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. ...
I posted one of these issues at the back end of 2023… 031 • The best of 2023 Seeing as it’s a whole year in the future now (it’s gone so fast), I thought that I’d do another one to round up everything that has happened this year. So without further ado… My Work I did a lot of work on my business PARAZETTEL this year, launching an update to the product all the way back in January, and again in September. ...
One idea that I keep coming back to is the damage that the emotional rise and fall of having a fresh start every single year can have - how this can negatively affect our progress through unnecessary highs and lows The reason I keep touching on this idea is because I keep falling for the fallacy that a new year is going to change something, that it’s going to be a suitable fresh start… ...
At the end of 2023 I wasn’t too sure about goal-setting, thinking that perhaps it would hold me back from what I actually wanted to achieve by straitjacketing me into ploughing forward on the same missions for the whole of 2024. I had set out a few rough guidelines, under the categories Health, Wealth and Relationships and today I just wanted to cast my mind back briefly to how things have gone in those areas for the last 12 months… ...
A book that’s come to my attention recently is Die With Zero by Bill Perkins. It’s all about how to best use your money throughout your life to maximise what Bill thinks the most valuable currency is - memories and experiences. After all, memories are what you carry with you all your life, and as you lie in old age, your memories will be what you have with you. Here’s what Bill said about creating a highlight reel for his grandfather from his sporting days… ...