June 2023

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June, 2023

June 29 Do you want your name in big, bold letters on the desk in a corporate corner office? Or would you rather have the world as your office?

Ref: "Chasing Prestige" (David Perell)

When giving feedback, don't pick apart the whole essay; pick a part, and help the writer improve the essay in one meaningful, memorable way.

June 28 Addiction puts blinders on you, like a horse. When the object of our desire is attainable, everything else fades to black, and we start sprinting, ever-faster, on the same circular track. Yet, there is no finish line. The only way it ends is if you are debilitated, depleted by the thing you're after: more and more of the same.

June 26 I study philosophy because it applies to all other areas of study and to every part of life (politics, business, leadership, psychology, relationships, and fitness to name a few).

PhD means "Doctorate of Philosophy." The highest level of study in any field is to understand and contribute to the philosophy of the field itself, to expand the field to new territory and develop a comprehensive map of it in your head. A PhD in philosophy, then is a meta-study. You are expanding the field of knowledge about what we can know and how we know it.

If philosophy were a three-legged stool, it would stand on these unanswerable questions:

1. What is just? (Ethics)
2. What is true? (Epistemology)
3. What is real? (Metaphysics)

— — OR

1. What is it that I ought to do? (Ethics)
2. What can I know to be true? (Epistemology)
3. What is the nature of (my)reality? (Metaphysics)

June 25 Mindfulness is a prerequisite for freedom, stillness a prerequisite for creativity.

Both mindfulness and stillness are modes of awareness. Unaware in action, you are coerced by causes and effects, not free. Unaware in thought, you are blind to your own insights, not creative.

June 24 Forget about developing IP. Focus on developing the 'I.' Your IP can be bought and sold, but your 'I' is an intangible, immeasurable asset.

(The 'I' is yourself, your intellect, your identify — verbally, introspection.)

Any book on writing will warn you about adverbs. They're low on the part-of-speech hierarchy because they rarely add meaning.

But that doesn't mean you can't use them well. Here's @BennyCarts with an admirable use of an adverb:

"Step back from the role you play and take in the fact that you’re a mobile meat sack provisionally containing infinity." (Benny Carts, The Art of Not Writing a Goddamn Thing)

June 23 What is this slippery, modern world robbing from you? Is there a grippy, analog tool that could change the outcome?

June 22 Stop worrying about packaging and presentation. Focus on quality for an infinite time horizon, and approach perfection. People will notice, and those who don't notice will hear about you from the people who do.

You can grow not from virality but from renowned quality and word-of-mouth credibility.

The quickest path to greener grass is to tend to your lawn.

Do you have a favorite pun?

My undisputed champion is "The Bare Necessities."

June 21 I saw a sign in Hiawatha, Kansas. It said "freedom hospice." Freedom for whom? I ask. Is it that the family will be free from caring for their elderly? Is it that the dying will soon be free from this world and ascend to His Kingdom? Or did that just not give the name much thought?

June 20 To quote another American transcendentalist, "we contain multitudes." That means, we are great insomuch as our scale and scope is incomprehensible, inexhaustible. We have, within each of us, such a breath and death that make us ineffable.

[[Emerson's Understanding]]

June 18 There are two types of individualism: the selfish and the responsible.

Selfish individualism: "I can do everything myself."

Responsible individualism: "I should take care is myself."

(East Coast vs. Midwest)

Don’t write to please. Don’t write to meet a perceived demand. Just focus on creating something you’re proud of and on writing well. Audiences form around quality and authenticity — and the only way to guarantee those is to write for yourself, to write something you would like to read.

(From a Daily Email that I wrote with Sherry)

June 14 Recalling a dream is like reading a printed page from the back side, holding it up to the light of day and reversing the backwards words.

June 13 The writer is not just an artist. He is also an editor, which is antithetical to art; editing is analytical. Yet, editing is necessary to make great art and to make a living as a writer.

June 12 Maintain the mystery. Without it, life ceases to be.

Mindset shift: It's not an unpublished idea; it's a pre-published idea. (Or, it's a dud that will help me dig up my next one.)

June 10 Every shit is a story. They all have a three-act structure — whether it's diarrhea or a no-wipe wonder.

1. Sprint/stroll/skip to the throne
2. Enjoy or endure
3. Flush, relieved and resolved

Everyone says that the book is better than the movie, but most of that is because your experience with the book is uniquely yours — more so than the movie.

(You create the world in your head or you watch it unfold on screen. Both can be well-told stories, but only the book will be a story you helped create.)

June 8 Line editing (sometimes copyediting) is an in-depth review and can require multiple rounds of revision and feedback, and can cover everything from paragraph order to punctuation. A proofread is the final polish of a piece before it goes out the door, which doesn't require any revisions from the author — just minor corrections.

(There's also developmental editing.)

June 7 If before I go to sleep tonight, I can let go of today, then maybe I'll be able to let go of life when I go to die.

June 6 You're not dancing if your hands are below your waist.

June 5 It is not immoral to park illegally. It is illegal. The immoral thing would be to shirk the responsibility of the consequences from parking illegally.

June 2 What is the chance of us being able to witness a full eclipse? Doesn't that mean that the moon has to be the same multiple closer to us than the Sun is larger than the moon?

Online creators amass a following in one of two main ways:

1. They grind through a prolific period, where they publish as much as possible, that propels them in front of the eyes of the world. (David Perell's YouTube and Podcast, Casey Neistat's vlogs, Stavros Halkias's crowd-work sets)
2. They create enough and well enough that someone (or many people) with a considerable audience recommends them, and then they retain that audience by following a publishing schedule (Van Neistat).

Analog Energy

Electronics rely on intangible energy, like the chemical potential energy stored in batteries. But analog devices rely on kinetic energy. They have mechanisms that must be activated, and you have the ability, the force to activate them.

Take a typewriter. Every key is a lever, and every time you hit a key, a metal bar swings up and stamps a single letter through an ink ribbon onto a sheet of paper. As long as the mechanisms are intact, you bring the energy. You can convert the food you eat, the water you drink, and the sleep you get, into words, paragraphs typed with a 90-year-old machine. In 90 years, where will your iPhone be? Who will be using to create art, to express themselves, to deepen their connection with themselves.

Imagine a life where we weren't feathered to our devices and outlets by the chords of our chargers and Ethernet cables. Imagine a life where you could use the energy within your body to perpetually use any device you needed.

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