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1,475 votes and 322 comments so far on Reddit

The Curiosity Chronicle has quickly become one of the most popular newsletters for growth-minded individuals in the world. Each week, subscribers receive a deep dive that covers topics ranging from growth and decision-making to business, finance, startups, and technology. In addition, subscribers receive The Friday Five, a weekly newsletter with five ideas curated to spark curiosity headed into the weekend.

Hey, you. You're doing great. Click here to read this on the web. Source: Northeast Ohio Regional Sewer District Twitter feed Welcome to the 118th…

David shares why highly successful people put their faith in one big idea. Read here.

Like it or not, your hook is the most important factor in whether your thread sees success or goes nowhere. In this deep dive, we'll show you how exactly to craft viral-worthy Twitter thread hooks.‍

作家、デザイナー、パブリッシャーなど、さまざまな肩書きを持つCraig Mod。テクノロジーとストーリーテリングの未来を探求してきた彼が、「歩くこと」から見つめる日本と自然について。

Get more results for your business and personal brand on Twitter than ever before. Powered by AI and automation. Try it for free.

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Earlier this week, the writer John McPhee turned 91. One of the nice things about McPhee's birthday, in addition to it providing an occasion to celebrate his incomparable output, is that it usually leads to one of my favorite writerly quotes spreading around the internet. By any reasonable standard, McPhee is productive. He's published 29

Strangely, the opposite of his advice works wonders

Some gadgets come with batteries and some don’t. Same with people. And if you’re a leader, the only kind to hire are those with batteries included.

“It’s terrifying to do it this way, but it’s always a great pleasure if it works.”

Why we need to take control of our influences and what we can learn from artists about how to do so

Content is about emotion, not informationIf you look at the transcript of one of Nima’s or Gary’s talks, you’ll notice just how little interesting information is included. But if you listen to them talk, you can’t help but be mesmerized.They will pull you into their world and keep you captivated until the very end.What they both understand is that the world rewards whoever is best at communicating ideas, not the ones with the best ideas.They both have the gift of gab and charisma is of course a…

3 Steps to Shock and Awe your audience.

Storyworthy: Engage, Teach, Persuade, and Change Your Life through the Power of Storytelling [Dicks, Matthew, Kennedy, Dan] on Amazon.com. *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. Storyworthy: Engage, Teach, Persuade, and Change Your Life through the Power of Storytelling

Name: Jack Butcher Timezone: CSTContact: hello@visualizevalue.comTwitterWebsiteYouTubeVirtual GalleryVV Archive Relevant Link (GitHub, Behance, Substack, LinkedIn, Notion, etc) What I do: Simplify complex ideas into shareable, memorable visuals. What I’ve done 10 years of creative di...

A subtle constraint on work & life

Andy Warhol on "America".

After much waffling, I ended up buying an M2 MacBook Air. I purchased this as a second Mac. My main machine is a 16″ MacBook Pro with all the bells and whistles. I love it, but it’s vast and expensive. I’ve wanted something thin and light to go along with it. In addition to my... Continue reading →

Arc gives the Web a fresh look

INTRODUCTION   The great Galen, a prominent Greek physician in the Roman Empire, at one point suffered the loss of all his work and books. In a clear example of what we can call a virtuous Stoic response, he wrote that “the fact that, after the loss of the totality of my pharmaceutical remedies, the […]

Mark Manson is the bestselling author of Models: Attract Women Through Honesty, The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck, Everything is F*cked: A Book About Hope, and co-author of the Will Smith memoir, Will. He has sold tens of millions of books in over 60 languages and has over 500,000 email subscribers. In this …

Intelligence and specialized skills are par for the course: we have to find ways to pair them with purpose, opinions and drive -for ourselves and our teams

On the inner life of molecules and electrons: or why panpsychism is highly likely to be true, even if it sounds crazy

Fifty-four years ago this month, in a push for publicity, The Sunday Times offered £5,000 to whoever could sail solo nonstop around the world the fastest. It was technically a race, but that was an afterthought, as no one had ever completed the feat. There were no qualification requirements and few rules. Nine men joined the race, one of whom had never sailed. Just one man finished, 312 days and 27,000 miles later. But it was two participants who never completed the race that generated the most news. One ended up dead, the other found himself happier than ever. Both outcomes came from decisions made at sea, but neither had anything to do with sailing. The two men, Donald Crowhurst and Bernard Moitessier, are astounding examples of how the quality of your life is shaped by whom you want to impress. Their stories are extreme, but what they dealt with was just a magnified version of what ordinary people face all the time, and likely something you’re facing right now. Donald Crowhurst was a tinkerer who came up with his own boat modifications. Convinced his innovations could propel him to win the Sunday Times race, he faced just one obstacle: he was broke, and stood no chance of financing the race himself. Crowhurst struck a deal with an English businessman who agreed to cover the cost of the race under two conditions: They would orchestrate a media frenzy, portraying Crowhurst as a sailing savant. And if Crowhurst didn’t finish, he would owe all the money back. Crowhurst left Teignmouth on October 31st, 1968, the last day participants of the race could begin their voyage. His boat, the Electron, had been so heavily modified, so weighed down with half-finished gizmos and gimmicks, that it was barely seaworthy for a short sail near home, let alone a solo trip around the globe. Crowhurst knew it. He broke down in tears in front of his wife the night before he left. Two weeks into the race, as Crowhurst had covered less than half his intended distance, the Electron sprung a leak. “This bloody boat is just falling to pieces due to lack of attention to engineering detail,” Crowhurst wrote in his diary. In the calm waters of the South Atlantic, the small leak posed little threat and could be bailed with a bucket. But continuing on to the treacherous Southern Ocean would bring certain catastrophe. So Crowhurst seemed to have two options: Continue the race and face ruin at sea, or return home and face bankruptcy and humiliation. He in fact chose a third option, which was outright fraud. By mid-November Crowhurst began loitering in the south Atlantic, drifting in circles in calm water. He then began sending fake coordinates back to England, giving the impression that he was still on track, rounding Cape Horn, on his way to circle the globe. He went virtually nowhere for months, which was the plan: By mid-summer, when enough time had passed to have plausibly circled the globe, Crowhurst hoped to quietly sail back to England, “finish” the race, and hope no one noticed that during his round-the-world voyage he never actually left the hemisphere. As Crowhurst sailed back to England he realized he did not want to appear to win the race, because if he did the media and judges would scrutinize his logs and uncover the deception, whereas no one cares about the runner-up. After receiving word on the location of other race participants, Crowhurst timed his return so that he would finish the race in third place, which seemed good enough to maintain dignity yet low enough to avoid suspicion. But then the boat that was in second place sank. And after miscalculating his return time, Crowhurst was suddenly on track to beat the sailor who had been in first place. Crowhurst was now going to cruise into England with what looked like the fastest time. He was going to win the race. The BBC had a crew prepared to meet the man who defied the odds to become the world’s greatest sailor – which, ironically, is the kind of attention a fraudster desperately wanted to avoid. On June 29th, Crowhurst wrote in his diary: I have no need to prolong the game … It has been a good game that must be ended … It is the end of my game. The truth has been revealed. It is finished. IT IS THE MERCY. Soon after he sent his last fake coordinates to his team, and shut his radio off. The Electron was found 11 days later, adrift in the Atlantic. There was no major damage, no sign of an accident – and no sign of Crowhurst. He had presumably thrown himself into the sea. Left behind were his diary and two log books: one real, one fake. Three months before Crowhurst took his life, another sailor in the Sunday Times race made an equally astonishing life decision at sea. Bernard Moitessier was an expert sailor, and five months into the race, he was on track to legitimately win. Moitessier loved sailing but despised the commercialization of his sport. Or, more accurately, he hated the sport side of sailing. He just liked sailing for sailing’s sake. The personality required to spend nine months alone at sea selects people who are fine detaching from society. Moitessier was an extreme version of that, and the idea of sailing for someone else’s pleasure – to perform for the press, the race organizers, the sailing magazines, the fans – was so detestable that midway through his voyage he’d had enough. He wrote in his diary: I really feel sick at the thought of getting back to Europe, back to the snakepit … I am really fed up with false gods, always lying in wait, spider-like, eating our liver, sucking our marrow. I charge the modern world – that’s the Monster, trampling the soul of men … returning to [England] feels like returning to nowhere. But being on his boat, Joshua, was a different story. He loved it, loved being on the water. Moitessier later recalled: There were so many beautiful days on this beautiful boat that it really made time change dimensions … I was just feeling totally alive. And that was just fantastic. As he sailed around Cape Horn – a position Crowhurst could only dream of – Moitessier began contemplating the unthinkable: Abandoning the race and sailing somewhere else. Thinking of his family and friends, he wrote: I do not know how to explain to them my need to be at peace, to continue toward the pacific. They will not understand. I know I’m right, I feel it deeply. I know exactly where I am going, even if I do not know. On March 18th, Moitessier threw a jerrycan onto the deck of a passing commercial ship, whose captain caught it on the fly. Inside was a note addressed to the Sunday Times’ editor. It read: Dear Robert, today is March 18th. I am continuing non-stop toward the Pacific Islands because I am happy at sea, and perhaps to save my soul. Moitessier shouted for the captain to take the message to the French consul. He then changed course, off the race’s path, and set sail for Tahiti. Moitessier wrote in his diary: Now it is a story between Joshua and me, between me and the sky; a story just for us, a great story that does not concern the others any more … To have the time, to have the choice, not knowing what you are heading for and just going there anyway, without a care, without asking any more questions. He anchored in Tahiti in June, where he remained for years. He built a house on the beach, grew his own food, and wrote a book about sailing. “You can’t understand how happy I am,” he wrote. In a twist of irony, Tahiti was so far out of the way and required so much backtracking that, despite dropping out of the race, Moitessier did circle the globe, and set a world record for the longest ever nonstop solo sail – more than 37,000 miles. There is no mention of that fact in his book. He didn’t seem to care. Anyone alone at sea for nine months will start to lose their mind, and there’s evidence both Crowhurst and Moitessier were in poor mental states when their decisions were made. Crowhurst’s last diary entries were incoherent ramblings about submitting your soul to the universe; Moitessier wrote about his long conversations with birds and dolphins. But their outcomes seemed to center on the fact that Crowhurst was addicted to what other people thought of his accomplishments, while Moitessier was disgusted by them. One lived for external benchmarks, the other only cared about internal measures of happiness. They are the most extreme examples you can imagine. But their stories are important because ordinary people so often struggle to find balance between external and internal measures of success. I have no idea how to find the perfect balance between internal and external benchmarks. But I know there’s a strong social pull toward external measures – chasing a path someone else set, whether you enjoy it or not. Social media makes it ten times more powerful. But I also know there’s a strong natural desire for internal measures – being independent, following your quirky habits, and doing what you want, when you want, with whom you want. That’s what people actually want. Last year I had dinner with a financial advisor who has a client that gets angry when hearing about portfolio returns or benchmarks. None of that matters to the client; All he cares about is whether he has enough money to keep traveling with his wife. That’s his sole benchmark. “Everyone else can stress out about outperforming each other,” he says. “I just like Europe.” I think Moitessier would approve.

Every shade and stripe of every possible variety of connection is about wanting, above all else, to be known; for someone else to see as much of you as possible. Shared experience is important. It’s not everything, but it’s something, because nobody wants to be explaining at forty to a hostile audience why they are the way they are, but you don’t want to punch below your weight class, either, and wind up with somebody who only loves you because they don’t know any better—because the day they do know better is the day they’ll walk out the door.