Everything I share — writing, short curated lists, and links. You can also find me on Threads.
I'm still getting my routine back on track (and deep in our puppy search), so doing something a little different today. Riding that new year energy, I took some time to re-evaluate my tools and apps so I can dial in my device use a little more. In that spirit, here are the apps on my home screens (I keep two pages) for 2024.
We know what quality means to us! We *feel* it. We know why high quality things cost more and we know how it influences our choices. In the physical world, it’s the difference between a $15.00 price tag and a $150 one.
On putting dreams on ice, career transitions, and embracing the current chapter of life.
Holiday gifting, game nights in Colorado, and a sampler I definitely don't need but am having trouble resisting.
i went mostly offline and then all this happened
November was quite the month. To borrow a phrase from one of our closest friends and mentors, 'life is really life-y right now.'
This one's all over the place — dog longevity research (RIP Bender), the best mug cleaner on earth, and some very comforting books.
On Sunday night at 8:55pm, our family lost our best friend. Our protector. Our adventure buddy. Our toddler-cleaner-upper. Our squirrel chaser.
A November grab bag. Music, internet archaeology, optical illusions, and way too much candy.
Every founder tells themselves a story about why they’re heading to the gold rush, but the executive coach I would eventually hire says there are really only two. Do you want to be rich, generating wealth in service of some further end? Or do you want to be king, with money a mere byproduct of trying to make the world the way you feel it should be?
The inaugural round of recommendations. A little bit of everything from Q3 2023.
The business consultant William Bridges argued that every transition involves a period of loss, then a period in the neutral zone, and then a period of rebirth. The loss that comes with retirement can be brutal. Some highly successful people mourn the life that gave them meaning and made them the center of the room. People in the neutral zone don’t yet know who the new version of themselves will be. They report feeling hollow, disoriented, empty.
Explain ideas in simple terms, strongly and clearly, so that they can be rebutted, remixed, reworked — or built upon.
You’ll have options! So many options that, unless you have strongly held preferences about spatula brands — unlikely, given that you just typed “spatula” into Amazon — you’re going to need some guidance. BANKKY or KLAQQED? Should you give IOCBYHZ a look or just pay extra for the Oxo?
The shopping mall is an experience.
Showing every SKU, of course, is exactly the Amazon approach - 'the everything store', and it works well for some categories, and especially when you know exactly what you want. But knowing what you want is not necessarily the starting point - that's what needs to happen along the funnel. Amazon's relative weakness at curation, discovery and recommendation (I've seen data suggesting the recommendation platform is only 1/4 of its books sales) is, I think, a big reason why, after 25 years of ruthless and relentless execution, it's still only got to 25% of the print books market in the UK and USA. A bookshop (or any shop) is, yes, the end-point to a logistics system, but a good bookshop is primarily a discovery platform. That is, it's more about the tables than the shelves. And the tables are lists, not inventory.
Amazon, very obviously, is Google for products. It's good at giving you the best-seller you've heard of or the water filter for your fridge (the long tail). It's not so good at the things in the middle. Amazon is great at selling you what's on the table in the front of the bookshop, and at selling one copy a year of a million or so obscure titles, but it's not very good at showing you what's on the shelves at the back of the bookshop. It's not so good at selling the mid-list - things that you didn't know existed, or didn't know you wanted, before you saw them. It does have a recommendation product, but it's not clear how well it works, and indeed an interesting question for Amazon is how far it can grow before running into categories for which its commodity merchandising model doesn't work so well. (Even in print books, Amazon's market share only reached a quarter of the market after 20 years of ruthless execution).
Amazon is getting worse, but you probably already knew that, because you probably shop at Amazon. The online retail behemoth’s search results are full of ads and sponsored results that can push actually relevant, well-reviewed options far down the page. The proportion of its inventory that comes from brands with names like Fkprorjv and BIDLOTCUE seems to be constantly expanding. Many simple queries yield results that appear to be the exact same product over and over again—sometimes with the exact same photos—but all with different names, sellers, prices, ratings, and customer reviews. If you squint, you can distinguish between some of the products, which feels like playing a decidedly less whimsical version of “spot the difference” picture games.
Reflecting on his path at Pinterest, Sciarra shared some advice for founders and go-getters alike: “In the early stages of a product or a company, no one really knows what’s going to work,” Sciarra said via email. “Don’t take ‘no’s’—even ‘no’s’ from really smart, boldfaced names—too seriously.”
*Wirecutter* helped popularize a genre of lucrative recommendation content—where the site gets a cut of every purchase you make after you click on “affiliate” links to Amazon or other partner sites—and spawned a series of copycats. If you’ve ever searched online for the “best” *anything*, there’s a good chance that *Wirecutter*’s DNA was in almost every single article you found.
Here's a simple, actionable framework to get you started:
A multipreneur is someone who creates multiple products per year, with the aim of creating a company that creates companies.
With every decade children have become less free to play, roam, and explore alone or with other children away from adults, less free to occupy public spaces without an adult guard, and less free to have a part-time job where they can demonstrate their capacity for responsible self-control. Among the causes of this change are a large increase in societal fears that children are in danger if not constantly guarded, a large increase in the time that children must spend in school and at schoolwork at home, and a large increase in the societal view that children’s time is best spent in adult-directed school-like activities, such as formal sports and lessons, even when not in school.
millions of men lack access to that kind of power and success — and, downstream, cut loose from a stable identity as patriarchs deserving of respect, they feel demoralized and adrift. The data show it, but so does the general mood: Men find themselves lonely, depressed, anxious and directionless.
The pendulum had swung so far in the opposite direction that my drive had evaporated in thin air. This only led to more self-loathing—I began to view myself as soft, lazy, and a waste of potential. Underneath these subconscious attacks was shame and existential dread. What if I’m going to be insignificant and just fade out?
• Stay firm and unwavering, like you are being deposed and cannot change a single word of your answer every time it’s asked.
When we’re actually engaged in the flow of fascinating work, we don’t think in these terms. The task at hand fills our mind. The task itself is what keeps us up all night, not some extracted story of purpose.
David Lee Roth, the band’s lead singer in those early years, published an autobiography in 1997, titled *Crazy from the Heat,* in which he claimed that, *actually*, the bowl of curated candy had an entirely functional purpose: it was a quick way to see if the venue had actually read the whole contract, line by line.
“Edge City”, a term a friend and I use to talk about living on the edge of what’s normal, surrounded by others who are into weird, edgy stuff.
Aim a laser pointer at the moon, then move your hand the tiniest bit, and it’ll move a thousand miles at the other end. The tiniest misunderstanding long ago, amplified through time, leads to piles of misunderstandings in the present.
The story of Babel is the best metaphor I have found for what happened to America in the 2010s, and for the fractured country we now inhabit. Something went terribly wrong, very suddenly. We are disoriented, unable to speak the same language or recognize the same truth. We are cut off from one another and from the past.
To build a creative environment, incentivize long-term thinking and experimentation. Making room for failure opens the door to much greater success.
The trusted advisor, with our permission, can simply watch and analyze the “digital exhaust” from our activities to develop deep insight into who we are and what is important to us.
Alda said in his interview: “If I have a difficult thing to understand, if there’s something I think is not going to be that easy to get, I try to say it in three different ways. I think if you come in from different angles you have a better chance of getting a three-dimensional view of this difficult idea.”
In the future, anything that’s used as a reference should become a chat bot. Wirecutter, Eater, and more should all be accessible this way so that when I have a product I want to buy, or I’m in need of a restaurant to visit I don’t have to scroll through a list of articles with lots of options. Instead, I can just ask, “What’s a good place to eat in Fort Greene tonight?” and get a response that’s based on the latest Eater reviews in my neighborhood.
There aren't many hard-and-fast rules of time management that apply to everyone, always, regardless of situation or personality (which is why I tend to emphasise general principles instead). But I think there might be one: you almost certainly can't consistently do the kind of work that demands serious mental focus for more than about three or four hours a day.
In my book, big things are only worth committing to if the answer to the question “would you do this thing even if no one was watching?” is an immediate and unequivocal yes.
I’ve watched far too many friends flounder once they attain freedom for me not to mypothesize (Molly hypothesis) that this is an American culture problem writ large. After all, our Declaration of Independence says life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness — but it gives basically no instructions beyond that. Any good editor would have told the founding fathers to go back and add more detail, for the love of god.
The point relevant to innovation overall is that the path that leads to discoveries, the ones that are most interesting to us, often are wildly circuitous and completely unpredictable.
that IS the question: whether to float with the tide, or to swim for a goal. It is a choice we must all make consciously or unconsciously at one time in our lives. So few people understand this! Think of any decision you’ve ever made which had a bearing on your future: I may be wrong, but I don’t see how it could have been anything but a choice however indirect— between the two things I’ve mentioned: the floating or the swimming.
I would add that if you don’t regularly feel utterly confused, if you don’t occasionally feel like you’re treading just above water, if you don’t ever feel misunderstood, then you probably aren’t living *in* life — you’re just observing it.
This means not waiting to find your story arc, but rather recognizing that there are stories that pop up which you can opt into if you recognize them and have the right skills and virtues. It is about being prepared for the call to adventure, and cultivating the ability to recognize it, rather than believing we can direct our lives from the perspective of some knowable, ultimate mission.
Roam the edge of practices, where they permeate several trends and communities, creating gateways between worlds of ideas; push the boundaries of knowledge by connecting seemingly unrelated ideas; direct your curiosity towards questions that haven’t even been formulated yet.
The self-centered voice of the ego has to be quieted before a person is capable of freely giving and receiving love.
Writing produces clarity of thought, because half-processed thoughts cannot create coherent writing. Writing out your fears turns possible "what ifs" into realistic outcomes.
You can choose to focus on your career. At that level, candidly, it will require support from your significant other, understanding from your family, and may affect your health. You may also need to make so much money that you can afford to support aspects of your domestic life via child care, personal trainers, elderly care, and other support. Do this on purpose, because you are in a zero-sum competition with people who are willfully sacrificing and find great joy in having a singular focus.
The best predictor of success for a startup is if people:
*Polyptoton*
So I’m not going to spend what’s left of my life hanging round waiting for it. I’m going to settle for small, random stabs of *extreme interestingness –* moments of intense awareness of the things I’m about to lose, and of gladness that they exist.
The viability of AI-first products as stand-alone companies will rely on data moats, privacy preferences for consumers and enterprises, developer ecosystems, and GTM advantages.