079 • The best of 2024
I'm turning this roundup into a tradition...
I posted one of these issues at the back end 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.
Throughout this, I learned a lot and created a lot of content. The best included the following…
Organising Your Notes in Obsidian - A Complete Guide - insights into the number of ways you can structure your notes in Obsidian. One of my most popular pieces of the year and in my opinion, one of the most fundamental and valuable.
PARAZETTEL's First Birthday - Lessons From a Whole Year of Selling an Obsidian Vault - half PKM guide, half business insights from a year of selling PARAZETTEL as my only product offer.
I also started doing YouTube videos for the business in the last month. I’ve never been great at talking to a camera but with the PARAZETTEL product videos and video issues for the newsletter I’m starting to get the hang of it. I should have started with business videos a year ago but I didn’t, so I’m glad I managed to get off the ground this year.
Here’s the most recent one, about Obsidian’s most recent insider update…
This newsletter’s had quite a convoluted journey this year. I think back at the start of the year it was still run on Beehiiv and Obsidian Publish. Soon though, I switched to convertkit and soon after this, built an entire personal website to hold all my writing. Why I Built a Personal Website in the Age of Social Media Dominance is the story of why I chose to do all of this.
But managing an email marketing account as well as spending copious time adjusting site layout and settings in the WordPress backend dashboard took its toll. So it was time for another change…
Just after my second PARAZETTEL launch of the year, I turned my attention to Fundamentalised with the idea of simplifying things so that I could do more work for university and keep up the same volume, quality and cadence for the newsletter. This meant moving back to Substack for the time being.
Don’t get me wrong, I still love the idea of having my own website and agree with everything I wrote in the piece I shared following building a WordPress solution. the thing is, I very much value simplicity, especially in this period of high workload, so a platform that could do email and website content without much input on my end except for turning up and writing was ideal. This meant I could do things that came to mind, and then have a low-friction way to write about them…
I started recording YouTube videos for these issues back in June, and since then I have taken them off of YouTube and put them as locally saved videos in the Substack issues. Again, since then, specifically last week, I realised how foolish this was and started putting issues back on YouTube, embedding them in the issues. Here’s last week’s one…
Others’ Work
There are a few people that dominated my content consumption this year, and in the same fashion as last year, I’m going to go over some of my favourite stuff that I came across in the last 12 months…
Modern Wisdom - Chris Williamson’s podcast was something I was getting used to towards the back end of 2023 but this year it’s probably the thing I’ve spent more time consuming than anything else, overthrowing Huberman Lab that dominated last year. As for the best episodes…
The Art Of Mastering Your Emotions - Joe Hudson - a fantastic episode about how to best approach emotions, making the most of the positive ones whilst being able to integrate the negative ones effectively as well. It’s a masterpiece.
How To Create A Life Of Freedom - Dan Martell - similar to Joe Hudson above, I’d never heard of Dan Martell before I came across this podcast. Out of curiosity, I started listening, and over a little more than two and a half hours was given a clinic on what it takes to build and scale companies without sacrificing the pursuit of a good life.
These two were far and away my favourite Modern Wisdom episodes of the year, made better by the fact that they both put someone completely new on my radar. It’s nice, of course, to hear household names on your favourite podcast but there was something special about the wisdom that these two had, uncovering two new worthwhile follows on the web.
(I also like the Q&As that Chris does for subscriber milestones - they give a nice intermission to the normal format)
Here are some of my other favourite pieces of content from this year…
Psycho-Cybernetics - a book all about the influence that the way you think has upon your reality. An encouraging read that’s not overly-scientific.
I’ve also read a couple of pieces on the site lesswrong.com, an ‘online forum and community dedicated to improving human reasoning and decision-making’…
Pain is not the unit of Effort - a good short piece reinforcing that you can do good even if you don’t feel the pain of working absurdly hard on things. Leverage is real and should be taken into account over sacrificing well-being at the altar of graft.
Babble - another great piece talking first about how language models function, then about how we have similar mechanisms in our heads. These personal mechanisms are getting messed up though, through the proliferation of rubbish content we consume every day, as well as a lack of creating and sharing outwards, mainly in real-life, personal interactions.
I don’t find conversation easy sometimes, and this piece seemed to hit the nail on the head as to why (avoiding mood-related reasons, which are their own collection of issues to address separately). Takeaways? More creating and speaking, less consuming. Tell me something I don’t know…
Miscellaneous
Here are some other things that have contributed positively to my life this year…
SURI sonic toothbrush - until Christmas last year, I’d been using a manual toothbrush. And the quality of the clean left a lot to be desired. I got ahead of the curve with this sonic vibration toothbrush (I see them everywhere now) and it’s been absolutely fantastic. Combined with some hydroxyapatite-containing non-fluoride toothpaste, this is the upgrade that my oral hygiene needed.
Healf.com - I’m a bit of a health nut and this is where I’ve been buying my supplements from for the best part of this year. Their customer service is fantastic (I got a boatload of store credit when a product I ordered was out of stock), and they’re UK-based (a win in my books).
They’ve also got a great standard for the quality of the stuff they sell, so I buy knowing that the price is good and that I get the best quality.
If you use this link, you get £10 off of your purchase on the site. I get a little bit of extra towards my own supplement purchases too - they sprung this offer on me the last time I checked out and I thought I’d share it because it’s a good deal for you guys. I’m buying my supplements from there next time anyway, so they’re getting a good deal from me as a recurring customer.
Qi-wireless charging stand - I got one of these out of curiosity because I’ve been to pubs in the past that have had them built into the middle of the tables there. I didn’t expect my iPhone SE to be compatible but it turns out there’s some technology older than MagSafe that works with both my iPhone and my airpods.
Now I’ve removed the friction of having to interchange both my USB-C and Lightning cables when I’m charging my stuff at home, and the phone is in a perfect position to track my sleep when I set it up to charge overnight.
That’s about all I can come up with for now. I hope I’ve put you on to something new or interesting in this issue - it’s quite a bit longer than usual and I commend and thank you for reaching this far if you’re still reading.
2025 is going to be great and I’m going to discover a lot more stuff to share with you in this issue next year.
In the meantime - next week I’m going to send you an issue that talks a little more about what I want to change and improve on for 2025. I need to do all the reviewing, journaling and introspection required to send such an issue though.
Until then, have a great Christmas,
— Theo
What I’ve shared this week…
Searching through my past images to see if there’s anything else worth sharing. I hardly ever shoot black and white deliberately, but sometimes images just come out better this way.