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.

Read More “Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish”

‘I’d Rather Read the Prompt’

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Clayton Ramsey:

I now circle back to my main point: I have never seen any form of create generative model output (be that image, text, audio, or video) which I would rather see than the original prompt. The resulting output has less substance than the prompt and lacks any human vision in its creation

28 Slightly Rude Notes on Writing

Linked List

#16:

I worked in the Writing Center in college, and whenever a student came in with an essay, we were supposed to make sure it had two things: an argument (“thesis”) and a reason to make that argument (“motive”). Everybody understood what a “thesis” is, whether or not they actually had one. But nobody understood “motive”. If I asked a student why they wrote the essay in front of them, they’d look at me funny. “Because I had to,” they’d say.

Most writing is bad because it’s missing a motive. It feels dead because it hasn’t found its reason to live. You can’t accomplish a goal without having one in the first place—writing without a motive is like declaring war on no one in particular.

I recommend this entire thing.

‘Minimum Viable Curiousity’

AI

Michael Lopp, writing at Rands:

I’ve made a career being a human terrified by becoming irrelevant long before AI showed up to drive my car. You bet I am poking every bit of AI that I can. Daily. I am trying to figure out what it can and can’t do, and this article aside, I am optimistic, just like I’ve been for the last three decades, that revolutionary innovations will knock your socks off in the next few years. It’s still early days for AI. Really.

However, I am deeply suspicious of AI, especially after watching decades of social networks monetize our attention while teaching us to ignore facts and truth, minimizing our desire to understand. Many humans don’t check their facts; they believe what they read in the feed. Most humans believe the manufactured reality is designed to get them to believe someone else’s agenda. The convenience of these services and tools has made us lazy and, worse, not curious.

America Has Crossed the Line Into Competitive Authoritarianism

The New York Times:

When citizens must think twice about criticizing or opposing the government because they could credibly face government retribution, they no longer live in a full democracy.

By that measure, America has crossed the line into competitive authoritarianism. The Trump administration’s weaponization of government agencies and flurry of punitive actions against critics has raised the cost of opposition for a wide range of Americans.

‘Anxiety Is an Expensive Habit’

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Ryan Holiday:

Anxiety, I’ve come to realize, is a very expensive habit. It has cost me so much. A lot of misery, a lot of frustration, countless hours of sleep. It’s caused me to miss out on a lot of things that are important to me. How many family dinners have I ruined by letting my mind wander to what could go wrong? How many minutes of vacations have I missed out on because I was preoccupied, lost in spirals about things that hadn’t happened? How many opportunities have I passed up because I was too caught up in my own fears? How many nights did I waste lying awake at night, worrying about what might or might not happen?

The Days Are Just Packed

Calvin and Hobbes

The sun is out today; I can smell the freshly cut grass.

This weather, this smell, it brings back a shockingly vivid memory for me. It would have to be around 1993. I’m ten years old. I am probably in either fifth or sixth grade. Every day after school I’d sprint home from the bus stop. I’d bound down the steps, feel my feet hit the pavement, and like a bolt of blond lightning I’d take off. Feet moving as fast as they could. It’s the age where you feel like you can fly. Curbs are launching pads. Fresh grass a safe landing spot. Your neighborhood your world.

I’d get home and rush downstairs to my bedroom. Dive onto the bed, and pull out my copy of Calvin and Hobbes’ The Days Are Just Packed and lay there on my stomach reading the comics and eating Red Vines from a giant Costco sized tub.

It was perfect.

Another Raycast Tip: Quick Message a Contact

Raycast

Along with Quicklinks and Fallbacks, another thing I love about Raycast is the great integration with Shortcuts. You can run any Shortcut directly from Raycast (and assign it a trigger keyword and/or keyboard shortcut directly), and if the Shortcut is configured to ask for input, it’ll do that right in Raycast. I use this for all sorts of things, but one of the most used is a very basic Message shortcut I built to text Hannah. By typing ‘m’ in Raycast, I get a simple interface:

Then I hit Tab and type my message. Hit enter. Message gets automatically sent to Hannah. I use this dozens of times throughout the day to quickly send a message without ever needing to open the Messages app.

The Shortcut itself is dead simple:

It just takes the input and sends it using the default Send Message action.

The combination of Shortcuts + Raycast can create an endless stream of simple little tricks like this. Another I use regularly appends text to a Ulysses note called “Liner Notes Ideas.”1 When I have an idea for an upcoming newsletter, I simply type ‘ln,’ followed by my thought, and hit enter. The note is added in the background without needing to open my notes app.


  1. Speaking of which: I ran out of time to finish the newsletter today, I’ll have to try and wrap it up tomorrow.

“Why I Left the Attention Economy”

Linked List

Joan Westenberg:

At some point, every creator hits a wall – it’s not burnout exactly. It’s misalignment. You find yourself fluent in a language you no longer believe in, you know how to hack the algorithm, when to post, what to say, how to craft the dopamine-hooked headline. You’ve learned to manufacture the kind of work that gets rewarded, but somewhere in the process you forget why you started making it at all.

The economy of attention doesn’t ask what you think; it asks how fast you can say it, how loud, and how often. And if you play long enough, you stop making anything for the people you care about and you start making it for the feed. The result is a race to the bottom with a leaderboard, a machine that needs to be fed even if it’s chewing up your integrity.

Preach.

The other byproduct of having been in that “game,” is you start seeing it everywhere. Numbers will go up, numbers will go down. Authenticity is the only thing that will last.