There are mail days and then there are good mail days. This one is up there in the upper echelon. I’ve been wanting to add these to the collection for a very long time.

YouTube Channel Recommendation: Low End University

YouTube

I posted about Low End University yesterday on the homepage, and since then have gone down the rabbit hole of watching a whole lot of his videos breaking down (and getting into) a bunch of punk classics. Great channel. Highly recommend. Great insight and a genuine delight as he discovers a genre dear to my heart. A handful of my favorites so far:

The Best Time to Start a Blog, Is Now

Adam Mastroianni:

The blogosphere has a particularly important role to play, because now more than ever, it’s where the ideas come from. Blog posts have launched movements, coined terms, raised millions, and influenced government policy, often without explicitly trying to do any of those things, and often written under goofy pseudonyms. Whatever the next vibe shift is, it’s gonna start right here.

The villains, scammers, and trolls have no compunctions about participating—to them, the internet is just another sandcastle to kick over, another crowded square where they can run a con. But well-meaning folks often hang back, abandoning the discourse to the people most interested in poisoning it. They do this, I think, for three bad reasons. 

One: lots of people look at all the blogs out there and go, “Surely, there’s no room for lil ol’ me!” But there is. Blogging isn’t like riding an elevator, where each additional person makes the experience worse. It’s like a block party, where each additional person makes the experience better. As more people join, more sub-parties form—now there are enough vegan dads who want to grill mushrooms together, now there’s sufficient foot traffic to sustain a ring toss and dunk tank, now the menacing grad student next door finally has someone to talk to about Heidegger. The bigger the scene, the more numerous the niches.

Smart People Don’t Chase Goals

Linked List

Joan Westenberg:

The cult of goal-setting thrives in this illusion. It converts uncertainty into an illusion of progress. It demands specificity in exchange for comfort. And it replaces self-trust with the performance of future-planning. That makes it wildly appealing to organizations, executives, and knowledge workers who want to feel like they’re doing something without doing anything unpredictable. But the more interesting question is: who is not setting goals? And why?

It turns out that many of the people doing genuinely innovative work avoid explicit goals entirely. They work within constraints instead.

Loved this.

Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish

The Steve Jobs Archive:

To celebrate the 20th anniversary of Steve’s commencement address at Stanford, we are sharing a newly enhanced version of the video below and on YouTube. It is one of the most influential commencement addresses in history, watched over 120 million times, and reproduced in media and school curricula around the world. The talk even helped inspire an unlikely NBA title comeback for the Cleveland Cavaliers when LeBron James played a clip from it in the locker room before a critical game three against the Golden State Warriors in 2016.

I have linked to and cited this speech many times over the years but wanted to post it, yet again.

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