While I have my share of bad things to say about social media on here, I’m still fairly active on most networks and plan to be for the foreseeable future. I suspect some of you found this post via social media, and that’s great!

In the long run, though, email is where your followers need to be. Not that email is great, per se, but you can truly own your list and that is hugely valuable. David Perell calls this taking your users over the Public to Private bridge.

Rand Fishkin recently laid this out in a very compelling (and somewhat depressing) post about the state of the web, and what creators need to be doing. In that post, he included the thought:

I’d rather have 1 new email subscriber than 1,000 more followers on Facebook

It’s amazing to me that email is again becoming one of the best ways to reach people, but the numbers don’t lie. Continue to use social media to the extent you desire, but do your best to continue to grow your list.

If you’re reading this through my email list, thanks! If not, I certainly welcome you to join me here.

If you list some of the greatest composers of all time, people like Mozart and Bach are likely near the top.

If you list some of the most prolific composers of all time, they’re also near the top of that list. Bach wrote over 1100 pieces, and Mozart (despite only living to age 35) wrote over 600. It’s not a coincidence that “prolific” and “greatest” are many of the same people.

I would think that both men had a solid degree of natural talent, of course, but I also think they made a lot of mistakes along the way that helped them improve. It’s like Henry Ford said, with “those who never make mistakes work for those of us who do.” The mistakes made along the way helped them become amazing at their craft.

It’s not unlike the story of the clay pots I shared last year, where the students that created the most pots also created the best pots.

That’s kind of what I’m doing here. By writing every day, I’m sure that some of these posts aren’t great and that’s ok. Every day I get a little better, and at some point I might be decent at it. Until then, on to creating more…

It’s kind of a weird title, no? To be able to think for yourself, you need certain friends around you? It might not be as weird as it seems.

George Mack recently published a great tweet that explains it more thoroughly. In short, you can have two kinds of friend groups:

1. Centralized friend groups that share the same history, beliefs and values.
2. Decentralized friend groups that share wildly varying beliefs.

While having centralized friend groups can be important for your well-being at times, if you don’t intentionally interact with the decentralized groups you’re likely to simply follow their thoughts instead of seeing more angles and thinking for yourself. Understanding the thought process of people that you don’t agree with is a great way to begin to have rational discussions with them.

This points back to some of my previous posts, encouraging you to see both sides of the aisle and fighting to avoid the filter bubble. Really, though, the best explanation of this is a nice graphic that George put together that explains his thoughts on it.

For more, check out George’s tweet and the discussion that followed it.

It can be hard to separate the two, particularly when it’s something big that happens to us personally, but anecdotes are not the same as real evidence.

We seem to be in the midst of that right now with COVID vaccines, but it’s hard to see while we’re still in the middle of it. Going back 40 years to when seatbelt laws were being introduced is likely the best comparison we have.

There are known cases where a driver died because they were wearing a seatbelt, often in the case where the car was on fire or submerged in water. In many of those cases the seatbelt still helped (less chance of being knocked unconscious), but sadly, some have died specifically because they were wearing their seatbelt. On the flip side, wearing seatbelts is estimated to save roughly 15,000 lives per year (NHTSA) and is clearly the wise thing to do. If you lost someone you love because they were wearing their seatbelt, your anecdote is incredibly tragic and compelling, but it still isn’t evidence.

Seth Godin recently wrote a short post unpacking this and ended with a simple statement:

An anecdote is not evidence. But we often treat it that way.

I encourage you not to.

A few weeks back, I shared about a friend of mine that posts constantly about politics on Facebook, with the majority of his posts attacking others, and a good number of his posts being completely false information. While I don’t mind his point of view and can respect all viewpoints, I find his (and a handful of others) consistent volume of posts difficult to understand.

A recent episode of the “Hidden Brain” podcast tackled this idea, and gave me more insight as to why someone might post political stuff all day long. They call it “political hobbyism” and compare it to people that constantly post about their favorite sports team.

In both cases, their actions online almost never translate into real change. For example, you’ll have people post online about how “I could have easily made that field goal”, when we all know that’s not true. Katie Nolan made a fun video about that a few years ago, calling out some of those folks:

By seeing those political folks online as being similar to that, it’s helped me to understand why they post that stuff all of the time — it’s just a hobby to them, like sports is to others. That doesn’t excuse posting outright lies to support your “side”, but gave me more insight into why people might post political stuff all day.

If you have time, that Hidden Brain episode (“Passion Isn’t Enough“) is well worth your time to listen to.

I’ve been listening to a lot of the “How to Take Over the World” podcast lately, and in a series he did about Steve Jobs, one line of his really stood out: Design is more than veneer.

People often think of design as “making things pretty”, and while that may be a piece of it, that’s not the purpose of design. I mentioned a few months ago that the best design is invisible, meaning great design helps users accomplish a goal.

As I said in that post, this doesn’t mean that design shouldn’t be beautiful, but rather than the “beautiful” aspect of design should generally be secondary to the full purpose of what you’re working on. Always be thinking of your users and how best to help them accomplish a goal, and then put some veneer on top of it once the user experience has been perfected.

Over the years I’ve tried various ways to handle my daily scheduling. While my official calendar lives in Google Calendar (and that’s not likely to change anytime soon), I’ve tried various ways of really processing and following my schedule throughout the day.

A few years ago I picked up the Full Focus Planner, and it was excellent. In terms of daily work, you essentially copied your digital appointments over to the paper planner, which seems kind of silly but really offers some great advantages. I touched a bit on that in a post later that same year when I was doing my manual planning in Notion instead, how making weekly previews intentionally inefficient can be a good thing.

For the past 18 months or so, I’ve essentially been using Roam Research to handle that side of things. Roam is an amazing tool (and another that’s not likely to change anytime soon), but this week I discovered a little wrinkle with another device that might change my direction again.

reMarkable

I picked up a reMarkable tablet about a year ago, and have been using it more and more lately. This week, though, I discovered something that might increase my usage of it a lot more, and it’s ultimately just a PDF.

Voja Dimitrijevic is a popular YouTuber and runs the “My Deep Guide” channel, mostly digging into products like the reMarkable. He released a product called “My Daily Organizer” that is, well, remarkable!

As I mentioned above, it’s really just a PDF, but it’s a very creative one! Each year is a separate PDF of around 1700 pages — various daily pages, weekly views, quarterly views, etc. What makes it magic is the linking between pages so you can just tap around to get exactly where you need to go in the document. A recent update to reMarkable allows it to support internal links in a PDF, and Voja has made fantastic use of that with this product. It’s kind of hard to explain, but he’s created a very in-depth video to show it off. I don’t expect you to watch the entire thing (it’s nearly 50 minutes long), but I encourage you to scrub through it a bit to see what he’s put together:

I’ve given it a good test for the past week or so, and it’s bringing me back to my Full Focus Planner days. Being able to use a device like this more often, with it’s intentional lack of apps and notifications, is a great way to focus.

This “My Deep Guide” PDF not only works on reMarkable, but works on some Boox tablets and Supernote products as well, so it’s available for most people.

Whether I use Voja’s product long-term remains to be seen, but it’s a very creative use of the old PDF and I appreciate him bringing it to market.

While slide decks can be a useful tool in some presentations, Steve Jobs was famously against them. When having staff present him with their arguments for or against certainly decisions, he famously believed that:

People who know what they’re talking about don’t need Powerpoint

If you need to make an argument about an upcoming direction, then you should make your point and have a discussion about it rather than going through a bunch of slides.

Ultimately, it’s not unlike the idea of only using paper for proposals after a deal has been reached. Have a discussion, figure out the direction, and then just write down the results.

No slides?

Of course, Steve Jobs famously used slides in his major presentations, but I think those are different for two reasons:

1. His slides were very simple, more of just emphasis on his words than on presenting content.
2. In those situations, a discussion with a room full of hundreds of people wasn’t feasible anyhow.

I see Seth Godin do something similar. He’ll use slides for many of his talks, but they’re very simple slides — the majority are simply an image to go along with whatever story he is telling at the time.

In fact, in his “Nine steps to Powerpoint magic” post from years ago, his very first suggestion is to not use Powerpoint at all! He says:

Most of the time, it’s not necessary. It’s underkill. Powerpoint distracts you from what you really need to do… look people in the eye, tell a story, tell the truth. Do it in your own words, without artifice and with clarity. There are times Powerpoint is helpful, but choose them carefully.

We have a variety of slide decks that we use in our business, and we’ll continue to use many of them, because there are cases when walking through some slides can be a great way to explain an idea with visuals. In most of our meetings, though, we try to simply have a discussion with the other party to help us all understand what the other is looking for and to plot the best path forward. In those cases, slides just get in the way.

At the end of most episodes of Seth Godin’s Akimbo podcast, they run an ad for the altMBA that includes a great line from T.K. Coleman that includes the quip that “there is no great thought leader who can outthink the internet“. While I personally work hard to have many answers available in my head, the real benefit is generating more questions.

Asking more questions is a great thing to do. It helps uncover missing pieces or makes us view things a bit differently. Even better, the right questions can help uncover pieces that no one even knew were missing.

In a recent blog post by Seth, though, he took it even a level deeper:

Rarest of all is the person with the humility (and confidence) to realize that even the list of questions can remain elusive. Finding the right questions might be the very thing we need to do.

If you’re not sure how to find more of the right questions, the “5 Whys” can be a good tool to help get there, and it’s super easy. Ask a basic question, follow it with “why?”, and keep asking “why?” to every answer. It can be a road that leads to sounding like a curious two-year-old, but if done correctly it can uncover great things.

Here’s a quick example showing how that might work:

Having the right answer is great, but having the right question can be even better.

“Happiness is reality minus expectations”

I heard this quote in a recent podcast from Adam Grant, though I believe it’s attributed to Tom Magliozzi, former co-host of the popular “Car Talk” radio show on NPR.

As I thought about it, it’s kind of a tricky thing. I wrote earlier this year about setting proper expectations, and it aligns nicely with that. If we know a particular restaurant is going to be slow, and we keep that expectation in mind going in, our happiness with the experience rises quite a lot.

On the flip side, if you always keep very low expectations it can lead to a rather unfulfilling life. Chasing dreams can lead to wonderful places, even if they sometimes fall short.

Which medal?

Ultimately, your expectations really make a big difference in how you see life. There have been studies that show that in the Olympic Games, bronze medal winners are generally happier with their result than silver medal winners. Silver medal winners almost won gold, but fell short. On the other hand, bronze medal winners almost got nothing at all, but ended up on the medal stand.

Trying to find happiness in more situations is a good way to go through life, and proper expectations will greatly increase your chances of staying happy.