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… ...

I’m nobody to tell a person how to live, but these are just some observations that I’ve had recently. With that aside, here you go… Does everyone believe they’re right? There’s a difference between being truthful and being subjectively right. But I think that the closer you can get to making both of them the same in your head, the happier you’re going to be because you’ll be, on average, as in tune as possible with the rest of the world. ...

Welcome back, I’ve not been taking particularly good care of myself recently. The signals that I’m not quite getting enough quality sleep, and that I’m carrying some stress around with me, are showing through and it’s come to the point where I’ve consciously decided to turn things around. The body keeps the score. No matter what you’re holding in your head, how you feel about yourself and the work you’re doing or what food you’re putting in your body, you get a lagging indicator of how well you’ve been living just by paying attention to your body’s signals. ...

Recently I’ve found myself taking more inspiration from one of the most influential books that I’ve ever read - The Flinch by Julien Smith. Even though I read it for the first time a year and a half ago, the book’s main lesson is still seared into my mind… Flinch forward. What this means is to simply accelerate when you notice a feeling of resistance that holds you back from doing something that you know will be good. ...