When I learned to use a table saw, my teacher impressed upon me that the machine wants to cut fingers. Fear the saw!
Powerful tools can do powerful things. If you want to make handmade wooden furniture you must cut wood. Your desire to have limbs and...
A tip for remote teams of 2-10 people. Create a personal “ramblings” channel for each teammate in your team’s chat app of choice.
Ramblings channels let everyone share what’s on their mind without cluttering group channels. Think of them as personal...
Companies break promises all the time. A self-guaranteeing promise is verifiable and non-reversible. It does not require you to trust anyone.
File over app is a self-guaranteeing promise. If files are in your control, in an open format, you can use...
Our bias is to always add more. More rules, more process, more code, more features, more stuff. Interdependencies proliferate, and gradually strangle us. Systems want to grow and grow, but without pruning, they collapse. Slowly, then...
Love is magic, it defies explanation. To the most rational and logical among us, this may be confusing. Its elusiveness is its significance. Love isn’t an illusion to be broken, but a miracle to bask in. Not everything needs to be understood to be...
The edge of a sheet of paper slices through the tip of your finger and blood begins to flow from the wound. This injury, as small as it may be, must be repaired. Blood cells rush to the site, clotting, scabbing, healing. You never asked for it, but a...
Why Obsidian is 100% user-supported and not backed by venture capital investors:
We want to stay small, we don’t need to hire lots of people
We follow strict principles that we do not want to compromise
Our users are happy to support us, we don’t...
Around the age of twenty-two I realized that my worldview had been deeply imbued with pessimism and cynicism. It was the culture I grew up in. A hostility to new ideas, to anything that strays from the norm. An assumption that if things can go wrong,...
As a child, you touched something hot, and it burned you. That pain gave you a piece of information: be careful touching hot things.
When you sign up to run a marathon, you are signing up for pain. But whether or not you keep running is up to you....
Quality software from independent makers is like quality food from the farmer’s market. A jar of handmade organic jam is not the same as mass-produced corn syrup-laden jam from the supermarket.
Industrial fruit jam is filled with cheap ingredients and...
Whenever I buy things I try to prioritize cost per use. Sometimes I consider other priorities such as cost per smile, cost per thrill, cost per externality, and cost per lesson.
Cost per use
Considering cost per use helps me make decisions about most...
I use Obsidian to think, take notes, write essays, and publish this site. This is my bottom-up approach to note-taking and organizing things I am interested in. It embraces chaos and laziness to create emergent structure.
In Obsidian, a “vault” is...
Oscar Wilde once said:
“Consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative.”
When it comes to ideas, I agree — allow your mind to be changed. When it comes to process, I disagree. Style emerges from consistency, and having a style opens your...
If you want to progress faster, write concise explanations. Explain ideas in simple terms, strongly and clearly, so that they can be rebutted, remixed, reworked — or built upon.
Concise explanations spread faster because they are easier to read and...
There is a parasite, I see it everywhere. It consumes your health and wealth. It preys on ignorance and is easy to catch. It’s so common you may not even notice you have it.
The parasite has a simple and attractive proposition: let me take care of...
There is a feeling I search for: being in good hands. It is the feeling I look to give and the feeling I look to receive.
I know I am in good hands when I sense a cohesive point of view expressed with attention to detail.
I can feel it almost...
How many individual electric motors are part of your daily life? Count your electric toothbrush, air conditioner, blow dryer, refrigerator, washing machine. Count the tiny motors that control the focus and zoom of your phone camera.
A modern car has...
There’s a French expression I like:
L’appétit vient en mangeant
Appetite comes when you eat. Nibble and your appetite will grow.
Appetite can be the hunger for any kind of thing, not just food. Some days I wish I had the appetite to write, to read,...
File over app is a philosophy: if you want to create digital artifacts that last, they must be files you can control, in formats that are easy to retrieve and read. Use tools that give you this freedom.
File over app is an appeal to tool makers:...
For the past seven decades, computers have been designed to enhance what your brain can do — think and remember. New kinds of computers will enhance what your senses can do — see, hear, touch, smell, taste.
The term spatial computing is emerging to...
One of my first industrial design jobs was working on a headset that never shipped, for a now defunct startup. It used two micro-OLED displays similar to the ones in Apple’s Vision Pro, but with clear, see-through optics reflected into the eye through...
Every week I create a weekly note, and write my to-dos for the week. I may add more items to it during the week.
If any items didn’t get done I roll them over to the next weekly note or drop them.
That’s it.
I usually write my to-dos from scratch...
Tools convert something you can do into something you want to do. A pencil converts hand movements (what you can do) into markings on paper (what you want to do) with the purpose of conveying an idea.
New tools cause revolutions when they make costly...
Specialization is too heavily encouraged as a career path.
Becoming a generalist is one alternative, but there is another path less discussed: become a hybrid.
The hybrid path means developing expertise in two or more distinct areas. Having several...
When I think about editing images, a vast array of options come to mind: contrast, saturation, sharpen, blur, airbrush, clone stamp, etc. Even basic image editors offer dozens of useful image manipulation tools.
When I think about editing text, a much...
The cover of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy has two simple words of advice for intergalactic travelers:
Don’t panic.
Panic is my least favorite feeling. I much prefer calm.
Calmness is a superpower that is useful in many situations. When you...
Evergreen notes allow you to think about complex ideas by building them up from smaller composable ideas.
My evergreen notes have titles that distill each idea in a succinct and memorable way, that I can use in a sentence. For example:
A company is a...
Emerging generative AI art tools such as Stable Diffusion, DALL-E and Midjourney have given rise to a new artform. I call it synthography.
A revolutionary new kind of camera was recently invented. Instead of turning light into pictures, it turns...
Every year I ask myself 40 questions that help me make sense of what happened over the past twelve months. I love working through that exercise and discussing it with friends and family who do it too.
As we enter a new decade, I’ve been pondering what...
Today is the 50th anniversary of Earth Day. To celebrate I brought together 30 ecommerce companies to launch slashpackaging.org, a movement to make packaging information accessible to all. I hope you will join too.
Most websites have...
How many days have you been alive?
Yesterday I found out that I have been alive for 12,431 days. If each day I split into a new person those 12,430 previous selves would fill a stadium.
If I live to 90 years old, there will be 32,850 selves in that...
For years I’ve had a fascination with the idea of digital paper. I’m not alone. People have been drawn to this idea since early devices like the Stylator (1957) and RAND Tablet (1964).
Over the decades we have inched towards creating digital paper,...
When did the word “compromise” become vilified?
Compromise is neither good nor bad, it’s something we do every day. It’s decision making. Prioritizing. Deciding that one thing is more important than another. It’s finding the right balance between two...
Methodologies for problem-solving are fairly well established. The scientific method is perhaps the best problem-solving template we have. However, finding good problems to solve is a different skill altogether, one that we don’t...
When trying to jumpstart a new habit, the only thing that matters is making consistent progress.
It’s easy to get in your own way by setting the bar too high. Instead, set the bar as low as possible. Any progress at all is a good thing. What is the...
One of my end-of-year rituals is asking myself these forty questions. It usually takes me about a week to work my way through all of them. I find it to be one of the most valuable exercises to reflect on what happened, good and bad, and how I hope the...
I saw a wonderful exhibit of Ishiuchi Miyako’s photography. Her series “Scars” particularly struck me.
"Scars" by Ishiuchi Miyako
The images are hard to look at without wincing. The oversized prints were even more painful to witness in...
There’s a saying you may have heard called Hanlon’s razor:
“Never attribute to malice what can be explained by stupidity.”
The word “malice” is perfect because it says nothing about the severity of the act. It could describe anything from someone...
When Google Maps first came out, it blew me away. It still seems like one of the most magical technologies we have today.
I wonder what Ferdinand Magellan would think if you showed him Google Maps on a phone? The entire world mapped in detail, with...
The term “vanilla” is often used to describe something ordinary, plain, or standard. In my book, there’s nothing less vanilla than vanilla.
Vanilla beans are the fruit of a rare orchid native to Mexico. Their aroma and flavor comes from a compound...
A professor of mine used to often quote Bob Dylan:
“He not busy being born is busy dying”
Some are comfortable making the same thing the same way their entire career But that approach is fragile, susceptible to unexpected events.
The documentary...
Stream of consciousness
A world where knowledge is captured and categorized, interpreted by the masses almost instantaneously digested, regurgitated, masticated, ruminated… and immediately available to access, pre-chewed. We become increasingly eager...