Popular use cases include productivity and focus, meditation and relaxation, and sleep. Soundscapes are personalized based on real-time inputs such as location, weather, heart rate, and circadian rhythm. 

I’ve been using it while I work for a few hours a day since January 2020. This post is part review and part exploration of generative music as a technology to augment mental states. 

Music for Airports

Several months ago, I found myself looking for new music to accompany me on a work trip to Boston. I ran across a post on Reddit about a Japanese ambient album, Kankyō Ongaku: Japanese Ambient, Environmental & New Age Music 1980-1990. 

What caught my eye was that one of the commenters said that the music was made with the belief that music is a physical phenomenon that can interact with the world around you. 

I thought that kind of made sense — sound waves bouncing off different objects and interacting with the environment seemed legit. 

I loaded up several of the best ambient albums the internet could recommend and went on my trip, and ended up strolling through the airport while listening to Brian Eno’s Ambient 1: Music for Airports.

It was a great experience, like living with a soundtrack. Everything felt more cinematic and elevated. 

Over time, I developed some go-to favorites. The problem with familiarity is that I began to focus on the music instead of letting the music enhance the situation. 

Generative music seeks to solve this familiarity issue by creating something perpetually new. 

Generative Music is an Experience

Proponents believe that generative music experiences can unlock an instance-based listening experience that has the potential to transcend static recordings. 

At first glance, it’s a little like being into jam bands.  My experience with Grateful Dead fans is that they love to collect recordings — not for their fidelity — but for the iterative jams. These recordings are highly sought after because the band took familiar songs in new directions. 

Generative music, especially when it uses existing tracks as seeds, can be thought of as a robot jam band that performs for you on demand. 

Side note: many video games have adaptive soundtracks, which serve to creative immersive experiences and emotional highpoints for gamers. That video link is an absolutely fascinating must-watch.

Bronze, Jai Paul, and Generative Experiences 

Firmly in the robot jam band category is the collaboration between Artist Jai Paul and Bronze.ai, a small team of AI research scientists and musicians that seeks to use AI to “fundamentally extend the capabilities of recorded music.” 

The result is a never-ending, unique listening experience that has to be heard to be believed. 

You can listen here. 

Details on how the Bronze platform works are scarce. The official website only offers these hints: 

Bronze is a new technology that allows music creators to utilize AI and machine learning as creative tools for composition and arrangement. Bronze is also an audio file format which will revolutionize music playback, enabling artists to release non-static, generative, and augmented music.

In an email, the team also had this to say regarding the Jai Paul example: 

…the creative decisions in arranging this piece were made by humans and the AI models were used simply to arrange, improvise and perform the piece on playback. We made a creative decision that given the nature of the production and the fact people were already familiar with the song, we would build a model unique to the piece that creates an endless arrangement on each listen, improvising around the instrumental form in many different ways and periodically dropping into a more fixed structure and improvising in a much more subtle way around the lead vocal.

It’s just so interesting and fun to listen to. I think (and hope) that we see a lot more of these artist-driven generative experiences. 

Regarding the promise of generative music, musician, composer, and producer, Arca, had this to say: 

“When you publish an album, that’s the way people will hear it forever more. When you play a song live, it’s unpredictable and ephemeral.” 

“There’s something freeing about not having to make every single microdecision, but rather, creating an ecosystem where things tend to happen, but never in the order you were imagining them.”

As for Endel, it isn’t quite music to my ears, and I can’t listen to it as such. It’s more like a static-y, white-noise soundtrack with temporary undulations and sporadic, melodic overtones.

I don’t think we’ll see users sharing recorded Endel sessions. For most, generative experiences are interesting once, and that’s the point. They feel more personal and intimate, and in Endels’ case, the here and the now are the inputs that the AI is riffing on. 

Use Cases for Endel and Personalized Soundscapes 

Speaking to Time, Endel CEO Oleg Stavitsky said that users have successfully used Endel for ADHD, insomnia, and tinnitus. 

As for scientific literature on music and its effects on the human animal, these claims seem well supported. 

Here’s a study that suggests that background music can increase worker satisfaction and productivity, particularly music that doesn’t have lyrics. 

The abstract for “The future of music in therapy and medicine” states: 

The understanding of music’s role and function in therapy and medicine is undergoing a rapid transformation, based on neuroscientific research showing the reciprocal relationship between studying the neurobiological foundations of music in the brain and how musical behavior through learning and experience changes brain and behavior function. Through this research the theory and clinical practice of music therapy is changing more and more from a social science model, based on cultural roles and general well-being concepts, to a neuroscience-guided model based on brain function and music perception. This paradigm shift has the potential to move music therapy from an adjunct modality to a central treatment modality in rehabilitation and therapy.

I spent hours reviewing medical studies on PubMed, and that’s the best overview I can provide. 

Endel has the tech and the science to back it up, but how does this team bring the product to market? It’s not exactly an easy sell to the masses. 

Notes on Marketing Strategy 

I was surprised to learn that Endel isn’t developed by a team of musicians but rather a team of scientists and engineers who leverage the body of scientific literature that pertains to music. 

Partnerships 

As reported by dozens of top-tier outlets, Endel was signed to a record deal with Warner Music Group. Endel will create 20 albums for the record label. 

Warner Music Group Signs an Algorithm to a Record Deal

It’s a nice angle, but I’m not sure how it makes sense in the context of a go-to-market strategy. This deal is very much about the end product, the “music,” and most of the messaging put out by the company outside of this is about the platform and the technology. 

The company understands this as well, quoting from the release: 

“Warner approached us and we were hesitant at first because it counters what we’re doing here,” Endel’s co-founder and sound designer Dmitry Evgrafov tells Rolling Stone. “Our whole idea is making soundscapes that are real-time and adaptive. But they were like, ‘Yeah, but can you still make albums?’ So we did it as an experiment. When a label like Warner approaches you, you have to say ‘Why not.'”  

There’s a live streaming 24/7 Twitch channel, and the WMG licensed records are available on Spotify. It is interesting to note that Endel doesn’t have a first-party presence on major music streaming platforms, which most certainly have their users. Popular YouTube channels with similar utility and 24/7 streams include ChilledCow, which syndicates music to Spotify, et al. 

Like the Jai Paul/generative experience mentioned previously, Endel also partnered with musician Grimes to release AI Lullaby, a limited edition sleep soundscape, which you can listen to here. 

DTC or OEM

At present, the team seems to be feeling out both distribution methods. Talks of partnerships with automobile makers and other OEM integrations sound promising. 

But at the same time, Endel has invested, and appears to be successful with App Store distribution, which intuits a direct-to-consumer orientation. I paid for a lifetime membership, but the current prices are $49 per year. 

It’s unclear to me which avenue is better, but I would say that I’m cautiously optimistic they’ll be able to do both. 

By leveraging different available data (based on integration), you could see the product’s variants. Automobiles could allow the platform to tune into ambient noise levels, traffic patterns and speed, and respond to a conversation (or lack thereof) within the vehicle. 

Still, these are things you could do directly within an app — so who knows. 

Wrapping Up

I love Endel, and I think that if you give it a chance, you’ll like it, too. It’s a promising riff on an existing idea and one that I suspect we’ll see much more of in the coming years. 

The macOS app has a few bugs — the most annoying of which is after opening the program, most users will want to minimize it to the tray to continue listening while doing other things, only the music stops, and you have to open it using the menu icon to start playing again. My life would be 3% better if they fixed this. 

Large publishers often call this content recirculation, but their goals are to take visits and push them into higher-value pages for revenue purposes. 

Since it’s a blog without any monetization, my goal on this website is to push visitors into other content and hopefully earn an email opt-in. My stats show me that readers are more likely to join my newsletter when they read multiple posts. 

Content Sequencing for Session Depth

People need to be interested in something to click on it. 

To make this happen, my gut says that I’m better served by giving the user more of what they’re already here for instead of showing them something random. 

It’s helpful to think of your content in terms of a sequence — which articles are most relevant to users at which times? 

Some content should be consumed in a linear sequence, such as tutorials with multiple parts. It would be a mistake to recommend content out of sequence. 

Other posts are standalone and can be consumed in any order, but users may still have a preference for when they’re shown. 

For example, you probably don’t care about the depth year that I took in 2020 unless you’re familiar with me as a person. Most first-time visitors would be better served being recommended pretty much anything else. 

By default, I’d like to show them closely related articles. 

WordPress has two handy built-in taxonomies that help group content. 

Categories vs. Tags 

The internet is filled with debates about which is better — but I don’t dig too deep into information hierarchy. 

I’ve got a quick rule that I heard somewhere a long time ago. 

Categories are the table of contents, and tags are the index.

Following this logic, I use categories for major site sections: 

• Blog Posts 
• Marketing Patterns 
• Conversion Gold

I use tags to help create groups of content. 

I have tags for: 

• Reviews 
• Productivity
• Design
• Site updates

The idea is to use these tags to group similar content to show a user. 

If you’re reading my Focusmate review, there are two groups of content that I think would be interesting to you: 

• Other reviews (FMail, Things 3)
• Content related to the product niche (Productivity)

If you had many reviews, the best ones to show would be the ones that were tagged with both Productivity and Reviews. 

So let’s build it. 

Code Example

To restate the problem and define the solution: 

The use case for this feature will be to upgrade a quick visit to a session with more depth. I want the user to read the post they landed on and see something else that catches their eye. In theoretical terms, I’m trying to bridge the specific information they came for with a broader topic that they can explore. 

I want to add a “you might also like” section to the end of each post. In WordPress, this file is single.php.

We have to grab the tags from the current post and run a query on the posts database to find five random posts that have one or more of the tags from the current post. 

Oh, and since there may be more than five posts to recommend, and we’re unsure which are the best to show users, we’ll randomize the list. 

Here is the important part broken out, with comments 

Here’s the full snippet to display the related posts by tag: 

You can view this feature in action at the bottom of every post page on this site.

Project Activation 

The sidebar lists active projects — which means that projects have an active state. 

Moving a project into Someday will toggle this status and remove a project from the sidebar. 

Projects also become inactive (or pending) when the start date is in the future. They’ll come back when the scheduled date arrives. 

Adding a deadline does not toggle the active state, so items will remain in the sidebar, Anytime, and/or the Upcoming section. 

Start Dates 

Projects and tasks can have a start date, which is the date that the item starts showing. 

If you take a project and set the start date in the future, the project will disappear from the sidebar. 

If you set the start date of a task, it’ll disappear from Anytime and Someday, but it will remain visible in the Upcoming section and in the project section with a date visible (if applicable). 

An interesting way to use start dates and deadlines together is for bills. Add a deadline for the date that the bill is due and a start date ten days or so before. It’s a way to say, “this is due on this date, but I need to complete it before that.”

Pro tip: Keep track of coupon expirations with due dates. A buddy of mine has a list called “Coupons” and does this.

Showing Tomorrow Only

Things can filter only the tasks and projects that have a start date set for tomorrow by using Quick Find and typing Tomorrow. 

If you’re like me, I can get overwhelmed looking at the Upcoming list. It’s nice to be able just to see what’s on my plate for the next day. I wish Cultured Code would add “today” into the Upcoming list, though. 

Showing Repeating Only

You can get a list of all repeating items by using Quick Find and typing Repeating. 

This is useful when you want to edit the repeating template as opposed to just the next upcoming instance of a repeating task or project (to make sure that your changes stick). 

Quick Entry 

Use the keyboard shortcut Ctrl + Space on the macOS version to pop up a modal window and create tasks within any app. 

You can also install a small helper app that will pre-fill the quick entry box with a link to whatever you’re doing when you hit the shortcut. 

Link: Things Helper

This is my cautionary tale, told in four parts. 

Part 1: Conversion Gold

It all started, as almost nothing good does, in a hotel room in southern Florida. It was October of 2019, and I had recently left my long-term SEO gig at CBS Interactive (now ViacomCBS). 

I had been running a side project called User Insights, which was a remote user testing platform. I was passionate about CRO (conversion rate optimization), and the insights you could get from watching real users do real things on real websites were outstanding. 

The problem was that most people only got to see what people did on one website — but I could see them all. I knew some common issues existed across many widely used design patterns. The problem was that many testing projects wouldn’t surface these issues. 

I had spent the past several years working with editorial teams and had closely watched the nascent paid newsletter industry begin to grow. Major publishers were shedding editorial staff, and many top writers were launching paid newsletters to what seemed like a great success. 

I saw it as a compelling business model: where someone with something to say could get paid to say it without having a boss. 

I decided that what I’d do is take all of those insights I was accruing from running User Insights and send them out in a paid newsletter a couple of times a month. The pitch was simple: for $10 per month (less than the cost of 1 user test), I’d send you an email with everything I knew about making better websites. 

I built the now “infamous” (in a relative way) landing page and sent an email to all User Insights users. 

Here’s what it looked like: 

Then I did what smart marketers do, and I told my friends about it. Several were really good friends and either tweeted it or shared it in their personal newsletters. 

I gave each of them 50% off coupons to share, so the vast majority of sales rolled in at $5 per month (or $50 per year, annual plans). 

The first few issues were very well received. I was happy to write them and my subscribers seemed genuinely happy to receive them. 

I had an opt-in form that sent a free sample — and a quick teaser of each issue would go out to those people to get them to sign up. It worked very well. Each month Conversion Gold grew by double-digit percentage points. 

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. 

Then I destroyed it. 

Part 2: Panoply

Those who know me know that I have a hard time standing still. I am utterly awesome at coming up with ideas and launching new projects. 

The problem is that I get bored quickly and move onto the next shiny thing. I don’t think that I’m alone here, but I’m certainly the only one in my friend group that does this. It’s embarrassing. 

Part of the promise of doing Conversion Gold was that it was supposed to be a long term project. I love writing about websites and marketing, and I certainly love getting paid. 

I found out that loving writing about websites doesn’t mean that you’ll love sitting down to do it twice a month for the rest of your life. 

I didn’t want to pigeonhole myself. My ideas were bigger than that. I had spent the past 15 years developing a particular set of internet skills, and it felt like a shame not to use them. I wanted to make courses, videos, apps, podcasts, and more than anything: I wanted to write more than Conversion Gold. 

So, I did what I do, and tried to make it so. 

In March of 2020, I gave all subscribers of Conversion Gold a pro-rated refund and canceled their subscriptions. Several friends advised me not to do this… but I felt sure that my readers would come back, especially since I had proven myself trustworthy and given them upfront refunds. 

I went dark, quietly working on my next big thing. In the background, Covid19 raged. Quarantining gave me more cover to go deep and work on something truly meaningful. 

It was called Panoply, which is an uncommon old word that means “a box full of wonderful things,” which is precisely what I intended to build. 

On April 15, 2020, I launched a snazzy new website, hand-designed and hand-coded. All of the old Conversion Gold content was there, in addition to a video course on spaced repetition and several podcast episodes (one with former poker player Annie Duke). 

I felt great. This was it — this was the project that could end all projects for me. I could put anything I wanted into the Panoply box, and it would fit and make sense. 

I sent out an email and left the computer for the day, planning to turn my phone on DND because of the anticipated swell of payment notifications. 

Except they never came. 

On that first day of the launch, I sent an email to thousands of former subscribers, people who had been paying me money for content about a month earlier. Grand sales total? Two. I sold two subscriptions. 

I scrambled. The messaging was all wrong. It wasn’t clear what people were buying, and more importantly, it wasn’t clear why it was valuable. I fell victim to the same fate as many product builders who build passion projects: I was unable to see it as my customers saw it. 

I had a roundtable with several friends, re-worked the value proposition, re-wrote my about me page, and changed the pricing. 

Slowly, but surely sales grew. Between April 15 and September 2020, Panoply grew to about 100 members. Not bad, but still a far cry from Conversion Gold. 

I produced some of my favorite things while working on Panoply. I love that spaced repetition course, and I love the presentation I gave at a virtual conference: How to Stop Being a Dumb Marketer. 

Anyway, it was time for a pivot. Tuning the messaging on Panoply to point more towards marketing advice was what helped grow the subscriber base. I figured I’d double down and figure out a way to finagle some consulting, as well. 

Part 3: Growth Library 

I’ve been writing about marketing online for a long time. I’ve seen firsthand how content can be your best sales asset for consulting gigs. 

I came up with a model that was compelling to me. I’d build out a company called Growth Library, which would be a hybrid, content-first agency. 

I’d produce premium marketing content (for subscribers), and then each piece would include a “need help implementing this advice?” CTA, which would allow people to book a call with me. 

The idea was that I would publish a piece of strategic marketing content, and that would drum up a handful of consulting calls each month from people wanting help implementing the ideas. All of my clients would become subscribers, and all of my subscribers would eventually become clients. 

The linchpin was a content type I called Marketing Patterns. 

I’m a pretty organized person, and I love doing research, so the way I do marketing is by building out specs. I dig in, take notes, and then build out a document that holds the entirety of the insight, strategy, and analysis for the program. 

Marketing Patterns are spec documents but without a specific product. They’re written to be more general and applicable to anyone with a little bit of thinking. As the landing page says, they’re DIY templates for growth. 

This was the killer content type. The idea was that these would be useful for marketers to keep up to date and generate campaign ideas and hopefully expose them to new concepts, which they’d pay for a strategy call or two to help get going. 

To make a long story short, it worked. I got consulting calls, and people paid to get access to the library of marketing patterns. 

But it didn’t feel right. My site traffic was very low, and I had no real discovery flywheels at all. All of the good stuff was behind a paywall, and due to other commitments, I didn’t have enough time to make great free content. I felt like I was running uphill through sand, and I began to feel like I wasn’t delivering enough value to my paid subscribers. 

Slowly, over the course of a few months, that peculiar dread came back. Every paid newsletter creator that I’ve met has mentioned it. It’s the low-level anxiety of selling your future time and having to deliver value in perpetuity, never knowing if you’re doing enough. 

What I wanted, at the core of it all, was an audience. Conversion Gold felt like an audience, and it was cool that it was private because it kept the gawkers out. But was that only because it was premium, or was it the type of subscriber it attracted? 

I hope to change one last time and create the kind of content that attracts a high-quality audience and get them on my newsletter to engage with my ideas. That’s the most valuable thing for me — the connections, opportunities, and friends you make from publishing really good stuff online that resonates with people. 

Part 4: The Present 

I decided to paint myself into a corner. I’m now living on my personal domain, which has everything I’ve made, 100% free. There’s nowhere to go from here. Every benefit I sought with the above moves is still possible here and probably makes a lot more sense. 

In addition, by making all of my content free for everyone, I can leverage significantly more channels for discovery. I’m counting on ramping up search and social as major channels over the next year. I plan to grow and measure progress based on engaged email subscribers. If you’ve read this far, I’d love to send you stuff I write in the future (in exchange for your email address, of course). 

You can read the full collection of Marketing Patterns, take the Spaced Repetition Course, or read through all of the issues from Conversion Gold. 

I hope that you will. That’s the entire point of this thing, to help my content find a larger audience than would be possible if it were all behind a paywall. 

To sum it all up… my experience has taught me two things: 

1. Be careful about selling your future today. 
2. It’s probably better to monetize an audience, not a piece of content. I had it backward. If you build it, they will come. And then you can sell things to them  

I started doing some research to figure out a methodical way to increase grip strength. Quickly, I stumbled across medical literature that said grip strength was an excellent biomarker for overall health. In some cases, it’s being correlated with overall (and disease-specific) mortality. 

I spent a couple of weeks diving into studies and medical literature, and below are the notes that I took (edited slightly for narrative structure). 

Grip Strength as a Biomarker

A biomarker is something that can be used to represent the physiological state of an organism. 

Your doctor checks your knee reflexes with a reflex hammer just below the patella. This patellar reflex test can be used as a biomarker for nervous system health. 

In this same way, doctors and researchers use grip strength as a biomarker for overall health, particularly in malnutrition cases and the elderly. 

Research suggests grip strength is valuable as a biomarker because it is: 

“…largely consistent as an explanator of concurrent overall strength, upper limb function, bone mineral density, fractures, falls, malnutrition, cognitive impairment, depression, sleep problems, diabetes, multimorbidity, and quality of life.”

Grip strength is tested using a dynamometer. Below is a list of grip strength benchmarks (also called norms) grouped by gender and age. 

This data comes from research done at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. 

Female Grip Strength Norms (in lbs)

• Ages 20-24: Right 55.9-84.9; Left 47.9-74.1
• Ages 25-29: Right 60.6-88.4; Left 51.3-75.7
• Ages 30-34: Right 59.5-97.9; Left 50.3-85.7
• Ages 35-39: Right 63.3-84.9; Left 54.6-78
• Ages 40-44: Right 56.9-83.9; Left 48.5-76.1
• Ages 45-49: Right 47.1-77.3; Left 43.3-68.7
• Ages 50-54: Right 53.9-77.4; Left 46.6-68
• Ages 55-59: Right 44.8-69.8; Left 35.4-59.2
• Ages 60-64: Right 45-65.2; Left 35.6-55.8
• Ages 65-69: Right 39.9-59.3; Left 32.8-49.2
• Ages 70-74: Right 37.9-61.3; Left 31.3-51.7
• Ages 75+: Right 31.6-53.6; Left 28.7-46.5

Male Grip Strength Norms (in lbs)

• Ages 20-24: Right 100.4-141.6; Left 82.7-126.3
• Ages 25-29: Right 97.8-143.8; Left 94.3-126.7
• Ages 30-34: Right 99.4-144.2; Left 88.7-131.7
• Ages 35-39: Right 95.7-143.7; Left 91.2-134.6
• Ages 40-44: Right 96.1-137.5; Left 94.1-131.5
• Ages 45-49: Right 86.9-132.9; Left 78-123.6
• Ages 50-54: Right 95.5-131.7; Left 84.9-118.9
• Ages 55-59: Right 74.4-127.8; Left 59.8-106.6
• Ages 60-64: Right 69.3-110.1; Left 56.5-97.1
• Ages 65-69: Right 70.5-111.7; Left 57-96.9
• Ages 70-74: Right 53.8-96.8; Left 46.7-82.9
• Ages 75+: Right 44.7-86.7; Left 38-72

As you can see, grip strength typically peaks between ages 30-34 and degrades with age. 

Grip Strength as a way to quantify biological age 

Further, studies suggest that grip strength could be an accurate quantifier of biological age. 

Our age in years is a measure of chronological age, but everyone ages biologically at a different rate. Researchers can use a series of biomarkers to establish a biological age, which seeks to quantify our overall health on a timeline of functional capacity and physiological maturity. 

Since grip strength is positively correlated with functional capacity and physiological health (and many factors correlated with chronological age), it can be used to evaluate biological age. 

Does Training Grip Strength Increase Overall Health? 

It’s not clear to me that training your grip strength can help improve overall health or if it’s just a way to optimize the biomarker. 

I ran multiple queries on pubmed to find data that suggests increasing your grip strength through training improves the same metrics that it can help measure but could not turn anything up. 

Even if grip can only be used as a biomarker, there are still numerous reasons to improve your grip strength. 

Here are a few that are relevant to me: 

Reasons to Improve Grip Strength

• Weight Lifting – You can’t lift what you can’t hold. 
• Firearms/Shooting – Increased grip strength can help with accuracy. 
• Rock Climbing – Better grip means better climbing and less falling. 

General notes on training grip strength 

Training grip fatigues the central nervous system (CNS) very quickly, so it’s quite unlike training larger muscle groups. The internet is filled with anecdotal evidence of people increasing grip strength immediately after squats and other large muscle group training or having optimal times of the day that coincide with their circadian rhythms. These anecdotes draw an interesting line to more research on CNS states. 

The concept of rate coding underscores the role that the CNS has to play with grip training. 

From a widely cited study, Rate Coding and the Control of Muscle Force:

The force exerted by a muscle during a voluntary contraction depends on the number of motor units recruited for the action and the rates at which they discharge action potentials (rate coding). 

Over most of the operating range of a muscle, the nervous system controls muscle force by varying both motor unit recruitment and rate coding. Except at relatively low forces, however, the control of muscle force depends primarily on rate coding, especially during fast contractions.

Additionally, another concept: post-activation potentiation (PAP), supports the idea of beginning with a warmup set before beginning a work set. 

“PAP is a phenomenon by which the force exerted by a muscle is increased due to its previous contraction.”

How to increase grip strength with spring grippers 

Spring grippers, such as Captains of Crush, are small hand-held devices that allow you to increase your grip strength. 

Some variants are adjustable, but most are static in terms of poundage (difficulty). 

Most people should start with the Trainer and Sport. The most typical training modality is to use a warmup gripper and then use a work gripper that is difficult for you to close. 

Here’s an example training session using the sport and trainer CoC grippers: 

Set #1: Sport Gripper. 10 reps in each hand. 

Set #2: Trainer Gripper. 5 reps in each hand. 

Set #3: Trainer Gripper. 3 reps in each hand (using other hand to help if you’re unable to close single-handedly).

How to increase grip strength with a towel 

Many athletes use a simple bath towel to train and increase grip strength. Drape it over something that can handle your weight and grab it and hang. 

Popular exercises include towel pull-ups, towel dips, and towel rows. One advantage of using towels for these exercises is that you’re training your grip in addition to other muscle groups.

Here’s a video that shows how to use a regular doorway pull-up bar and a towel. 

How to increase grip strength with rice 

It’s popular within baseball and rock climbing circles to use buckets (or bags) of rice to train grip and forearm strength.

The idea is that resistance helps develop your forearms’ extensors, which are often weak compared to the flexors. 

Essentially you fill a bucket, at least as deep as your mid-forearms, with dry rice. 

Here’s a video on the process. 

It’s an analysis of the streetwear space, which admittedly isn’t relevant to everyone. Still, I think it has profound utility for understanding how exclusivity and demand act as forces on consumer perception. 

The report is broken up into a few parts: 

• 001 Defining Streetwear
• 002 Measuring Streetwear
• 003 How Streetwear Talks
• 004 How Streetwear Sells

Interviews and summaries are interspersed between as connective tissue and to recap and underscore the primary findings. 

The research methods used to construct the report were consumer (40,960 respondents) and industry (763 respondents) surveys. 

Notes on demography: 

• Consumers
  • 80.7% male 
  • 59% were from Asia (largest cohort: Korean)
  • 33.9% age 16-20, 28.9% 21-25
• Industry 
  • 36% were “Original SW brand”, 34.73% were “Adopted streetwear”
  • Largest cohort: high street fashion 

Notes

Streetwear is defined as fashionable casual clothes. T-shirts, hoodies, sneakers. It can be seen as a response to broader fashion trends and has roots in many countercultural movements: skate, surf, and hip-hop being primary. 

Streetwear is not a trend within fashion but a fashion component of a larger cultural idea. 

Streetwear subverted the luxury fashion model, which is primarily reliant on exclusivity and cultural status, derived from high price points. In streetwear, exclusivity comes from “know-how” — as many consumers aren’t aware of popular streetwear brands or stores. 

Additionally, streetwear opened up a demographic of young men who traditionally weren’t “allowed” culturally to engage with fashion. 

Pioneers of the movement include Supreme and STÜSSY, and many brands sprang up on the coasts. In Japan, Nigo and Hiroshi Fujiwara helped define the street style in the 1980s. “Like other major cultural movements, streetwear quickly rose simultaneously in major cities and regions throughout the globe.”

Streetwear brands operate through “almost cult-like” relationships with their consumers. This is in stark contrast (a real disruption) of the model for the broader fashion industry — which has largely struggled with direct-to-consumer sales. 

The most popular products can only be purchased through a “drops” model, which leverages scarcity and limited production to create high demand. As a result, products often sell out very quickly, and a booming secondhand market has developed. 

The resell market is integral to how streetwear works, as it serves as a metric for a brand’s success. 

Most fashion brands traditionally released collections all at once, but streetwear relies on “piecing out” products in a steady stream of consistent releases. 

Streetwear brands operate with a scarcity driven model: leverage drops and keep supply strictly below demand, which produces high sell-through, encourages the secondary market, and creates more initial demand for new drops. 

For example, Sneakers are high demand items that are timeless and season-less, which is again in direct contrast to the larger seasonal and cyclical fashion industry. 

“The ultimate driving force behind streetwear is its spirit.” Its consumers do not have unlimited money, but they have a desire for exclusivity and authenticity. 

The typical streetwear consumer is young, vocal on social media, and discerning. They can spot inauthentic attempts to tap into their culture and are very vocal about sharing the opinions. This is another place where streetwear has upended the traditional fashion model, which operates on a top-down gatekeeper orientation. In streetwear, consumers set the trends. 

There are four key segments of the streetwear industry: 

1. Original streetwear brands with accessible price points, comfortable clothing, and authenticity (Supreme, BAPE, Stussy)
2. Sportswear brands (Nike), primarily selling sneakers to the market
3. Adopted streetwear brands who have incorporated streetwear trends and styles into their line
4. Luxury streetwear brands (Off-White)

Relatively low retail prices allow a wide range of consumers to buy the products, and the high demand feeds into the resale market. You’re lucky to score a drop for retail, and you always have the opportunity to pay significantly more for an item if you want it. 

To illustrate the resell market impact: Most Supreme shirts retail for $38-48, but the Supreme box logo crewnecks (originally priced at $158) resell for a minimum of $500. 

Insights: 

• 1/2 of consumers reported they are willing to wait in line for a product release 
• 2/3 of industry respondents reported drops are essential to their company strategy 
• Primary reasons consumers reported liking streetwear: cool, comfortable clothing, exclusivity, community, and status symbol. 
• 70% of consumers reported income of $40,000 or less 
• $100-$300 is the sweet spot for pricing items
• 62% reported sneakers as the most likely purchase (ahead of tops and accessories) 
• 2/3 of consumers reported brand activism as being very important 
• Consumers consider musicians the most credible figures in the industry 
• Almost half of the industry respondents said their customers average monthly spend was $100-$500 (in line with what consumers reported)
• 45% of consumers reported purchasing streetwear items once per month 
• Industry respondents reported hoodies, t-shirts, and footwear to be best selling products 
• 96% of consumers cited Instagram as the most important channel (followed by 42% Youtube, 16% forums) 

It’s the best email service I’ve found, and it’s mobile apps are great, but it lacks a first-party desktop app. 

While you can use Fastmail with any modern email client (IMAP is well supported), I didn’t like the privacy policies of many of them, which store your email content on remote servers indefinitely (in some cases, even following account purge). 

Others, like Apple Mail.app, have their quirks, and lack essential features like snooze. 

Many Fastmail users use webmail to overcome this, which is a good solution but not great for my workflow. I’d love to have the web interface but in a desktop app. 

Finally, that’s do-able. 

FMail is a free Mac desktop app for the Fastmail email service by French developer Arie van Boxel. 

FMail provides a variety of must-have desktop features such as: 

• Badges and notifications 
• Full Fastmail settings 
• Full Fastmail interface 
• Able to be set as a default email client on macOS

It’s not just a web wrapper but a fully functional app, written in Swift. 

I’ve been using it now for several months, and it’s nearly flawless. I’ve recommended it to several others, and it’s worked well for them, too. Give it a try!

You can download it here.