Substrate

“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.”

This week vlogger Leena Norms included Steal Like An Artist on her list of “Top 10 Self Help Books that ACTUALLY HELP.” I was especially taken with her thoughtful intro: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SdyYF2vH8pA Steal Like An Artist was written and drawn at such a fast and furious pace that I don’t think I spent a lot of time thinking about

“Even if it doesn’t make sense to you yet, try to believe my story; believe me when I say that I’m a woman. You might not see a woman yet when you look at me – sometimes I don’t. But this really is me.”

calling it now: the next successful social media site will be a MUD with gardening instead of combat mechanicspeople want to be in a place that they personally (alongside their friends) can exert effort to make better, even if only in small ways— Max Kreminski (@maxkreminski) August 18, 2018

“Because the things you wrote in your diary, even your public one, may make sense in the moment, but a few years down the line, many thoughts and expressions will undoubtedly be cringe-worthy (or worse). We all know this feeling. And now because of services like Twitter (and yes, even blogs), some people experience this embarrassment (or worse) in public.”

“At any given point in time, there are countless versions of our lives that we can see for ourselves, and we’re committed to maintaining that optionality.” “These relationships are some of the most rewarding parts of my life, and they didn’t just happen. We built them. So the next time you’re faced with the question of whether to show up or not show up for someone, be conscious about how that choice impacts your relationship. Because, for better or worse, it will.”

“Twitter should look at itself as a platform in the same way. As it stands, they’re chasing influential users away.”

Missed listening to this podcast.

“Whenever I perform a save or equivalent preservation action, I stop and spend a second determining the context that needs to be associated with this artifact. Every single artifact has a bit of context.”

“Of course, I still have work to do on finding healthy ways to cope when something triggering happens while I’m out at dinner. But I also envision a world where those in eating disorder recovery don’t need to sidestep landmines whenever they enter a restaurant, where our stomachs are filled with only hunger or fullness, not anxiety. By shelving the practices above, managers and servers could help create that reality, and make eating at a restaurant the carefree experience I’d always hoped to have — not a test to be passed.”

“When you talk to someone on FaceTime, there is a little square of your face in the corner that gives you a self-awareness you would not get on a date. It’s as if you’re holding up a tiny mirror in front of yourself during the entire conversation.” “We have so many options that we throw people away with our fingertips. We reject potential soul mates within seconds and then cry over three glasses of wine to our best friends about how there is nobody out there.”

“In my limited experience what you find in the wake of exercising your honor is not fanfare or recognition, but the silent satisfaction where you know that had you not taken action the outcome would have been far worse for others.” “Learn to see the inner child within each person”

In the years I worked at a sex shop, I saw how the pressure to have great sex — in a world that will never be a level playing field — can inflict its own kind of damage.

Focus is one of your most valuable resources. It acts as a multiplier on the value of your time. An hour of absorbing focus can be worth ten times that of a distracted one. Unfortunately, focus is also hard. Distractions are everywhere. Even when they aren’t, it can often be difficult to get into a

“The trick, therefore, is to allow for some types of changes to be fast and fluid, while requiring others to be slower and more deliberate. Some changes should require nothing more than a quick chat, while others need a stakeholder meeting, and others need an all-hands company meeting.”

As a company scales the number of meetings initially grows faster then headcount. With more people comes more coordination. Most companies ...

“it’s precisely because such fervent competition exists that these companies and so many others have been pushed to build their best-in-breed products: Kindle is better because of iBooks, Spotify is better because of Apple Music, and iOS is better because of Android. This list goes on and on and on”

I’ve been talking myself out of building this app for three years. That’s how long I’ve been logging my caffeine intake with my iPhone and wishing there were a better way to do it. Over the years, I’ve tried just about all the caffeine apps. Most

“Edgar Schein’s writing on organizational culture, via Erik Hollnagel”