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 ☕️

  • Destroy Any Website. I have spent way too much time on this retro pixel-art stickman game this past week, but it's just so much darn fun. The idea is simple and brilliant - you give it any website and within seconds you have an 'armed-to-the-teeth' stickman that can run around and blow it apart into a million pieces. Total carnage! But it's great for a quick arcade experience. Side note: I've found it incredibly fun when dealing with some product that has a website - I just load it in and blow it into smithereens.
  • How to Stop Getting Taken Advantage Of: 6 Secrets From Game Theory. I searched through the archives to see if I've written about Game Theory previously, but it looks like there's a gap that I definitely will hit in a longer post. Simply, Game Theory is the study of how people make decisions, and if you go down the rabbit hole there are deeper mathematical models around decisions and cooperation, but I find understanding it in general is a fascinating place to spend time. Simon Sinek refers to this as Infinite Games: It's the game about the game. I liked this post that has strategies for leveraging Game Theory: 'Nice people like to be accommodating, which is a great quality in a hotel and an expensive one in a person. Make limits black and white.' Lots of really interesting, counterintuitive ideas in here.
  • How to Make Difficult Decisions, According to Philosophy. 'This is the crux of hard choices: When options are on a par, we hunt for a definitive reason, given to us by the world, for picking one over the other, but no reason presents itself. The way isn’t signposted. External reasons have run out. Rather than feel gloomy or anxious about this, Chang notes, we might actually see it as liberating: If external reasons have run out, then perhaps we can choose to be guided by internal ones.' We live in a world of hard choices; that's just life. Just remember not everything is in our control, just how we can react to it.
  • 'Ask for What You Want' Is a Key Skill for the 21st Century. I love the thinking here, and it aligns closely with this newly found superpower of building apps for one. 'I’m not invested in that future; most days, I think a minor bust would be a good thing. But, that underlying technology, in its development and flourishing this past year — yes, really that recently — is profound. It reframes computing entirely, replaces a stack of API reference docs with this simple invitation: Ask for what you want.' I've been burning down subscriptions, reducing my cloud footprint, and instead just talking to the genie and having it build workflows/apps for what I need. But Sloan's best advice: 'get your wish, then stuff the genie back into the lamp.'
  • Mathematicians, Here's a Way to Think About Your Existential Crisis. 'Most teams don’t have a strategy problem. They have an adaptation problem. Your plan was never going to survive contact with reality. The question is whether your organization bends or breaks when it doesn’t.' I appreciated this post in how it frames work between features (things that are visible) and futures (invisible understanding and abstraction that nobody gets credit for). Seems to me, the best long-term bet is going to be spending more time thinking about and understanding futures, as the machines may be taking on more of the features.
  • To Live Healthier for Longer, Train Your Weaknesses. As someone who has probably put 10x more effort into understanding what's going on with my body via data than most people, I really appreciated the viewpoint here. 'Long-term strength requires paying attention to what’s not being electronically measured, what’s not being regularly trained.' A good read on getting more in tune with your body instead of relying on what a device tells you.
  • What You Bring Home. Something to remind myself of next time I go to a conference or other type of off-site (or heck, even a fellowship call). Take a look through your notes, and pull out: 'one idea to think about, one action for this week, one person to reach out to.' A simple, but very useful, practice of Essentialism that feels very valuable.
  • The Life Triangle. Focusing on getting to Life 3.0 has been a framework that I've been trying to put into focus now that I'm halfway through my 50s. But this is one of the first attempts I've come across that try to put it into a diagram-able model. Manuel refers to the fundamental questions he asks: '1) Do I want to have a life and 2) What kind of life do I want to live?' Adding in a third 'vertex' - reality - creates a triangle where 'the distance between them represents how far my current life is from what I want and also how far apart my individual life is from my social life.'
  • David Bowie Answers the Famous Proust Questionnaire. Looking back at the timeline, I joke that the multiverse destabilized when Bowie passed away in 2016. Nothing's really been the same since. I only recently learned that he wasn't even aware that his cancer was terminal until three months before he died. I had also never seen these questions that he answered in Vanity Fair's Proust Questionnaire: 101 Luminaries Ponder Love, Death, Happiness, and the Meaning of Life. Some of his answers: 'What do you regard as the lowest depth of misery? Living in fear. What is your greatest fear? Converting kilometers to miles. What do you consider your greatest achievement? Discovering morning.' A fun read, which caused me to go out and buy the book, and I'll probably do my own self-assessment of the questions in a future post.
  • The Geology of Sticking With It. Persistence is like geology: one day it looks like nothing. Ten years later, you have a mountain. Always important to remember that little things add up to big ones over time.
  • Analemma Over the Callanish Stones. 'If you went outside at the same time every day and took a picture that included the Sun, how would the Sun's position change? A visual answer to that question is an analemma, a composite image taken from the same spot at the same time over the course of a year.' An incredible photo of a year of noon photos of the Sun and how it traces a figure-8 above a 4,700-year-old stone circle in the Outer Hebrides. Just a delightful image to close out this week on.

Amor Fati ✌🏻