The other day I was reminiscing and I realised that the first time I set foot in a gym was around this time, just seven years ago. I was fourteen, going into the local gym for the first time. Payment used to be a pound I placed on the front desk every single time I went in through the door. The staff realised what I was doing after a while and asked me to pay for a membership, but I’d caught the lifting bug by then. ...
Sorry for a week’s hiatus from writing newsletter issues 🙏 - I’ll explain why it happened at the end of this one, but for now… Although I don’t travel abroad very much (true, although ironic to say having just come back from Poland), I travel through the UK quite regularly. The weekend before last, for example, I headed from my home in Sheffield, all the way to Oxford to watch my brother row in the second-largest inter-college rowing event of the year. ...
Although I don’t think for a minute that the world conspires against you, it won’t ever go out of its way to help you either. At least not without reason. In life, you have to by and large help yourself by putting energy out into the world. Be a positive part of the reality of others and you’ll be reciprocated, whether by gaining relationships with people you can count on, or by earning money or health to help you do what you want to do in better condition, physically and mentally. ...
It’s been a long time since I’ve done a listicle piece like this but I’ve been thinking about these things a lot recently so here we go… 1. Standing desk This was the one hack that inspired the rest of this issue - I’ve been using a riser on my desk for a while now, seeing as I’m quite tall and have to hunch down to access a laptop most of the time. ...
Hello from Kraków, Poland… I’ve been away for a few days now - the video issue below is from here if you want to see what it looks like - and I was going to give this week a miss. But a note-to-self piece of advice I’ve been mulling over because of recent life is better than nothing, so here you go… For the last couple of weeks (until I came out to Poland) I’ve been working on revising for a university exam, and whilst I don’t think that what I study is boring, sitting and reading and writing about it for hours every day is. Much more monotonous than what I do normally, anyway. ...
Seeing as it’s still quite early in 2025, the review that I undertook at the end of last year is still quite fresh in my mind. There were a few ideas that dominated this review, and I’ve talked about one of them already in connecting with people to share and deepen satisfaction and experiences (in issues 058 and 082), but today I want to talk about another. And this one might be the most important of all… ...
As you can see, things have changed around here again. And if you give me the next 5 minutes I’ll bring you up to speed. A few days ago, I was procrastinating in the main library at university when I saw a tweet from Steph Ango, talking about using Obsidian and a static site generator to build a website based on text… Priorities for my personal site: 1. I can write and publish directly from Obsidian 2. I can preview the site offline 3. I can switch hosts easily, all the data is in my control For a personal site I find that CMSes like Wordpress, Squarespace, and Webflow, add too much… ...
First, I want to apologise for not sending an issue last week. The reason was that I had to work on the literature review for university, and this took up most of my time. I didn’t want to have to work on anything else simultaneously, so I could avoid context-switching and distraction. Now I’m back, though, and I wanted to discuss an idea that I’ve covered before but in a different capacity. And that idea is to make sure that you’re connecting with real people at every opportunity. ...
When I start thinking about AI, professional uses are largely what come to mind—wrangling data for my university work, catching grammar errors in longer pieces of writing, and providing instructions to change detailed configurations in business backend tools. But as the power, especially the memory, of these tools improves, I’m becoming more interested in making them useful for self-improvement. There’s not much in this context that I’m using AI for consistently right now, but there are a couple of places in which it’s helped, and I wanted to go over them here… ...
For the longest time, my phone and laptop’s background wallpapers were just plain black. But recently, that changed. Now they look like this… This is the midwit meme. And it’s a better mental heuristic than it might appear. The first time I came across it was in the context of productivity… But there are countless other examples… There is so much to be taken away from the lesson here. We’re all striving to be the sage on the right. But we can’t ever get there. Every one of us is the person in the middle metaphorically, but we can shortcut our route to the same result as the sage by doing the stupidly simple thing, whether we think it’s right or not. ...