Espresso Shots 6-21-26

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 ☕️

• Prepare for the Ultimate Gaslighting. Remember 2020? The great reset of everything. Work from home was the future: a promise of more time for you, your family, and your interests. In May of 2020, I wrote, 'the longer it goes on being home, the clearer it’s becoming that lots of people don’t want things to go back to the way they were before. I am in way more control in creating a life that I want to live, and not being forced to live the life that is my current reality.' When I originally read this article, it was still unclear what would happen next. 'The treadmill you’ve been on for decades just stopped. Bam! And that feeling you have right now is the same as if you’d been thrown off your Peloton bike and onto the ground: What just happened?! ... The crisis has given us a once-in-a-lifetime chance to see ourselves and our country in the plainest way. At no other time, ever in our lives, have we gotten the opportunity to see what would happen if the world simply stopped. Here it is.' And came with a stark warning: 'We are about to be gaslit in a truly unprecedented way. It will be a one-two punch from big business and the White House. Both are about to band together to knock us unconscious again. It will be funded like no other operation in our lifetimes. It will be fast. It will be furious. And it will be overwhelming.' Here we are in 2026. Take a minute and think about what you did with that opportunity. Did we waste it? 'I implore you: take a deep breath, ignore the deafening noise, and think deeply about what you want to put back into your life.'
• On Being Good at Life. 'The only thing I would have to do to make this a reality is to be content, appreciative, kind, generous, and satisfied. These are all choices within my control and have little to do with external circumstances and the actions of others. They are not dependent on the economy, politics, climate change, or peace. They are only dependent on my ability to achieve a level of contentment with my reality. I believe this is the key to happiness. Contentment and acceptance. I believe happiness is a choice, not a result.' A wonderful think-piece from David Todd McCarty on how to 'be good at life'.
• The Tombstone Exercise. Another morbid math entry known as The Tombstone Exercise. 'The exercise involves writing your epitaph: the ideal epitaph represents your values, encapsulating the kind of person you want to be and the life you’d like to have lived, looking back from your deathbed. And, the feared epitaph is an epitaph written as if you died today, summarizing what your life and behavior has been about. This exercise is most powerful when you engage with the fact that you will die someday, and genuinely ask yourself how you might want others to remember you and what you were about.' As I approach Life 3.0, I've been thinking a lot about 'ghost decisions', those invisible constraints, the accumulated inheritance of them, and what, in reality, doesn't matter. Often I refer to these as load-bearing walls, but more on that in an upcoming post. I liked this phrase: zoom out to zoom in. Again, systems over goals. (Noticing a pattern?)
• Death by 1,000 Compromises: How to Tap Into Founder Mode. 'Know your goal or suffer death by 1,000 compromises.' - a great quote from Mark Pincus that leads off this post, which is the first chapter from his new book, Life at the Speed of Play. In it, he describes a 'Book of Life' practice that he's been keeping for the last 30 years. Described as 'a compass that helps you come back to your North Star', he only writes in this journal once a year over the Jewish High Holidays, and returns a year later to remember 'where he was, how he felt, and what he hoped for.' He considers what he writes a partnership with your future self, where he has a conversation with himself across time. As I've had my own personal obsession with time, the choices we have made, and what to do with the time left, this one is going into the commonplace journal as a practice I need also to undertake.
• How to End Your Workday: The Hemingway Principle. 'Ernest Hemingway had a rule for ending his writing days: he stopped while he still knew exactly what would come next; sometimes, reportedly, in the middle of a sentence. I stole this idea, and you should too. For my last act of each workday, I specify a single important task that I will take up first thing in the morning. As it did for Hemingway, it gives tomorrow a known target. That simple act of specification defends against two of the most reliable ways a workday goes sideways.' Interesting idea, the 'known target'. I'll think about this and how to incorporate it into my workflow.
• AI Isn't Breaking Work. It's Already Broken.. 'An earlier generation of digital tools, like email, Slack, video conferencing, and mobile computing, also led workers to vastly underestimate the time wasted wrangling diverse devices, applications, and rapidly toggling back and forth between different tasks and channels. Workplace theater isn’t new either (in my book, I called it 'pseudo-productivity').' Further evidence that the best use of AI is to blow up the systemic friction in organizations. Rethink the workflow: Get Rid Of Stupid Stuff (or GROSS), automate where you can, maybe it needs a little AI. When I hear people claim that AI can replace engineers, I kinda chuckle. Writing code is only about 10-15% of what an engineer actually spends time on. The rest of the week is wasted on meetings, figuring out requirements, and other random noise. Huggy Rao has it right in The Friction Project: 'focus particular attention on people who take responsibility for identifying, removing, and repairing what we call jargon monoxide, the hollow, convoluted, and incomprehensible language that undermines workplace communication, collaboration, and coordination.' Systems over goals, always.
• Watch Baseball Games in Realtime in 8-Bit View. Too much fun not to share: Ribbie. 'Actual live games rendered pitch by pitch in a cozy 8-bit view while they happen. Watch for free. No account needed. A calmer way to keep baseball close.' 🤯
• A Paean to Inside Macintosh. I love Apple history, and this retrospective on Inside Macintosh was fascinating. 'Inside Macintosh was nothing less than a book of magic spells. If you wanted a window with scroll bars, all you had to do was write some Pascal code and make a few procedure calls. You didn’t have to be a genius. Apple supplied the geniuses and they had written the code for you. It was built in. And Inside Macintosh calmly told you all about it. Just laid out the secrets of the universe right there before you. I was stunned by the detail and clarity of the documentation, and the promises it made on behalf of the software.' I see there's a copy for sale on EBay... hmm...
• Apple's Weird Anti-Nausea Dots Cured My Car Sickness. Speaking of Apple - did you know there's a way to stop getting motion sickness while looking at your iPhone in the car (in the passenger seat, hopefully). How Visual Motion Cues works, according to science: 'this type of vehicle motion sickness is caused by the eyes staring at a static display while the inner ear feels the car turning, braking, and accelerating. Motion Cues solve this by placing dots around the periphery of the display that move in harmony with the motion of the car. When the car turns right, the dots sweep across the screen to the left; when the car brakes the dots slide forward.' WILD!
• Handwritten Blog (via https://vhbelvadi.com/handwritten-blog). This website has to be one of the most unique styles I've seen on a blog in a long time - it's completely handwritten via a Remarkable device; the process for doing this was ultimately unmaintainable, but it's still worth a look.
• Inside the Handcrafted World-Building of Olivia Rodrigo's The Cure Music Video. A total creative masterpiece: 'An army of over two dozen craftspeople worked for a month on a gargantuan undertaking that bridged the worlds of practical effects, stop-motion puppetry and miniature art.' Watch the final video here.
• You Should've Seen the Sky Today. Along the theme of embracing your inner 8-year-old self's sense of curiosity, 'Researchers who study awe have found that even brief moments of noticing something vast... like a piece of music or a giant tree … don’t just inspire us. These are moments that calm our bodies, soften our stress, increase our sense of connection, elevate joy, and remind us that we’re part of something larger than ourselves. Which is to say, these things don't just inspire us or make us feel good, but are actually, scientifically good for us.'
• Seattle Hotel's Silent Reading Party Has Been Turning Pages for 15 Years. Closing out this week with a Seattle favorite: The Silent Reading Party. 'The Silent Reading Party at Hotel Sorrento is THE place for introverts to introvert. They gather behind the blue velvet curtains in The Fireside Room twice a month, to bury themselves in books. There's a rotating literary cocktail menu, and a sliding scale for places to cozy up. The fireplace seats are premium at $35 and the bar seats are a steal at $12. There’s also a $20 minimum on drink and food, so the hotel can keep hosting. And any place here is the perfect place to curl up with a book.' Sounds perfect.

Amor Fati ✌🏻