Espresso Shots 11-23-25

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 ☕️

• How to Love Learning Again. Along with curiosity, I believe in a continuous learning mindset. And, as I try to practice little things add up to big things over time, this post does a nice job of putting the science behind that. 'Your relationship with learning isn't fixed. Neural plasticity research shows we can rewire how we respond to learning. The key is starting small and building positive momentum.'
• Can You Just Do Things?. Instantly added this new book, You Can Do Things, to the pre-order list. This 'conversation about how agency is gained, used, and misused' was super fascinating, and I can't wait to read the whole book when it's out. 'Fundamentally, I believe that most people take too few risks and limit their results in life because of that. Embracing some degree of risk is probably part and parcel of a high-agency mindset.'
• Add Friction Back Into Your Life. 'We live in an age of hyper-convenience, where at the snap of a finger you can have almost anything shipped to your door, listen to any song, watch any movie, even create images and code with a single prompt. Daily chores like grocery shopping have been replaced by having it delivered to your door, and, of course, we're building robots to take care of the laundry. The unsettling truth is that these points of friction, these mundane things, are actually what give us purpose.' I really liked this one, which leans into why the deliberate reintroduction of challenges into one's life is an accelerant to learning. Of course, this is one of the problems with everyone just 'vibing' their way these days. In some odd way, my mind connects this to the forced friction that's explored in Plurbius episode 4.
• Life Is Just an Experience. I completely agree with Scott's post here: 'The goal isn't to achieve great things (although that can be nice). Nor is it to be remembered (although helping future generations is a lovely goal). Instead it’s to experience all of the different kinds of experiences that life allows.'
• Life Isn't Chess. It's Poker.. I liked this one on how to reframe your thinking - 'When you frame a decision as a bet, you're forced to explicitly acknowledge that you're operating under uncertainty. You have to assign some probability to different outcomes, however rough. You have to think in terms of expected value rather than guaranteed results.'
• Overthinker!. A quote from this post that immediately made it into my commonplace journal: 'You don’t win by being right in principle. You win by being useful in practice.'
• Why Does Mattering... Matter?. An interesting look back at an 1844 piece from Karl Marx, entitled 'Alienation'. 'Where Marx gets it right is that alienation is caused not necessarily because you don't feel like you fit in, but by your lack of agency. In other words, you feel completely replaceable—a cog. Like the organization would hum along just fine without you, in other words, you feel alienated because you feel you're not mission critical. You feel like you don’t matter.' Totally on with the analysis here. As a leader of teams, it's an important reminder: 'We’ve built systems that give us all the social cues of belonging while stripping away everything that makes us essential.'
• Understanding The Banker's Rounding. This week, I learned a bit about Banker's Rounding via the Dithering podcast. How John Gruber learned about it is an interesting story (listen), but I didn't know about this. 'When you are learning or studying math, it is normal that one of the topics includes rounding numbers. Banker's rounding is an algorithm for rounding numbers to the nearest integer. But this algorithm applies to numbers that are equidistant from the two nearest integers: they are rounded to the nearest even integer.' So, when you thought 2.5 would round to 3, turns out, with banker's rounding, it rounds to 2. WHAT!?!
• Why Does Every Thumb Keyboard Look Like That?. Super interesting history lesson on thumb keyboards.
• Nobody Votes for Bad Bread. As my wife's sourdough micro bakery has been taking on a life of its own, the title of this post pulled me in immediately. Turns out this post about the food industry is more about how 'gradual change has compounded over decades, leading to a noticeable difference in food quality.' Something that I wrote about back in 2024, the 'Curse of Meh'. 'Consistent actions, even small ones, establish new norms and expectations over time.'
• Yes, They Did Have Star Wars Spoilers Back in 1978. This was a fun one: 'In 1978, David Prowse mentioned in a public setting that Darth Vader was the father of Luke well before Empire Strikes Back came out.' If that happened in 2025, the Internet would have spread it in minutes.
• Who Bought Grandma's house?. A fun read on what happens when the author visits his grandparents' house and rings the doorbell of the current owner.
• 21 Facts About Throwing Good Parties. I consider Priya Parker's 'Art of the Gathering' the de facto standard for putting on a memorable gathering, but I did learn a few new tricks from this post. And, they do point out one of my pet peeves with large groups - 'A large party is more like an Everything Soup: you mainly need to avoid ingredients that ruin the flavor for everyone else; beyond that you can mostly throw in whatever and see what works.'
• Allow Me to Introduce the Two-Sentence Journal. This week, I learned about the concept of a two-sentence journal. The basic idea is this: 'aim to constrain each day's entry to one or two key things, and limit their expression to one or two sentences.' Here's some additional prompts for your two-sentence journal if interested. Hat tip to Robb for finding this one.
• A Fond Farewell. Closing out with a goodbye to the Farmers' Almanac, after 200 years, is ceasing publication. 'So go ahead—plant your peas when the daffodils bloom. Watch for a red sky at night. Tell the kids how granddad always swore by the Almanac. That’s how our story stays alive.'

Amor Fati ✌🏻