Espresso Shots 7-20-25

Here's my weekly update with a few interesting random findings that I came across the last week or two. I am going to try to make sure they're here in time for you to enjoy with your morning coffee (or beverage of choice) every Saturday or Sunday, and include some of my thoughts around them.

The Latest Drippings ☕️

• On Chasing the Right 'Zero'. I've been a long-time follower of Merlin's Wisdom Project (which, if you are unaware of, head over there), so I was interested to see his take on Inbox Zero. Despite adhering to the practice for many years, I've had my struggles with the practice. 'Given that every inbox necessarily represents a source of incompletion in our lives, any potential source of new input that we invite (or even permit) into our world presents a never-ending challenge that we may choose to address frequently, but which we must accept we can never even begin to control. Because, honestly, all of that blobby corpus of unknown, undefined, and incomplete stuff is, at the heart of the matter, what makes anything into an inbox. It's all just... stuff.'
• The Poison of Status. In an excerpt from his book, The Inner Compass, author Lawrence Yeo explores how one's actions are incentivized by status and how to shift your intuition. 'The charade is status, and it's our thirst for it that drives every game we play. It's what makes people feel superior to others, which also leads them to assume inferiority when it comes to people they admire. Status is always zero-sum in this way; your arrogance only stretches as far as your subservience.'
• Sunk costs and the framework for forward motion. I've written before about the 'sunk cost fallacy' and the dangers of just keeping the eye on the prize instead of knowing when to burn the ships. I did enjoy Seth's view that they can also be viewed as 'a gift from our former selves, but like all gifts, we don't have to accept them.'
• Application development without programmers. A look at a book, published by James Martin in 1982, on how advancements in data processing mimic today's concerns about AI. 'This means a major change for many of the personnel involved in data processing, from the data processing manager to the junior programmer. Data processing personnel have always welcomed new hardware and software, but it is not as easy to accept fundamental changes in the nature of one's job... Unfortunately, the winds of change are sometimes irreversible.' Sound familiar?
• 'That was good.'. Another link out to Merlin Mann, on a weekly challenge to 'notice some good things.' Sound advice - one of the best things my wife and I started to do before bed was to share one 'win' we had today. Little things, big things, or just that we showed up in some way. 'If you actually start doing this, a funny thing happens... You do start noticing more things that are good.'
• The User Journey. I've found some valuable insights in several of the posts from the folks at PointC.
• I Spent 90 Days Rebuilding My Brain. Here's What I Learned.. 'No Hacks. No Apps. Just Rules, Paper, and Silence.' I'm now a long recovering PKM-addict; I found that I was spending too much time on perfecting the tools and ecosystem to take notes rather than being present or taking notes. Highly recommend burn the ships when it comes to PKM.
• Tactical Reset. Speaking of burn the ships, 'a surprising number of technical issues can be solved by resetting the glitchy device. Sometimes you have to unplug it or hold down several buttons to make it work, but this can be a fairly simple solution for what are sometimes shockingly complex issues resulting from an operational state that's somehow gotten muddled.' The same goes for some things in life.
• A Simple Trick for Better Parties. If you haven't read Priya Parker's Art of the Gathering, you're missing out on an excellent book on how to create meaningful dinners/events/etc. 'Gatherings flourish when structure is baked into them. And framing time together in an intentional way helps people understand what they're walking into, how to show up and why it matters.'
• Mapped: The State of Freedom Around the World in 2025. I won't make any political commentary, but it's worth taking a look at this.
• Machine Readable. Steven Johnson always provides great perspective on how to think better using AI, rather than most of the garbage out there on replacing thinking. 'It is effectively functioning as a conduit between my knowledge/creativity and the knowledge stored in the source material: stress-testing speculative ideas I have, fact-checking, helping me see patterns in the material, reminding me of things that I read but have forgotten.'
• SLA vs SLO. How to measure, what to aim for, and what happens if you don't.

Amor Fati ✌🏻