Fernando Gros's Blog, page 10

This Week I Quit My Podcast

You didn’t know I had a podcast? That’s OK. For a while there, I forgot I about it as well. Anyway, I had a podcast called Seventeen Trees. And now it’s gone.

The Brief Story Of A Podcast

I started Seventeen Trees in October 2018. At the time I had a great studio in Tokyo, which had been designed in part for podcast audio production. I’d also spent that year building a house in the Japanese alps, which prompted a lot of thoughts about the intersection of creativity, nature, and sustainability.

And I missed podcasting.

So, I decided to start a podcast aimed at the idea of living well and in harmony with nature. The connections between ecology and spirituality run deep for me. Whether it’s visiting a Shinto shrine in Japan or a Shaker village in New England, I’m fascinated by the way people’s beliefs shape how they experience nature.

With Seventeen Trees, I wanted to emulate the tone of the On Being podcast, something considered and patient, encouraging of reflection. Each episode, I would read a piece I’d written, then talk about how the piece was written and unpack some of the ideas a bit further. Some were older pieces, which created a chance to explore how my beliefs had changed over time.

But the podcast was pretty much finished by the spring of 2019. When I packed up the Tokyo studio, I didn’t have a plan for how to keep the podcast going. Once the pandemic stopped my plans to build a London studio, it was unlikely the podcast would rise again. I tried, but it was over.

Just Because You Can

Back in 2018, I missed podcasting. For a few years, I’d collaborated on a moderately successful film review podcast. It was a lot of fun. But I’m not really a film reviewer, and the podcast ran its course and was the subject of a piece in the previous series of This Week I Quit.

The experience left me hungry for more. I wanted to podcast again, but with topics that were closer to my areas of expertise.

During my years in Tokyo, every time I met someone at an event, or over coffee, I would ask myself if they could be a good co-host. I was looking for someone with the work ethic required to keep a weekly project afloat, deep subject knowledge, and a great speaking voice coupled with the kind of sharp wit that brings a podcast to life. Sadly, I didn’t meet anyone with the trifecta.

But I didn’t want to use this as an excuse to stay out of podcasting. So, I decided to go it alone.

Most podcasts have two or more hosts, or feature a host conducting interviews. Solo podcasts are rare, but not unknown. They can work well, especially in shorter formats.

I got a logo made, created an account with Simplecast for distribution, made some backing music and recorded some episodes. It was a lot of fun. I managed to keep up a pretty good near-weekly cadence of shows.

But, it was the worst time to start a podcast. I was going to be moving soon, and I didn’t have a plan for how to keep this project going beyond that move.

Define Lightly

Looking back over my journals, notes, and writing from that last year in Tokyo, I was motivated to “make things.” Too often I’d found myself at the end of my time in a city feeling like I hadn’t achieved much. I’d work a lot, learn a lot, but not always have a lot of things I’d finished, made, and shipped.

So, I focused on things that were easy to make and light on planning: prints, zines, and the podcast. I wanted to get it made rather than try to make it perfect.

I couldn’t know that when I packed up that Tokyo studio, it would be so long before I had a recording space again. It’s already been two and half years, and I’m still waiting.

Maybe a little more definition would’ve helped – like rather than leaving it open ended, saying the podcast would run for a certain time, then end.

The thing is, while the podcast wasn’t happening, it was still weighing on me. Listeners would email to ask for more episodes, and I felt guilty about not recording any more. I would try to write for new shows, only to get stuck and feel bad about the whole thing.

Giving Seventeen Trees a definite end gives me a chance to honour what I made. For this, and other reasons, I didn’t leave Tokyo feeling like I’d underachieved.

Was There Another Way?

The obvious question is, why not just keep going? After all, you can record a podcast anywhere, with all sorts of cheap equipment.

That’s true. I’ve recorded that way in the past, and I tried it last year here in London. None of the results felt satisfying.

A podcast isn’t just an opportunity to project words at a listener. There’s plenty of podcasts I’ve stopped listening to simply because they sounded horrible. The podcasts that appeal to me are sonic experience, and it’s a comfort and joy to relax into their audio environment.

And I want to create the thing I enjoy as a fan.

This requires a good space to record in but also the physical and mental room to edit carefully and craft great backing sounds and music. I managed to bring that to both the podcasts I’ve worked on.

To Podcast Another Day

Of course, I’d like to try podcasting again. I love the medium. For now, my voice pops up occasionally on social audio (especially Twitter Spaces). In the future, when I have a studio again, there’ll be another podcast.

I’ll try to find a co-host, but if I can’t, that’s okay. I’ll integrate more closely to this site, so the existence of the podcast isn’t a surprise. Most importantly, I’ll have more of a plan about how to keep it going.

Mostly, I’ll just enjoy doing it and putting the thing into the world for you to hear and enjoy.

This Week I Quit is an occasional series about using minimalism and simplicity to foster creativity, productivity, and well-being. The series originally ran from 2016 to 2019, and you can read a summary of that series here. You can find an archive of all This Week I Quit articles here. You can also follow the hashtag #ThisWeekIQuit on Twitter.

The post This Week I Quit My Podcast appeared first on Fernando Gros.

The Masterful Practice Advice Of Tommy Emmanuel

“Play songs.”

As the pandemic shut down live touring, many musicians turned to online performances to compensate for lost revenue and stay connected with fans.

TrueFire, an online guitar learning platform, put on live video masterclasses with Tommy Emmanuel. This is how, late on a Saturday night, I found myself on my sofa, acoustic guitar in hand, on a Zoom call with a few other guitarists, getting advice from a living legend.

“Play songs.”

I’d heard Tommy give this advice before. Many times, in fact. It sounds simple. But this advice corrects a lot of bad habits guitarists are known for and suggests a path to mastery that has something to teach all creatives and not just musicians.

Understand The Fundamental Unit Of Your Craft

Tommy Emmanuel is a great guitarist with a brilliant technique and a discography full of wonderful recordings. But he’s at his best live, as a thrilling solo instrumentalist. Be it in a bar, jazz club, or concert hall, Tommy quickly wins over the crowd with his personality and fearless playing.

Tommy plays songs, and that entertains people.

He brings three guitars on stage. He doesn’t waste time retuning between songs. He has enough tech with him to sound good, but not so much it becomes a distraction. His guitar arrangements have plenty of bass and groove because the rhythm gets people in. But they always retain a strong sense of melody because that’s what people connect with emotionally.

The performance is built this way because Tommy understands the fundamental unit of his craft. Or, as he puts it:

“Play songs.”

Guitarist Often Don’t Play Songs

Most guitarists don’t play songs. They play bits of songs. It’s an odd habit we seem to acquire as beginners. When I was young, a lot of my friends had guitars. Back then, young people dreamt of being rock stars rather than video creators. It was pretty common to get together after school or on weekends and jam.

Sweet Child o’ Mine was one of those songs everyone tried to learn. Most could play a version of the introduction. Some learnt the fills, and a few learnt the solo. All the flashy bits. But no one learnt the rhythm guitar parts, the background that held the song together. A five-minute song – and no one could play it all the way through.

“Everyone talks about Clapton’s lead playing, but you should check out his rhythm work.”

In my late teens, I got a job in a guitar store. I worked Sundays, and it was slow. Mostly I cleaned up, dusted guitars, emptied bins, that sort of thing. One Sunday, Steve, the store owner, was in and an Eric Clapton compilation album was playing. As I dusted guitars and rearranged music books on their shelves, we talked about the importance of rhythm guitar for making songs work.

“Guitarists sing along to solos, but ordinary people sing along to choruses.”

Steve was dropping the truth bomb that day. We talked about how rhythm guitar “made the song work”. He suggested I watch Tommy Emmanuel live. At that stage, Tommy was becoming well known in Australia, but he played with a band rather than as a solo instrumentalist. Pretty soon, I was learning every little detail in rhythm guitar parts for my favourite songs, including Sweet Child o’ Mine.

Play Songs Because Everyone Loves Songs

Learning an instrument is hard. It’s easy to get discouraged, particularly if what you’re learning isn’t interesting enough to share with anyone.

Unable to play full songs, my friends couldn’t get into bands or entertain other people, so gradually they all gave up. Their guitars disappeared to cupboards or classified listings. If I could travel back in time, I’d say the same thing at every jam session.

People want to hear songs.

The sad irony is that a love of songs was what got my friends into guitar in the first place. They wanted to emulate their favourite artists and the songs they sang.

One of the reasons Tommy Emmanuel suggests playing songs as the foundation for practice is because it gives you instant gratification. You need a reward for picking up your instrument. Your creative craft is competing for attention with a whole lot of other less demanding paths to a dopamine hit.

Can playing random scales compete with watching Netflix or YouTube for an easy buzz? At least playing your favourite songs stands a competitive chance. And playing songs for people is a whole other buzz.

Fill Your Practice With Craft

Guitarists aren’t the only musicians who get side-tracked. Drummers are prone to playing ever more complex rhythms as a way to master the technical aspects of their instrument. Keyboard players often get seduced by ever more complex chords because their instrument allows them to play so many notes at the same time.

The technical and theoretical possibilities of music can turn practice into some kind of athletic or mathematical competition. Much like the solo-paying guitarist, any musician can spend a lot of time on things that don’t immediately relate to making the song work.

It’s easy for a musician to fill their practice time with things that might not be put to use in the songs they perform.

That’s where the playing songs advice helps again. It encourages putting theory into practice. It helps identify which techniques require the most focus.

Every Craft Has A Fundamental Unit (Or Two)

Every craft has a standard – the thing (or things) people most commonly enjoy from that field. Writers have essays, poems and short stories. Photographers have photos, of course. Music has songs.

This isn’t really about commerce. We’re not talking about marketing the things you make. It’s about how people enjoy the fruits of your creativity.

It’s about learning to appreciate how those units work. Playing more songs helps you become a fan of good songwriting, which, in turn, is a never-ending well of inspiration for your music making. The same is true of learning to love good essay writing, or the craft that goes into making a photo that makes people stop and look.

Mastery Comes From Making Things For People

It’s tempting to think of mastery as a solo journey based on the acquisition of skills. But another way to look at mastery is the attention you give to the fundamental units of your craft.

Or, to put it simply, making things for people.

This helps fill your efforts with joy. If you excel, then you might make things for lots of people. But even if you don’t get that good, you can still share what you make with friends and loved ones. And you have the validation that comes from making a thing that exists in the world.

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What Is A Masterclass?

“You could just give a masterclass on mastery.”

My friend was joking about this current series, but the comment stuck with me because the word “masterclass” feels so overused.

Every other room on Clubhouse advertises itself as a masterclass. It’s the same for so many online courses or in-person workshops. In sports, an excellent performance is often described as a masterclass.

Masterclass has become an adjective, a way of describing how good a service or performance is.

But what about the historical definition of masterclass? That’s masterclass as a noun, a thing, a particular kind of learning experience. Is that definition relevant anymore?

What Is A Masterclass?

Picture a small concert hall. As you enter with the rest of the audience, you see two chairs at the centre of the stage with a row of chairs behind them. You take your seat, and then a procession of musicians come out and sit down in the row of chairs on stage. After a brief wait, loud applause greets the famous concert musician, who takes one of the two seats at the centre of the stage.

The first of the musicians in the back row comes up and takes the empty seat next to the famous musician. They start to perform. The famous musician stops them, points out some technical detail, and then the music starts again. The pattern continues. Interruption, critique, performance. Some musicians get to play their whole piece without interruption. Most don’t. Some interruptions become lectures. Others cause the famous musician to pick up their instrument and demonstrate.

This is a masterclass.

I was in the audience for the scene described above. To me as a teenager, it was eye-opening. I can’t even remember the name of the guitarist who gave the masterclass, but I can remember how good all the students were – good enough to be giving concerts themselves.

These masterclasses are still part of the classical and jazz world. Their name derives from the presence of a “master” musician as teacher. But really, the point of the masterclass is mastery of the instrument and the art of performance.

The Path To Mastery

A masterclass is a high-pressure learning environment. The focus is entirely on the small but important differences between advanced students or good musicians and world-class performers.

The masterclass isn’t about the “master” showing off their knowledge and skill. Instead, the masterclass is about pushing the advanced student to become better, to notice more of the music’s details, to understand their instrument more deeply, and to develop the habits and mindset to perform at the highest level.

The masterclass has three essential components: an excellent teacher who has demonstrated mastery of the craft, advanced students who are on the path to mastery, and the accountability that comes from doing this teaching in a public space.

The Situation We Face

The word masterclass was cleverly co-opted by the online education company Yanka Industries, which markets itself as MasterClass and offers online classes with world-famous actors, chefs, film-makers, musicians, and writers. The company’s subscription-based education model is hugely successful, leading MasterClass to be valued recently at $2.75 billion.

While the MasterClass instructors would all be suitable teachers in the model we described above, what MasterClass lacks is the selective approach to choosing students, personally tailored learning, and the public forum for learning.

Large online courses sometimes offer cohorts as a solution. These present themselves as being similar to university tutorials. But cohort leaders usually lack the domain expertise university tutors have, and the cohort lacks the peer pressure that comes from grades and shared assessments.

These cohorts are more like the small groups churches use. Church adherents come together, often in a leaderless dynamic, to analyse lessons, share experiences, and build connections as a way to reinforce their commitments.

Coaching is a popular alternative that also tries to enter this space. But coaching happens mostly in private, and most coaches are not master practitioners, but more like teachers with specifically developed educational skills.

Where To From Here

We’ve probably lost the battle to save the word masterclass. Much like the word “decimate”, masterclass has acquired a broader and less specific meaning, becoming an adjective rather than a noun, a way to describe the qualities of a performance or teacher.

But we can still look for those comments of the masterclass in different ways. The company of advanced serious students. The access to elite practitioners. The public accountability for our learning journey.

Perhaps the modern masterclass is a thing we construct for ourselves on our journey to mastery?

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This Week I Quit LinkedIn

First, a word of caution. A warning, like those ones you get on finance articles saying the ideas don’t constitute investment advice and you shouldn’t buy or sell based on what the author says.

I believe quitting makes sense for me, both professionally and as an act of self-care. Maybe it does for you too. But there’s also a good chance it doesn’t. Exercise caution before nuking your LinkedIn account!

With that out of the way, here’s why I quit LinkedIn.

What Is The Point Of LinkedIn?

LinkedIn isn’t a terrible platform. Yes, it’s frequently mocked and not always well loved. But LinkedIn works well and, for a lot of people, is arguably the best form of social media.

If you’re looking to get a job, or hire a new employee or pitch your services to corporate clients, then LinkedIn is fantastically effective.

So, if you work for a company with a human resources department, or you have companies like that among your clients, not only should you be on LinkedIn, but it would also make sense to make sure your LinkedIn page is full of fresh updates and references.

But that’s not me.

The False Promise Of Being Everywhere

We still see social media gurus advising people to be active on every platform. This makes sense if your business model is selling consulting time. The more strategies your clients need for each and every platform, the more time you can sell.

This advice made sense ten years ago. I’m not sure it does anymore.

Early on, we didn’t know which platforms might flourish. So it made sense to claim your space on many of them. But now the social media is so well developed you can pick and choose the platforms that suit you best. There might be a reason for you to put your films on Vimeo instead of YouTube, or to share your photos on Glass or VSCO instead of Instagram. But you don’t need to be on all of them.

We Don’t All Have A Team To Back Us Up

Big brands manage to do well on multiple platforms because there’s a team, sometimes more than a hundred people, working on it. Even if a celebrity takes their own selfie or writes a caption, there’s a team at work. Although I occasionally dunk on social media “gurus”, there’s a lot of very smart, hard-working people who consult with smaller companies and creatives to amplify their work and help them make strategic decisions.

It’s tempting to try to be everywhere. But finding an audience on numerous platforms isn’t a part-time, DIY project, and being on a lot of platforms without an active and engaged following on each of them doesn’t achieve much when it comes to growing the audience for our creative work.

A much better place to start is looking at how much time (and money) you have and asking where you can make an impact.

What About Thought Leadership?

Over the years, LinkedIn has evolved to include a lot of thought leadership, which makes sense for a career-forward, professional social network. While Twitter is still the sine qua non of thought leadership, LinkedIn has some natural advantages.

If you’re a C-suite executive, a business coach, or an author who writes about economics, finance, or workplace culture, then being on LinkedIn as a thought leader is a no-brainer. You should do it. You will be speaking to an engaged and captive audience.

And, of course, if you’re a C-suite executive, you aren’t doing this alone. You have a team of expert communications and marketing people, along with professional copywriters, photographers, and videographers helping you.

But if you’re not in those circles or don’t have those resources, then LinkedIn becomes another place you are trying to grow an audience. It’s no different to the challenge of creating a following on alternative platforms like Medium. IL “Repurposing content” doesn’t work. You have to create for the audience expectations specific to the platform if you want to gain a following there.

Participating In Marketplaces

LinkedIn is looking to add a freelance marketplace to compete with services like Fiverr and Upwork. This will allow users to post projects and get creatives to compete with each other for the work, while LinkedIn can take a cut of any transaction.

But, as I wrote before, my experience of pitching creative work on LinkedIn or being approached by potential corporate clients there has been consistently and dispiritingly terrible. IL It’s hard to shake the feeling these marketplaces serve only to pit creatives against each other in a battle for the work of clients who are motivated more by paying as little as possible than by rewarding quality work.

Maybe I’m being a bit harsh. These marketplaces are here to stay. The news that Fiverr bought CreativeLive this week only reinforces that.

Even if these marketplaces were fairer, they’re still something I’ve chosen to not work inside. Quitting freelancing was a strategic decision I expect will carry me through the rest of my working life. The commercial work I do is self-directed. I’ll collaborate and take commissions, but I don’t pitch or work to spec.

The Psychology Of Self-Presentation

Logging into LinkedIn makes me feel terrible. I see my life dissected and reassembled according to LinkedIn’s layout, and it looks appalling, fragmented, and uneven. I can tell a coherent story about my life and my work, but not in the format LinkedIn demands.

This sense of a coherent identity is something I’ve struggled with all my life. It doesn’t just weave through my career; it’s also connected to growing up as an immigrant kid and living my adult life as an expat, to joining the church then leaving the church, to finding academic success then quitting a PhD, to being a professional musician early in life then coming back to the arts in midlife.

This might make me a poor candidate in a regular job interview. It might make for droll answers to the tedious “so, what do you do?” questions from strangers at social events, but this story is the product of a lot of decisions that have unlocked all sorts of opportunities to explore the world, meet amazing people, and investigate how far I can push my creativity. And I don’t, in any way, regret those decisions.

So why should I try to squeeze my story into the constraints of a platform that wasn’t made for me?

Choose Your Validation Carefully

LinkedIn is great as a soft background check. A digital CV does fulfill a need. I know people who have a sense of pride about their LinkedIn profile and the engagement it generates.

I know I’m blessed, lucky, privileged – call it what you will – to be in the position to do what I do. Sometimes I protest and say it hasn’t been easy and I’ve made a lot of sacrifices, but the truth is the cards have fallen in my favour several times, and I’ve had a lot of support.

But I’ve also had to learn to make better choices around where I seek validation. When you’re unsure of your story, it’s easy to fall into people-pleasing behavior. I’ve had to learn to keep the list of people whose opinions matter quite small. This includes prioritizing the views of people invested in my well-being and my improvement as a creator.

In a recent session, my therapist said I should give myself the “gift of completion”. This was a perfect insight and ties directly to the decision I’ve made to quite freelancing and focus on the things I create in my writing and studio practice. It’s there, in the work, as it’s finished and shipped, that I can find the right kind of validation.

And not on LinkedIn.

This Week I Quit is an occasional series about using minimalism and simplicity to foster creativity, productivity, and well-being. The series originally ran from 2016 to 2019, and you can read a summary of that series here. You can find an archive of all This Week I Quit articles here. You can also follow the hashtag #ThisWeekIQuit on Twitter.

The post This Week I Quit LinkedIn appeared first on Fernando Gros.

Mastery – Seasonal Theme

The last three months of 2021 are upon us. The days are already shorter, colder, and darker. Soon, it’ll be winter, and our thoughts will turn to the new year.

My theme for 2021 has been imagination. With no prospects for travel or major adventure, I knew this year would require imagination for magic to appear in our lives. So far, I’ve broken the year up into seasonal themes related to the idea of Imagination: Optimism, Map-Making, and Panache.

For the remaining months of the year, the theme is Mastery.

Writing About Mastery

I’ve already signalled that most of my writing for the rest of the year will be focussed on this topic of mastery. This has been an obsession of mine for some time. I’m deeply curious about what it takes to go from being good at something to being excellent, to move from intermediate to advanced, to reach a level where you don’t just perform, you excel.

In particular, I’m interested in how the question of mastery changes as we get older. How it becomes more urgent. Acquiring skills is one thing when we’re young and learning feels easy. It’s something else when we’re older and society entrains us to believe we aren’t able to remember what we know, or maybe what we know is no longer relevant.

Once you reach a certain age no one looks at you as undiscovered talent anymore. No one is waiting for you to “emerge”. You aren’t going to be “discovered”. It feels like you’ve either “got it or you don’t.”

It’s easy to tell yourself you don’t have it unless you can feel a sense of mastery in what you do.

Some Problems With The Word Mastery

We need to acknowledge the word master is problematic. Master evokes the legacy of slavery. And also the many abusive work practices of the old master and apprentice system.

To be a master implies standing in an exploitative relationship to other people. That’s why the world has dropped out of favour in a lot of professional settings, from groups that used to certify master status on well-trained individuals, as was common in many areas of the food and beverage industry, to the dropping of phrases like “master bedroom” from the real estate lexicon.

But does this same concern apply when we talk about mastering a skill, or mastering our emotions?

I’m not sure it does. When we talk about a musician’s masterful performance, or a coder’s mastery of a piece of software, or a chef’s command of seasonal ingredients, we’re describing their relationship to the things they work on. It might be instruments or music, apps and code, ingredients and knives. They are all things.

The word master is problematic when we use it to map out power relations between people. I am not the master of my household, so I don’t sleep in the master bedroom. I’m not the master of anyone I hire to work for me.

Mastery And Generativity

One particular way the issue of mastery gathers importance as we age is the question of generativity, which is a way of describing our legacy and our impact on the people who follow after us.

This can express itself in the desire to codify knowledge. We don’t just not just aim to master a skill but also to master explaining how the skill was formed.

As we get older, teaching, mentoring, and being a wise friend can take on a moral dimension. Our mastery helps us make deep and meaningful contributions to the greater good.

This sense of generativity can benefit our well-being when we age. It can help us avoid becoming self-obsessed or stagnant. Generativity can also deepen our satisfaction with life.

One Stone Among Many

Of course, this is simply the beginning of a journey. One stepping stone among many. We’ll come back to this question of mastery in several ways over the coming few months.

I hope we come to see that as we age, mastery is a fortress for our mindset and sense of well-being.

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This Week I Quit Pinterest (Again)

Yes, I’d already quit Pinterest. I didn’t forget the long article I wrote about it in 2016. But I rejoined Pinterest last year. Only to quit again. Let me explain.

My plans for 2020 originally involved a soft refresh of my “brand”. I wanted to update parts of this site, some of the material I use for mailing and communication, and, in particular, my logo.

I’ve had that logo since 2015. It’s served me well online, on business cards, and alongside things I’ve sold over the years. But it feels like the right time for something simpler, a little less “rock ’n’ roll”.

Pinterest And The App Trap

The process always begins with a conversation. The designer wants to know about you, your work, the impression you want to create. They want to see some of the work that inspires you, maybe designs that have caught your eye, or the way people you admire present their work. And they also want to share suggestions with you, to gauge what resonates or doesn’t appeal.

And there the problems start.

You could put it all into email. But email trails gets messy really quickly. Who said what and which ideas were approved or rejected requires a new investigation with every email. This is a terrible way to run a creative project.

The designer suggested using Pinterest. That made sense. Pinterest makes it easy to create collections of pretty well anything that’s online. I tentatively signed up again.

Unfortunately, 2020 happened and the project stalled. I’m currently doing a cut-down version, with just the essential updates to this site. The larger project will start again next year, after I’ve moved.

That left Pinterest – which I quit, again, this week.

Finding App Clarity

Sometimes it feels like the biggest hurdle in any collaboration is agreeing which apps to use. We all have our preferences, and reaching consensus on the best tools and services for a project can take time.

But it matters.

Not all tools are equal. More importantly, not all tools are equal in our hands. Bringing our best to a collaboration involves being able to use the tools well.

For example, my writing app of choice is Scrivener. I can write with Word, but it’s a much slower process. And much more frustrating. I’m significantly less productive. Not a little bit. A lot.

Multiply these inefficiencies over several apps and collaborations, and you soon feel like you’re wasting a lot of effort. It’s better to have a clear sense of what tools you can and can’t use with maybe a little flexibility to accommodate people, but not so much generosity that you make it too hard to be your best.

Building A Coherent Ecosystem

I once had a client who loved to communicate by any means available. Email, phone, video call, text message, direct messages on social media – even, on a few occasions, handwritten notes delivered to my home. We also had meetings where he never took notes. As you can guess, he was prone to making last-minute changes to things that had already been agreed.

I loved the project. But it was supposed to take only about 10–20% of my time. The barrage of random communication was overwhelming. Trying to reconstruct the communication trail when something went wrong was crazy-making.

Establishing a shared way of working is a better approach. You need a coherent ecosystem for communication. Think of it as dos and don’ts. We do use Notion for project updates and not social media dms. Or we keep the latest version of project documents in a shared dropbox folder and not embedded in various emails.

Yes, This About More Than Pinterest

Of course, we aren’t really talking about Pinterest or social media so much as talking about setting boundaries. By accepting the use of Pinterest, I crossed one of my own boundaries. I have a good ecosystem for that in Abode and Behance and the suite of Cloud apps. That’s my working world for all sorts of design projects.

It’s up to me as a client to set those boundaries and be clear about the apps I use and the ecosystem I work within.

As for Pinterest, I have no negative things to say about the platform. It works great for some people, and it’s fun to use. But it’s not for me, for the work I do, or the way I like to work.

This Week I Quit is an occasional series about using minimalism and simplicity to foster creativity, productivity, and well-being. The series originally ran from 2016 to 2019, and you can read a summary of that series here. You can find an archive of all This Week I Quit articles here. You can also follow the hashtag #ThisWeekIQuit on Twitter.

The post This Week I Quit Pinterest (Again) appeared first on Fernando Gros.

This Week I Quit Subscribing To Lens Wipes

The great pandemic toilet paper shortage. We’ll joke about it for years to come. In country after country, as we faced the most urgent global threat of our lifetimes, a horrible contagious respiratory disease, we watched people empty supermarket shelves of toilet paper.

Why?

There was another shortage, less talked about. Stores also quickly ran out of hand sanitiser.

This made much more sense. We know infections can be carried from our hands to our faces. We didn’t know then how long this new disease could live on surfaces. Did we honestly want to trust everyone else’s sense of personal hygiene?

Men’s sanitation update from Sydney airport toilet. 7/9 guys left without washing their hands. The other guy who did failed to dry his. #itscoronatime

— Fernando Gros (@fernandogros) March 2, 2020

Beginning An Obsession With Lens Wipes

Heathrow airport was particularly chaotic that day. I was waiting for my daughter’s flight to arrive from the US. Her campus had recently closed.

She’d boxed up her dorm, like thousands of other students, unsure when they’d see their belongings again. And she boarded a flight with as much of her life as she could cram into two suitcases.

At the airport I was one of the few people wearing a mask. But almost everyone was wary, keeping their distance. It was like being at a train station famous for its pickpockets. Everyone watched everyone else out of the corner of their eyes.

I had one bottle of hand sanitiser with me. It was nearly empty.

To pass the time I went searching for more. The airport stores, like those near my home, were mostly empty. I did find one brand but it didn’t list alcohol among its ingredients – a requirement we had been advised to look for at the time, in any hand sanitiser.

Then I thought about lens wipes.

Those packets of lens wipes intended for cleaning spectacles and camera gear are usually quite high in alchohol. To my surprise they were fully stocked. I bought a packet.

Later that day I searched on Amazon. You could buy boxes of lens wipes from Zeiss, 200 of them, in handy sachets! I took out a subscription.

Wiping My Way Through The Pandemic

Through the middle months of 2020 I wiped furiously. Wiping to keep disease at bay. Wipe, wipe, wipe.

Everything that came through the mailbox, which of course was everything that came into the house, got wiped down with CIF antibacterial wipes.

I was glad I’d bought a box of them, because soon you couldn’t buy them. Along with masks and nitrile gloves they were sequestered by the government for emergency services. You’d think governments would have stockpiles of that sort of stuff for just this kind of emergency, but clearly they didn’t.

For more personal things, the Zeiss lens wipes came into service.

Anything that we touched outside the house got wiped. Phones, EarPods, keys, even jacket zippers. Wipe, wipe, wipe. The subscription came in handy because we were using a lot of wipes.

The Great Wipe Slowdown

Over time it became clear: the threat from surfaces wasn’t so great. Magazines that had travelled across the Atlantic in an envelope didn’t need to be wiped down. Same for EarPods that had been untouched while I went for a walk in the park.

The rate of wipe use started to decrease.

Finding lens wipes in that nearly empty airport store was a moment of clarity. Maybe one of those wipes, in the car home from the airport, or some other trip, helped keep us safe?

I’ll keep some of them with me every time I travel from now on. Like masks and hand sanitizer, they’re now a permanent part of my kit.

But a box of 200 lens wipes will last a long time!

Rethinking Adaptations

We often develop habits that outgrow their usefulness; adaptations to circumstances we no longer need to address. It’s worth auditing those habits occasionally to ask if they are still relevant.

This Week I Quit is an occasional series about using minimalism and simplicity to foster creativity, productivity, and well-being. The series originally ran from 2016 to 2019, and you can read a summary of that series here. You can find an archive of all This Week I Quit articles here. You can also follow the hashtag #ThisWeekIQuit on Twitter.

The post This Week I Quit Subscribing To Lens Wipes appeared first on Fernando Gros.

You Can Be Good At Several Things

“You have to choose one thing and stick to it.” We were in a church hall. Bright fluorescent lights in the low ceiling gave everyone’s faces a harsh, pale glow. An older man was giving me a lecture. He was wealthy, white, born on the rich side of town. I’m an immigrant kid from a working-class neighbourhood. The week before, I’d given the sermon. This week, I’d just finished playing guitar in the church service. I’d already had a brief career as a professional musician and was now on the way to becoming an academic. He seemed to find this combination of skills problematic. “You don’t want people to think of you as a dilettante,” he advised.

We’ll come back to that word, dilettante, later.

For now, I want to consider his main argument. You have to focus on one thing. You have to specialize.

It feels like smart advice.

So much so that you probably felt obliged to specialize early on, maybe while you were still in your mid-teens.

Specialization is hard-wired into our culture. But is this a good thing? Is it the answer for everyone and the only path to “success”?

Embracing Our Range

This excessive focus on specialization is called into question in David Epstein’s book, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialised World. Epstein suggests when the rules of a game are clear and the challenges predictable, then specialists shine. This is particularly true in sports, for example.

But life, for most of us, isn’t like that. The rules are unclear, they change over time, and the problems we face are unlike the ones we learn to solve in school.

Time and again, Epstein highlights where specialists, when faced with challenging and novel problems, rely on their established expertise and struggle to find answers.

It’s not that experts are naïve. They just find it hard to think outside their specialization.

Epstein cites research by James Flynn, a researcher and academic who lectured in political studies at the University of Otago in New Zealand, studied the ability of students to apply insights from a range of specialties to real-world problems. His results were eye-opening. Flynn found no correlation between students’ grades and their ability to solve such problems. Most students couldn’t think outside their discipline, evaluate truth claims, or distinguish value judgements from scientific conclusions. Business majors did poorly on everything. Biology, chemistry, and English majors struggled with everything outside their specialization.

Economics majors did best, perhaps because economics is now interdisciplinary, drawing on insights from behavioural studies, neuroscience and statistics to understand people’s decisions.

Real-world problems require that kind of complex and diverse thinking. Even within a speciality like medicine, understanding something as mundane as how we respond to a paper cut requires thinking about a range of bodily processes that are all simultaneously at work.

Find Me In A Coffeeshop

“Live long enough and you can get good at a few things.” That’s me speaking, probably in some hip cafe somewhere, trying to answer a question about how I do all the things I’m known for doing.

It’s not great advice. But I’m not sure how else to put it. Typically, I’m being asked by someone younger than me who is trying to make room in their life for some serious creative pursuit. They can already feel mid-life closing in around them.

There’s a natural impatience in people who find themselves in this situation. They want to try their hand at something and not feel like it was a waste of time.

We overestimate what we can achieve in the short term. We think that if we practise something for an hour a day, be it guitar or photography, we’ll be noticeably better in a month. We think a quick, heroic effort will pay off. It seldom does.

But we underestimate how much we can change over time. Practise well for 20 minutes a day, every day for a few years, and excellence will follow. Modest amounts of effort daily are better than sporadic, intense attempts.

Creativity And Repetition

Another fascinating study Epstein quotes looked at creativity in the comic book industry. Alva Taylor and Henrich Greve wanted to look at the factors that made comic book creators commercially successful.

Taylor and Greve hypothesized that repetition would improve a creator’s output. They also guessed that the creator’s years of experience and the resources available to their publishers would have a positive impact.

They were wrong on all counts.

What made individual comic creators successful was the range of genres they’d worked in. Breadth of experience mattered. Broadly experienced creators were more innovative than teams of creators, better able to integrate diverse ideas and experiences into their stories than teams were.

Years of experience or the resources available to their publisher made no difference. And repetition – doing the same work over and over – usually made them less successful.

Kind And Wicked Problems

The benefits of specialization versus generalism depend on the challenges involved in the work. Epstein describes these as kind and wicked problems.

Kind problems are predictable. They follow clear rules and familiar patterns. Wicked problems are full of surprises, and solutions require fresh, innovative thinking.

Learning to play golf might be hard, but in this context it’s a kind problem. You can copy someone else’s approach to the game, turn up every day to practise the same skills, and become very good.

But being a parent is wicked. There’s no easy template to follow. Every child is different. And growing up in one culture, or moment in history, doesn’t prepare you fully for understanding childhood in another situation.

Kind problems lend themselves to specialization. Being excellent at kind problems involves sticking to a predefined process. The margins are tight, so every gain through efficiency helps. You’ll use the same tools over and over again. High performance through repetition keeps us alive in airplanes and hospitals.

To get better at wicked problems, you’ll need to embrace detours, experiments, and risks to broaden the resources you bring to those challenges. Using the same tools could limit you. Following familiar patterns can lead to disastrous misunderstandings. Efficiency alone won’t give you the better results.

When it comes to wicked problems, your breadth and range will help you succeed.

Specialization And Obsolescence

If you’re GenX like me, then you finished high school sometime in the ʼ80s or ʼ90s. Many of the jobs you were told were “safe options” might not look so safe now. Many of them will have been replaced by algorithms and robots before you finish your working life.

This is one risk of specialization: your skills can become obsolete. My father worked his whole life in electronics, from tubes to transistors to silicon chips. That’s a lot of adaptation in one career. The rate of change is even faster now.

Adaptability is possible by having a broader perspective. Understanding how technology is developing and how the industry is changing means looking beyond any particular specialization.

The problems we face and the insights we need require thinking on a systems level. This is the kind of creativity Steve Jobs famously prized when he sought engineers who also understood arts and humanities. In other words, engineers who could design for people who weren’t also engineers.

One point James Nestor makes in Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art is that medical experts may be so focussed on their specialization that they struggle to question assumptions about respiration, like the role of CO2 in the breathing process, because they aren’t used to thinking of breath as a complete system. Instead, they live inside their focus, be it some part of the anatomy or a particular illness.

Skills And Mastery Still Matter

“I’ve chosen not to be successful.” Another badly lit flat roof. Another monologue.

This time it was the comfortable couches of a digital agency for a meetup of creative types. The speaker was talking about his music-making exploits. He could be more successful if he wanted to be, but he’d chosen instead, for the sake of his artistic purity, to keep his work “under the radar”.

Listening to him describe his process and work ethic, I wasn’t convinced his lack of success was a choice. He worked when he felt “inspired”. He didn’t seem interested in getting better. And he had no external accountability, or benchmark, to measure his progress against.

Maybe it’s this kind of attitude my elder was lamenting in that church hall all those years ago? Was this the dilettantism he feared I might be indulging in?

What made this musician sound deluded was the way he spoke about success, as if it were some independent variable unrelated to effort and excellence and all the things that go into making music in a creative ecosystem. He felt like success was a simple choice, like whether to put on socks.

If he’d said he made music as a hobby, that it didn’t matter to him how good he was because it was fun, then I wouldn’t be telling you the story.

What was frustrating was that most other people in the room were serious about their craft. They did want to get better. They were trying to find some kind of success. And they were hoping to disprove the belief that mastery is possible only through relentless specialization.

Thankfully, history also gives us plenty of examples that show that to be untrue.

Famous Dilettantes

We don’t have to look far for examples of people who didn’t follow the stick-to-one-thing-for-the-rest-of-your-life advice.

Alice Cooper, at 73, plays golf off a handicap of 4, has a relationship with golf club company Calloway, and has even written a book for beginners. Mark Twain was friends with inventors Nikolai Tesla and Thomas Edison and patented three inventions of his own.

Victor Hugo made over 4,000 drawings in his life. Artists like Van Gogh and Delacroix were impressed with his work, and he kept his art private only for fear it would overshadow his writing. E.E. Cummings always thought of himself as a poet and painter, having produced over 1,600 pieces, including work that now hangs at the Whitney Museum.

Jack White recently created a site featuring his varied work in art and design, including architecture and furniture along with industrial and interior design. Award-winning director Alejandro Innaritu started his working life as an architect and attributes his meticulous approach to film making to that experience.

Brian May was an accomplished student when he joined the band Queen as their guitarist. During a lull in the band’s journey, he went back to academia to finish a PhD in astrophysics. Giorgio Armani began his career as a doctor, then later got into fashion through a job as a window dresser. The Guardian recently ran an article on people who thrived through mid-career transitions.

And, as Epstein points out, even in kind domains like sports, many elite stars specialized late and tried a wide range of activities in their youth.

Process Beats Goals

Two recent articles here, 2031 and Your Ideal Day, set out exercises for setting some life goals. The suggestion isn’t to set lots and lots of goals, with multi-stage plans to get you there. In fact, you probably shouldn’t do that.

Instead, you should aim to have a clear picture of where you’d like your life to head, then commit to habits and mindsets that can lead you.

Set a few big goals, then lean into the method and process of living well.

Embrace Range And Mastery

Wanting to be good at something isn’t a great goal, but it’s an important first step. Especially if you’re questioning the specialization mindset. You need more detail.

Say you want to get good at guitar. What does that mean for you? Do you want to play on stage? Because you don’t need to be a virtuoso to play on stage. In fact, a rudimentary knowledge of guitar and lots of conviction might be enough.

That’s where the detail matters. You need to elaborate what mastery, what being good, will look like for you.

And, in a minor concession to the fans of specialization, you might have to accept one thing. You might have to focus on growing in one area at a time.

What my church critic didn’t see was that the two skills I demonstrated were the result of intense focus over many years. Range doesn’t just happen. It takes work. And over the course of a lifetime, and with a lot of work, the range can get pretty vast.

He thought aiming for range might mean “people” don’t take you seriously.

But I’m not sure who those “people” are. Maybe because I don’t live in an either/or world. Or perhaps because I’m surrounded by people whose career is a “slash” between multiple professional identities.

Above All Else Enjoy Your Life

One thing I loved about living in Japan was almost everyone I met had a hobby. And they took their hobbies very seriously. This might include lessons, coaching, workshops, attending concerts, putting on exhibitions, and even travelling extensively. People managed to build a life around work, hobbies, and family.

There’s no reason to believe that you can’t be excellent at something just because you haven’t dedicated your whole life to it. Excellence isn’t the sole domain of specialists.

This is particularly true in all sorts of creative domains from art to woodworking.

Over the next few months, there’ll be more articles specifically on the issue of mastery, on how we can add excellence and quality to the things we do.

But, for now, I’d like you to go back and read the piece on Your Ideal Day. Imagine yourself doing the things you love in a way that’s deeply satisfying to you, and paint a picture in your mind of the life you’d like to create for yourself.

The post You Can Be Good At Several Things appeared first on Fernando Gros.

This Week I Quit Quitting This Week I Quit

My yearly theme in 2020 was Momentum. Of course, the cruel joke was we didn’t go anywhere for most of 2020. The world ground to a halt. The true theme of 2020, for all of us, whether we liked it or not, was Adaptation.

We think evolution means improvement. But sometimes evolving doesn’t mean becoming better. We evolve when we adapt to survive in our environment. And surviving doesn’t always look like thriving. We adapted to the pandemic. We became the work-from-home, shop-online, only-go-out-when-essential version of ourselves.

The pandemic isn’t finished with us. But we’re increasingly feeling done with the pandemic version of ourselves.

I don’t know if it’s like Lent or like New Year’s, but many of us now want to quit living this way. We’re ready to begin the slow pilgrimage towards our post-pandemic identity.

This is why I’m bringing back This Week I Quit.

The Origins Of This Week I Quit

This popular series ran here from 2016 to 2019. Every “week” (or thereabouts), I’d quit something different. Maybe give up a habit. Or delete an app. It was an exercise in practical minimalism as a way of life.

The series was inspired by something Bob Goff said. IL Every Thursday, he would try to quit something. Think of it as decluttering your life. Letting go of things you don’t need. Things that take up time and energy without getting you closer to where you want to be.

At the start of This Week I Quit, I’d been struggling with anxiety and was looking critically at how I spent my time. Why did I feel constantly distracted? What things fractured my focus?

So, I tried a little experiment. Every week, I’d quit something and write about the experience.

As I wrote in the summary, IL I wasn’t able to keep up with the once-a-week rhythm. That didn’t matter because the experiment was a success. My ability to pay attention improved. My mindset changed. I was able to “Marie Kondo” my beliefs, commitments, and habits. This happened as part of a broader focus on mental well-being (including therapy). Better sleep habits, more exercise, and the books I was reading all contributed as well.

But the experience of This Week I Quit (and writing about it) made some things pretty clear.

What I Learned

We all have beliefs about ourselves. They might be stories about our strengths and weaknesses, our character, or our potential.

Early on, we learn to categorise ourselves based on these stories.

And these stories are often remarkably negative. So we enter adulthood telling ourselves we’re “naturally” not artistic, or musical, or we’re disorganized, or messy, or we’re not good at maths or public speaking.

And we just accept that story and hold onto it for the rest of our lives. Which is just wild! We become so good at obeying beliefs that might not even be true anymore.

Those beliefs were formed in our earliest years, when we were young, naïve and struggling to understand the world. Why hold onto them forever?

Sure, school experiences are important. But we’re adults maybe ten times as long as we spend in high school. That’s long enough to try so many things and change so many of those self-beliefs.

You can change your self-beliefs.

Quitting Towards Growth

We’re talking about removing limiting beliefs and developing a growth mindset. IL This isn’t as simple as deciding to be “optimistic”. Our self-beliefs are like a garden that requires constant care and nature – which includes pulling out the weeds from time to time.

Growing up, I learned to call myself disorganised and lazy. Teachers reinforced this message. Today’s better trained educators might’ve spotted learning issues, traces of social anxiety, or the challenge of being a third-culture kid as part of my approach to school.

At home, I didn’t have siblings my age. So I compared myself to a household of highly motivated adults. Of course it always felt like they had it together more than I did!

The shadow of these kinds of experiences is long, and we compensate for them in ways like perfectionism and overcommitment. Or we let them hold us back, fearfully not trusting our ability.

The quitting itself isn’t the point. Yes, we make room for new things when we get rid of stuff. But the freedom and joy that comes from breaking down limiting beliefs and replacing them with growth habits is truly liberating.

Quitting Isn’t A Cure-All

Quitting doesn’t solve all of life’s problems. Sometimes we have to stick with things that aren’t easy or fun. Learning can feel somewhat uncomfortable. And sticking with things fosters endurance, patience, and resilience. It can even help us become kinder and more tolerant, since we understand through our own experience things aren’t easy all the time.

Because we can’t always quit, it means we can when the time is right and the reasons compelling.

Then we should consider the opportunity carefully. Especially in moments like these, when we need to rethink and undo decisions, or reflect on whether the adaptions we made to cope with the short-term problems are ones we want to live with for the rest of our lives.

Footnote 1

If this post got you thinking about your own post-pandemic identity, then take a look at the recent articles, Your Ideal Day, and also 2031, which both discuss being intentional about building the life we want to live.

Footnote 2

This Week I Quit is an occasional series about using minimalism and simplicity to foster creativity, productivity, and well-being. The series originally ran from 2016 to 2019, and you can read a summary of that series here. You can find an archive of all This Week I Quit articles here. You can also follow the hashtag #ThisWeekIQuit on Twitter.

The post This Week I Quit Quitting This Week I Quit appeared first on Fernando Gros.

The Journey Of A Note

Let’s go on a journey, down the river of knowledge, from the bubbling mountain-top stream of reading and new ideas to this great expansive blog of content you’re currently swimming in. You could call this adventure the journey of a humble note.

OK, that was a crazy opening. But note-taking is such a big deal now. There are so many articles, courses and videos popping up suggesting note-taking is now suddenly causing a revolution in human thought. Most describe how to curate a note-taking system but a few describe in detail how a note becomes a piece of content.

So here’s a case study, a journey if you like, from an initial note to the article you’re currently reading. Along the way you’ll encounter some familiar apps: Readwise, Obsidian, Scrivener, Notion and WordPress. You’ll get to see how they work together. So, let’s go down the river of knowledge!

Reading to Make a Note

For a few months now, I’ve been writing a long piece on the current popularity of note-taking apps and systems. It’s not going well. Currently, it’s 4319 mundane and uninspiring words. Way too long and missing any kind of hook, thread or compelling story to bring it together.

So, I keep reading and thinking, writing and rewriting. I work on other pieces and generally get on with life, trusting that an insight will emerge to help me cut through the words, like a sculptor cleaving away at the stone, to reveal an idea you might want to read.

So, I found myself searching the archives of the New York Review of Books. There I found a 2001 article, The Reader Strikes Back, which discusses a book about marginalia, those little notes readers make in the margins of books as they read them.

Marginalia aren’t the same as the kind of notes I’m trying to write about. But there’s a fascinating idea in the article that caught my eye. Apparently, a lot of authors used to write margin notes as a kind of address, as if they were giving a talk about the book to an audience, a bit like a silent lecture.

That idea feels worth capturing.

The Readwise Capture

I wrote about Readwise recently. Since I was reading the article about marginalia online, it was easy to save any highlights. In iOS (iPad or iPhone), this involves highlighting the passage then tapping the share button and choosing Save Highlight To Readwise. On a Mac you can use the Hypothesis bookmarklet to save the highlight, which can later be synchronised with Readwise.

While reading, I highlight anything of interest. There’re opportunities later to delete highlights or decide which ones deserve attention or need to be kept.

Once the highlights are in Readwise, I add a screenshot of the article as cover art. Readwise creates these wonderful mini-posters out of highlights and they look much better with cover art. Book covers are recovered automatically from e-readers like Kindle, but you need to manually add art for highlights from web articles.

Of course, this isn’t a note yet, it’s kind of a proto-note. Thanks to Readwise’s use of spaced repetition, the opportunity will soon come up to review the highlight and decide what, if anything, I’ll do with it.

The Obsidian Note Creation

There’re a few different ways to automatically import Readwise Highlights (or clippings from other tools) into Obsidian. I don’t use any of them. Automation is great if you want to migrate everything from one app to another. But automatically adding progressive updates creates inboxes in every app you use. Clearing those app-specific inboxes is distressingly time-consuming.

And kind of pointless.

There are hundreds of highlights in my Readwise catalogue. Soon, there’ll be thousands. Not all of those deserve a note. Sometimes several highlights all point to the same idea.

Notes are about the ideas you want to hold onto, not every single thing you’ve read or noticed. Highlights are a product of reading. Notes are a product of thinking. That’s why I don’t want to automate their creation.

Notes in Obsidian often contain a highlight from Readwise, a link to the original article, some tags, maybe a direct link to another relevant article in Obsidian and most important of all, the original insight.

The note is always an idea. Not a quote. Not a summary. Never a whole article. Just an idea.

The Scrivener Experience

Once I sit down to write, all the action happens in Scrivener. I have Obsidian open in the early stages of a first draft, as I gather ideas. I might revisit Readwise, to look for more ideas or maybe a good quote.

Once those sources are assembled, I cut and paste everything into Scrivener. Normally, I keep quotes and notes in separate text files until they get used. Notes always get rewritten anyway. Quotes might occasionally be cited whole, but their idea typically gets rewritten into the article, with a reference added as a link.

Having that data from the original highlight makes it easier to add the link to the original article or book.

Once the notes have found their way into the draft, they’ve served their purpose. They go back into hibernation in the Obsidian vault.

Then I put on a playlist of instrumental music and sit down to write, rewrite and write some more. I’ve written before about using Scrivener for blogging and my writing process. Some articles take only 2–3 days to write. Most take about a month. A few take considerably longer. The article about note-taking has been bouncing around since early April!

The WordPress Backend

Once the writing has gone through a few drafts, it goes off to be edited before being uploaded to WordPress. I probably don’t say enough about this amazing and free platform that’s powered this blog since 2004.

Anyway, WordPress is amazing!

Before hitting “publish”, a few more things need to be done. Each article is assigned to a category. A heading is added and a few SEO things are added. A feature image gets included. And each post has some tags assigned (which you can see below), which allow you to find other articles on related topics.

Then the article goes live on the internet. Another stream feeding into the great content lake.

The Purpose of a Note

If it feels like the journey of the note has morphed into the creation of a blog post, then that’s the point. Curating an art exhibition finds its purpose only when the public turns up to experience the art. So, too, creating a note doesn’t find it’s meaning until people turn up to read your work.

We don’t create notes to have a beautifully manicured private intellectual garden. We create notes to add depth and substance to the things we create.

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