At work, if your job is to move a bunch of heavy things from one side of the room to another, you should use whatever assistive tech you have on hand: a wagon, a forklift… even an AI-powered robot. But at the gym, it makes no sense for that robot to lift weights for you. The point of weightlifting isn’t to move heavy things across the room; it’s to actually lift those heavy things. ...
Just have notebooks lying around, or on your person. Write grocery lists, doodles, notes on meetings, to-do lists, or stray ideas. Journal. Copy out good lines from books. Anything that has your mental focus will have a more enduring presence in your brain if you write it down. — Writing by Hand is Good for your Brain - Here’s how to do it
So, I use this as an excuse to buy beautiful Moleskine, Leuchtturm, and MUJI notebooks and coloured pens, and I stash them in my gym bag. Each day before class, I open the app and copy the workout into my notebook. I do any necessary calculations, which is the basis of weightlifting training. I lift based on percentages of a “1 rep max” (1RM), which has been established prior, and often these percentages increase over the course of a training session. ...
Every post I publish represents at least two things I’ve learned: the thing that prompted me to write the post, and the thing I learned in the course of writing it. If I don’t learn anything new while I’m writing, it’s not interesting enough to publish. […] I think the core reason this works is that every single one of my blog posts argues a point. I never publish a post that just gives some scattered thoughts on a topic, or a post that only says “yes, I agree with this other article”. If I write a draft that nobody sensible could disagree with, I scrap the draft. Making sure that everything I write is at least minimally controversial is a forcing function: it forces me to think about what the most interesting part of my position is, and it forces me to do enough research to defend it against the obvious criticisms. ...
This was a helpful reminder to focus on the basics first. For the median well-off Silicon Valley person spending money on longevity, two free interventions dominate the entire effect of everything they buy by a wide and somewhat embarrassing margin: Get enough sleep, and… Don’t be lonely. Everything downstream of those two things is, at best, rounding error, and at worst, a way to feel like you’re doing something so you don’t have to do the hard things. ...
Among other things, Fong argues that Costco’s limited selected raises its average product quality. This is similar to to Joan Westenberg’s argument as well. In other words, winnowing selection is a service, not a limitation—especially with Costco’s product catalog. Costco is not known for having the cheapest goods, but it is known for having the cheapest price on its goods, and that is because its buying team has closer relationships with suppliers than any other big retailer. Such scrutiny and communication point away from low-road suppliers. This is a structural effect of Costco’s conscious choice to offer a low SKU count: fewer products to investigate means more time to investigate each product, and a natural gravitation away from the bargain basement. That its member-customers have come to expect a certain quality of everything in their stores reinforces this dynamic. ...
Here’s the thing no one acknowledges about the entrepreneurship narrative: it’s written by survivors. The people who write the books, give the TED talks, and post the LinkedIn manifestos about “betting on yourself” are, by definition, the ones for whom the bet paid off. You don’t hear much from the ones who went back to traditional employment after three years of grinding, a depleted savings account, and a marriage that got stress-tested past its limits. ...
Financial options live in highly liquid markets. You can hold an option on a barrel of oil without knowing the first thing about drilling, and extract value purely through arbitrage. Human value is illiquid and depends on compounding. You can’t buy mastery of a hard skill, a deep friendship, a sense of community, or a real reputation on any spot market. None of it exists in a liquid state. These assets accrue only through the sustained, irreversible investment of time and attention. ...
When we record every casual encounter, we’re optimizing for “Information Retrieval” at the expense of “Relationship Formation,” treating our friends // colleagues // loved ones as data sourced to be mined, rather than co-conspirators in the brilliantly messy and intentionally unquantifiable business of being alive. — I’m Begging You to Leave Your AI Note-taker at Home
[…] LLM-generated prose undermines a social contract of sorts: absent LLMs, it is presumed that of the reader and the writer, it is the writer that has undertaken the greater intellectual exertion. (That is, it is more work to write than to read!) For the reader, this is important: should they struggle with an idea, they can reasonably assume that the writer themselves understands it—and it is the least a reader can do to labor to make sense of it. ...