Espresso Shots 2-15-26

It's that time again for my weekly update, which includes a short collection of noteworthy finds, posts that inspire, as well as a few reflections from the past week or two. I'll aim to land these in your inbox by the weekend, in time to pair with your morning coffee (or your preferred cup of inspiration).

The Latest Drippings ☕️

• My Latest Nerdy Obsession. Peter McKinnon (of Pete's Pirate Life fame) posted a fun video yesterday about hiding mini messages in a bottle around town. For no reason, other than just having some fun. His creativity is always inspiring (with over 6m subscribers on his YouTube channel) and his photography is unmistakable. I am sharing one of the creators who always reminds me to try and reinvent myself; be warned, though - he always costs me money.
• Creating Space. Say no to protect the yes is one of the most powerful lessons that I've learned. In this post, the same message is clear: 'We don't have unlimited time or energy, but we can better spend the limited time that we have. That's why: Focus.'
• Craig Mod on the Creative Power of Walking. Another inspiration for me is Craig Mod and his powerful walks and photography through Japan. I was recently reminded of his insight by another article, No More Teleporting, which lamented the time the author was spending on mindless phone things: teleporting. 'When I’m not talking, just walking (which is most of the time), I try to cultivate the most bored state of mind imaginable. A total void of stimulation beyond the immediate environment. My rules: No news, no social media, no podcasts, no music. No teleporting, you could say. The phone, the great teleportation device, the great murderer of boredom.'
• Why Your Best Ideas Come After Your Worst. A really interesting neuroscience read about 'why novel ideas tend to emerge when you persist beyond obvious options, take breaks to reset thinking, and work within meaningful constraints that focus the search for solutions.'
• Can You Just Do Things?. Cate Hall, author of the upcoming book You Can Do Things, had a really interesting interview in which she discusses agency and why that skill is more important than genius or grit. 'I define agency as the capacity to both see and act on all of the degrees of freedom that life offers. So it has two components: One is noticing degrees of freedom, the other is taking action on the basis of them.' This book will be an interesting read on how to help turn constraints into choices, failure into fuel, and setbacks into opportunities.
• It's Fine If I Suck Sometimes. 'One of the helpful things I’ve learned is that while you do need to change and grow, you still need to be yourself.' I really liked this post - so often we get buried in all the noise on continuous improvement, and it was really refreshing to have this take. He also refers to a magazine article on Sara Hussain for Vogue India: In 2026, I'm No Longer Interested in 'Working on Myself', aka the exhausting 'hyper-policing [of] our thoughts and language until having a personality feels like a risk assessment exercise'. Some great stuff in here, especially with this warning: 'Awareness is progress. My awareness, however, has tipped into surveillance.'
• Publish Even If You Think It's Not Perfect. 'Many writers think they need to make a specific piece perfect before they can publish it. I do agree that checking your logic and removing typos makes any piece much easier to read. However, these writers trip themselves up on the perfection part. If a writer gets stuck on the perfection part, they stop themselves before they can publish. Then we, the potential readers, never get to read what that writer wanted to share.' Good advice in here, but the part that really stuck out for me was the argument that publishing actually completes 'the stress cycle.'
• Love Is a Mixtape. Ah, an ode to the mixtape and some thoughts on what makes the -best- ones. 'A good tape, puts you right back in the original time and place when you first heard the songs.'
• The Philosopher of Games. What makes a game fun? 'Designing for fun is so delicate. If you just tweak a few little bits in the incentive structure or tweak a few little rules, the fun will fall out of things. People think fun is mysterious — it’s not for game designers. There are micro-issues of exactly how you pace the timing and exactly how you pace the rules that seem to emerge. A lot of people are most impressed by the game designs that are elaborate and complicated, but what a lot of game designers are most impressed by is a five-rule party game that’s fun, because that's the hardest thing to build.'
• The Death of an Argument. Besides his website having an amazing look and feel, I enjoyed this post around 'nuanced discussions' (ie, arguments), and the importance of how 'specificity is essential for meaningful debate.' 'The trouble with analogies is that it can be spun both ways and also completely out of shape. It assumes that both sides approach the argument in good faith, that both sides respond similarly to changing circumstances, and that both sides remain consistent in their beliefs and expectations without moving the goal posts.'
• Your Brain Does Not Process Information and It Is Not a Computer. 'Here is what we are not born with: information, data, rules, software, knowledge, lexicons, representations, algorithms, programs, models, memories, images, processors, subroutines, encoders, decoders, symbols, or buffers – design elements that allow digital computers to behave somewhat intelligently. Not only are we not born with such things, we also don’t develop them – ever.' Wait, what? There's a lot to unpack in this post, but there are some really fascinating points in here that I hadn't really considered. 'Because neither memory banks nor representations of stimuli exist in the brain, and because all that is required for us to function in the world is for the brain to change in an orderly way as a result of our experiences, there is no reason to believe that any two of us are changed the same way by the same experience.' But, the most important concept to remember: 'We are organisms, not computers.'
• Conveniencing Ourselves to Irrelevance. Om taps into some important questions we should be asking ourselves as a society. 'The meta point is that now that we are indeed a button-pushing society, how long before this lack of friction starts to erode what could be described as human capacity? We will forget what it is like to do something ourselves.' Or, as many have asked previously, are we just amusing ourselves to death? (Roger Waters - 'And then, the alien anthropologists admitted they were still perplexed. But on eliminating every other reason for our sad demise they logged the only explanation left - this species has amused itself to death')?
• TikTok Is Tracking You, Even if You Don't Use the App.. Slimy, and not cool.
• The Small Web Is Beautiful. If you're not already familiar with 'the small web', you're missing a corner of the Internet that's a ton of fun and a source for great content. For the unaware, the 'big web' is the Internet you rely on every day, owned by mega-corporations. The Small Web is the opposite of the Big Web. If you want to discover some great parts of the web that go largely unnoticed, check out Kagi's webpage, which continuously features a new corner of discovery.
• The Unbearable Loudness of Chewing. 'Why do some people find certain sounds intolerable? And why has it taken so long for scientists to get even a preliminary answer?' Just leaving this one here for future reference.

Amor Fati ✌🏻