Reading Time: 2 minutes
Here’s a bit about what I wrote, read and learned over the past week. I hope you find it helpful!
Blog posts from the past week
- Building the skill of happiness. Happiness is a wonderful trait to have, and it’s a skill that can be built intentionally.
- Use 10% of your slides. “The Harvard Business Review says a partner at McKinsey tells new hires to use this rule of thumb: For every 20 slides you want to put in your deck, use 2.“
- You don’t always have to try so hard. I’m certainly not advocating for you to be lazy, but sometimes trying too hard can be equally problematic.
- He wanted to be home for dinner. “If you look closely at how Steve Jobs spent his time, you’ll see that he hardly ever traveled and he did none of the conferences and get-togethers that so many CEOs attend. He wanted to be home for dinner.”
- Take time to digest information. “With food, it’s obvious if you just eat all the time and you don’t give your stomach time to digest, it’s not a good idea. Same with your mind. If we just sit for hours putting more in, we don’t give the mind any time to digest. So we need information fasts that we don’t consume any new information.”
- Your beliefs shouldn’t come in packages. “Any belief you took in a package (ex. Democrat, Catholic, American) is suspect and should be re-evaluated from base principles.”
Noteworthy articles that I read
- China’s year-to-date irradiance up 30% as aerosols drop. This article was interesting, but it was a summary of it elsewhere that really stuck with me, when someone said “more solar means more solar”. In other words, particularly in polluted areas such as large cities in China, increasing use of solar power means less pollution which leads to even more efficient solar energy.
- Perplexity AI’s Quiet Coup. The AI search engine from Perplexity is quietly adding features to make it quite a powerhouse on your phone.
Books that I’m reading
- Still working on Judo Strategy, but making good progress.
- Finished reading The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry, with some posts coming from it soon.
- I started (and finished) reading Unclobber, which is a book about “Rethinking Our Misuse of the Bible on Homosexuality“. It was quite a deep look at the specific meanings of a few words in the Bible.
Tech Rec
Stealing the idea from my friends at the Tech Talk Y’all podcast, I’ll drop in some tech recommendation every week as well.
- The Meta Quest 3: I’ve gotten more use out of this VR headset than I ever expected, and it’s not slowing down. While I have the Meta Quest 3, the newer Meta Quest 3S is a steal at just $299 (compared to $3,500 for Apple’s Vision Pro headset). Despite the huge number of possible uses for it, I spend 99% of my time in one of two apps:
- Supernatural, for workouts with some friends almost every morning.
- Walkabout Mini Golf, for a fun way to burn a few minutes, also with a variety of friends.
It’s amazing, and I encourage you to check it out.
I hope you found some value in this. If you ever have questions, ideas, or disagreements regarding anything I write, please don’t hesitate to reach out.
