Colin Wright's Blog, page 4

Discussing the News

The news can be stressful, anxiety-inducing, tribalism-reinforcing, and littered with misleading, misinformed, heavily biased takes.

There are things we can do to make our news-consumption habits more productive, including (for instance) avoiding most TV news, avoiding editorial/opinion content, and sticking with journalistic entities with the right economic incentives (and reputations for generally non-polemical coverage) like Reuters and The Associated Press.

Exposure to solid news cover...

Sharing and Preserving

There’s a tension between sharing enough of oneself to convey complete, round narratives, and sharing too much: stepping over the line into something uncomfortably open, unnecessarily detailed, or embellished till it’s more icing than cake.

It’s tempting to aim for extremes when we’re communicating personal details, whether that means chatting about ourselves with coworkers over lunch or broadcasting snippets of our lives to strangers from the internet.

There’s something straightforwardly ...

Time Spent

I don’t particularly enjoy the process of making a podcast: there are elements of it I find fulfilling and this process allows me to produce things I want to see in the world, while also contributing to my livelihood.

But if there were a button I could push that would allow me to convert all the things I want to convey, automagically, into a well-made podcast episode, I would push that button immediately—the outcome of investing that time and effort is what I’m after, not the spending of the ...

Places to Put Things

When I think about work, I sometimes visualize a collection of little boxes in which I can put things.

This is true of paid work—the projects that help me make rent and buy groceries—but also the sort of work I do alongside that, which is maybe just for fun, maybe meant to help me grow in some fashion, maybe something experimental and boundary-expanding, and maybe something that will someday evolve into a money-making venture.

I suspect I reflexively reach for this metaphor because I often...

What I’ve Got

It can be useful to embrace your limitations when you feel stuck, uninspired, or unable to make any progress on some task or undertaking.

Sometimes you’re missing what feels like a vital component or data-point, and the slow-down is related to that lack of a fundamental tool or possibly necessary information.

Sometimes the array of options you face is so sprawling and varied that homing in on the ideal next-step feels overwhelming or impossible.

Sometimes the weight of the task—its bulk...

Energetic Expenditures

There are countless ways we might visualize our portfolio of intrinsic resources, but one metaphor I find to be useful is that of electrical production and expenditure.

You can produce electricity in all sorts of ways, ranging from the burning of coal to the harnessing of photons (using solar panels) to the tapping of wind and water and other sorts of environmental movement using turbines of various shapes and sizes.

You can then spend this accumulated energy in all sorts of ways and on al...

Notes On Speaking

I’ve been speaking professionally (in the sense of standing up in front of groups of people and talking for a while, for money) since 2009 (though it didn’t become a real-deal part of my career until a few years after that), and I’d like to share some things I’ve learned in that time, having since given hundreds of talks to groups of five and crowds of 5,000, at schools, conferences, libraries, and everything in between.

First, a lot of people are curious about how the speaking world works, i...

The Spark

Recent data almost universally suggest we’re in the midst of a loneliness epidemic.

Folks are spending less time with friends and acquaintances, more time wishing they were hanging out with other people, and are benefitting from fewer of the warm feelings we tend to associate with meaningful (and even casual) human contact.

I suspect this isn’t just the consequence of pandemic-era isolation: we’re being tossed about by a cyclone of novel technologies and communication mores that arguably f...

Weighing Maybes

I’m in the process of figuring out “formats” for some experimentation I’m doing in the video world.

In publishing or production, your format is a bit like a template you use for whatever it is you’re making.

So the format for my One Sentence News email is three news items, each briefly summarized and contextualized, followed by some kind of image and a number (each also concisely explained), with a “trust click” link to something interesting at the bottom. The podcast format for OSN is an ...

Fumbling and Juggling

I turn 38 this weekend, and as tends to be the case every year I’ve been wrangling over whether to instill the day with additional meaning (beyond the accolade of having survived another orbit around the sun).

My inclination is to shape my life so that there are plenty of peaks and valleys, but to also invest in both practical and philosophical salves for most of what life might throw at me (slowly accumulated savings and a AAA membership, but also a “go with the flow” default stance and a re...