I've been thinking about goals after they came up multiple times in coaching and mentoring conversations this week. More specifically, I've been thinking about what happens when people take on too many goals simultaneously. This is something I commonly see with New Year's Resolutions. People have a goal of losing weight, learning a new skill, … Continue reading Five reasons it’s better to minimize your number of concurrent goals →

Cohort 14 of Building a Second Brain wrapped up this week. I debated jumping back into another cohort-based course, but I've decided to take a break for a bit. Reflecting on recent months, I feel like I've been doing too much metawork and too little actual work. Metawork is work directed towards the systems and tools we … Continue reading The allure of metawork (and changes to my reading process) →

I noticed that a lot of what I'm consuming recently is being processed through a lens of scarcity and abundance. I recently started reading The Infinite Game for a book club at work. In The Infinite Game, Simon Sinek differentiates between finite and infinite games: Finite games are played by known players. They have fixed rules. And there … Continue reading A couple ways we may see life through a lens of scarcity or abundance →

Initially, I had planned to share some notes from my vault this week. But this morning at the gym, I was thinking about something else. So I'm going to write about that instead. Last week, Alex and I watched Everything, Everywhere, All At Once. It's an excellent, entertaining, thought-provoking movie, in my opinion. I will try … Continue reading The subconscious messages I’ve been sending to myself about emotion →

In Ship 30 for 30 (affiliate link), the class has two phases. The first phase is all about making noise. This means talking about a wide variety of different topics and writing in different styles. Experimenting. This sets us up for the second phase. The second phase is about looking for a signal. This means looking at … Continue reading What I learned from Ship 30 for 30 regarding how to use statistics, the performance of my writing, and ideas for moving forward →

We're already 25% through 2022. 👀 It feels like time goes by so fast. At the same time, looking back so much has already happened this year. Work has been a rollercoaster. Sometimes I help other teams solve problems. Other times, I answer people's questions. And I've been able to take some time to create … Continue reading A review of the first quarter of 2022 →

I've been thinking this week about taking notes from movies and TV shows effectively. This is a challenging medium for me. With books, I usually read on my Kindle. It's easy to highlight things and then export those highlights into my Obsidian using Bookcision. With articles, it's a similar setup. I can highlight articles in my browser using Readwise and … Continue reading Taking notes effectively from movies and TV shows →

As I mentioned last week, I'm currently taking Ship 30 for 30 (my essays can be found here). I'm learning a lot in this cohort-based course--there's way more material than I had expected going into it. Some of the things I've learned so far include: It's important to write for a super-specific audience. It's almost like you should be writing … Continue reading Reflections on applying Ship 30 for 30 principles to my newsletter content →

I'm currently doing Ship 30 for 30, a cohort-based course known for its focus on producing 30 atomic essays or Twitter threads over a month. In addition to writing, I've also been trying to read other essays to know others in the community better. In reading some of those essays, I noticed that one of the … Continue reading Authenticity and the Complexity of Experience →

I'm entering week four of my time-boxing experiment. It's funny because part of me seems to be aware of the nature of my current struggle: I've dubbed it my denial of reality. I want to do so many things, yet there are only 168 hours in the week. One of the things I've liked about time-boxing is … Continue reading Solutions that produce the problem they intended to solve →