Reading Time: 2 min There are two main ways you can approach the internet: You can be patient and giving, contribute to the discourse, and leave it better than you found it. Work to squeeze every bit of value out of it and not worry about what’s left when you’re done. Individuals likely have some granular levels between those, […]
If you can’t describe it, you don’t know it well enough
Reading Time: 2 min A key to understanding how well you know a subject is how easily you’re able to explain it to others. As I shared last year in “Explain it to me like I’m five“, being able to distill a complex subject down is a great skill to develop. In the case of that post from last […]
Curiosity over worry
Reading Time: < 1 min When looking at the days ahead, none of us know for sure what’s going to happen. We can treat that uncertainly with curiosity or with worry. In the book Four Thousand Weeks, the author Oliver Burkeman encourages us to choose curiosity, saying: Not knowing what’s coming next—which is the situation you’re always in, with regard […]
Time-shifting your effort
Reading Time: 2 min Time-shifting can be a wonderful thing. I talked last year about how time-shifting is so helpful for entertainment and communication, which is why I suspected Clubhouse might have trouble staying relevant. There’s another angle to be considered, and that’s time-shifting your effort. Effort Part of this is pretty obvious, when you schedule your work around […]
Absence Blindness rewards drama
Reading Time: < 1 min Absence Blindness is a cognitive bias that prevents us from identifying what we can’t observe. It seems pretty obvious — if we can’t observe something, of course we’ll be blind to it. That shouldn’t always be the case, though, and absence Blindness can lead to two problems. First is the lack of ability to “do […]
If you have toxic links pointing to your website, just ignore them
Reading Time: < 1 min If you run auditing tools on your website, they’ll often find “toxic” links (from spammy sites) that link to yours, and advise you to work to get rid of those links. While those links won’t do you any good, they’re not worth worrying about. Generally speaking, your best course of action when you find those […]
Your brand is simply your reputation
Reading Time: < 1 min Branding has been a hot word in marketing for many years, and for good reason — a strong brand can help make sales that a weaker brand wouldn’t be able to make. What is your brand, though? While building a solid visual identity and messaging framework is vitally important to sharing who you are, at […]
Videos you should watch twice
Reading Time: 2 min There are times when I find a short, interesting video that has too many things to notice in one sitting. Here are two fun examples of that; neither is very new, but they’re both very entertaining. Softball In this video, the team at bat is in the final inning, two outs, down by two. They […]
It’s an open book test
Reading Time: < 1 min While I spend a decent amount of time trying to memorize various things using tools like Anki, for the most part rote memorization is unnecessary. Learning systems and frameworks for understanding are vitally important, but for most everything else you can just look it up when you need it. Similar to the “you won’t be […]
My sources for weather updates
Reading Time: 2 min For roughly 300 days a year, the weather app on my phone is all I need. We live in Georgia, so temp and rain are really all I need to know about. However, for a few months each year we have an outside chance of seeing some snow, which I love, so I pay a […]