articles

The goal is resonance. Nothing is better than resonance. If you have a billion dollars, you are still seeking resonance. If you are well respected, you are still seeking resonance. If you are enlig…

If you are making a li

The psychological origins of waiting (... and waiting, and waiting) to work

What's yours?

A look inside the pricing playbooks used by dozens of unicorn companies with Pete Flint and Madhavan Ramanujam.

Fill-in-the-blank headlines you can use to generate ideas for effective content and provide value to your audience.

How to deal with the bollocks in your head with creativity Published Jul 08, 2021

Two hacks to get shit done Published Jul 08, 2021

The play before time ran out. The last speech of the campaign. The typo on your resume or the spot on your tie. The final decision before the company declared bankruptcy. We focus on the thing that…

Earlier this week, Caitlin Flanagan published a provocative essay in the Atlantic titled: “You Really Need to Quit Twitter.” In this instance, the label of “provocative” seems obligatory, even though an objective read of the piece reveals mainly common sense. Which serves to underline the whole point Flanagan is attempting to make. The article reports […]

That’s why some of this stuff is not a joke. We’re talking months of work—useful work—not busy work, not garbage work, but useful work done in days. At the beginning we asked the question, ‘Can you be productive to build the life you want?’ Imagine if you could move this quickly toward the thing you …

You can technically write an entire novel inside of Apple Notes or compose your blog posts in Notepad on your Windows computer. The basic concept of letting users type text into an app is not special, and yet writing apps are one of those things that everyone is very particular about. It’s all about the little things, and what feels right for each person.

“Am I dead? Am I still alive?” “Those aren’t the questions you should be asking.” (Care of Adult Swim)

No modern productivity guru would dare suggest it, but minimalist painter Agnes Martin got into creative flow by staring at the wall for a few hours.

I have two exemplary pieces of 21st-century writing that I want to share with you. Neither is hot off the CMSes; they've both aged just a li

Need a great ebook design? Get this guide on how to design an ebook like a pro. In 5 simple and free steps, you’ll produce an ebook that will engage your readers.

A list of things you're allowed to do that you thought you couldn't, or didn't even know you could.

Time has a monetary value to you. That is, money and time can be traded for one another in lots of circumstances, and there are prices that you are willing to take and prices you are not. Hopefully…

Is 1559 all hype? Or will it send Ethereum to the moon?

How to think about pricing ads in your newsletter.

The easy way to generate 3 interwoven pieces of content

What to do when you write about yourself.

Are you good at changing perspectives? If so, it may benefit you in more ways than you imagine.

Ryan writes to me: Consuming the different variety of media in which you publish ideas, I’ve noticed that you pose very high quality questions. For me, high quality questions have a Heideggerian quality insofar as they open a space for exploration, i.e. a concept, category, path of thought has specific affordances that were merely dormant […]

Chris Voss spent 25 years negotiating with bank robbers; this is what le learned about building trust Published Jul 01, 2021

Why Personal Branding is the next Multi-Billion-Dollar Marketing Trend Published Jul 01, 2021

My new book Four Thousand Weeks, about making the most of our absurdly brief time on the planet, is now available for pre-order in the UK, US, Canada, Australia, NZ & elsewhere. Pre-orders are hugely important for authors, these days – they count towards the first week's sales, giving a crucial signal to booksellers that a title has momentum – so if you value my writing, by far the most effective way to support my work is to pre-order the book! If you do: thank you. And hold on to your receipt, pending details of a forthcoming giveaway I'll be announcing exclusively for pre-orderers. For more about the book, and to pre-order, click here. • I'll admit that when I first encountered the Pomodoro Technique, years ago, I couldn't see what the fuss was about. Divide your work into 25-minute portions with five-minute breaks, measured with a timer (canonically, a tomato-shaped one, hence the name)? I mean, sure. If you like. Or don't. What's the big deal? It took writing a whole book about the power of embracing your finitude for me to appreciate that there's something deep and potentially transformative here, embodying the limitation-embracing outlook I explore in Four Thousand Weeks. For the uninitiated, the basic technique goes like this: figure out the time you have available for work (or housework, or life admin – it's useful there too). Then divide it into 25-minute chunks of focus, or Pomodoros. After each one, take five minutes off; after four Pomodoros, stop for a longer period. In the full version of this approach, you figure out, at the start of each work session, what progress you plan to make in each Pomodoro. There are rules for what to do if you get distracted, or mis-estimate how long a task will take. I'm not especially suggesting you adopt the technique (though I've recently returned to it, combining it with the "three or four hours" approach I outlined the other week). The real point is that it's just one way of making a key step on the path of embracing limitation: giving up the fight against time. The core trouble in our modern relationship with time, I think – made worse by most productivity advice – is that we've come to see it as something we need to try to master or conquer. First, we think of time as a separate "thing" (unlike, say, medieval peasants, who'd have had no such abstract notion). Then, we feel we've got to make the most of it, or squeeze the most work from it, or use it to get on top of things, or do enough with it to feel a sense of self-worth. And our economic system makes things worse, making many feel as though they need to achieve this mastery simply to stay afloat. Sadly, though, no finite human being has ever won a fight against time. We just get the limited time we get, and the limited control over it that we get. And if you spend your life fighting the truth of this situation, all that happens is that you feel more rushed and overwhelmed and impatient – until one day time decisively wins the fight, as it was always destined to do. (In other words: you die.) To make the same point a different way: you're not actually separate from time to begin with. You just are the sum of the moments of your days. So trying to gain a sense of control over them is like Baron Munchausen, pulling himself out of a swamp by his own hair. Enter the Pomodoro Technique, which its creator Francesco Cirillo describes as a way to turn time from a "predator" into an "ally". It's not about conquering time by imposing Pomodoros on it. It's about seeing – like Molière's M. Jourdain, astonished to find he'd been speaking in prose his whole life – that in a certain sense your day already consists of Pomodoros. You have a certain number of slabs of time available for work, unfolding one after the other, whether you like it or not, until it's time to pick up the kid from preschool or make dinner or go to bed. So the Pomodoro Technique is just a way of becoming more conscious of what's already true – that your time is fixed, finite, given, un-pausable – and a tool for making slightly wiser decisions about what you do with it, in the full knowledge that by the end of the day, there'll still be a million things theoretically left to do. All you need do, because it's all you ever could do, is to use the next 25 minutes in the most worthwhile way that seems feasible, then repeat. This explains a crucial but lesser-known rule of the technique: if you assign a Pomodoro to a given task but finish early – because your goal of, say, making notes on a book chapter took less time than you predicted – you shouldn't move on to the next task, or end the Pomodoro early. That way lies a resumption of the fight against time, and the secret deluded hope of one day getting on top of it all. Instead, use the remaining minutes to review your work, and to get comfortable with the impatience you'll inevitably feel about not hurrying onwards. Because on the other side of the discomfort of accepting your limitations comes liberation, and for that matter a lot more productivity. Stepping into finitude is a relief. You get to drop the futile quest to do something no human could ever do – to attain a position of mastery and dominance over time, to feel fully in control at last – and get stuck in to what's actually possible instead. • I plan to mildly increase the frequency of messages to this list in the coming weeks as my book's publication approaches; if you want no part of that, see below. Anyway, I'd love to hear from you – just hit reply. (I read all messages, and try to respond, but not always in a timely fashion: sorry!) If you enjoyed this email, you'd be doing me a big favour by forwarding or sharing it; the "View in a browser" tab will take you to a web version. And if you got this from a friend and would like to subscribe, please go here. 540 President St, Brooklyn, New York 11215

Background In my article last week, I wrote up the basics of DeFi and how DeFi is coming to Bitcoin. Building DeFi on top of Bitcoin makes sense as the base layer is the most unchanging, trustworthy, and decentralized blockchain to build upon. "To build DeFi on a centralised protocol, or one that is a protocol managed by rulers, is inherently broken from the start" -

Industry study that analyzes why content tends to be evergreen over time.


 
 
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 Icebergs are fascinating things. ​ During World War II, the British tried to manufacture some icebergs to help bui...