Substrate

“A more interesting question, a question that perhaps you’ve never considered before, is what pain do you want in your life? What are you willing to struggle for? Because that seems to be a greater determinant of how our lives turn out.” “If you find yourself wanting something month after month, year after year, yet nothing happens and you never come any closer to it, then maybe what you actually want is a fantasy, an idealization, an image and a false promise. Maybe what you want isn’t what you want, you just enjoy wanting. Maybe you don’t actually want it at all.”

“The mistake commonly made is in thinking that their deliverable is “work” and everything else is “not work”. The critical thing about collaboration and team projects is that the deliverables matter but the connection of one person’s deliverables to another is what makes or breaks a project — and those connections can only happen by meeting, talking, listening, and planning. That’s why those activities are as much work as typing code or talking to a potential customer.”

The window to write this, I know, has passed. The subject has been exhausted, what happened has happened and we are here. The day after, I walked through a North Carolina airport in a determined daze—crying and deliberately looking any stranger who would let me, right in the eyes. I was manic and furious and the task felt aggressive. It felt like my right. More people than you would think met my sobbing gaze. Each time, I would look away first.

“I've been thinking a lot about the term "calculated vulnerability". I've seen a lot of my peers write after the resolution of a something hard (overcoming an illness, shutting down a startup, IVF etc) after a happy ending, neatly packaging their vulnerability in a bow. But what if that happy ending doesn't come? Do you just stay in a purgatory? Do you just stay in silence? I've been wondering about what my "resolution" will be so I can start publishing again. This self-imposed hiatus is basically me waiting for a satisfactory resolution in order to start writing again.”

“Sometimes I think back to some of the single actions that ended up changing my life forever.”

“But if I have learned anything in the past year it is how to change, and if I can turn into a runner I must be able to turn into anything else.”

“Often it’s not the expectations of other people that burn us out and make us miserable, but those we place on ourselves.”

“The trope is “Change is scary.” It’s actually not. It’s uncomfortable”

A few years ago, I woke up and took a look at my work calendar. Back-to-back meetings from 10am to 5pm. Sigh. I rolled out of bed, checked…

or, how I think about long-term success

On September 12, as far as Facebook is concerned I won’t exist. Yesterday, I permanently deleted my Facebook account. I let go of 300,000 followers, 1200 friends and the blue seal of authenticity. …

“From my perspective, this shift from “You’re buying stuff that’s already created” to “You’re funding the creation of ongoing content” has been a clear evolution in Memberful.” “Also, from a philosophical perspective, our number one core behavior — some companies have values, Patreon has behaviors, we like that word because it’s something you can do — is “Put creators first.””

One of my unpopular beliefs is that many meetings in companies should have more cc's, not fewer as is the common complaint everywhere I've been. We underestimate how much observational knowledge transfer occurs.

kept the city in a hostile sepia the way the calendar rips itself away from your grasp.

Every year, for the last twelve years, I’ve done a birthday post. These posts summarize what’s happened in my life over the last year, as well as my thoughts about the future. This year was a big one for me, more than just rolling into a new decade. I got married. I signed a book

“Twitter friends: what’s your most underappreciated tweet? Don’t think too hard about it. Just share something that you appreciated more than your audience did.”

“I could see an audio directory showing the status of who has their airpods in and who doesn’t, and a low level audio notification exposing the name of any friend that’s asking to pop into your Airpods. Kind of like a Waze alert notification.”

Over on Twitter, I saw this insightful observation: She is not wrong. There’s a lot of writing advice that focuses on, “shut off the inner critic, just write, you can fix it in editing&…

“And I remind myself to be kind and see the potential in people. Give them a break. Just like Kevin did for me.”

Advice for high performers in any company

“So, iOS nerds: People often ask me for the best resources to learn iOS development and my list is out of date and in need of a refresh. What links, videos, books, courses, apps, etc. do you send to people who want to learn how to write iOS apps?”

“The heart of becoming a writer is to come into focus on oneself. To know — and usually it’s best not to know until after you’ve done it — what has finally become important to write about and what you can say that no one else particularly can say.”

“I have a very simple rule that serves me well: Don’t think too much about your life after dinnertime. Thinking too much at the end of the day is a recipe for despair. Everything looks better in the light of the morning. Cliché, maybe, but it works.”

“I have lived for the last eight years in seasonless places, where things do not die, but revolve in a constant tropic sun. I had forgotten how the fall sharpens pencils, gray and colored ones”

“What I love about my son’s drawings is that he does not really care about them once he’s finished them. To him, they are dead artifacts, a scrap of by-product from his learning process. (For me, they’re tiny masterpieces to hang on the fridge.)”

“But I think that boredom was just the sort of “self-care” I needed. I don’t like that term for all the reasons others have pointed out, but also because I think that self-care sometimes involves doing things that don’t feel lovely or gentle. It involves doing the thing that will actually make it possible for you to do the things you like doing, to be the person you like being.”

“The problem with focusing on features as a means of differentiation is that nothing happens in a vacuum: category-defining products by definition get a lot of the user experience right from the beginning, and the parts that aren’t perfect — like Facebook’s sharing settings or the iPhone’s icon-based UI — become the standard anyways simply because everyone gets used to them.”