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I have another birthday, and another bunch of unsolicited advice.    • That thing that made you weird as a kid could make you great as an adult — if you don’t lose it. • If you have any doubt at all

By Duncan Anderson. To see all blogs click here . Reading time: 7 mins One Sentence Summary : it’s not optimal to be one way all the time, try to figure out what mode best suits each set of circumstances!  “Make your interests gradually wider and more impersonal, until bit by bit t

In a sermon delivered at the height of World War Two, a period awash in distraction and despair, C.S. Lewis delivered a powerful claim about the cultivation of a deep life: “We are always falling in love or quarreling, looking for jobs or fearing to lose them, getting ill and recovering, following public affairs. If […]

I have made notes when reporting news, interviewing people, or drafting outlines for most of my life. In the early days, it was shorthand. Later, it became a weird blend of English, symbols, and ol…

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Listening increases the value and impact of your words. “The biggest communication problem is we do not listen to understand. We listen to reply.” Stephen R. Covey Not listening: Waiting-listening:…

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Where do you start when you're first considering angel investing?

Here are 7 reasons I am not optimistic about Ethereum’s long-term future.#1. It is not immutable and can be censored. The developers can roll back transactions and change the rules whenever they want. They can also be pressured by others – such as governments.— Nick Giambruno (@NickGiambruno) April 30, 2021

10 years after Bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto's disappeared, Pete Rizzo distills the full story of his time as project leader into one readable article.

At Basecamp, we treat our company as a product. It's not a rigid thing that exists, it's a flexible, malleable idea that evolves. We aren't stuck with what we have, we can create what we want. Just as we improve products through iteration, we iterate on our company too. Recently, we've made some internal company changes, which, taken i...

“Any observed statistical regularity will tend to collapse once pressure is placed upon it for control purposes.” True.

Creator content funnels can help you grow quickly. Here's how.

I started reading Paul Graham because I was interested in startups. But I continued reading him because I became interested in good writing. Similarly, he once told an interviewer, “You have got me as your guy for programming and entrepreneurship or something like that. And, actually, probably, it is writing. More than anything else.”

The neglected middle child of mental health can dull your motivation and focus — and it may be the dominant emotion of 2021.

By Duncan Anderson. To see all blogs click here . Reading time: 4 mins One Sentence Summary : in the present good and bad things will happen, but bad things in the present can be good long term if you can learn from them.  *Note: for the purpose of this blog I’m going to be talki

I've often wondered how I would start my digital identity again. This wouldn't be applicable to me but rather for anyone just sta...

People rated a physicist’s talk as 19.3% better when they listened to it in high (vs low) audio quality. They also thought he was smarter and liked him more.

Frank Chimero’s Personal Website

There are now over 50 million pro or semi-pro content creators. Here are the must-know influencer stats, tools, and trends.

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This topic is an exploration of the storytelling process at Pixar.

There aren't many hard-and-fast rules of time management that apply to everyone, always, regardless of situation or personality (which is why I tend to emphasise general principles instead). But I think there might be one: you almost certainly can't consistently do the kind of work that demands serious mental focus for more than about three or four hours a day. As I've written before, it's positively spooky how frequently this three-to-four hour range crops up in accounts of the habits of the famously creative. Charles Darwin, at work on the theory of evolution in his study at Down House, toiled for two 90-minute periods and one one-hour period per day; the mathematical genius Henri Poincaré worked for two hours in the morning and two in the afternoon. Thomas Jefferson, Charles Dickens, Virginia Woolf, Ingmar Bergman and many more all basically followed suit, as Alex Pang explains in his book Rest (where he also discusses research supporting the idea: this isn't just a matter of cherry-picking examples to prove a point). Before you jump down my throat, I realise, of course, that many such figures relied on wives and/or servants to keep their lives on track. And in any case they didn't live in an era like ours, where those in high-status jobs feel they have to work as relentlessly as anyone. The moral here isn't that you ought to be in a position to rise from your desk, once your four hours are up, then spend the rest of the day playing tennis and drinking cocktails. (Though if you can, I say go for it.) The real lesson – or one of them – is that it pays to use whatever freedom you do have over your schedule not to "maximise your time" or "optimise your day", in some vague way, but specifically to ringfence three or four hours of undisturbed focus (ideally when your energy levels are highest). Stop assuming that the way to make progress on your most important projects is to work for longer. And drop the perfectionistic notion that emails, meetings, digital distractions and other interruptions ought ideally to be whittled away to practically nothing. Just focus on protecting four hours – and don't worry if the rest of the day is characterised by the usual scattered chaos. The other, arguably more important lesson isn't so much a time management tactic as an internal psychological move: to give up demanding more of yourself than three or four hours of daily high-quality mental work. That's an emphasis that gets missed, I think, in the current conversation about overwork and post-pandemic burnout. Yes, it's true we live in a system that demands too much of us, leaves no time for rest, and makes many feel as though their survival depends on working impossible hours. But it's also true that we're increasingly the kind of people who don't want to rest – who get antsy and anxious if we don't feel we're being productive. The usual result is that we push ourselves beyond the sane limits of daily activity, when doing less would have been more productive in the long run. How far you can check out of the culture of unproductive busywork depends on your situation, of course. But regardless of your situation, you can choose not to collaborate with it. You can abandon the delusion that if you just managed to squeeze in a bit more work, you'd finally reach the commanding status of feeling "in control" and "on top of everything" at last. The truly valuable skill here isn't the capacity to push yourself harder, but to stop and recuperate despite the discomfort of knowing that work remains unfinished, emails unanswered, other people's demands unfulfilled. That's the spirit embodied by one monk at the Monastery of Christ in the Desert in New Mexico, interviewed by the writer Jonathan Malesic for his forthcoming book The End of Burnout, which I've been enjoying. The monks' daily work period lasts (can you guess?) three hours, ending at 12.40pm. Malesic writes: "I asked Fr Simeon, a monk who spoke with a confidence cultivated through the years he spent as a defence attorney, what you do when the 12:40 bell rings but you feel that your work is undone. "'You get over it,' he replied." • 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 it to someone else who might like it, or mentioning it wherever you emit opinions online; the "View in a browser" link above will take you to a web version. And if you got this from a friend and would like to subscribe yourself, please do so here.

Getting better at making the thing makes the thing better.

In the digital world, user rights are civic rights, and creator rights are worker rights

“Don’t play everything (or every time); let some things go by… What you don’t play can be more important than what you do.” — Thelonious Monk     In 1960 Thelonious Monk (October 10, 1917 – February 17, 1982) delivered his 25 Tips for Musicians. Could Monk’s eccentric compositions, and piano playing noted for dissonances, … Continue reading "Thelonious Monk’s 25 Tips for Musicians – 1960"

In light of our recent discussions of “productivity,” both in this newsletter and on my podcast, I thought it might be useful to provide a more formal definition of what exactly I mean when I reference this concept. In the most general sense, productivity is about navigating from a large constellation of possible things you […]