November 2024
Books, articles, podcasts, and thoughts throughout the month
Books read:
📖 Ken Liu's translation of Laozi’s Dao De Jing
📕 Supercommunicators by Charles Duhigg
Posts published:
November 29
📰 Studio Gear by
Because people ask, here is a page listing what I use in the studio. Not necessarily endorsements — most of this stuff was not acquired after long testing and research. Often, I simply find something that works for me and stick with it. Remember: The tools matter and they don’t matter
📰 On Meaningful Minimalism and Micro Investments by Jo Franco
I'm standing firm on my shopping philosophy: I only buy things for myself and loved ones that are investments in the present or future.
Here's the one question I ask before clicking buy: "Will this support who I'm becoming?"
📰 The 2024 Kleon Studios Gift Guide by
Books I didn’t write:
the doorstopper of the year for creative people is probably Adam Moss’s The Work of Art.
Lovers of notebooks will love Roland Allen’s The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper.
A book that helped me quite a bit was Katherine Morgan Schaffer’s The Perfectionist’s Guide To Losing Control.
We’re all going to need Timothy Snyder’s On Tyranny next year.
A24’s Hey Kids, Watch This! was a fun help for picking our pizza night movies with the kids. (I also love Ty Burr’s The Best Old Movies for Families.)
The Pentel Portable Pocket Brush pen is the most magical pen I own. I buy them in bulk, but they last forever so I rarely have to replace them. I love them so much I hacked them to do color using Lamy fountain inks and Pelikan highlighter ink.
I loved Julia Turshen’s holiday hack: “If you don’t like cooking with people, you can set up a 1000 piece puzzle in another room and tell them they’re not allowed in the kitchen until the puzzle is done.”
We resisted getting them an e-reader for a long time, but our oldest loves his Kindle Paperwhite for Kids and reads it all the time in middle school.
November 28
📰 Being an Idiot and Writing Your Newsletter - An Interview I Did for Creator Spotlight -
Personal essays alone don’t pay the bills Alex makes around $15,000 a year from paid *Both Are True* subscriptions. Which is, as he says, “for that 27-subscriber guy, crazy. But how do you support a family on that?” In a classic Both Are True situation, the newsletter itself doesn't pay all the bills, but it has opened doors that do allow him to make a full living.
At one point, writing the newsletter but still without a full-time job, he began reaching out to other writers, offering to help them define their brand, edit their writing, and market their newsletters. He found most were interested in the latter. After helping a few people pro bono, he had testimonials and began picking up paid clients.
He then, about 1 year ago, got an offer from Sari Azout, the founder of Sublime, a knowledge management app, to work on their newsletter and handle a number of other responsibilities as Head of Creative. This is his full-time job; the newsletter and consulting work provide supplementary income.
if you got to text personal messages to someone only 4 times a month, wouldn't you make sure that what you texted them really counted?
Austin gave away free gratitude zines
📰 Defeat Jet Lag by Andrew Huberman
Before You Travel East (to an earlier timezone)
Eastward travel is typically more challenging for the body to adapt to. Why? Most people find it easier to stay awake later than to fall asleep earlier. In the former, there’s more time to get the necessary light signals at the right times compared to the latter. If you can, prepare for your trip and partially adjust your circadian rhythm before your eastward travel by using light, exercise and caffeine: • Get Early Light Exposure: When traveling east (say you’re flying from California to New York) you need to shift to waking up earlier than you normally would. Starting two days before you leave, try waking up 30 to 45 minutes prior to your usual wake-up time and view bright sunlight or bright artificial light as soon as you wake up. • Drink Caffeine Early: This will help promote alertness early in the day and make it much easier to shift to your new time zone when you fly east. • Getting Moving: Within 60 minutes of your new, earlier wake-up time, get some physical movement — even just some light jogging if you can’t do a full workout. These three levers: light, caffeine and exercise will help adjust your circadian clock fast.
Before You Travel West (to a later timezone)
As mentioned earlier, westward travel tends to be easier for most people. That said, it can still help to adjust your circadian rhythm before your travel by using light, exercise and caffeine. In this case, however, you’ll want to shift everything to 30 to 45 minutes later in the day as opposed to earlier. A slightly later wake-up time, a slightly later caffeine intake in the morning and day (but still avoid caffeine in the eight to 10 hours prior to bedtime) and a slightly later workout — even just by 45 minutes, will all combine to help. You’ll also want to make sure that you get bright light exposure to your eyes from artificial lights in the one to two hours after sunset. Remember, you’re trying to prepare to stay up later as you soon fly westward.
When You Arrive at Your New Destination (Regardless if You Flew East or West)
Eat Like a Local
Eating is a strong mechanism for entraining (setting) your circadian clock. Adopting the local meal schedule when you arrive — eating breakfast, lunch and dinner more or less at the same times as the locals, even if you’re not hungry — will help you shift to the new time zone.
Many find it effective to fast for a period of 14 to 16 hours before the local breakfast time to best adopt the new eating schedule.
Before You Travel West
As mentioned earlier, westward travel tends to be easier for most people. That said, it can still help to adjust your circadian rhythm before your travel by using light, exercise and caffeine. In this case, however, you’ll want to shift everything to 30 to 45 minutes later in the day as opposed to earlier. A slightly later wake-up time, a slightly later caffeine intake in the morning and day (but still avoid caffeine in the eight to 10 hours prior to bedtime) and a slightly later workout — even just by 45 minutes, will all combine to help. You’ll also want to make sure that you get bright light exposure to your eyes from artificial lights in the one to two hours after sunset. Remember, you’re trying to prepare to stay up later as you soon fly westward.
Time Your Light Exposure Correctly by Knowing Your Temperature Minimum
This is the power tool to shift your circadian clock fast, but it involves learning about your “temperature minimum” first. Your temperature minimum is your lowest body temperature in each 24-hour cycle. You don’t need to measure your body temperature to know it, as it occurs approximately two hours before your usual wake-up time. If you typically wake up at 7 a.m., your temperature minimum is very likely to be between 4:30 a.m. and 5:30 a.m. Know your temperature minimum by knowing your typical wake-up time, irrespective of whether you use an alarm clock. Again, this is a time, not a temperature.
Here's the key: If you get bright light exposure to your eyes in the one to two hours after your temperature minimum, you will adjust your circadian clock such that it will make you want to go to sleep earlier in the subsequent nights and wake up earlier in the subsequent mornings. Perfect for traveling east.
Use Artificial Light & Red Lens Glasses
even when it is cloudy, sunlight through cloud cover is almost always far brighter than artificial lighting. Get outside and get that sunlight at the correct times and you’ll shift fast. Then, you can return to your standard “view sunlight in the (local) morning and (local) afternoon” to stay on the local schedule.
I wear red-lens glasses (Note: I helped ROKA design the Wind Down lens and they are a podcast sponsor) after sundown to help adjust to my local sleep schedule. Doing this is known to protect against the melatonin-reducing effects of bright light and to prevent the cortisol-increasing effects of bright light.
Maintain a Regular Exercise Schedule While traveling, try to maintain a consistent early-in-the-day exercise routine (adjusted to the local time at your destination) to help reinforce your circadian rhythm and aid in quicker adjustment to the new time zone. Exercises might include light aerobic exercises like walking or more engaged activities depending on your fitness level and degree of jet lag.
For trips that last fewer than three days, staying on your home schedule may be beneficial to minimize disruptions to your circadian rhythm.
📰 The Foodie’s Guide to Taipei, by BAO Founder Erchen Chang - Service95
Little snacks:
Stinky Tofu Boss 臭老闆臭豆腐
Fu Hung Soy Milk 阜杭豆漿
Dong Yi Pork Chop 東一排骨
Hong Yeh Cake 紅葉蛋糕
Yu Ping Yuan Mochi Shaved Ice 御品元冰火湯圓
4 Of The Best Restaurants In Taipei
Ji Jia Zhuang 雞家莊
Chan Chi Hot Pot 詹記
Xian Jin Seafood 先進海產
Moon Moon Food 雙月
📰 The Limiting Belief That Prevented Me From Hitting a $10K Month via
(welcome back to Substack!)Fear comes not from a lack of skill or ability but from a lack of preparation.
Imagine a potential ghostwriting client comes to you. How can you prepare so you’re confident in your execution? This could be:
A Templatized Proposal. A simple template in BoldSign that lets you send contracts in minutes.
Pre-Written Interview Questions: A list of 10-15 questions for your client that you’ll base your content on.
Notion Systems: A Notion home base you can copy-paste for different clients that include a content calendar, recorded calls, and proven LinkedIn templates (Ryan Law’s course on Writing Thought Leadership is great for this). So instead of going, “Shit I don’t have the capacity for this I’m going to burn out but agh the money” you go, “I have everything in place so this is seamless.” There will be a learning curve with your first few clients. But once you get the process down this should go much faster.
📰 Manifesting My Ideal Information Diet by
If I'm being honest with myself, I have no business consuming any other form of media within a day if I haven't already spent time reading a book. And what a pleasure a book is! An expert, informed by years of study, compiles the most valuable information she knows, or tells the most compelling story he can muster, and renders it in captivating prose that is subject to high editorial standards. On the metrics of value-per-minute or wisdom-per-word, no place on the Internet comes close to most books.
No Netflix, no Hulu, no Disney+, no Apple Tv+, no HBOMax, no Prime Video, no Xbox Game Pass.⁵ If I'm not willing to pay money for a piece of media, then maybe it's not worth my time and attention either.
November 27
🎧 Jon Chu on Wicked, Silicon Valley, and Defying Hollywood’s Gravity - On with Kara Swisher
The death of Steve Jobs was a very big moment. I remember it to this day, but it switched from think different to move fast and break things, which, you know, and I pay a lot of attention to words, obviously.
Being in the front lines mean you have to be ready to take the bullets
I didn't know Singapore as much as I did eventually when I went in there, and I would have had a lot more different people and cultures that were in some of those scenes, And I would have treated some of the characters in there a little differently, give them a little more human side to them. The fact is the book itself doesn't have those characters. So it's hard to like just create characters out of nowhere. So there are things that I'm much more hyper aware of that I ask a lot more questions because sometimes I think it's these blind spots that you just are learning at the same time. And what I really learned was you got to talk to everybody, but also like, you got to keep going. Like if you're on the front lines of this stuff, there are things that are happening all the time that you're learning. Oh, you call them Latinx or not Latinx? Like that debate was happening even to this day. And I don't still know what to say. And I think being aware of it, but being aware of it is really important in hearing the conversation.
🎧 Trump’s Controversial Picks, Bluesky’s Pop, and Spotify’s Subscriber Jump - Pivot Pod
You can't have a relationship with your viewers unless you tell them what's going on, including about yourself.
November 23
📰 The Reading List: The Books That Inspired Ocean Vuong’s on Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous
November 21
🎧 To Manifest or Not to Manifest - Staying Up with Cammie and
Different versions of positivity
My positivity on you of like this is our bubble and thing that we're doing that like collectively let's just all make this more positive but then that was negating your experience and
What you needed and my and my version of positivity totally yeah that's the difference it's not like you putting your positivity on me yeah yeah it's we have different views of what positivity Looks like right now you're like but I'm not being negative yeah nobody wants to be told they're being negative
November 15
🎧 Raising the Roof Returns! - Beautiful/Anonymous
Luxury of boredom before having kids
If I'm going to sit around sucking at cello, I might as well be doing dishes or folding laundry or helping with any of the dozens of things that are needed around the house at any given time. Like it's one of the things I've been thinking about a lot lately, which is like when I was younger, this is going to get weirdly profound based on the fact that we're not I'm not trying To proclaim my own profound statements, but just based on what we're talking about being kind of like frivolous. I'm like, man, the thing that I didn't realize when I was young is that you have the time to suck and you have the time to be bored. Those are really valuable things. And you don't realize that they go away. Yeah.
Absolutely. And that's definitely something that you, yeah, you don't, you don't realize when you're a kid, you take advantage of it. You're like, I'm bored. I don't want to be bored. But yeah. And now.
The board is a negative thing. I'm so bored. Right. Right. As a parent in my forties, do you know how much money I would pay to just be allowed to be bored for 20 minutes, bored, and not feel like I have to fill up this time with something and get it Off the to do list. I just want to honestly be bored. That's a luxury that I have not. Right. Long time. I am.
Yeah. I'm with you. I think that's why I would love to be bored. Like.
I think it's wise to much creativity happens when people are in their twenties. It's why musicians explode in their twenties. It's why actors come to prominence in their twenties. And it's like you still are young enough that you have a lot of time where if you suck, it doesn't have a negative impact on anyone else. And you can sit around and be bored. And then the things you figure out to do to fill the boredom are oftentimes your own creativity and the luxury of that boredom is something we don't talk about enough. Doesn't that sound like a great title of a self-help book, a luxury of boredom? Somebody's got to somebody got to that. Yeah. Right. Something I'm going to look this up.
I think. I mean, if it's not written already, I think. I think you need to write it.
🎧 82: How to Not Get a Divorce - Staying Up with Cammie and
Gratitude exercises at night.
I do like the idea of maybe once a month we do something new. It's like you just gotta see your partner in a different light to like appreciate them.
Communication workshop instead of couple’s therapy. Sometimes it feels overkill to do couple’s therapy for a little tiff.
People only care about women’s sports when it’s to bash trans athletes
We care we don't care if they get paid, we don't care if they're taken care of, we don't care about anything else but all a sudden, it is like the most important thing in the world to us that women's sports is fair.
November 13
🎧 Stock Market Surge, Kara's X Defection, and Guests Samantha Bee and Joanna Coles - Pivot Pod
What is also happening in podcasting is that the biggest podcast, the biggest podcasting platform is the biggest streaming platform. And that is the biggest podcasting platform is now YouTube. And that is if you are not getting more views from your podcast on YouTube, it means that your podcast is not thriving.
Keke Palmer
So at a summit in 2024, she was describing how below her means does she live? And so her quote was, if I have $10,000 in the bank, then my house would be $500 a month. That's how under I mean, because I can probably afford something 2,500 maybe, but I'm going way under. So where it's like, if she has 10,000, she's spending 500. / Wow. So 5% of her income essentially is going towards her house. / Yeah. Yeah. It's like, you know, kind of like with, with that ratio, it's like, that's, that's how she's thinking about it um because that's traumatizing it's traumatizing it's traumatizing Hard she works so hard and so it's like if you have that money you want to keep that money and you want to be able to enjoy it so um and because she said that her her reason for doing this is because She wants to invest in her business and she said so if i want to invest in my business then the material things that i'm currently that i have currently might have to take a back
November 12
📰 Re-Noted: Carl Jung's Midlife-Crisis Notebooks by
In his notebooks, Jung wrote down his visions and analyzed them. He worked himself out of despair, while simultaneously developing some of his most influential theories (the archetypes³ and collective unconscious⁴). These notebooks became known as The Black Books (1913-1932)—so named for their color.
Jung considered the Red Book to be his crowning achievement—the most important work of his life. But it wasn’t published in his life-time. We are the first generation to have access to it—thanks to the brilliant work of the Jung-scholar Sonu Shamdasani
Write out things you don’t understand—like your dreams: Jung used his notebooks as a way to externalize his visions so that he could study them. He approached his own mind with incredible humility and he opened himself up to its mysteries.
Setbacks can be valuable: Often great things come out of difficult times. Jung’s midlife crises was shattering. He isolated himself and gave up his job as a professor.
Find note-taking guides: You don’t need to invent a Philemon, but I have found that studying notes often guides how I structure my own notebooks. I find figures I respect, who have note-taking methods that resonate with me. And then I try out their style for a while. Sometimes it takes. Sometimes it doesn’t. But I always learn something from the experiment. In this week’s postscript, I’ll explore a practice I learned from Jung.
📰 Why Educate? by
I had read The Well Trained Mind, and a classical education sounded rigorous and inspiring. As I’ve shared, it worked wonderfully —until it didn’t.
Most people who have reached the frontier of knowledge come back talking about the beauty of it all. Paul Lockhart⁶ calls mathematics “the music of reason” and equates doing mathematics with “being awed and overwhelmed by an almost painful beauty; to be alive dammit.” Francis Su⁷ talks about the mathematical YAWP (with a wonderful reference to Dead Poets Society) as the expression of surprise and delight at discovering something new. And it’s not just mathematicians that are seeing beauty. Einstein described physics as the “pursuit of truth and beauty.” Marilynne Robinson⁸ describes storytelling as “essentially a new discovery of the joy of consciousness—and, of course, the perils of it.” J.R.R Tolkien loved philology so much he invented entire languages of Middle-earth.
I want them to know the joy of getting to play with ideas, to plug them into the lineage of great thinkers and explorers and even subversives. My job is to help them see the awe-inspiring beauty that exists when you start to see the forest for the trees. My takeaway: don’t teach them everything; show them the beauty in anything.
teach them what excellence looks like?
But they don’t just work obsessively (they do that and more), they are obsessive over things that seem unimportant to others. The cleanliness of a shop, the perfect placement of a comma, just the right note a 3 minutes and 47 seconds into a song, and the precision inside the first Macintosh computers. Excellence leaves clues. Learning what excellence feels like is important for children. So is seeing excellence modeled. We should help them test themselves against the world. We should show them how much they are capable of, even if we’re not sure they can do it. Our children are capable of far more than we believe.
learning how to be excellent helps them choose what they want to be excellent in.
teach them what they’re capable of. Show them what it means to do excellent work, and model choosing what to work on with them.
don’t teach a hundred things; teach a few things really deeply.
Louis Pasteur said “luck favors the prepared mind.” But we don’t teach preparation.
don’t prepare them to get a job; prepare them to learn with the best
don’t teach problem solving; teach them to pose interesting problems.
📰 A Mechanic’s Dictionary: A Case for Forgetting by
“Books tell you what should happen. Engines tell you what is happening.”.
Because if there’s one thing he’d hate more than me staying, it’s knowing that his sacrifice has turned into my burden.
We talked about schedules and strategies, but the real insight caught me off guard. “It’s strange,” he said, “I just felt like something clicked on in me.” When the kids came, he was definitely busier, but he was somehow more focused. He was able to be more efficient with his time, and more creative. As if to drive the point home, a few minutes later he was detailing his plans for the next volume of his photography publication.
📰 Should Art Be About Personal Expression? by
Émile Zola, for example, wrote that painting allows us to see a little corner of nature through another’s temperament.
He seldom left his dorm without a camera, and never without a notepad. All day he would write his experiences by hand, and then upload them onto his website that night, sometimes as late as 4 am. On his 1996 homepage, you’d read about classes, parties, drugs, conversations, Batlhazar’s suicide rumors, VC meetings, threesomes. It was a feed of campus gossip, filtered from a single point of view. On the DAZE page (described by Justin as a “chronological miracle of navel gazing”), you can browse through the calendar of his life. You can click into years, and then months, to arrive at a particular day that he froze into text.
When you log frequently, you turn your consciousness into media. It lets you capture the little moments, the ones not notable enough to turn into an essay, but notable enough to replay in your head at the end of a day. By capturing your thoughts, they don’t fade to memory. By publishing them, you invite others into your reality.
Some of Justin’s peers were uneasy about his logging. They’d check his site every day to see if he wrote about them; everyone on campus was a character in his public drama.20 When people challenged his ethics, he’d tell them to write online about him. Justin wanted everyone to take responsibility for their own perspective through logging.
o off-brand, at least on your personal website. Do whatever it takes to overshare, whether it’s about controlling visibility, adopting a pen name, or finding a better home to host your thoughts.
Unlock the world through self-publishing. Find that group of 10 people who become conspirators on your journey, and add nuggets to your time capsule as you go (let me know if you figure out century-long domain hosting).
🎧 Alicia Keys: 5 Ways to Overcome Self Doubt & Build Confidence Within - Jay Shetty
Alicia Keys: Love with an open hand.
ever since the day our vows were about this idea of loving with an open hand, there's a beautiful thought of loving with an open hand and you know, that everyone should be free to fly as they want to fly. There should never be a closed hand over around someone. And I really Like that, you know, it should be this open hand. And so we, we really have always looked at it like that. He'll always say she's, she's her own boss. I don't have anything to do with whatever she's choosing. Don't call me and ask me to try to get her. I can't. She's her own boss. So talk to her about whatever that might be. And, and, and so there's always been that respect there that we each have our own way of flowing and it works. It works. / Yeah. That's beautiful to hear. And I love that, that, did you write though, was that a poem that you came across with? Yeah. IsjwaraI wanna remember where that came from, but I wrote a song about it that never came out.
A beautiful book called the artist's way um Julia Cameron I believe her name is like tried and true book like classic and one of the things that was beautiful about it is she says, take Yourself on an artist's date. So once a week you were meant to take yourself on an artist's date, which meant you could go with no one except yourself. And you had to think of what would serve you on that date, which is quite hard for many of us. Like what will make me happy? What would I like to go? And crystal shops is what I discovered was one of the things I loved. I loved the peace and the serenity. I loved exploring every name. I found that if I went to one, it would be exactly the one I needed. I would just look at the way it looked and I would pick it up. I'm like, that's what I need right now. I need more courage. I need more manifestation. I need more clarity.
Like, I do know that I need number three, which has lavender and eucalyptus or whatever it is, because I'm seeking rest and relaxation. Or I do need citrus because I'm seeking energy. And you know, right? You do know. But we don't use that scent. We don't use our power of scent, of sight, of sound to know what we need.
Like I want to connect with people. I care about that. I love bringing good. I want people to bring me good energy. I don't want to bring someone else anything else but good energy. Like I care about the energy that I cultivate in a space. And I also have learned that if I can't bring that energy, then I can remove myself from that space. Like I don't have to be in a space if I'm not feeling good, you know, cause I can also not feel good. I don't have to always feel good either. That part was a lesson. Took me a while to get there too, you know, but, um, but I appreciate that I can, I want to bring that I'm conscious of what I'm bringing into a space and into a room. And I want what I bring into a space to be something that feels good. And so I think that that's kind of, that's it. I think that's really it. And so just the distinction between the two, giving myself permission to maybe not feel like I can fill that space is great. And then when I can and when I'm ready, I do. And that's what I want to do. I want to bring that. And I hold other people to that. I'm like, hey, I don't bring you that energy. I don't want you to bring me that energy, you know, because my energy is precious and it's important and it's special and it's just not free. I don't just give it to those who don't deserve it. So I also had to learn the value, back to one of my gaps, of who I am and what my energy is and what a gift it is to be able, all of our energy is a gift. And we can of choose how do we want to give it. And so I love that and learning when it's when to give it and when not to give it has also been a part of the journey too. I think I'm doing better with that. I think I'm doing better.
📰 Transparent Tuesdays by
When you write unsparingly about yourself you do not include disclaimers or self-deprecation.
November 7
🎧 The Tell Them Method - How to Stop Holding on to Emotional Baggage and Regret by Jay Shetty
We avoid tough conversations because we don't want to deal with the consequences of what comes from them. But the reason why we should tell people how we feel is because if we don't tell them, we'll probably tell someone else. If you don't tell someone how you feel, you'll probably tell someone else how you feel.
another reason why it's important to tell people is because of what's actually happening inside of us.
According to a researcher named Nelson, three things happen when an emotion is experienced.
The first is we develop an emotional vibration.
The second is we feel the emotion and any thoughts or physical sensations associated with it. This is where the mind and body's interconnectedness come into play.
Number three, we move on from the emotion by processing it. But here's the interesting thing.
According to Nelson, when the second or third step mentioned above gets interrupted, the energy of the emotion becomes trapped in the body. As a result, you might experience muscle tension, pain or other ailments.
Express your emotions to yourself. Explain them to others.
When we don't express your emotions and tell people how we feel, we end up blaming them rather than engaging with them.
We can end up taking that stress out on loved ones. And so a lot of negative energy gets trapped in the body when it's not released in that way. And so I want to ask you, when's the last time you've been feeling a headache? Is there something on your mind and your heart that you've been wanting to say? And here's what I'd recommend you do.
Tell them. Because if you don't tell them, you'll spiral. If you don't tell them, you'll regret it later. And the reason why we're not telling them is we don't think about this.
A five-step formula for how to understand how to tell them.
What would you say if they’re not there? Write it out.
The first thing is, they're not in front of you. What would you say if there were no edits, right? If you didn't have to filter it, if you said it with all the anger, if you expressed it with all the pain, all the tension, what would it sound like? Write it out, audio it out, say it out loud. How would you express your pain, stress, tension towards someone without thinking about how they digest it? Let it out without them there. I ideally would say write this down if you can journal it because
Edit it
the next step is focus on what you actually are trying to say as you now edit this. You're now extracting the explanation from the expression. It's not that you're taking the emotion out of it, but you're taking the accusatory, the blaming, the judgment out of it so that you can truly explain how you feel over expressing what You think of them. So you're editing now in order to make it make sense to someone else.
Figure out the best time
The third thing, which I think is really important, is figure out the best time to say it. People underestimate the time. I think it's so interesting. So many of us, we choose the worst times to have the best conversations. A lot of people in their relationships will choose the moment their partner walks through the door to have the most difficult conversations. Now, that person maybe just had a stressful journey home back from work. And you're thinking to yourself, so did I. Well, guess what? You're not in the right position either. Not only is the timing wrong for them, it's the wrong timing for you. The next thing is, you don't know how heavy their day was. So they're already carrying a load. And now they don't have the ability to carry your load on top of it. You've now reduced the probability that they have the conscientiousness and the compassion in that moment be present with you. That they have any capacity. You're speaking to them at a time where their emotional capacity is so reduced. And it's really funny because we think in this moment, well, they should get it. They should understand it. It's so important to me. They don't have any other time when actually you could have made it a lot easier for yourself to bring it up at a time that they could digest it.
Figure out the best place
The other important thing, not just time, is to figure out the best place to say something. I think sometimes, again, we choose the worst place to have the best conversations. We do it over dinner when someone's just trying to eat. We do it passive aggressively when someone's friends or family is around them. We do it when the person's trying to disconnect from everything while watching a TV show. Rather than setting a time and a place, we take up any opportunity because we think it's so important. But anything that's truly important, if you think about in the workplace, you set an appointment, you set a meeting to have important conversations. We've got to do that even with the people we love.
we're usually quite attached to the result.
📰 How to Keep a Cool Head: Regulating Emotions, Pt. 1 by
Here's part 1 of a 3-part game plan for how to regulate your emotions, based on DBT (Dialectal Behavioral Therapy): 1. Observe
Step 1: Step back and just notice your emotion.
Step 2: Experience your emotion as a wave, coming and going.
Step 3: Now imagine surfing the emotion wave.
There's an immediate rise of emotion that can feel overwhelming. You have to rise with it but ride it through until it comes down.
Step 4: Try not to block or suppress the emotion nor try to get rid of or push away the emotion.
Step 5: Don’t try to keep the emotion around.
It's so easy to use identity-based language in how we feel. We say, "I AM angry." We unintentionally hold on to the emotion after the situation has subsided. It makes it's home in our subconscious and we have to gently re- distance ourselves from it as it's overstayed it's welcome.
Step 6: Don’t hold on to it.
While that's all good and powerful, we must realize we are draining energy and efficiency by holding on to them. Discharge your loyal solider.
Step 7: Don’t amplify it.
We need to see them for what they are and for what they aren't. Respect them but not enslaved by them.
Try these steps to regulate your emotions through the practice of observing. Stay tuned for part 2.
📰 Value Before Color? by
I do think about the value structure as a separate step from color in developing a studio composition. I like to do that thinking as a preliminary step in the charcoal or pencil stage.
In my experience such planning doesn’t take away from painterly spontaneity. On the contrary, it opens the doors to free-style brush handling, because you’ve already solved a lot of the other issues of value and design.
With a fantasy or historical painting, once I have figured out the tonal design in two or three values as a separate step, I begin the lay-in or block-in, which is typically with a big brush, transparent pigment, and limited color. The whole block-in step should only take an hour or two.
When working on location, or when painting the figure in under two hours, I am under shorter time requirements. So I often dive right in with color, but sometimes I do a quick pencil thumbnail sketch to plan the value design.
📰 The Top 5 Things People Tell Me When They Find Out I Don’t Have a Smartphone by
Supposed inconveniences like planning ahead, asking for directions, and not having every answer in my pocket are small trade-offs for a life with more stability, simplicity, and calm.
I’m not anti-smartphone, I’m just pro-quiet.
In fact, the little challenges that come with being smartphone-free add a touch of intentionalityto my days—like committing to plans well in advance or embracing boredom while waiting in line at the grocery store.
I get it, I also have addictions—whether it’s YouTube, buying too much stuff, or even just thinking itself. I’m just not addicted to a smartphone.
🎧 Third Quarter 2024 Review — Ft. Aswath Damodaran - Prof G Markets
Do not like acquiring large public companies as part of my growth plan because historically, it's almost never delivered enough returns to justify it. I'll make a prediction. If they do go for the Expedia acquisition, their stock price will drop and it'll drop pretty substantially in the announcement of the acquisition. Because I think markets share that same skepticism about growth through big acquisitions. I'd much rather Uber focus on smaller acquisitions, perhaps with private businesses that add to their platform, add to their technology and get them there. I'm not sure buying Expedia is the way to get there.
November 6
📰 November by
We ended up giving the prize to Anne de Marcken for It Lasts Forever and Then It’s Over. It’s a devastatingly beautiful, moving, funny, chewy book. I am changed for having read it. Please go read it. But don’t neglect the other books on the shortlist either. I could go on and on and sing the praises of each and every one of them. This shortlist is incredible. The books restored my faith in the power of fiction to tell the truth, to say with words what cannot be said in words.
📰 Ursula K. Le Guin — 2024 Prize for Fiction
The Saint of Bright Doors by Vajra Chandrasekera
The Skin and its Girl by Sarah Cypher
It Lasts Forever and Then It’s Over by Anne de Marcken
Orbital by Samantha Harvey
Sift by Alissa Hattman
The Library of Broken Worlds by Alaya Dawn Johnson
Those Beyond the Wall by Micaiah Johnson
The Siege of Burning Grass by Premee Mohamed
Some Desperate Glory by Emily Tesh
Mammoths at the Gates by Nghi Vo
November 5
🎧 The State of the World — With Ian Bremmer
I think that we're heading towards a different global order, going back to the beginning, one without global leadership, one that feels more anarchic, one where the relatively Loose rules and norms that we have, that we largely, the Americans, have created with allies to try to reduce instability around the world is breaking apart.
Timelapses need to be edited
Time lapse can aid the viewer's understanding of the overall painting process or show the broad-scale strategy of a time-consuming step. You can also speed up footage that was shot in real time. But time lapse can have an unreal, detached quality that can be frustrating for viewers who want to understand how long each step really takes.
Most people prefer real-time captures. The advantage of shooting in real time is that you can show what happens with each brushstroke. Painting can take many hours of repetitive action, and it usually needs to be edited down to make it watchable.
Since time lapse comes without audio, I would recommend using voiceover to explain what’s going on. You can include real-time recorded audio of painting sounds under the time lapse footage, even if that sound doesn't correspond exactly to the action. Either way, you want the audio to connect the viewer with the real-time experience of painting.
Shot list
Screenshots from my video “Snyder Swamp.” Even though the video is only 1.5 minutes, I made sure to get the following shots (reading across from upper left): 1. Establishing shot; 2. Easel setup; 3. View of scene; 4. Detail of palette; 5. Detail of painting; 6. Detail of foliage
Actual painting environment sound > low-level music
People often use low-level music throughout the whole production to cover bad or missing field audio.
The actual sounds of the painting environment are usually more immersive and compelling.
Music usually works best if you restrict it to the first and last minute of the video, or when you use it for transitions. In the first minute it sets the emotional tone, and in the last minute it signals the impending close.
Make sure you capture a long take of field audio or voiceover for the body of the video, because you don't want to jump-cut the captured audio from clip to clip.
Ideal duration: 10 minutes because viewers’ attention is locked down and passive
A video for a painting like this needs to compress the action of two or three hours into about 10 minutes, and to demonstrate the important choices made at each step.
These long art videos result from the assumption that the video is equivalent to a real-time workshop. It’s not the same thing! In an actual workshop, you're freely in control of your attention, but in a video, your attention is locked down and passive.
📰 Every Day Is Election Day by
Obeying my inner leader had set me up to respond to the audition invitation.
November 4
There's a couple of tells for a CEO, a good or a bad CEO. Good CEOs don't speak that much during the board meeting. They bring in other people and they want to highlight other management and they let the CFO speak and they listen and they answer questions.
November 3
🎧 Trump's Rally, Bezos Backlash, and Guest Daniel Lubetzky
What Sam Harris said that sort of, I wouldn't say it changed my life, but informed it, he said, if you have economic security and people who love you unconditionally, you have an obligation To speak your mind because we live in a society where everyone starts buying into a narrative and feels pressure to bark up the same tree, if you will.
🎧 Perplexity’s Fourth Funding Round + Lessons From Boeing in Long-Term Thinking
When I'm talking to young people and they're asking for advice around compensation, my attitude is ask for more options ask for more match ask for the shit that's going to build wealth Not that's going to get you a bigger flat screen or a bigger apartment
For the majority of our species existence on this planet, you haven't lived past the age of 35. So you literally, your brain cannot realistically imagine you're going to be my age. And the other thing you can't imagine is how fast it's going to go. And you want to, A, try and fight that instinct and leverage that instinct or leverage the reality. And that is, if you continue to do that 5% and then maybe you start making real money and you go up to 10% or 20%.
November 2
and Khe HySo the answer is, does work have to suck? Deep down, I believed that until I quit my job.
It wasn't like work has to be painful or terrible. It was like work is this thing in adulthood that all the adults do. You're going to have to do it and there's no escape.
Within that story, I would claw at the edges of work for freedom. I would leave early on Fridays. I prided myself on being the guy that is like, I'm picking up and walking out at three. I don't care what people think about me. I took all my vacation days. I worked remotely when I felt like it and didn't inform people. I thought I had mastered the game.
I was scared to like really face the fact the longer I stayed in that consulting path, I was now in a path where I didn't actually enjoy or care about the work anymore. I'd gotten really good at it. I could kind of do it in my sleep. I wasn't challenged. I was ignoring who I really was. I was playing the outer game and ignoring some of the things I actually loved early on that path, which was like intense curiosity.
Lived on $800/month in Taiwan
Spend > income doesn’t feel good
My bank account is shrinking, but man, I am having the time of my life. I'm listening to podcasts. I'm waking up every morning and writing. I'm feeling good about myself. I'm starting to loosen some of my anger at corporate world.
What if I just spend my life like this? That was really the question. At that time I was rejecting everything. You've mentioned on our last podcast, how's Paul doing this? Is he just naive? He's gonna have to make money eventually. But that was the question that was most interesting to me. I was like, screw it.
I'm just going to see if I can aim at a life where I do the opposite of what my brain is telling me to do. / And your brain saying, get make money and like do something productive. / My brain still says that. I did have a huge boost from like book sales, but that's declined rapidly. So for the last three months, my spend is now above my income. And that doesn't feel good.
The replace your income before you leap, or leap to a similar or higher income I think is a terrible place to start
It’s something I try to convey in both my books is that if you do want an unconventional path like you should pay for that. There might actually be things you are willing to pay for.
I have this chart where like it shows like if i just basically just stayed on my path I've probably left over a million dollars on the table over the last seven and a half years. That is hard to look at.
When I look back, would I have made the same decision? Probably but it would have been like damn.
But in return for that I'm getting compensated in all these magnificent things. That meandering phase helped me reprice a lot of those things. What I found is that a planned sabbatical is actually the most efficient way to test this meandering phase.
Paul Millerd prefered blowing it all up vs a sabbatical
I think for me, it worked really well just to blow it up without a plan. I didn't have any income coming in for four or five months. I sort of like running into the fire. I was missing that sense of adventure in my life on such a plan predictable path so you got to figure out like where you are on that spectrum of like how much fire you want
A planned sabbatical is much more common now. They're much like cooler to talk about three months. In those three months I guarantee you, if you let the journey come to you, you will find things you are called to do
Literally with like non-work time, people start to just remember stuff about themselves. Oh I used to like surfing, oh I used to play basketball for fun, oh why am I suddenly writing? Everyone that takes their sabbaticals starts writing. I don't know. I don't know why. Maybe it's writers take sabbaticals or people just like creating things, I think. So you will find things to do.
Writing doesn’t pay the bills
For five years, I made less than $1,000 from writing. I was spending the majority of my time doing writing and writing-related activities. I was very pragmatic about how to make money. I call this the puzzle of good work. I slowly started shifting away from consulting projects, which still would pay me far better than any of the work I do toward what I call my good enough work. And this is work that still lets me express some of the things that make me me. But honestly, if you gifted me a million dollars, I would stop doing them tomorrow. So lay that out. So you have your good work. Your good enough work. Yeah, if you gifted me a million dollars, I would continue to write tomorrow.
The corporate halo
This is a huge mistake people make when they leave a traditional path is that they try to replace their income. It's like, no, there's a premium. You probably were good at your job. So there's just like a halo, whether it's like the Goldman Sachs halo or the McKinsey halo or the Yale halo or some like halo that just like gave you 10, 20, 30% more compensation. So you can't just like recreate that halo on your own.
A job is a backup plan, not step two
You need to have the versatility to be like, right now, my scarcity is like really kicking is on overdrive. I'm like acting like a shithead husband because I'm just worried about money. I'm gonna suck it up do this hedge fund consulting gig. Get the bag, secure the bag.
The problem is that should be the escape hatch, like the breaking case of emergency. Not step two.
Constraints on products/services: not in person and not selling time
One of the constraints I gave myself was I want to be able to live with [Angie] her wherever she is. 2018, I just decided I will not take work where I have to physically be anywhere. Everything I did was designed for remote-first. Some of the trainings and workshops I started to experiment with for like very small dollars at the beginning, I was doing them remotely. So I actually got three years of reps before the entire world started working remotely. Now remote training is a thing. I sort of lucked out because I gave myself the constraint and I got actually pretty good at doing that.
Another thing was like, OK, I am always going to be willing to like create digital products, info products, things like that where I can make money not selling my time. So no in person and no selling my time. I've tried to avoid that as much as possible.
I've taken like a month at a time at multiple points to create courses, create products, try stuff. Most of my stuff has failed, but I keep doing those experiments and especially a ton at the beginning, I have a freelance consulting course I basically just give it away for free inside my community. I could never find like product market fit, but I took like a month and a half to build that. Actually it was very fun for me, it was good enough work, like creating a course and like synthesizing ideas I love that but ultimately when it was done I like I didn't have enough energy to like go all in and create a business.
2-3 small bets worked out
Probably like 2-3 of those 25 small bets in the constraint of no time for money and has to be remote work friendly have worked out. I think people just don't realize when you give yourself constraints around the life you actually want to live, you will figure something out eventually.
Ann Lamont piece. That's like watching Steph Curry play basketball. She's so good. Her book on writing is just so delightfully beautiful around the writing life.
I'm probably the poorest student in my business school graduating class.
This is the confusing thing. I miss the like guaranteed money and success and like people being impressed with me. I do miss that, it would be nice. But I like this path more.
Emotional solvency
There's this quote by Keynes that says, markets can stay irrational longer than investors can stay solvent. And I appropriate that quote. So basically, what the quote is saying is, usually it's like, if you borrow money or you're in a bad trade and you need cash, the market can just move against you for longer and you're going To need the cash, you're going to make a bad decision because you're on the verge of going bankrupt.
I think about that often as this solo unconventional path is that markets being irrational is like people telling you you're crazy or the world being against you. You don't fit into this box. And I always said, if I could stay emotionally solvent to withstand that and to get to the other side of it, whatever that is, in the markets analogy, it's like when markets start eventually going back up.
So here it's like when the world either accepts you for who you are or stops caring. I don't know exactly how the metaphor plays out. And I tell you now, I have these moments, Paul, when I'm like, should I go do this? Should I go do this? And usually my answer is like, okay, whatever will deepen your self-awareness is the thing you should go do now.
If I'm like, should I go write a chapter in my book or should I go make a YouTube video? Usually I either end up meditating. If I'm listening to my own advice, I end up meditating or reading a spiritual, say sacred text or listening to some music. And that is the thing that keeps me emotionally solvent. And I think it's why I've been doing it for 10 years.
How to be comfortable with uncertainty: do small walks and follow where body takes you
If someone asks you like how do I practice being comfortable in uncertainty, how do you answer them? Yeah, so I've done these practices and exercises with people. Basically pick a work day because most people work during work days especially americans work day middle of the afternoon block off two hours and go for a wander so like minimum effective Dose is a two-hour wander and by a wander i mean you have no destination you don't know where you'll end up maybe you don't even end up at home in two hours take a lift or whatever um but you're You're walking and you're just trying to listen to your body where it's telling you to go take a turn do the opposite turn you usually take take the long way maybe you're on a bike but just Wander and just keep seeing where you end up and then also just notice the feelings that come up right so you're just practicing your own intuition and going against where your head says Right um because we get in these these like we get locked into these routes say you're commuting to a job you take the same route every day and you know exactly when to put your blinker on To go over to the next path so that you you hit the light the exact right time what if you just took a completely random turn tomorrow yeah and drove out of your way for five minutes and then Just see how that feels
Trifecta of time freedom, family time, creative projects
You want time freedom which like look let's be time freedom is a hard thing to get but it's not it's not impossible you're right you want to spend time with your family which is downstream Or upstream from time time And you want to do both creative projects. Like that's, that's like a very simple, beautiful, complete, like trifecta of life that I think a lot of people overcomplicate.
Ideally Paul wants to make 60-70k/year until 65 years old
🎧 Grit and Perseverance — With Angela Duckworth - Prof G Pod
Think self-control and grit are members of the same family. Call them cousins if you want, maybe even siblings, but they're not the same thing. So the family is really the psychology of effort.
These are two traits that describe people who put forth effort toward goals. Grit, which I'm probably a little better known for, is about expending effort toward very distant goals, so goals that might take years or even a lifetime to accomplish. Self-control is also about effort, but these are goals that are kind of everyday goals. Like, I have to floss my teeth. I should go to bed instead of scrolling through Twitter. You know, I should really get my taxes filed before April 15th. So self-control and grit are related because they're both about effort toward your goals. But I think grit is actually driven by having a kind of passion and resilience and self-control. You know, we could talk more about it, but it's like delay of gratification, ability to resist temptations in the moment.
What leads to specialization is sampling. It's the opposite. It's kind of, you know, Rowdy Gaines doing like a half dozen sports before he decides to become a swimmer, right? Best documented that athletes who become world-class are more likely to have sampled broadly in their youth than prematurely specializing.
November 1
a huge part of what I thought was depression, in my twenties, was simply the fermenting, repressed rage I felt at always feeling taken advantage of and for granted.
“Well darling, a doormat is already lying down before people wipe their feet all over it.”
I’m still a good person, I’m still a giving person, I’ve just remembered that I am a person, and not a punching bag or storage unit of space for everyone apart from myself.
I choose to view PTSD as my visitor, rather than my companion. I reclaim this life as my own and return the pain and shame to sender.
To quote the writer Jacob McNeil in the new play, McNeil, digital machines are not just remaking stories, they're remaking us. McNeil is now showing at the Lincoln Center Theater in New York. I saw it last week and I was blown away by it in really interesting ways. It made me think. I do not agree with a lot of the critics. I think you should go see it. And it's not just about AI. It's also about the truth. It's about the pillaging of information. It's about plagiarism. It's about lies and, of course, power.
Shakespeare was a plagiarist. I mean, I think we used to call it plagiarism, and in AI we call it, you know, amalgamation or synopsizing. But it's plagiarism nonetheless.
Ayad Akhtar: you said in an exchange I was having with you that we're on the verge of a Cambrian explosion. It is a Cambrian explosion. I think it's an extraordinary metaphor because I think it's exactly right.
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Becky, it’s both a little humbling and entirely thrilling to imagne my words sharing space with your mosaic of insights. Thank you for making me feel like i've contributed, even in some small way, to the vivid chaos of your November ❤️