commission if you make a purchase through the links at no cost to you.
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 🤩