“The next big thing always starts out being dismissed as a toy.”

This is a key idea from Clayton Christensen’s disruption theory — a seminal paper on on how innovation develops.

But according to popular science writer Matt Ridley, this isn’t enough. In his book How Innovation Works: And Why It Flourishes in Freedom, he systematically expounds on Christensen’s ideas… To show why simply improving existing products or inventing new things isn’t enough to produce truly disruptive innovation.

Here are a few notes I had from the book (plus my honest review of it at the end):

I. Innovations are toys that became tools

In Innovation, Ridley quotes the Nobel Prize-winning economist Edmund Phelps who defines innovation as a new method or product becomes a new practice somewhere in the world. To Phelps, an innovation is merely a toy until it catches on and becomes, as Ridley writes, “sufficiently practical, affordable, reliable, and ubiquitous to be worth using.”

II. The real innovator of the printing press

In 1450, Johan Gutenberg combined the individual inventions of the printing press, paper, and movable type to invent printing — and unknowingly ushering in an era of enlightenment and knowledge (as well as political and social upheaval in the West).

Because of this most people think Gutenberg was the inventor of printing.

But while he was the inventor of the printing press, he wasn’t the innovator who brought into popular use.

To Ridley that titles belongs to Martin Luther. Luther used printing as a way to reach the masses, producing short, readable pamphlets in more colloquial German, rather than Latin. “By 1519,” Ridley writes, “[Luther] had published 45 works in almost 300 editions and was Europe’s most published author.”

III. The real inventor of the light bulb

In February 3rd 1879, Joseph Wilson Swann passed an electric current through a glass bulb that contained a carbon filament, illuminating a room of 500 people, and demonstrating the first light bulb before Thomas Edison.

And he wasn’t the only one.

According to Ridley, 21 different people could lay plausible claim to having invented incandescent light bulbs before the end of the 1870s.

So why do we remember Edison, not Swann?

Edison knew something that Swann and the other didn’t: that the innovation — not the lightbulb — itself was the product. He knew it wasn’t enough to come up with a new invention and patent it; a new invention needed to be distributed into the market to catch on.

So Edison went into business with Swann who had the most thorough work and the best patents around the lightbulb. He then combined it with a system for generating and distributing electricity. Most importantly, Edison pushed to make the incandescent bulbs more reliable, as a direct challenge to — and eventually triumph over — the oil lamp and the gas lamp.

IV. Thomas Edison: The innovation is the product

To Thomas Edison, the innovation itself is the product.

He set up his New Jersey laboratory in 1876 to do what he called, “the invention business.” He assembled a team of 200 craftspeople and scientists. He stuffed his workshop with materials, tools, and books.

As Ridley notes in Innovation, Edison was obsessed with two things: finding out what the world needed, then inventing ways to meet it.

Not the other way around.

Edison pursued inventions as solutions to existing, valuable problems, not as fanciful thought experiments.

As a result, this mindset made it financially and creatively worthwhile to invest time, money, and manpower to test 6,000 plan materials to find the exact right kind of bamboo for the filament of a lightbulb, to pursue 50,000 experiments to develop the nickel-iron battery, and to register 400 patents within 6 years.

Edison is an innovator, not by genius but by experiment.

My review

I won’t write a review of every book I read… I disliked this one so much that I had to review.

This might come as a surprise.

But my notes aside, I think Innovation is a lazily put together, disorganized mess and as a result, a painful slog to read.

The introduction and first chapter pulled me in with the promise of a multidisciplinary approach to learning about the principles of innovation. But I hit a wall a quarter of the way through while reading about the innovation of the potato. Then I hit another wall once I got to the chapter on prehistoric innovations because… Wait, why is this the 7th chapter, not the first chapter?

So maybe it’s my fault for not being interested in fertilizers and potatoes. But I kept reading.

And I realized halfway through that the issues wasn’t my lack of interest in tubers.

The book was just so poorly organized.

• It felt more like a series of blog posts. Each chapter had 4-5 examples of innovation, but each story could’ve stood alone. Maybe as an entertaining blog post.
  
  I know this. I’m a digital writer and I write blog posts and newsletter for a living.
  

  And standalone pieces are not what I’m looking for in a book.

  
  The author didn’t explicitly connect them to each other or to the overarching principles of the book. Instead, I was often left to connect the dots myself.

  
  You know it’s bad when the publisher could’ve cut an entire chapter on fraudulent innovation — all 25 pages of it — and I, the reader, wouldn’t have missed a thing.

• It had no story arcs. The first 230 pages are made up of stories of innovation from energy, food, public health, and computing. But instead of having a beginning, middle, and an end, each story was just a chronological retelling of every enthusiast, scientist, or engineer who ever touched the invention. I’ve seen resumes using the STAR method with more of a story arc than this book.

• It had the core lessons… in the middle? Like I alluded to above, the author didn’t get into the core ideas of the book until Chapter 8. Then two chapters later, launched into a list of failed innovations. Again, why?

Anyways, while I had high hopes for this book — I picked it up after a recommendation from Naval Ravikant — I was hugely disappointed. I prefer Robert Green’s style of weaving in bits and pieces of a handful of core stories to support the main themes of the book.

For comparison, Innovation took me almost an entire year of dipping in and out to finish. Robert Greene’s Mastery on the other hand, took me less than a month.

Now that is a masterclass in using stories to teach lessons, while giving the reader a satisfying and entertaining reading experience.

Overall, reading Innovation was a huge struggle for me.

The ideas in the book are sound, unique, and interesting, especially for someone with a tech background like me. But sadly, it was lazily put together and it just not a good book.

As a result, the ideas are not worth the tradeoff of hours I spent reading it.

I turned 29 today. Yay!

This marks the 10th anniversary of when I start writing online. In honour of this, I decided to restart my blog and share notes from the books I read. A labour of love for my friends. ❤

Here are 4 insights from Morgan Housel’s “The Psychology of Money”.

Enjoy.

I. People don’t want to be millionaires. They want to spend $1M.

… And this is the total opposite of being a millionaire.

Investor Bill Mann wrote that there is no faster way to feel rich than to spend. But that the way to be rich is to spend money you have. And to not spend money you don’t have.

According to Housel, the very definition of wealth is to not spend the money you have.

Rich is your current income. But wealth is how much you have saved up.

II. Historians are not prophets.

Housel quotes investor John Templeton as saying,

“The four most dangerous words in investing are ‘it’s different this time.’”

To balance this, he tacks on this one from Michael Batnick:

“The 12 most dangerous words in investing are, ‘The four most dangerous words in investing are ‘it’s different this time.’”

What does this mean?

1. Don’t use history as a way to predict the future.

2. At the same time, don’t ignore history and blindly move forward.

This is especially relevant for people like me who love reading to make better decisions in the present.

Housel suggests a more nuanced way of learning history:

1. The farther back the event was, the more general your takeaways should be.

2. The closer to our time it was, the more specific your takeaways can be.

III. The secret to saving more

In the book Housel writes,

“Savings can be created spending less. You can spend less if you desire less. And you will desire less if you care less about what others think of you.”

So what if you’re not rich, income-wise?

Remember: People don’t want to be millionaires. They just want to spend $1M (or look like one). This also means that there are so many people who seem rich — i.e. spend a lot, live a luxe lifestyle, buy designer… and post it all on IG — who are just living, paycheck to paycheck.

You don’t want that.

Instead Housel advises, the key to saving more and becoming rich is to care less about what others say.

“Others” also means Instagram and Tiktok influencers and YouTube vloggers. Care less about what they say you should buy. How you should dress. How you should live.

Those influencers are not gonna tell you this.

Care less = Desire less.

This means that you end up spending less over all. And when you do buy something, you can be certain it’s something you really want.

Win-win.

IV. What was Charlie Munger’s non-financial goal in life (that also made him rich)?

Charlie Munger was Warren Buffet’s business partner at Berkshire Hathaway. He once said:

“I did not intend to get rich. I just wanted to get independent.”

In Psychology of Money, Housel reframes this goal for himself writing, “I mostly just want to wake up every day knowing my family and I can do whatever we want on our own time.”

Optimize for freedom and independence. And the money will follow.

Thanks for reading! Hope this made you think.

— Rox

P.S. No set schedule for now. I’ll post whenever I finish taking notes.

Last week’s newsletter had a 40% open rate. The top link you clicked on was Noah Smith’s essay on Generative AI. A warm welcome to the 1 person who signed up since then!

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In 1967, Walt Disney broke Disney Animation down into multiple business models. He then drew this on the back of a napkin:

Disney called this a synergy map. This diagram shows how each line of business elegantly feeds the company’s flywheel. Over the past 50-odd years since the famous animator’s passing, the map and its distribution models have evolved, but the idea of synergy — building a multiple businesses into a united flywheel — remains embedded in Disney’s DNA. The core of which continues to be the intellectual property (IP) that Disney Animation churns out.

In today’s newsletter, I’m summarizing two articles that shed light on what business synergy looks like in the present day:

• What the NBA Can Learn From Formula 1 by Stratechery

• Epic Games Primer (Pt I): Epic's Flywheel & Unreal Engine by Matthew Ball

The first one gets into how F1 managed to turn a rich man’s sport into one that the masses follow avidly. The second one outlines how Epic Games built its business and is poised to become one of the sleeper picks of the tech industry.

And with that…

1. On market penetration: F1 vs the NBA — 

What the NBA Can Learn From Formula 1 by Stratechery

“Part of the brilliance of Drive to Survive is that it made everyone a star, from the most obscure midfield driver to team principals and CEOs; the powers-that-be in Formula 1 want to make sure they pay that off by not forgetting about the fans.”

I recently came to a shocking realization: In 2023, I’ve spent more time watching F1 than basketball. This is surprising because I grew up dabbling in basketball and watching the NBA. I did not grow up go-karting or watching F1. 

In my world, a career in racing is on the same lofty rung as horseback riding, golf, and country club memberships. It’s a path that is decidedly not for a kid like me, for whom getting a car for my birthday was a privilege and not a given.

Still in the past few months I found myself talking about Daniel Ricciardo more than Steph Curry. 

What happened? 

This article offers some answers. Here, Ben Thompson talks about how in recent years, F1 has been able to crack the US market, while the NBA — purveyors of a decidedly more popular sport — has seen a steady but gradual decline in its viewership. 

According to Thompson, part of it is thanks to Netflix’s Drive to Survive. Part of it is due to the organization’s diligence at earning new fans through new venues and fan-friendly rules. This combination led to brisk growth in F1’s viewership since the docuseries premiered in 2018

In contrast, the NBA has kept games on cable and continued to allow rules and behaviour that don’t make for great entertainment. Thompson explains:

“The [NBA] allows entertainment-killing nonsense like flopping and intentional fouling and endless timeouts and interminable reviews to continue, and refuses to shorten the season — increasing the importance of every game and making it more likely that star players play — for fear of losing gate revenue (and, until very recently, regional sports network revenue). Far too many players, meanwhile, seem to treat fans with derision, asking for trades or simply not trying, with seemingly zero appreciation that they are harvesting money that is downstream of structures put in place decades ago, which are rotting out as more and more CasualFans can’t be bothered to find an antenna, much less pay for cable.”

As a result, the ratings for the NBA finals has declined over the last five years, even when the 2022 finals featured two big market team — the Celtics and the Warriors:

In other words, F1 made it easy for non-fans and casual fans to dip their toes into the sport throughout its season. The NBA didn’t.

Critiquing the league’s approach to its biggest moneymaker, the NBA Finals, Thompson writes, “If interest was not sown throughout the year then the harvest may be smaller than hoped, particularly when it comes to the casual fans that drive the biggest ratings.”

As a casual basketball fan who only tunes in to playoffs if my local Toronto Raptors make it, I won’t go out of my way to pay for cable. I would watch the NBA if it was already in a bundle I owned, like Netflix or Disney+. But honestly, after spending hours watching Drive to Survive, I’m more likely to fly to Las Vegas or Montreal to watch an F1 race live than I am to pay for an ESPN subscription.

2. The Unreal Engine powering Epic’s business flywheel — 

Epic Games Primer (Pt I): Epic's Flywheel & Unreal Engine by Matthew Ball

I love learning about business models. In this essay, entertainment and media analyst Matthew Ball explores how Epic Games — best known as the maker of hit games like Fortnite, Gears of War, and Infinity Blade and as the company behind the gaming industry standard Unreal Engine — might be the quiet juggernaut that will dominate the technology industry in the years to come.

Video game companies have done an exceptional job at double- or triple-dipping into their value chain to generate revenue. While Epic is not the top grossing company in video games right now — the crown belongs to Activision — it does have an incredibly dense map of business that puts it on a strong upwards trajectory:

At the core of these businesses is the Unreal Engine — Epic’s proprietary game development software.

The majority of new game studios use Unreal because it is the most widely-deployed third-party gaming engine. For context, there are only two engines that dominate the $200 billion gaming industry: Unreal and Unity. While Unity is lightweight and easier to use, Unreal is more robust and ideal for richer, visual games.1 Riot Games, for example, chose Unreal to publish two of the most popular games in the world right now: League of Legends and Valorant.

Because of its ability to allow third parties to build virtual experiences, Unreal has slowly expanded into film, TV, and live events in recent years. Disney’s 2019 The Mandalorian, for instance, was shot entirely on Unreal. Ball writes:

“The entirety of The Mandalorian, from its unnamed ice world, to the desert planet Nevarro and the forested Sorgan — and every set within them — was almost exclusively shot on a single virtual stage in Manhattan Beach, California. This was critical to the show’s ability to offer film-grade visuals at half a film budget and more than twice the running time.”

Why is this important?

1. Consumers are demanding more immersive virtual experiences.

2. Unreal’s specialty in handling complex, cross-platform virtual environments positions it as a frontrunner to handle the needs for film, TV, live events, and even architecture.

Ball explains:

“[Using Unreal or Unity] allows for not just easier and more sophisticated rendering of their models, but also the ability to present fully functional simulations based around them.”

In other words, as we spend more time in virtual worlds, we will want more realistic experience — experiences that video game engines are able to deliver. Being the most widely deployed, cross-platform engine, Unreal is uniquely positioned as the frontrunner in this race to power — and extract value from — our digital future.

This essay from Ball is the first piece in a multi-part series on Epic Games’ business strategy and its network effects. If you’re curious about the intersection of entertainment and technology, I highly recommend digging into this along with the rest of the series.

What’s next?

Thanks for reading all the way down!

I’ll be staying on the topic of media, entertainment, and technology for the next few weeks; there’s so many more business models to dive into.

If you find articles on companies or industries that have interesting business models, please send them my way! I’d love to read them and feature them in the newsletter.

With that, have a great weekend. 

Stay strong, stay kind, stay human.

Till next week,

roxine

Last week’s newsletter had a 38% open rate. The top link you clicked on was Wait But Why’s article on “The AI Revolution: The Road to Superintelligence.”

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Last week, I shared a couple of articles that give a broad sweep of the AI landscape thus far. Today, I’m sharing a few ideas on how AI affects how we work and learn to wrap up this two-part series on AI. 

This week’s articles shed a lot of light on how AI affects our daily lives in the near term, particularly in 2023 and in the next 2 years:

1. "Generative AI: Autocomplete for Everything” by Noah Smith and roon

2. “AI Homework” by Ben Thompson

With that, here’s what I learned, shared, and paid attention to this week about AI:

1. “Will AI take my job?”

"Generative AI: Autocomplete for Everything” by Noah Smith and roon

Recently I've been seeing more artists publish posts that disown AI:

The captions say something along the lines of, "No AI was used in the creation of this work. I do not allow the use of my work in AI generators."

I’m not invalidating how an artist decides to share her work, but this week’s article from Noah Smith and roon offers an alternative perspective on the use of AI in creative work. From the article (emphasis mine):

"We think that the work that generative AI does will basically be 'autocomplete for everything'… Midjourney isn’t dreaming up 'Guernica' – there’s a limit of narrative abstraction to the text prompt after which it loses its grip and starts spitting out nonsense. It’s up to the artist to distill a creative motive, an inspiration, into simpler ideas a machine can understand, and iterate on this. At the moment, prompting is an inexact science where a human must find the right way to communicate intent to an AI – a problem not dissimilar to difficulties of delegating to other humans! Then finally, the artist must fix up any details the AI may have screwed up."

In other words, what if we embraced our new AI underlings as creative collaborators instead of as artistic rivals who are out to take our jobs?

This isn't a new suggestion. Creative collaboration has been a celebrated and crucial part of the creative process for hundreds of years.

Take Andrea del Verrocchio, a sculptor and painter who ran an important workshop in 15th century Florence. Even though his apprenticeship produced a handful of important Renaissance artists, Verrocchio’s workshop was less like an art school or studio, and more like a commercial design shop that produced paintings and sculptures on demand. 

In workshops like Verrocchio’s, artworks were products, not expressions of individual creativity. Like many master artists of his day, Verrochhio employed studio assistants called garzones (a.k.a. live-in interns) with whom he collaborated to create the commissioned works. One author writes, "The goal was to produce a constant flow of marketable art and artifacts rather than nurture creative geniuses yearning to find outlets for their originality."

Verrocchio was best known for his sculpting, not his painting skills. Collaborating with talented young artists was crucial for business. As a result, even an untrained eye can see the marks of this collaborative process in pieces like Verrocchio’s The Baptism of Christ. 

If you zoom in on the two angels, the left one in particular possesses what experts call "a melting softness." This is in contrast to the harsh sculpture-like angularity that pervades most of the work — a calling card to Verrocchio, the sculptor.

Even though this painting is attributed to Andrea del Verrocchio, it features contributions from apprentices in his studio. One of these apprentices, a then-unknown 17-year-old painted the angel on the left. This student would soon eclipse his master in skill, fame, and historical notoriety: Leonardo da Vinci.

Walter Isaacson writes about this master-apprentice collaboration in his book on the artist:

"X-ray analysis shows that Verrocchio, with his lesser feel for nature, had originally begun the background by drawing a few rounded clumps of trees and bushes, more wooden than sylvan. When Leonardo took over, he used oils to paint a richly natural view of a languid but sparkling river flowing through rocky cliffs, echoing his Arno River drawing and foreshadowing the *Mona Lisa*. Other than Verrocchio’s pedestrian palm tree, the backdrop displays a magical mix of natural realism and creative fantasia."

Of course, working with AI is different from working with other human artists.

I'm not here to debate the ethical implications of attribution and of using generative AI to produce creative work — personally, I’ll never publish anything that I copy-pasted from a ChatGPT response — but I am curious on how creatives can use AI as a way to jumpstart our creative processes and help us produce better work sustainably.

A final word on this from Smith and roon: 

“Just as some modern sculptors use machine tools, and some modern artists use 3D rendering software, we think that some of the creators of the future will learn to see generative AI as just another tool – something that enhances creativity by freeing up human beings to think about different aspects of the creation.”

2. “What should schools do about AI?” 

“AI Homework” by Ben Thompson

In this article, Thompson likens the use of ChatGPT in schools to the use of the calculator. He says:

"The obvious analogy to what ChatGPT means for homework is the calculator: instead of doing tedious math calculations students could simply punch in the relevant numbers and get the right answer, every time."

How teachers adapted to the calculator is a good starting point for dealing with ChatGPT in classrooms. Instead of banning calculators from classrooms, teachers asked students to show their work.

Instead of banning ChatGPT, educators can teach students to think critically. AI has devalued the skill of regurgitating facts on demand. Educators will now be forced to adapt teaching methods to emphasize asking questions thoughtfully, thinking critically, and editing ruthlessly.

With the advent of generative AI, educators and institutions must accept: 

1. There will be a lot more authoritative misinformation coming at internet users in the next few years. This means that…

2. Editing and critical thinking skills will become even more valuable.

Thompson concludes:

"There is a lot more bad information for the simple reason that it is cheaper to generate. Now the deluge of information is going to become even greater thanks to AI, and while it will often be true, it will sometimes be wrong, and it will be important for individuals to figure out which is which."

AI’s strong suit is probabilistically remixing available content on the internet. Humans’ strong suit is giving our AI underlings the right prompt, then verifying and editing the output. To paraphrase Thompson, while calculators offer an answer we can trust, generative AI offers a starting point we can correct.

What’s next?

This newsletters wraps up my survey of the AI landscape. In the last 2 weeks, I realize I’m less interested in Ray Kurzweil’s singularity — the point of no return when AI surpasses human intelligence — and on whether superintelligence is going to take over the world, than I am in what we can do about it in the near term.

I’m psyched to dive into a different part of the tech and business industry next week.

I’m finishing up my read of Sapiens and will also be publishing an essay on that this month. Stay tuned. 🫡

Stay strong, stay kind, stay human.

Till next week,

roxine

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The past 10 years have seen a “golden decade” for AI research, thanks to the invention of techniques like deep learning and the leaps we’ve made in hardware and computational power. 

I’ve been fascinated with AI since Apple released Siri in 2010, alongside the iPhone 4S. At that time, Siri could only do a small set of basic actions and only when the user used specific commands. 

Fast forward to 2023. Our voice assistants can do a whole lot more than let us call Mom handsfree. Siri can play specific playlists from Spotify, Alexa can buy items for us on Amazon, and Google can dim our lights and calibrate our temperature at home.

This begs the question: How did we get here? So this week I spent a lot of time gathering resources and reading about the historical developments in AI. In this week’s newsletter, I’ll share some of those resources.

But before that, here’s a follow up from last week. My friend Ryan sent me this clarification, after reading last week’s newsletter on disruption theory: 

“If I am understanding what you've written correctly [disruption theory is] about stealing market share from an incumbent on their least loyal customer base. This happens because companies tend to specialize on their most profitable market segment over time. 

“E.g. Wave accounting came in and realized that enterprise firms like Oracle or SAP have a really weak accounting offering for SMB customers. Oracle acknowledges this weakness and chooses not to invest in it because they make 80% of their revenue from enterprises anyway.”

A few notes:

1. Yes, one way to understand disruption theory is through market segmentation or the thin slicing of a market into niches. The other side is about turning non-consumers into consumers. 

2. The other key idea from disruption theory is that listening to a firm’s customers leads them to offer incremental — not disruptive — improvements. 

   
   A rational manager at a well-managed company will always choose to put resources towards serving its most profitable customers, over an untested technology. Because disruption is a innately illogical and unpredictable, making the safe choice doesn’t put the organization on a path of disruptive innovation.

The best practices in marketing and business — listening to your customers, generating demand before building the product — doesn't lead to disruptive innovation. In fact, the same practices that allow an incumbent to maintain market leadership could cause them to be blindsided by a true disruptor. 

I can't comment on Wave’s status as a disruptor (or not). I haven't looked into Wave’s story relative to Oracle and SAP, but here’s one thing I know: disruption theory does not guarantee profitability or business success. It merely posits on how a firm can bring an innovation to market and increase its chances of success. 

With that, here’s what I learned, shared, and paid attention to this week about AI:

1. The AI revolution, according to one of the biggest brains on the internet — 

The AI Revolution: The Road to Superintelligence by Tim Urban, Wait But Why

Tim Urban of Wait But Why is one of the most popular writers on the internet because he’s fantastic at making difficult topics easy and accessible to everyone. 

In this article, he takes several papers, books, and ideas that are key to understanding artificial intelligence, and condenses them into a digestible — albeit, monstrously long — blog post. This is an excellent introduction into the concepts and milestones that paved the way for the brisk, nascent breakthroughs that have sprouted up in the AI landscape in the past year.

Why read it: The post and its insights hold up well today, 8 years after they were first published in 2015. Not a lot of posts about futuristic technology can say the same. 

Here are two ideas that stuck to me:

1. The Law of Accelerating Returns. In his book The Age of Spiritual Machines, futurist Ray Kurzweil coins this law as an extension to Moore’s Law. As Urban explains it, “human progress moves quicker and quicker as time goes on.”

   
   While experts argue on the numerical accuracy of this law, the notion that we progress faster each day is a useful accessory in our mental toolbox. It reminds us to measure the velocity of technological progress — where civilization could be in 5, 50, and 100 years — relative to our present speed, not to our past.
   
   Under the Law of Accelerating Returns, getting to the next level of progress gets faster as time goes on. This is technology’s version of compounding, of the rich getting richer. 

2. The 3 calibers of AI:

   1. Artificial Narrow Intelligence (ANI), is AI that specializes in a single area, like recommending complementary purchases, playing GO, or driving our cars for us. We see ANI everywhere in our everyday gadgets.

   2. Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), is AI that is on our level in measurable areas of intelligence, like problem solving, learning, and abstract thinking. Our AI is not quite here yet, but it’s getting closer. We now have AI that can beat us in handwriting recognition.

   3. Artificial Super Intelligence (ASI), is AI that leading thinker Nick Bostrom defines as “an intellect that is much smarter than the best human brains in practically every field, including scientific creativity, general wisdom and social skills.” This could range from an intelligence that thinks just a bit faster than us, to the Kree Empire’s Supreme Intelligence in Captain Marvel. While we’re pretty far out from creating a superintelligence, the palpable possibility of a sentient being that is superior to mankind is one the reason why AI is such a hot topic these days.

I recommend reading Urban’s article to get a bird’s eye view of AI. This includes an overview of the strategies scientists are using to get us from ANI to AGI, what hardware and software we would need to get to superintelligence, and the opportunities and fears of recursive self-improvement in AI.

What’s next: For extra credit, check out the 3 books Tim referenced extensively in his post:

• Our Final Invention by James Barrat

• Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies by Nick Bostrom

• The Singularity is Near by Ray Kurzweil

2. A brief history of AI — 

The Brief History of Artificial Intelligence: The World Has Changed Fast – What Might Be Next? by Max Roser, Our World in Data

“All AI systems that rely on machine learning need to be trained, and in these systems training computation is one of the three fundamental factors that are driving the capabilities of the system. The other two factors are the algorithms and the input data used for the training.”

How did we get to this point where AI’s language and image recognition capabilities are on par with ours? While Wait But Why’s post tackles the broad stroke concepts, this one gives a chronological report of AI’s rapid development.

As the image above shows, over the last 20 years, AI has steadily improved in handwriting recognition, speech recognition, image recognition, reading comprehension, and language understanding. Check out the improvements in image generation quality over the years:

Finally, take a look at how Google Research’s PaLM correctly interprets 6 different jokes:

This last example — AI’s emerging ability to understand the nuance of human language — is the most mind-blowing development for me. In Sapiens, Yuval Noah Harari notes that the one thing that separates us from animals is our grasp of language. No other creature on earth has the ability to tell stories and use them to band together in large groups. But what happens to our place in the pecking order when another sentient (artificial) species can do this too? 

That’s worth pondering as we accelerate faster into a future where that might be a norm.

That's it for this week!

This is part 1 of a two-part newsletter series on AI. I hope this newsletter piqued your curiosity and made you wonder about how AI will affect how you live. I’m excited to keep digging and sharing what I’m learning in the coming weeks.

I’ll talk to y’all next Friday.

Stay strong, stay kind, stay human.

roxine

Hey friend!

If you've been in the tech industry for a while, then you've probably heard of the word "disruption" getting thrown around. Unfortunately, while many people like the idea of disrupting a new industry—after all, that's what gets VCs excited— many misunderstand the concepts of disruption. Folks who use it in pitch desks and Twitter threads use the idea of disruption in support of whatever venture or idea they're trying to persuade people of. They often haven't read the original books and papers on the subject.

You see, disruptive innovation by nature, is unpredictable. Misunderstanding the lessons of disruption leads to sloppy application, undermining the usefulness of disruption theory in the first place.

Disruption is also counterintuitive. Would-be disruptors who don’t have a deep grasp of the theory’s concepts will likely make the same mistakes that the theory seeks to help companies avoid.

So in today's newsletter, I’m synthesizing 3 key pieces of literature that I think are essential to comprehending what disruption theory really means.

1. "Disruptive Technologies: Catching the Wave" by Joseph L. Bower and Clayton M. Christensen. The original 1997 paper on the topic that defines disruptive and its antithesis, sustaining innovation.

2. "What Clayton Christensen Got Wrong" by Ben Thompson. A 2010 critique of Christensen's initial paper, by one of the foremost technology analysts and writers of our time.

3. "What Is Disruptive Innovation?" by Clayton M. Christensen, Michael E. Raynor, Rory McDonald. Christensen publishes a refinement of the theory, tackling Thompson's critiques head on.

Together, these will give you a profound understanding of what’s called the Innovator's Dilemma.

1. What is the theory of disruptive innovation?

"Disruptive Technologies: Catching the Wave" by Joseph L. Bower and Clayton M. Christensen

“Disruptive Technologies: Catching the Wave” is the paper Clayton Christensen published that introduced "disruptive technology" to the business world. Christensen is the business professor who developed the theory of disruptive innovation, which has been called "the most influential business idea [since its conception in 1997". He defines disruption as the process of how a smaller, less-resourced company can challenge established businesses—and win.

But what does that mean? First let's get into what it's not.

The opposite of disruptive innovation is sustaining technology or sustaining innovation. Sustaining innovation is about delivering better products and services to an existing customer base. Incumbent firms focus on existing customers who will almost always ask for better solutions to what they currently have, thus ignoring or intentionally overlooking other potential customer segments.

Disruptive innovations, on the other hand, begin be serving these overlooked customer segments or as Christensen says, “They seek to turn nonconsumers into customers." These disruptors then develop technologies and a business model that has the potential to meet customer needs faster than the incumbents.

While both types of innovation are important for firms to grow and thrive, many people confuse the two all the time.

Disruption theory describes how established firms can lose market share and leadership to new competitors, even after listening and delivering the right products to their best customers.

Disruption theory is important to understand because it is counterintuitive.

First, market leaders can lose to new, disruptive competitors not in spite of listening to their customers, but because they listen to their best customers.

Disruptive innovations create new consumers out of non-consumers. Sustaining innovations improve the current offering for existing customers.

Disruption requires that both technology teams and marketing teams work together to build innovation, that either

1. Brings it to an underserved niche, or

2. Offers it to an entirely unserved customer segment

The disrupting company might even need to hatch entirely new business models. On the other hand, sustaining technology is about meeting customer needs better, whether through incremental fixes or major breakthroughs.

To be clear, a piece of technology could be a major innovation, but if it is aimed to serve an existing market better, then under disruption theory, it is still a sustaining technology. Listening to one’s best customers causes a company to deliver sustaining, not disruptive, technologies.

One of the signs of a truly disruptive technology is having a lack of features (at least in the beginning).

An inferior starting point with a steep growth trajectory is a leading indicator of a truly disruptive technology.

According to Christensen, an innovation's trajectory is more important than its starting point. In other words, it's okay for potential disruptors to have less features than their competitors, as long as...

1. The features they have solve their target market's problems

2. Their product is on a steep trajectory to catch up1 to their target customers' needs

Because disruptive innovations tend to offer lower hardware specifications, slower performance, or a more limited feature set at the outset, market leaders and existing customers often dismiss them until it's too late.

This said...

Disruption is not a recipe for success.

Disruption theory identifies the symptoms of a truly disruptive technology and lays out countermeasures for incumbent firms to avoid being disrupted, but it's not a secret formula to business success. Nor is bringing a disruptive innovation to the market a surefire roadmap to market leadership.

In a follow up article to his original 1997 paper, Christensen uses the example of internet retailers in the Dotcom Crash of the early 2000s to illustrate this points.

“Any number of internet-based retailers pursued disruptive paths in the late 1990s, but only a small number prospered. The failures are not evidence of the deficiencies of disruption theory; they are simply boundary markers for the theory’s application. The theory says very little about how to win in the foothold market, other than to play the odds and avoid head-on competition with better-resourced incumbents.”

We’ll get into this follow up article in the third part of this newsletter, but first…

2. How does disruption theory hold up in history?

"What Clayton Christensen Got Wrong" by Stratechery

Now that we understand what disruptive innovation is about, how has the theory held up in the real world of business and technology?

One interesting take is from Stratechery's Ben Thompson. In this article, Thompson observes that the theory of disruption is based on examples drawn from business buying decisions, not consumer buying decisions. As a result, the theory has failed to hold up under the weight of one of the most successful consumer electronics companies of all time: Apple.

In the definition of disruptive innovations above, I mentioned that disruptors focus on overlooked or underserved customer segments. There's two ways a potential disruptor could do this:

1. Start with new markets — this is the original starting point that Christensen introduced in the article above, and in his first book The Innovator's Dilemma.

   Instead of serving an existing customer base better than the current players in the market, disrupters create new markets, turning non-consumers into consumers. Disrupters don't give people better horse-drawn carriages; they give them the Model T. Or as Steve Jobs would say, disrupters give consumers what they didn't know they wanted.

2. Start with low-end markets — the second part to the original theory, published 5 years after the first one, and expanded on in his next book, The Innovator's Solution.

   
   Most large firms try to target high-end, demanding customers with progressively better products and services. This leaves room for disruptors to undertake the low-end markets strategy and look to serve the cheaper, lower end of the market.

Paired with Thompson’s observation that Christen’s theory revolves mostly around business buying decisions, there are 3 reasons why disruption theory failed to account for Apple and the iPhone’s runaway success:

1. Consumers are irrational decision makers, unlike businesses who are highly rational and results-driven.

2. Consumers care a lot about ease of use and less about what's under the hood, unlike businesses buyers who care less about the user experience and more about performance.

3. Consumers who all want better experiences, are best served with Apple’s deep hardware-software integration, vs the vertical integration strategy2 the rest of the electronics industry adopts.

3. On what technological disruption really means — 

"What Is Disruptive Innovation?" by Clayton M. Christensen, Michael E. Raynor, Rory McDonald

First a quick timeline so far:

• 1997 – Christensen introduces the concept of disruption theory

• 2010 – Ben Thompson publishes his paper, using Apple as an example to critique disruption theory.

• 2015 – Christensen publishes this article that tackles Thompson's Apple challenge head on.

In this final article, Christensen doesn't address Thompson's idea that disruption theory best addresses business markets, vs consumer markets, but he answers the rest of Thompson's challenge:

Why did the iPhone become a disruptive success, even if it was a sustaining technology — a better smartphone — much like how Uber is merely a better taxi service?

According to Christensen, the disruption was not the iPhone itself, but what it came with. Apple offered a better smartphone, yes, but it also gave its customers the systems to make it more than just for calling and texting. They gave customers access to the iTunes Store to listen to the music they'd bought for their iPod. They gave customers an App Store that allowed them to download a compass, a ruler, a photo editor, and an ereader, on to a single device in their pocket.

Christensen shares that while the iPhone was a sustaining technology in the obvious market it entered — smartphones — it was a disruptor in the broader, non-obvious market of devices that access the internet. Christensen writes:

"The product that Apple debuted in 2007 was a sustaining innovation in the smartphone market: It targeted the same customers coveted by incumbents, and its initial success is likely explained by product superiority. The iPhone’s subsequent growth is better explained by disruption—not of other smartphones but of the laptop as the primary access point to the internet. This was achieved not merely through product improvements but also through the introduction of a new business model. By building a facilitated network connecting application developers with phone users, Apple changed the game. The iPhone created a new market for internet access and eventually was able to challenge laptops as mainstream users’ device of choice for going online."

The disruption wasn't in the phone. It was in the overall Apple user experience.

That's it for this week!

Stay strong, stay kind, stay human.

Till next week,

roxine

P.S. For further reading, I recommend Thompson's longer paper on the topic of Apple and disruption theory.

My last email on “The Paradox of Progress” had a 48% open rate. A warm welcome to the 7 new people who subscribed since then!

My goal is to publish 40 pieces of writing this year. Most of these will be weekly newsletters, with some longform essays sprinkled in.

With today’s edition, I’m restarting my weekly newsletter. Future emails will hit your inboxes every Friday.

Finally, I want each piece I publish to get a little better, in medium and in message, so I’d appreciate your feedback on what you liked and didn’t like about each one! Shoot those emails.

And with that…

Here’s what I learned, shared, and paid attention to this week:

1. On Pantone’s savvy business model — 

“Meet the People Who Decide What Design Trends Will Dominate Each Year” by Ivana Rihter

I read this 👆 article about Pantone’s Color of the Year a couple of weeks ago, so when a friend hit me up to attend a last-minute event with Pantone in New York, I jumped at the opportunity.

What is Pantone? Since its founding in the 1930s as a printing company, Pantone has established itself as the de facto industry standard for color. According to its website:

Pantone provides a universal language of color that enables color-critical decisions through every stage of the workflow for brands and manufacturers.

While color standards accounts for 70% of Pantone’s revenue, it has developed other businesses over the years: 

• Pantone Standards, established in 1963, is its bread-and-butter tool. It’s a numeric language for printers, designers, and manufacturers to accurately reproduce colors and achieve consistency across the board. This first came into being as a portable swatch book of 500 colors that fanned out to reveal color chips on a spectrum. Today, the book contains over 1,700 colors.

• Pantone Color Institute, is its consulting arm. Established in 1986, the Institute offers color recommendations and brand consulting to companies, as well as its much-anticipated Color of the Year and Fashion Runway Color Trend reports.

• Pantone B2B licensing allows companies to use Pantone’s system for their customers.

• Pantone Lifestyle is their line of merchandise, offering fans Pantone-inspired apparel, home furnishing, and travel accessories. 

Outside of its core community of professional designers, though, Pantone's brand has become synonymous with good design and cultural relevance. They’ve achieved this, thanks to their much-anticipated Color of the Year report.

To come up with it, Pantone forecasters and colorists do in-depth research and spot patterns in popular art, Netflix hits, and viral social media moments. For example, the 2023 Color of the Year is Viva Magenta. This selection was inspired partly by a combination of interiors from Netflix's series Bridgerton and the reddish hues from cochineal bugs — insects harvested to sustainably produce a reddish dye for cosmetics.

Leatrice Eiseman, an executive director at the Pantone Color Institute says:

"It’s not just a random choice made by a group of people sitting around. It’s not fluff. We tune in and ask: What is it that’s driving the world around us? What’s the zeitgeist we’re feeling out there?"

This was a fun little deep dive for me. Digging into Pantone’s history and business model was a great lesson on how a 50+ year old company managed to stay culturally relevant over the years and even maintain its leadership in design — an industry notorious for being susceptible to rapid shifts cultural trends and consumer behaviour. 

2. The tech of tomorrow are the toys of today — 

“The Next Big Thing Will Start Out Looking Like a Toy” by Chris Dixon

“The reason big new things sneak by incumbents is that the next big thing always starts out being dismissed as a ‘toy.’”

Chris Dixon is a general partner at the VC firm a16z and has been one of the biggest advocates of web3.

I reread his essay after attending last Wednesday’s Pantone panel on how technology, fashion, lifestyle, and color converge to affect the future of design. The discussions on the panel made realize that while crypto and NFTs still sound like amusing pastimes to many people, they might be considered serious technological disruptors in a few years. At the very least, blockchain — crypto’s underling technology — is worth keeping a sober eye on. 

In the present cultural narrative, fashion, art, and crypto share the same plane of existence: they’re luxuries. They’re expensive and frivolous. They’re fun hobbies for influencers, celebrities, and wannabes who have the time and the means for self-expression and financial speculation. 

Avatars, NFTs, and the metaverse, in particular, have sparked a lot of excitement in the fashion and art worlds. A fashion designer on the panel talked about launching their avatar at SXSW in March, along with their entire line of clothing. They pointed out how much easier becoming a virtual designer is, compared to being an IRL designer. After all, digital design is cheap to create, replicate, and sell. After spending time creating and coding a piece of clothing, they don't need to think about additional fabric, labour, and manufacturing overhead as variable costs. 

The decrease in effort and the increase in potential supply doesn’t equate to lower prices of goods, either.

A run of designs coded as limited NFTs introduces scarcity to a world of internet abundance. Each copy of the design is unique and able to be authenticated. Fashion houses like Chanel and Louis Vuitton could use the distinct grain patterns of their leather bags to create unique cryptographic hashes that certify each SKUs authenticity.

Here’s what I think: Even with these new business models and the amount of capital that has been poured into them in the last few years, art as NFTs merely scrapes the surface of what a distributed, worldwide ledger like a blockchain could do.

From my research, blockchain’s most powerful application will be in the global supply chain — not just for the businesses that profit from it. The benefits of blockchain is not simply about decreasing the black market for Gucci belts and Chanel purses. It’s about having accountability and transparency in the entire value network of trade.

Even we, the consumers, can benefit from this.

Having access to detailed product data gives us more knowledge, visibility, and power in our purchase decisions. Being able to vote on businesses, products, and brand values with our dollars takes power out of the hands of corporations and gives more of it to us, the people.

That's it for this week!

Here’s a photo of me at MoMA.

Stay strong, stay kind, stay human.

Till next week,

roxine

Roxine here. If you’re new to my work, quick intro: I’m a writer, marketer, and analyst who’s curious about what’s going on with commerce and tech and the history behind it.

I recently wrapped up a tour of duty in crypto and web3 — I spent late-2021 – 2022 bootstrapping Cabin’s marketing efforts (which you can read more about here and here) — and yet, I still struggled to answer a handful of important questions like:

• Why is crypto and blockchain such a breakthrough technology (or not)? 

• What is web3? And when did the other “webs” happen?

• What problems are crypto and blockchain solving? What’s the scale of these problems?

This led me to wonder how these can potentially affect the lives of regular people like you and me.

• Does all this new technology like blockchain, crypto, and now AI, herald a new era — akin to the development of the printing press and the steam engine? 

  • Follow up to that: What technology should we pay attention to? What can we safely ignore?

• How do we — regular citizens of earth and of the internet —  evaluate and handle these trends in tech and media?

• How do these trends affect technology’s its early and mass adopters, usually the consumers and producers of modern media?

So I’m embarking on a quest to answer these plus the money question on my mind: 

“We’ve got all these things going on in tech and business... 
1. What does history say about this?
2. So what?
3. What's next?”

I’m both uniquely unqualified and qualified to answer this. 

First off, I am not a trained historian or journalist. Nor am I a biologist, anthropologist, or any other “-ist”. You have been warned.

This said, I have spent the last 10 years working and thinking hard about content, marketing, ecommerce, and tech. I’ve been a keen observer of what’s gone down with ...

• Blogging and the creator economy

• SaaS and the unbundling of services

• Marketplaces and the platform/aggregator-ing of networks

 I’ve been digging into the history of technology and business, along with a bit of economics and political theory to add as much color as I can to the picture in my mind.

So while you can’t expect objective reporting or comprehensive academic advice from me, you can expect informed opinions that I personally believe in. Expect in-depth syntheses of trends as I see them, along with thoughtful, well-balanced insights that inform my own decision-making. 

And with that preamble, let’s talk about The Paradox Of Progress.

I’ve been doing a lot of heavy reading on history recently. To complement that, I dusted off and picked up an old video game again: Civilization VI. 

Civ — as players call it — is a turn-based strategy game where you play as a leader from history, directing their people against other civilizations to achieve global supremacy. There are 6 ways to win: science, culture, religion, diplomacy, and domination.

• For a Science victory, a player needs to establish a colony on Mars.

• For a Culture victory, a player needs to attract the most tourists to their cities.

• For a Religion victory, a player's religion needs to be the majority in every civilization in the game.

• For a Diplomacy victory, a player needs to earn the most diplomacy points through actions like mitigating global warming, sending military aid, or voting correctly in the World Congress.

• Finally, for a Domination victory, a player needs to conquer the capital city of every other civilization.

I play as Hojo Tokimune, an 11th century Japanese shogun who successfully repelled the Mongolian empire. The easiest way to win the game as Hojo is through a Domination victory. After sinking over 15 hours into a single campaign, I realized that even though my main strategy is military conquest, I can’t just spam samurais and fan them out over the continent. I still need to ... 

• Create trade routes, markets, and commercial hubs to fund my army

• Stay ahead in the sciences, so Gandhi thinks twice before trying to nuke me

• Build entertainment centers, theaters, and farms to keep my citizens happy and my cities growing

I just spent 300 words on a video game. Why is this relevant? Here’s what I realized:

1. Regardless of your victory path, you always end up going to war.

2. Blitzkrieg campaigns hardly succeed. You always have to pull all the levers of civilization to progress.

Life imitates art. And that’s exactly how human civilization has progressed over the last 12,000 years. For better or for worse.

I’m on my quest to study history so I can better understand and solve the present problems I see. In my research, I reread The Lessons of History — a summary of observations about humankind, distilled from a more comprehensive, 11- volume work called The Story of Civilization. Here’s how its authors Will and Ariel Durant defined progress:

“Progress is about increasing control of the environment by life.” 

Here’s the paradox of progress that I see:

Our biology compels us to do everything possible to progress the whole of civilization, even at the expense of individual well-being. The irony is that it is the individuals in the past and present who pay for the progress of the whole in the future and of a ruling class in the present.

In this essay, I’ll examine what progress has meant for us as a species, through the lens of this definition of progress. Here’s what I’ll cover: 

1. How did the human race achieve world domination (despite being physically inferior to many species on earth) ? 

1. Why is our overreliance on war to achieve progress problematic?

2. What does the paradox of progress look like, then and now?

3. What’s the cost of progress and who’s paying for it?

4. What’s next?

Before we get into the paradox of progress, though, we need to dig deep into our DNA and how humans have functioned for the last 12,000  years.

I. How humans conquered the world

“War is one of the constants of history, and has not diminished with civilization or democracy. In the last 3,421 years of recorded history only 268 have seen no war.”
— Will and Ariel Durant, The Lessons of History (1968)

Despite the fact humans are not physically strong, we love bullying the rest of earth’s creatures. 

Michael Phelps can’t outswim an octopus. But we eat octopus for dimsum.

Usain Bolt can’t outrun a llama. But we’ve domesticated llamas for tourism and entertainment.

Even three fully-grown alpha dudes can’t beat a single lioness in tug-of-war — a lioness who then goes back to her enclosure to live out her days in captivity. 

Why is that?

For one, maybe it’s because our species is so physically weak that we do this. Like bullies on the playground, our insecurity and obsession with survival drives us to either completely obliterate or domesticate all of nature. 

As control freaks with weak bodies, we humans used our Big Brainpower, multiplied by technology and sheer numbers to wage war on the rest of the planet. Let’s call this the Human Control Freak Production Function.

The Human Production Function paved the way for dominion and progress. We fought our way through the tundras and savannahs to emerge victorious in the Cognitive Revolution. We built towns and cities in the Agricultural Revolution. We transcended the Scientific Revolution, ushered in the Industrial Revolution, and — if we’re to believe Bitcoin maxis — we’re now at the cusp of a new technological revolution.

Here’s a brief summary of how that happened.

The process of conquering the earth began with the discovery of fire. This allowed us to fight off direwolves and cook food. We were still beholden to the elements but at least, we had a weapon against wild animals. 100 points for human survival.

Then we began farming wheat and domesticating animals. We settled down into warm homes, narrowed our diet, and lived in closer proximity to each other. Despite the increase in sickness and death, our populations grew. 300 points for human survival.

Over the next few thousand years, thanks to our competitive instincts, we “subdued the earth and everything in it.” We built skyscrapers, coded social networks, and accumulated enormous wealth along the way. As of this writing, humans are the apex predators of earth, the undisputed omniweight world champions. 1,000 points for the survival of human DNA. 

But we paid a heavy price to get here. In our bones (literally) we think that we’re still at war. Biologically, many of us behave like we’re still in the grasslands of Africa, plotting trench warfare against a neighboring tribal band who stole our food. 

Or our toilet paper. 

 Why is that?

II. The biological basis for war

In Civilization VI, if a leader declares war on another without due cause, they get what’s called a warmongering penalty. This ranges from moderate to severe and affects their final score in the game. Folks, we’ve been abusing the laws of nature, gaming the system, and decimating entire species for the last 10,000+ years. It’s time to pay up.

IIa. The natural laws

Let’s start by talking about laws we’ve been hacking — the laws of nature. I’m a practicing Christian, so I’m not supposed to say this but ...  According to evolutionary biology, there are 3 laws of life:

1. Competition – Human DNA > Animal DNA

2. Selection – Some human DNA > Other human DNA

3. Reproduction – DNA, multiplied by 7,000,000,000

Our natural programming optimizes for the flourishing and preservation of human DNA. In other words ... 

1. More us, less them

2. More Us, less Them

3. More, more US

Our society is built on an Us vs Them mentality. This sounds great for us on paper, but I see 3 reasons why this has become problematic (and how the system we’ve been gaming, is now gaming us):

1. A general desire for more. Our biology tells us that we win the nature race if there is more human DNA populating the world than any other type of DNA. More of us means a lower chance of our kind being eradicated, and a higher likelihood our civilization will continue to live long and prosper.
   
   This is the root of the rest of our problems.

2. A thirst for war. Warmongers, remember? In our hunter-gatherer era, we took out most of the large land mammals. Since then, we have worked together in our tribes to kill off other tribes of humans. (Sometimes we even rationalize this by saying that they are in fact, not human, and that they deserved to die. Brutal.)
   
   Now that we’re not being threatened by saber-toothed tigers and most of us don’t murder other people who don’t share the same worldview (ex. pineapple on pizza), we continue to find other things to fight about: 

   • Vaccines

   • The color of our skin or our political leaning

   • Toilet paper 

3. A small number of powerful people. This is how we created order amidst a species of apex predators: create a class system, identify the alphas, and get everyone else to pay the penalty.
   
   See, you and I are the descendants of people who either ruled or were ruled.
   
   Rulers are those who chanced upon circumstances, talent, or skills that the rest of us deemed valuable. They worked with our biological programming and prospered. Back in the day, they were the royals, courtiers, and landowners. These days, we have billionaires, reality TV stars, and landlords. Rulers generally lived a pretty comfortable life. No warmongering penalty.
   
   Everyone else? In the old days, folks who wouldn’t or couldn’t rule did not have a fun life. My ancestors, for example, chose to bend over their herds and rice paddies, rather than raise their heads in defiance and risk getting shot by the Chinese communists. Everyone else paid the cost.
   
   Thanks to our brave, subservient ancestors, we have things a lot better these days. (I know I sound sarcastic, but I’m truly thankful. More on this later.)

IIb. The extreme side of the natural laws

Phew. That’s a lot. Here’s what we’ve got so far. 

Despite having created a world of abundance and safety, we’re still anxious. We worry about the future. We’re wary of what we don’t know. We continue to operate as if we’re hunter-gatherers, jumping and turning our weapons towards the slightest agitation. We are still afraid. 

Despite having raised the standard of living for our kind and made our lives more convenient, instead of doing more with what we have, we just got… Softer. Modern day bourgeoisie live in mini-palaces with appliances for convenience, smartphones for social connection, and media systems for entertainment. But even though we don’t break our backs on the fields, we slouch in front of our smartphones and social media platforms instead. We crave more ease.

Despite standing as the apex predators of earth, numbering billions, we continue to pursue pleasure, dopamine, and more happy feelings, regardless of the long term consequences to ourselves or other people. We still want more.

Here’s how the Durants put it in The Lessons of History:

“We have multiplied a hundred times our ability to learn and report the events of the day and the planet, but at times we envy our ancestors, whose peace was only greatly disturbed by the news of their village.

We double, triple, centuple our speed, but we shatter our nerves in the process.”

Harkening back to my playground analogy: whether we like it or not, humans are bullies who have muscled our way to the top of the good chain. Now that we’ve got the entire world at our feet, we want more: taller buildings, faster wifi, more immersive virtual experiences. 

Remember how I mentioned what a big problem this is? Yeah, this insatiable craving for more leads us to continue paying warmongering penalties like individual suffering — one that many of us aren’t even aware we’re paying.

But before we get to that, we need to take a detour and ask: How did we even get here?

III. How we won the world (but lost our soulS) 

Add a dash of philosophy to what we’ve learned about biology and history so far, and we get The Paradox of Progress:

Our biology compels us to do everything possible to progress the whole of civilization, even at the expense of individual well-being. The irony is that it is the individuals in the past and present who pay for the progress of the whole in the future and of a ruling class in the present.

Here’s what I mean by that.

Remember our ol’ friend Progress? Here’s the ironic thing about it. 

Progress is measured by the average human’s ability to control their environment. In the relentless pursuit of progress, we’ve forgotten that every data point in that average is made up of individuals, made up of us.

What this means is that in the long run, progressing civilization at the expense of individual well-being hurts the whole. Without the careful cultivation of individual autonomy and creativity, overall development grinds to a halt. In The Lessons of History, there’s two chapters on growth and progress (highly recommend reading it) and here’s a juicy paragraph from it:

“When the group or a civilization declines, it is through no mystic limitation of a corporate life, but through the failure of its political or intellectual leaders to meet the challenges of change… What determines whether a challenge will or will not be met... Depends upon the presence or absence of initiative and of creative individuals with clarity of mind and energy of will (which is almost a definition of genius), capable of effective responses to new situations (which is almost a definition of intelligence).”

At first the paradox took the form of wealthy landowners and monarchs who profited off the surplus of food that their peasant population painstakingly pulled from the ground. Our ancestors worked the construction crews of ancient Egypt, the rice paddies of Fujian, and the assembly lines at Ford — all so that we can have the wonders of the Great Pyramids, the culinary and cultural delights of China, and the marvel of the car.

Today, history has favored the technology platform owners who optimize their apps for daily active eyeballs, making billions of dollars off of advertising and of people’s time. 

Us? We fill out spreadsheets and build slide decks so that Corporate can hit their revenue goals (and fire us if they don’t).

We agree to do what’s good for our quarterly OKRs, what’s good for the team, even at the expense of our mental health and our relationships.

We fold and tuck away our creative pursuits, only pursuing side hustles that could turn into businesses, because that’s what gets people’s attention, the work funded, and the mortgage paid.

We’ve been conditioned to delay gratification of our deepest desires for the good of the family, the community, the company, and — if our job is important enough — the world. 

Tech companies are the modern day ruling class. We — the users — are the modern day equivalent of peasants and rice farmers. 

OK, now we know how we got here. We’re ready: What did individuals have to pay so that our society could continue its endless march towards wealth and prosperity?

IV. The rise of the modern day peasants 

Think about Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs.

At first, individuals gave up physiological and safety needs to progress civilization:

• Farmers gave up back muscles and fair skin to give us food.

• Families gave up their sons and daughters to secure national safety.

• Assembly line workers gave up their health to give us microprocessors.

Fortunately these days, most of us live in a society where our basic needs are easily met. Plus most of us spend half our lives in the virtual, too.

Full bellies, work anywhere, endless entertainment. Yay, progress!

But — and you knew this was coming —  progress as a whole continues to be paid for at the individual level. Modern day humans have begun giving up love and belonging, esteem, and self-actualization — the costs for our higher standard of living:

• We gave up communal farm living to move to 1+1 condos in the cities for a better future. We turned down leisure and social gatherings to work. 

• We gave up peace of mind, contentment, attention, and the ability to focus for the fleeting, dopamine-laden pleasures of our Instagram feeds. 

• We traded our desires for creativity, autonomy, and purpose for mindless but stable jobs.

I’m not saying that technology and progress is bad. In fact, we have these new sets of problems because we’ve become so successful as a society at meeting people’s basic needs. 

Knowing that progress by default means that our lives could get sh*tty if we don’t carve out a path for ourselves. It’s up to us to create our own proverbial bomb shelters.

So what do we do?

V. The revolt of the modern day peasant

In this essay, I've repeated the definition of progress for a civilization. I covered our history and our biology, and brought us to the present and how we’re continuing to pay for the decisions of our forefathers.

But even as I harp on what tech and media companies are doing, they’re merely taking advantage of our natural inclinations. These are the systems of nature embedded in our DNA:

• To resist or ignore views, people, and ideas that we disagree with

• To pursue pleasure, not pain

• To get more of anything, for ourselves

See, I’m not writing this to stick it to the man. I’m not writing this to change a company’s business practices, or to topple a nation’s political system. I’m not writing this for Mark, Jeff, or Elon (but if you are reading this, sup?). 

I’m writing this for you, because the power is with the individual. With us. 

Throughout history, technology and progress were tools that had been exploited by the ruling class. But it’s also what’s given the peasants, merchants, and artists a way to resist and revolt.

Here’s why I’ve repeated the definition of progress so much. 

Because if progress is about life’s control over the environment and we’ve basically conquered our external environment, then isn’t control over our internal environment the next logical step? 

And technology is there to help us.

• We get to choose how much time we spend on Instagram and Tiktok — and have apps like Freedom help us stick to our resolution. 

• We can create essays, art, music, code with Google Docs, Procreate, Ableton, Python and get paid for it directly via Substack, Convertkit, Patreon, or Mirror.

• We don’t need to make as much money or own more stuff because we can live somewhere cheaper, while staying connected working online with the internet and esim providers like Airalo. 

The modern day ruling class might be to blame (and to praise) for all the progress we’ve made. But the mantle of responsibility and ownership over Progress is beginning to fall to us, the individual. 

It’s up to us to have control over our addiction to dopamine and our desire for endless pleasure on our phones. 

It’s up to us to flex our creative muscles and produce work only we can do, stuff we would do even if no one paid us to do it.

It’s up to us to use the access, technology, and opportunities of the Internet Age to exercise our power as sovereign individuals.

That’s it for this week. Talk soon!

— Roxine

Deliberate practice refers to a set of activities done intentionally to improve performance. For athletes, this means doing drills until movements and plays become muscle memory, not just playing a scrimmage or a game. For musicians, this means working on a challenging piece, measure by measure for hours, until they can run through it flawlessly, versus playing a piece of music that they’ve already committed to memory. 

But if you’re reading this, then chances are, you’re not a professional athlete or musician. You’re like me: you’re a knowledge worker who wants to grow in their job, or a creative person who wants to improve their craft. How do we implement deliberate practice as knowledge workers? 

In other words, how do we employ deliberate practice to become more creative and get better at thinking and at creativity?

Today, we’re looking at how Tyler Cowen, one of the internet’s most influential economists, hones his thinking and develops his ideas. 

Tyler Cowen is a professor of economics at George Mason University and writes about society, culture, arts, and ethnic food. In his weekly podcast Conversations with Tyler, he “engages today’s deepest thinkers in wide-ranging explorations of their work, the world, and everything in between.” Since 2003, his popular blog Marginal Revolution has offered insights and intellectual fodder for the internet’s most curious minds. 

How does someone like him — who’s already arguably in the top 1% of his field —  continue to get better at his job?

In his post entitled “How I Practice What I Do”, Cowen answers this question. He writes:

1. I write every day.  I also write to relax.

2. Much of my writing time is devoted to laying out points of view which are not my own.  I recommend this for most of you.

3. I do serious reading every day.

Let’s break that down.

I. Clear writing is clear thinking

Cowen publishes primarily on his blog Marginal Revolution (MR). Along with his co-author Alex Tabarrok, he often posts multiple times a day. For example, here’s what he published on a single day in January 2023 ...  

• His comments on an article from The New York Times

• Some tips on using ChatGPT

• A collection of links he found interesting

• A call for questions to ask the owner of Comedy Cellar

• An RIP on the passing of a game theorist and fellow economist

Cowen uses writing as a way to document and share what he’s learned — particularly, if he reads a noteworthy article, stumbles on an interesting idea, or discovers a new line of thinking. Marginal Revolution is less of an evergreen resource (think, Stratechery) and more of a way to collect interesting scrap from the internet and to document his intellectual journey (think, Tumblr). 

This brings us to the second intellectual practice strategy he employs.

II. Summarize other people’s ideas to hone your thinking

In F. Scott Fitzgerald’s essay The Crack Up, he writes: 

“The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.” 

Similarly, in Cowen’s quest to understand economics better, he seeks to deeply understand other people’s ideas. He writes: 

Much of my writing time is devoted to laying out points of view which are not my own. 

Specifically he does this through “cracking culture codes”. He explains:

“I’ve long been convinced that ‘matters of culture’ are central for understanding economic growth, but I’m also painfully aware these theories tend to lack rigor and even trying to define culture can waste people’s time for hours, with no satisfactory resolution. I figured the best way to understand culture was to try to understand or ‘crack’ as many cultural codes as possible.  As many styles of art.  As many kinds of music.  As many complex novels, and complex classic books, and of course as many economic models as well.  Religions, and religious books.  Anthropological understandings.  I also learned two languages in my adult years, German and Spanish (the former better than the latter).”

One example of attempting to understand what makes a culture tick is Cowen’s blog about ethnic restaurants in the Washington, DC area and his ethnic food guide. Connecting the dots between economics, culture, and food, he says:

“Restaurants manifest the spirit of capitalist multiculturalism. Entrepreneurship, international trade and migration, and cultural exchange all come together in these communal eateries.”

Along the lines of cracking cultural codes, Cowen launched his biweekly podcast. In contrast to all the reasons most people start podcasts, Conversations with Tyler is primarily for intellectual sparring practice with people he finds interesting. Preparing to interview these guests forces Cowen to dive into unexplored topics or to reexamine old ones with fresh eyes. 

Which brings us to the last strategy he employs.

III. Read books that challenge you

Like a pianist laboring through a piece from Liszt instead of an old favorite like Für Elise or Claire de Lune, part of Cowen’s deliberate practice plan is reading about a topic that he knows very little about. He writes: 

“I’ve been reading a good deal lately about neural nets, transformers, and other AI-related topics, but not understanding it very well.  YouTube videos have helped only a little.  We’ll see if I ramp up those efforts or discard them.  I am learning a lot from playing around with GPT, however, and maybe I’ll ask it what else I should read.”

But unlike a musician playing tunes that they’ve already mastered, in the case of books, there is value in rereading old favorites. In Cowen’s reading list for the first half of 2023, alongside a list of new books and topics (“[I read] what is recommended to me by credible others”), there’s also a handful of rereads (“the New Testament”) and reviews of familiar authors (“Jonathan Swift’s work”) and topics (“British history”). Rereading a handful of “quake books  – books for one reason or another shook up our view of the world (pun intended) – can serve us just as much as reading a selection of new tomes. 

Recommendations

To learn more, here’s the 1993 research paper that coined the term “deliberate practice”. To go deeper, check out Peak by Anders Ericsson — the same academic who spearheaded the study. For more examples on using writing to document learning, here’s Bob Woodward on using blog posts as reporting memos.

If you’d like another example of how publishing online leads to intellectual evolution, check out my curation of author Cal Newport’s earlier work on deep work, focus, and productivity. Some of these were published while he was still a graduate student, almost 10 years before his books So Good They Can’t Ignore You and Deep Work came out and yet, you can clearly trace his intellectual curiosity veering in that direction. 

It’s annual review season! Here’s a recap of my 2022. As always, this review answers 4 questions:

• What went well?

• What didn’t go well?

• What did I learn?

• What’s next?

If you’d like to check out my previous reviews, here’s 2021, 2020, and 2019.

What went well?

I had a lot to be thankful for this year.

My personal MBA, courtesy of my work at Cabin. OK, I didn’t actually go back to school to get an MBA. But I did treat the past year I spent at Cabin as a hands-on equivalent of a graduate. At Cabin, I had the unique opportunity of being given as much responsibility as I dared to take on, while working at the cutting edge of technology and human organization. 

I took this as a challenge to get an MBA crash course, with a highly personalized "curriculum". Whenever I faced a problem, I would find books, articles, and mentors who could help me find and execute a solution. I wrote memos to myself and to my teammates to document my lessons, opinions, and ideas.

Under my direct care, our content production scaled, we launched and grew the newsletter, and hit 11k on Twitter. Cabin’s brand became known for our content: both for having a thoughtful vision and for being ahead of the curve for how we work with our media contributors. During the 2nd half of the year, I also orchestrated the positioning, launches, and promotions of all our IRL events on our existing content channels this year.

Creativity. I finally grew  comfortable enough to call myself a creative. Following The Artist's Way, I kept a near-daily journal and went on multiple dates with my creative self: I enjoyed museums, tried new restaurants, went on walks, and bought myself toys that brought out my inner child, like a Nintendo Switch. I also allowed myself to dream and take steps towards a future I never thought would be mine: that of a professional writer. I took classes in creative writing, investigative journalism, and design.

This year I built in time to have fun. I read novels because they were interesting to me, not because I had a use for them. I went down Wikipedia rabbit holes on the stories behind commercially successful creative projects and the people who put them out into the world. I spent hours in museums, reading plaques, and taking notes. Here are my favourite novels from the year:

• Jade Legacy by Fonda Lee

• The Priory of the Orange Tree by Samantha Shannon

• The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo by Taylor Jenkins Reid

Bucket list travel. I did the most traveling I'd ever done this year. I was outside of the country for 3 out of 12 months this year. But even though most of this was work travel, I made sure to make time to check off some bucket list items along the way:

• Saw Hamilton on Broadway with my parents in June

• Tried out digital nomading in Lisbon, Portugal

• Went backcountry camping in Yosemite

• Went scuba diving for the first time and made progress towards my PADI license

• Test drove a Tesla

• Tried a boxing class

• Played ultimate frisbee in the Philippines

I also summited a 14er — a mountain peak that exceeds 14,000 feet — rented a Mustang convertible, and went on a solo roadtrip in Colorado.

Relationships. While I enjoyed a lot of alone time in 2022, my favourite moments of 2022 were spent with friends and family. I slept over at an old friend's place in Singapore, spent a weekend at a cottage with my family, and even took a few days (and a plane ride!) to watch my friends play world-class ultimate frisbee. 

Career. This past year, I had some realizations and made some hard decisions. I realized that I’ve been in marketing for 7 years and I feel that I’ve learned everything I want to know about the field. As a result, I decided to take a (positive!) step back from my marketing career and commit to my creativity — to write and publish more for myself (more on this at the end).

Gym-ing. I started the year off with no gym membership and low interest in working out, aside from my ultimate frisbee games. Going to the gym is an event I look forward to, rather than a necessary evil. Now I have friends to go with, a trainer who plans my workouts, and an internal drive to get stronger. 

What didn't go well?

While I’m proud of my wins across the board, there are a number of areas in my life that I feel I could improve on:

Personal writing. Because I'd been so focused on work and producing content for Cabin, I had little time to publish on my own channels and only published 5 essays on my blog this year — an all time low. To put this into perspective, I published thirty eight in 2021, eleven in 2020, and fifteen in 2019. This year, I’m recommitting to writing and publishing for myself (more on this later).

Being organized. Despite my overall productivity, I felt all over the place. I often felt like I wasn't doing enough each day. To-do's oftentimes fell through the cracks. I had to set numerous reminders for myself, to make sure things got done. 

Responsiveness. A lot of emails and DMs were left unanswered. I found myself having to declare email bankruptcy — I just archived everything, and only responded to follow ups, apologizing profusely for my lack of responsiveness. 

In 2023, the lighter workload will help me catch up with my overflowing to-do list. I’ll also have the space to cultivate my productivity habits. Finally, I’ll actively protect this lack of busy-ness and say no to projects that don’t directly help my writing.

What did I learn?

As part of my efforts to stoke the fire of my creativity and reconnect with my inner kid, I tried several new things this year. Here's what I enjoyed and didn't enjoy:

I like...

• Writing. A lot. I spent many weekends learning about and writing notes on history and technology. I also spent a lot of time understanding the lives and careers of commercially successful creatives. This is the work I would do, even if no one paid me to do it.

• Reading biographies. As I write this, I just finished reading Lou Gehrig by William C. Kashatus and I’m halfway through Jordan Mechner’s journals, The Making of Prince of Persia. I prefer reading these over self-help or more declarative books.

• Researching to pursue my curiosity. Curious what inspired the fiction authors I read, I love going down Wikipedia rabbit holes on the most random topics like the Qing dynasty, the Nordic decorative art of rosemaling, and the origins of the Rick Roll meme. Again, I would spend hours writing essays on these for free.

• Traveling to spend time with people, or by myself to learn. The most creatively fulfilling times this year came from visiting museums and art galleries by myself. At the same time, some of the most enjoyable moments of my year were when I was traveling with friends and family.

• All-inclusive resorts. I went to a couple this year. While some people in find them boring, I don’t. I see them as a place where I can read by the beach all day without worrying about my meals.

• Training to play ultimate frisbee. I find that I enjoy going to the gym, getting stronger, and seeing the results of that work on the field. 

• Leading and managing people. I liked seeing people flourish and produce work that is even better than how I would’ve done it. This year, I realized that I’m pretty good at this, too.

• Building systems for work. I learned to parallel process doing the work in front of me and thinking about how I could scale. This was a lot of fun to do.

• Driving nice cars and roadtrips. Thanks to Turo, I got to take a few Audis and a Mustang convertible out for long drives in the Eastern Sierras, the Colorado Rockies, and the Texas Hill Country.

• Snowboarding. I can barely get on the lifts, but I like the challenge.

• Design. As part of my creative awakening, this year I took Nate Kadlac’s Approachable Design course. It was exciting seeing how my interests and curiosities inspire what I create. 

• Camping. I went camping for the first time this year and I slept outside of my tent, under the stars. My group and I got lucky: no rain and no bugs.

I don't like...

• Hiking. I did quite a bit of hiking this year so I can say that I gave it a good solid try ...  But it really isn’t my passion. I enjoy walking and I like it if I can go at my own (very slow) pace to enjoy nature.

• Traveling and working, simultaneously. Travel is too disruptive to do good work. On the other hand, I don't like having deadlines to meet or people to respond to when I want to explore a new place. I enjoy traveling but I don't want to be a digital nomad.

• Airplanes and airplane food. I just sleep on planes.

• Bouldering. I enjoyed watching Free Solo and seeing friends at the bouldering gym, but that’s about it.

What's next?

I alluded to a number of upcoming professional changes: stepping back from Cabin and marketing, and pursuing a more creative career. 

Why now? Throughout my 7- year career in marketing, I’ve had to figure everything out myself, including most recently, learning product marketing and growth at Cabin. To grow in my career, there are a few distinct paths forward: 

1. Get a product marketing job in an established company with an experienced leader 

2. Learn a different but complementary skill, like design or software development, and change career paths

3. Use my marketing knowledge to build a business around my own writing and interests

After acknowledging my waning interest in content marketing and in working for other people, option #3 excited me the most. My main focus in 2023 will be to spend most of my time on the projects I enjoyed the most in 2022: writing and growing an audience around my interests.

This said, I'm not leaving the Cabin community. I'm available to Cabin for freelance projects (what we call "bounties"), but I'm stepping away from being a full-time worker. Aside from that, I don't intend to take on any freelance writing, content writing, or content marketing projects this year. I want to give my writing and my ideas the chance to develop and flourish.

And with that, I’ll talk to y’all soon. 👋

Here's quote from the book Elements of Fiction Writing: Scene and Structure:

“…fiction must make more sense than real life if general readers are to find it credible. So, for example, in real life someone may fall ill for no apparent reason and with no evident cause. In fiction, the character would have to be seen depressed about recent developments and tired from overwork.”

Since reading this quote referenced in Nat Eliason's essay "What Would Happen to You in a Book?", it's come back to me again and again over the past month:

• My fiction writing brain thinks: fiction must make sense, even though real life doesn't. Note taken for my own writing.

• My armchair philosopher brain thinks: maybe fiction must make sense because real life doesn't. Oo, let's unpack this...

I'm always looking for patterns in life. I want to make sense of what's happening to me. I want some assurance that the pain I go through has meaning. And every so often, I just need a break from real life.

This is why fiction is crucial to our culture and our society.

Dreaming about a day when we open our window to an owl with our Hogwarts acceptance letter clutched in its beak, helps us make sense of, give meaning to, and add a dash of profundity to the mundane.

Seeing Charlize Theron’ Furiosa topple the patriarchal society she lives in against heart-wrenching setbacks makes difficult truths more palatable and a better future seem more achievable.

Watching Tony Stark/Ironman vanquish Thanos with the same snap the Deviant used to destroy half the world's population helps us get out of bed, knowing that no matter how difficult life gets, at least we're not an Avenger.

Fiction is a way to tell the truth through memorable lies. As legendary novelist Neil Gaiman writes in Art Matters — a call to arms for artists, writers, and creators —

“Fiction is the lie that tells the truth. We all have an obligation to daydream. We have an obligation to imagine. It is easy to pretend that nobody can change anything, that society is huge and the individual is less than nothing. But the truth is individuals make the future, and they do it by imagining that things can be different.”

Sorry I’ve been AWOL for the past 3 weeks. Write of Passage Cohort 6 kicked off, along with the Christian Education class I’m helping teach at church.

BUT good news today: I got out of my writing rut and published a new post on James Clear’s newsletter.

I’ve also got a few more articles in the pipeline that I am pumped to share with you, particularly one around writing newsletters. But for now and without further ado… Here’s James Clear.

This post was first published on RoxineKee.com where you can also find the full footnotes for this article.

Most internet writers-turned-authors recycle their online articles into books. Their post-book newsletters tend to be similar: more chest-thumping and rehashing of ideas, solutions, or opinions for which the author is already known. 

I won’t name names, but I once bought a “bestseller” from a 20-something internet guru. I’d admired his early business success and studied his work thoroughly. 

Halfway through the book, I had a sense of déjà vu. 

I wasn’t sure why.

Until I realized that I had read the stories in the chapter before. In fact, I could have copied his articles into a document, got it printed and bound, and I would have produced a near-perfect replica of his book.

Dis gus ting.

Because of this gag-inducing impression I had of online writers, I ignored James Clear’s 3-2-1 newsletter for a while. 

(James, if you’re reading this, no offense. I’m a fan.)

Now, I didn’t always ignore James Clear’s newsletter. In fact, I’d been subscribed to it since 2017 when he sent long form articles every Tuesdays and Thursdays. He struck me as a smart, straight up guy.

But I stopped reading his emails after I read Atomic Habits and he began sending his 3-2-1 curation newsletter, instead of articles. 

I thought, “Eh, more of the same habits stuff from the book. Another 5 Bullet Friday ripoff.”

That is, until I saw this quote he posted on Instagram:

“Some people need more focus. Others need to broaden their perspective. 
Some people need to try harder. Others need to stress less. 
Some people need to care more. Others need to let it go. 
The secret is you are both people. The key is to know which one you are in the moment.” 

Damn. That hit home for me at that time. I decided to give his newsletter another shot. 

And I’m glad I did. 

3-2-1’s tagline is, “The most wisdom per word of any newsletter on the web.” 

That’s not an exaggeration. James Clear doesn’t just take pithy quotes from his book and shares them in an email.

• The “3” ideas from him are tweet-sized, impactful words of uncommon wisdom

• The “2” insights from others are a gateway drug to discover ideas and books from thinkers that have influenced him (and you know how much I love going straight to the source)

• The “1” question is a reset button that I use for reflection or journaling

While I’m seriously tempted to turn James’ newsletters into an almanack, for now, I’ll settle for this collection of the best of James Clear’s 3-2-1 newsletter.

Leverage habits & behaviour change: How to start becoming who you want to be

• Don’t miss two. “True behavior change is identity change. Anyone can convince themselves to visit the gym or eat healthy once or twice, but if you don’t shift the belief behind the behavior, then it is hard to stick with long-term changes. Improvements are only temporary until they become part of who you are.” 1

• “People generally have more control over their actions than their feelings. But we can influence our feelings by taking action. Take one small step. Move the body first and the mind will follow.”

• “Motion feels like progress. Action is progress.” 2

• “If you genuinely care about the goal, you’ll focus on the system.” 3

• “The more disciplined your environment is, the less disciplined you need to be. Don't swim upstream.” 4

• “3 things that help habits stick:

  1. Repetition. Habits form based on frequency, not time

  2. Stable context. If the context is always changing, so is the behaviour. You need a reliable environment.

  3. Positive emotions. If it feels good, you’ll want to repeat it” 5

Play long term games: How to develop ironclad discipline

• 1% better every day. “The most useful form of patience is persistence. Patience implies waiting for things to improve on their own. Persistence implies keeping your head down and continuing to work when things take longer than you expect.” 6

• “Greatness is consistency.
  Meditating once is common. Meditating daily is rare.
  Exercising today is simple. Training every week is simply remarkable.
  Writing one essay rarely matters. Write every day and you're practically a hero.
  Unheroic days can make for heroic decades.” 7

• “Aim to be great in 10 years. Build health habits today that lead to a great body in 10 years. Build social habits today that lead to great relationships in 10 years. Build learning habits today that lead to great knowledge in 10 years. Long-term thinking is a secret weapon.”

• “The only way to become excellent is to be endlessly fascinated by doing the same thing over and over. You have to fall in love with boredom.”

• “The more control you have over your attention, the more control you have over your future.” 8

• “To become successful, default to saying yes to opportunities. To remain successful, default to saying no to opportunities.
  When you say no, you are only saying no to one option.
  When you say yes, you are saying no to every other option.
  No is a decision.
  Yes is a responsibility.
  Be careful what (and who) you say yes to. It will shape your day, your career, your family, your life.” 9

• “When you lose track of time, you are either living your best life or wasting it.”

Play infinite games: How to succeed without selling your soul

• “Entrepreneurship is a personal growth engine disguised as a business pursuit.” 10

• “The secret to winning is learning how to lose.
  That is, learning to bounce back from failure and disappointment—undeterred—and continuing to steadily march toward your potential.
  Your response to failure determines your capacity for success.” 11

• “An approach that has worked well for me: Friendly, but persistent.” 12

• “A brief guide to leadership:

  1. Always know the answer to, “What are we optimizing for?”

  2. Recruit. Recruit. Recruit.

  3. Never ask someone to do something you aren’t willing to do yourself.

  4. Give away the credit. Take the blame.” 13

• “What is the real goal?
  The real goal is not to “beat the market.” The goal is to build wealth.
  The real goal is not to read more books. The goal is to understand what you read.
  Don’t let a proxy become the target. Don’t optimize for the wrong outcome.” 14
  RK: More about this in my Annual Review 2020.

• “Don’t write to sound smart. Write to be useful. If you’re useful over a long time period, you will end up looking smart anyway.” 15
  RK: Simiilarly, I strongly believe that one should read for knowledge and enjoyment, not to seem smart.

In Summary

“What is the highest leverage action I can execute on right now?” 16

James Clear’s work gives you the tools to get the life you want after you already have an idea of what you want. Through his work, we learn that we can change our identities through systematic behavioural change. 

For habits to change our identity, we need to compound them and persist. Over time, we develop the habit of discipline and stellar execution. 

James Clear's books, articles, and newsletter give us insights on how to become a functional adult human being — which coincidentally leads into a fulfilling life of purposeful work, enjoyable fun, and life-giving relationships. 

His Thursday 3-2-1 newsletter is high signal. It cuts through the noise and – well – helps clear the path to your goals (I COULDN’T RESIST, OKAY). And it is the only newsletter I’m excited to read every week. 

Bar none. 

(My sincere apologies to everyone else I’m subscribed to: Tim Ferriss, Farnam Street/Shane Parrish, Web Smith, David Perell, Tiago Forte, Mark Manson, Nat Eliason, the Every bundle, etc. James’ newsletter just hits different.)

The speech was delivered after Steve Jobs’ cancer diagnosis and successful treatment. This speech, viewed over 30 million times on YouTube, popularized the quotes “stay hungry, stay foolish” and “connect the dots looking back.”

However, if you’ve read Cal Newport’s book So Good They Can’t Ignore You, then like me, you don’t agree with the idea of “follow your passion”.

Instead, I use this speech as a recurring reminder to sate my curiosity and to love learning. To allow myself to pursue my creative interests, even if there is no monetary reward in the short term. To loosen up on the planning and to let go because the dots “don’t connect looking forward, they connect looking back.”

Hope this gives you a little creative boost this week.

Welcome to the ~25 new folks from last Friday's Marketing Brew feature (among other places).

I've emailed most of you to say hi. If not, expect an email from me sometime this week. 👋

Whether you’re a new or a longtime reader, check out my updated Start Here page. I updated the “What I’m Doing Now” and added links to my best writing around marketing, online writing, and ecommerce. Whether you subscribed to this newsletter because you want to...

• Start writing online

• Read more marketing or ecommerce case studies, or

• Learn more about  me

... you'll find some articles and essays from me on that page.

On to the article.

This post was first published on RoxineKee.com

This article is a curation of links and resources from Cal Newport over the past 12 years.

In 2012, my family immigrated to Canada from the Philippines and I started Grade 12. I struggled to adjust to the new school system, find friends, and juggle applying for university and swim training (15-20 hours a week).

Around that time I stumbled on to Cal's blog. It changed my life.

"Study Hacks", as it was called back then, initially documented his journey and strategies in studying more efficiently as a graduate student.

The blog morphed into reflections and experiments on finding work one loves, as Cal himself become a tenured professor at Georgetown University. 

Eventually, the blog became about living a life of focus and meaning, as he published books, grew his audience, and now, started his podcast all without having a social media presence.

In the 9 years that I've been following Cal’s blog and books, his work has helped me get a 3.8 in my first year of university (until I got lazy), land my dream job ("finding your passion" is for suckers), and cultivate a life of calm and focus (I recently deleted Instagram).

Whether you're a student, a knowledge worker, or a recovering dopamine addict, Cal has a book, a blog post, or  a course to address that.

A few notes before we get into things:

1. I've put book titles in italics and blog post titles in "quotation marks".

2. The book links are Amazon affiliate links. You know the drill: if you buy anything from this list, you'll help support the blog (and fuel my 5:00 AM writing sessions). 

3. I don't recommend anything I don't like. Unless otherwise noted, I've personally read and enjoyed every resource on this list. 

4. I'll update this page on my blog as I finish new books of his or resurface more content.

On living a deep life

Almost everyone in tech has read – or claimed to have read – Deep Work. But unless you read So Good They Can’t Ignore You and Digital Minimalism too, the habits won't stick. So Good, in particular, is a severely underrated, must-read book for students and new grads early in their careers.

If you're keen to cultivate a lifestyle of calm, enjoyment, and professional fulfillment, I recommend reading Cal's books in this order:

1. So Good They Can't Ignore You: Why Skills Trump Passion in the Quest for Work You Love. This book's main argument that "find your passion" is BS advice and that mastery of skills comes before passion has proven true in my own life. I have both eBook, iBooks, and a paper copy of this book... And I've read through it at least 3x at this point. 

2. Bonus: Top Performer course. Cal’s course, in collaboration with ultralearner Scott H. Young, teaches you to apply the deliberate practice theory from So Good. I bought the course when it first came out (2017, I think?) and have used its strategies over the years to map my career and to become– in my humble opinion – a pretty good writer, despite not having gone to school for it.

3. Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World. This book for which Cal is best known and that popularized the term "deep work" This book is the "how" for So Good and the "why" for Digital Minimalism.

   Here are some deep work tactics from the blog that are not in the book:

   • Have a pre-game ritual

   • Use inspiring locations and concentration circuits

   • Work outdoors

   • Schedule productivity-free days

4. Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World. This book features Tristan Harris and pre-dates Netflix's The Social Dilemma, but I only picked it up after watching the latter. Applying the ideas and tactics in the book made me calmer, happier, and more productive, despite skipping the core recommendation in the book for a "30-day digital detox".

On productivity

If you're looking for the simplest productivity system in the world, this is it. 

For most of my undergrad career, I ran my life the Study Hacks way with a combination pen and paper, Google Tasks, and Google Calendar.

My systems have grown since then to accommodate the complexity of my life. But I've come back to these Study Hacks posts at crucial points in my life over the years, whenever I let my systems get away from me.

Cal's concepts and systems simplify and build on David Allen's 20-year-old Getting Things Done (GTD) philosophy with a focus on mastery of the GTD workflow, not the tools. 

Even after becoming familiar with GTD and taking more productivity courses since then, I still adhere to all of these tactics as the basics of my system. They’re just that good.

1. "How to Reduce Stress and Get More Done by Building an Autopilot Schedule". Schedule recurring events/tasks into your calendar. This way you can field ad hoc tasks as they come without letting your recurring responsibilities drop.

2. "Fixed-Schedule Productivity: How I Accomplish a Large Amount of Work in a Small Number of Work Hours". Have a set time to end your day (thus, the "fixed schedule"). Work back your schedule from that end point.

3. Deep Habits: The Importance of Planning Every Minute of Your Work Day. Best done in conjunction with the tactic above, time -locking keeps you hyper-realistic on what you can actually get done in a day.

   Bonus: Cal recently came out with his Time-Block Planner book/notebook. I don't plan to get it (see what I did there?) because I have a personalized daily system in my bullet journal. But if you want to learn time-blocking and squeeze every minute out of your day, then that might be worth checking out.

4. "Drastically Reduce Stress With a Work Shutdown Ritual". This is an abbreviated, daily version of the GTD weekly review. My adherence to the shutdown (or daily review, because I do it in the beginning of the day now) directly correlates with the calmest, most productive periods in my career.

5. "Deep Habits: Plan Your Week in Advance". Every Monday morning, I list out my 5 projects for the week and tackle them consecutively. This pre-planning saves me energy throughout the week trying to decide what to do. 

   For more on weekly planning, read this blog post to learn about the "tool" Cal uses to keep track of his weekly plan (spoilier alert: it's just a plain text file called "Plan.txt").

How to think like Cal Newport

Even more important than learning from Cal is learning to think like him. If you like Cal's work, here are source books from which he derives his ideas:

• Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. All of Cal's books derive from this one. I've been raving about this book to friends and colleagues. I wish I'd read it earlier (and I don't say that lightly). Highly recommend.

• Daily Rituals: How Artists Work & Daily Rituals: Women at Work by Mason Currey. Cal often features the habits of knowledge workers, writers, and creatives on his blog. If you enjoy reading about productivity rituals and morning routines, then you'll enjoy these books.

• Getting Things Done by David Allen. This book has been around for 20 years – a remarkable feat for a book that tackles a time- and technology-sensitive topic like productivity. This alone speaks to the strength and timelessness of GTD’s core workflow. The penultimate chapter on zooming out from productivity is underrated, as well.

Finally, here are three sources that I haven't read myself, but that Cal has referenced often in his books and blog posts:

• K. Anders Ericsson's much-cited paper on peak performance entitled, "The Role of Deliberate Practice in the Acquisition of Expert Performance" (which eventually spawned a book version)

• Robert Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values

• Matthew Crawford's Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work

A final word

The challenge with Cal's work is that he is both prescriptive and prolific. 

He's not an armchair productivity pontificator or, as my friend and subscriber Kevin Rapp calls them, "optimales". Cal's detailed solutions are incredibly specific to his needs (best-selling author, academic, and blogger). While they do work for a wide variety of people, it's impossible to replicate his results without self-awareness about your own situation.

He's also been blogging 3x a week since 2008. There's hundreds of blog posts in his archive, as well as 6 books, 2 courses, and a podcast. 

I hope this article helps you sort through Cal's recommendations and serve as a starting point for your own life experiments.

After my previous essay on why reading a lot of books is just a vanity metric, I got a handful of emails, one of which came from a very good friend. He said,

Good point

You started the article with challenging a common assumption then showed the solution

I relate to it because I track X number of books and do in fact only read nonfiction business lol

So I guess the article spoke to me as a target audience

So my question to you is how do you train yourself to like the activity of reading?Particularly BOOKS. It's easy for people to enjoy blog posts but much less often for books.

I agree with him. Enjoying blog posts is much easier to do than books.

Reading articles or listening to audiobooks don't net the same benefits as reading a book. They don't require our full attention and thus, don't offer the full engagement and enjoyment we crave.

Just like how it’s easier to eat snacks than a whole meal.

But the sad fact is that most of us just grit our teeth through books because "All CEOs/smart people/interesting individuals read," not because we actually enjoy it.

(I don't agree with the “one must read to be smart” idea, by the way. But that's a rant for another time.)

In this essay, I'll expand on two pieces of advice from Naval Ravikant on enjoying reading:

1. "Read what you love until you love to read"

2. "The best books are the ones you devour"

The point is to learn to enjoy the challenge of reading a book. Wisdom comes as a consequence of turning reading into an enjoyable hobby.

Enjoyable reading: Read what you love

"Read what you love until you love to read."— Naval Ravikant

Find a book that will make 30 minutes of reading fly by.

Just like any habit, enjoying the act of reading takes repetition. In the beginning, read what you know you like, until you get into the habit of reading.

If you enjoy reading comic books, do it.

If all you want to read right now is a Dungeons & Dragon's 5th Edition Player's Handbook, go for it.

If you want to reread C.S. Lewis' The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe for the fifth time, you're welcome to do that.

Don't worry about what other people say is worth reading or not. What's important is that you pick up what you enjoy reading so you can do it day after day.

With time, you'll organically reach for more challenging books.

Contextual reading: Read what you'll devour

"The best books are the ones you devour." — Naval Ravikant

Read contextually, both in an energy sense and a circumstantial sense. 

Instead of fiction and non-fiction, categorize books as either narrative versus non-narrative. And only read when you have the winds of curiosity in your sails.

The existence or the lack of an overarching story dictates how much energy you need to read a book.

For example, narrative books, like novels, biographies, and memoirs, have big picture stories that pull you through from beginning to end. Non-narrative books, like business, advice, and personal development, don't.

The natural desire to know what happens next mean narrative books require less energy to slip into flow and to continue reading than a non-narrative one.

Narrative and non-narrative books demand differing levels of attention also because they force you to grapple with the author's ideas or arguments at different times.

Narrative books are indirect or less explicit about how they present ideas. Learning from narrative books tend to happen subconsciously, when you're not actively reading the book.

In contrast, non-narrative books (at least the good ones) get straight to the point and require you to understand the ideas while you read.

Now, there are books from authors like Malcolm Gladwell and Robert Greene that employ stories so skillfully that they blur the line between narrative and non-narrative.

For books like those, use your judgement and self-awareness to gauge the amount of energy required to beat inertia and maintain momentum.

The other way to approach contextual reading is to read books only when you are intensely curious about the topic.

I call this "just in time reading". This means you:

1. Read a book to help solve a problem

2. Put down books that don't pique your curiosity at the moment

In particular, I've found that I read non-fiction books faster this way.

So how do you give a book a chance without becoming too invested into finishing it?

Read a book for 100 pages minus your age. At that point, you can keep reading or put it down if it doesn't interest you.

(For example, I'm 25 as of this writing, so I'll read 75 pages of a book to gauge my desire to finish it.)

In the future, your circumstances or reading habits might change to make reading it easier. In the meantime, the hateful slog isn't worth the suffering.

My reading habits: How I trained myself to enjoy reading

Personally, I try to read for 30 minutes a day. I track this habit just for awareness and to spot my natural patterns for when/how much I like to read. I don't beat myself up if I don't hit it.

During the day, I follow my contextual reading strategy. I always read at least 1 narrative and 1 non-narrative book at once. I tend to read non-narrative books when I have more energy and motivation and narrative books when I have less.

Here's my current reading list:

• Jim Finnegan's Barbarian Days (narrative)

• Eric Jorgenson's The Almanack of Naval Ravikant (non-narrative)

• Ryan Holiday's Trust Me I'm Lying (work-related, non-narrative)

I keep a running list of the books I'm reading in an Evernote file.

When I do my weekly planning, I gauge my progress for each of those books. If there is one that is close to being finished, I try to read it first before I read the others.

By incorporate my reading into my planning, I have a tangible goal to work towards on a short term basis. This keeps me motivated to read day to day and balances my desire to finish books without the unneeded pressure to do it.

But don't take my word for it.

Try out different books and varying ways of reading.

Ultimately, to become a reader, you can't blindly follow everyone else's advice on how to do it. Reading is an intensely personal activity, one best enjoyed on its own terms.

Whether we’re a binge reader like Ryan Holiday or a consistent one like Farnam Street's Shane Parrish, we don't have to push ourselves to finish a certain number of books by the end of the year when we enjoy reading.

Bragging about having read 50 books in a year is a vanity metric. It's more worthwhile to rack up an impressive number of books read – and understood! – at the end of the year as a consequence of our commitment to enjoying the process of reading.

Finishing a certain number of books in a year is a vanity metric for knowledge. So is the entrepreneur adage of “I only read business books/non-fiction.”

Popular advice like this quote from Haruki Murakami, 

"If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking."

… propagates this snobbish thinking that you’re wasting your time if you read fiction or one that is less than 25 years old (see the Lindy Effect).

I disagree.

How you read matters more than what you read and how much you read.

Regardless of how popular or obscure the ideas in a book are, in order to think differently, you have to seriously grapple with what you read and how they apply (or don't apply) to your life. And to enjoy doing this on a regular basis.

To become smarter, it’s not enough to pick challenging books. It’s more crucial to:

1. Train yourself to enjoy the activity of reading

2. Commit to applying knowledge and gaining wisdom

While you don't have to finish every single book you start – I follow librarian Nancy Pearl's advice and read the equivalent of 100 pages minus my current age to help me decide whether I want to keep reading – don’t read a summary just to be able to quote from Robert Caro’s The Power Broker.

For example, I have beef with people who read book summaries or use Blinkist for productivity.

That is not the point.

Sure, read a summary to see if a book interests you. But don't delude yourself that a 15-minute summary gives you everything it has to offer.

(Ironically, I'll probably publish my own set of book summaries for my quake books. But the intention is to document how the books helped me become a better. Not just to share my interpretation or my notes from the book.)

Love reading & gain wisdom

In a world where 99% of knowledge is common and accessible to all, your experience and ideas are the only differentiating factors you can have.

The real gold in reading, therefore, is to learn to think more clearly and to develop the ability to think for yourself and achieve uncommon knowledge. .

To paraphrase Naval Ravikant: smart people come to their own conclusions, whether that’s in how they read or what they read. 

“The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.”
― Marcel Proust

What about you? Why do you read?

‘What you need,' the Savage went on, 'is something with tears for a change. Nothing costs enough here.'
—Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

Freedom doesn't mean we feel happy all the time or that we can do whatever we want each day. Instead, freedom is in being able to thoughtfully choose to which problems or pain we give our attention.

As Goethe said, a quest for freedom above all else "hopelessly enslaves". Unbridled freedom in itself–particularly a desire to be rid of problems caused by ourselves or by others–does not bring happiness.

In Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, fetuses are preconditioned with a certain levels of talent for specific skills and in effect, are predestined for particular professions. Once they're adults, they are then assigned to simple or complex careers, based on their programming. Huxley's population do the work for which they were born, their jobs perfectly matching their skills and capabilities, and are given as much or as little autonomy as they are designed to desire.

Thus, the people in that utopia—or dystopia, your choice!—are happy.

We don't have the simplicity of preconditioning. For better or for worse, we need to develop self-knowledge and self-awareness, figure out which skills we can do better than most, and list out what we want and don't want in a career.

While I was still in university and doing co-op, I knew then that there would never be a perfect, problem-free job. But I didn't really know what a satisfying job meant to me. 

As I jumped from one corporation to another, I was always unsatisfied. I was always wary, constantly painfully aware, that regardless of how perfect a job looked on the outside, there would always be something down the road that would make me hate it and want to quit. 

I didn't know that that was normal, that the secret to happiness in any job was to accept the inevitability of problems and act accordingly. And I wish I knew then that my job satisfaction was fully in my control. 

Instead of thinking about perks, I wish I thought about investing attention into every nuance of my job each and every day.

Instead of thinking about what would excite me, I wish I welcomed the challenge of solving new problems.

Instead of complaining about the boring nature of the jobs, I wish I obsessed about gaining valuable skills, even if it was manipulating spreadsheets (the bane of every summer corporate intern, ever).

Choosing to pay attention to a boring project is the path of most resistance, to say the least.

Choosing to raise my hand for project I'd never tackled before and being faced with the possibility of failure is terrifying.

Choosing to develop skills, instead of complaining with everybody else takes self-assured determination.

Freedom is merely a means to an end. That's the paradox of freedom and happiness.

What bring ultimate enjoyment and satisfaction isn't in having all the choices in the world at our fingertips. But it is found in using our freedom in order to choose the pursuits and people for which we are willing to sacrifice.

Even if they make us feel unhappy in the short term.

'... All the tonic effects of murdering Desdemona and being murdered by Othello, without any of the inconveniences.’

'But I like the inconveniences.'

'We don’t,’ said the Controller. 'We prefer to do things comfortably.’

'But I don't want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin.'

"In fact,' said Mustapha Mond, 'you're claiming the right to be unhappy.'

'All right, then,' said the Savage defiantly, "I’m claiming the right to be unhappy.'

'Not to mention the right to grow old and ugly and impotent; the right to have syphilis and cancer; the right to have too little to eat; the right to be lousy; the right to live i constant apprehension of what may happen tomorrow; the right to catch typhoid; the right to be tortured by unspeakable pains of every kind.'

There was a long silence.

'I claim them all,' said the Savage at last.

Mustapha Mond shrugged his shoulders. 'You're welcome,’ he said.

—Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

First off, happy New Year, folks! I had a great 3-4 months off from the blog/newsletter and I’m excited to get back into writing.

This year, my newsletters will look different:

1. I’ll send you a newsletter whenever I publish a post. No commitments on when or how many times they’ll go out each week. My intention is to give myself space to write faster or slower, depending on what my goals are. If it gets annoying for you because I’m so prolific… Well, we’ll figure it out then.

2. I’ll be writing essays and articles, no more Tim Ferriss-like roundups. Those were fun to write and kept me consistent, but they didn’t allow me to give certain ideas the full treatment they deserved.

If this is the first newsletter you’re getting from me, welcome!! Crazy to think that there’s folks on this list that I haven’t met in person. You can check out my blog’s About page to learn more about who I am and what I do.

Finally, if you’ve unsubscribed in the past and are annoyed to receive this newsletter from me, please unsubscribe again (scroll down to the link at the bottom of this email). I took down a sign up form on my site and resurfaced some emails sign ups from it. So I just re-added everybody because I wasn’t sure who had unsubbed and who hadn’t.

Anyways, have fun reading my Annual Review 2020. I’ll talk to you soon. 👋

One of my favourite days of the year: chasing waterfalls in Hamilton, Ontario with my best friend

I’ve done an annual review every year for the past 3 years. (Here’s last year’s review.)

Like the previous ones, I initially wanted this to be a “what went well”, “what didn’t go well”, and “what I want to work on next year” format. But I’m learning to take external events without judgment, without trying to force change. 

So instead of that, I’ll review the lessons I learned this year in chronological order. I’ll also pull from my most impactful books and quotes from 2020.

I won’t dwell on how the pandemic affected my life. But briefly:

Was it tough? Yes.

Do I miss life before the pandemic? Of course.

But to me, this is the most important question: 

Did this experience provide more “grist for the mill”? Most definitely. 

I’m lucky to report that lockdown and quarantine has done me more good than harm. I wouldn’t wish it on any generation—I for one, am beyond ecstatic for the vaccine—but despite the difficulties, I’m thankful for the difference it’s made in my life.

And it’s these 10 lessons that made 2020 worthwhile.

1. A meaningful life requires high quality leisure

”The wise man is sufficient unto himself for a happy existence, for he needs many helps towards mere existence, but for a happy existence he needs only a sound and upright soul, one that despises fortune."—Seneca

Leisure and rest are not meant to support work. Work is supposed to support a life of leisure. 

I’m not just talking about a binge-watching-Netflix kind of leisure. I’m talking about serious hobbies — creative, challenging ways to spend time and energy that grows and challenges a person.

I didn’t realize how important serious hobbies were until the pandemic took ultimate frisbee away from me.

Playing ultimate gives me hours of weekly social interaction that fill up my tank and my time. It used up mental energy that I would otherwise spend anxiously overthinking the rest of my life—which I struggled with in the first half of 2020 (more on this in the next point).

In the first 2.5 months of 2020, all the training I’d been putting into growing as an ultimate frisbee player were finally showing. I had my first layout goals —first on beach, then on turf. I was supposed to try out for a professional womxn’s team in Toronto the weekend we went into lockdown. 

I’ve since replaced ultimate with writing and reading, Spikeball in the summer, making time for friends, going on walks, and pursuing creative and artistic projects. 

It’s not the same. And I’m still looking forward to the day I’ll jog on to the grass/turf/sand again (and semi-dreading how horribly out of shape I’ll feel). But I’m glad I developed other activities on which to spend my time.

2. Actively manage the chaos of life

“Hope is not a strategy. Luck is not a factor. Fear is not an option."—James Cameron

Unless one learns to control the chaos in their external and internal lives, entropy, anxiety, and fear will always be their unwelcome bedfellows. 

I managed the internal chaos by doubling down on my journaling. I started my journaling practice 5 years ago on the advice of a productivity coach, in order to control my monkey mind.

My journaling practice—more than any other activity I did this year—helped me ease my anxiety, untangle my convoluted emotions, and just friggin’ get on with my day. As I write this, I’m on my 10th morning pages journal and my 6th bullet journal.

To control the external chaos, I underwent Tiago Forte’s Getting Things Done Like a Boss course in March to learn David Allen’s Getting Things Done (GTD) productivity system. In April, I took Tiago’s Building a Second Brain (BASB) course and implemented that as my note-taking system. 

Committing to these 3 simple activities–journaling, implementing GTD, and mastering BASB—were instrumental in dealing with the flaming projectiles of garbage that 2020 kept lobbing in my direction.

3. Differentiate then integrate

“What does it really mean to be ‘in the world but not of the world’?”

This question is based on Jesus’ prayer to the Father for His disciples in John 17:15. This was one of the 12 favourite questions I identified during my BASB coursework.

Shifting gears from chaos to creativity, here’s my answer to that question: becoming “in the world but not of the world” requires differentiating oneself from any other human being in the world and to integrate back to contribute to society as whole. 

I learned this firsthand when I participated in the 5th cohort of David Perell’s Write of Passage in July. Finding success in online writing requires one to publish compelling articles on a consistent basis. 

I achieved differentiation by drawing heavily from my personal experiences around being an immigrant and going back to working for someone else. I achieved integration by asking for feedback from my peers (shoutout to Robbie, Michael, Ari, and Brandon!) as I wrote the articles.

On a personal level, this meant acknowledging and understanding my unique experiences. In order to detach myself from self-consciousness, shame, and narcissism, I needed to share my story with others. Thus my Tuesday newsletter, and the tagline of my blog: “open sourced self-reinvention”.

4. Build valuable career capital to make career moves that pay well

You go do something that you love and make money, like making films. Then you go get to do something that you love that people won’t pay you for, like deep ocean exploration.
—James Cameron

Writing online built my career capital. This year, it finally paid off. 

In the tail end of July, as I was taking Write of Passage and trying not to feel sad about the world, I achieved the sweet spot of being able to do for work what I would do even if no one paid me to do it. 

In July, I landed a job doing work I love with people I respect.

Publishing online opened the door for my friend to know what I was interested in, career-wise. It also gave the hiring team to an extended cover letter to assess how well I fit the company and the role.

Most importantly, it showcased that I could communicate complicated topics well—particularly valuable for especially for companies doing business-to-business work. 

"I have this principle about money that overrides my other life rules: Do what people are willing to pay for. Money is a neutral indicator of value. By aiming to make money, you're aiming to be valuable."
— Derek Sivers, as featured in Cal Newport’s “So Good They Can’t Ignore You”

5. Become autotelic and actively direct my attention, thoughts, & emotions

The outcome of having an autotelic self—of learning to set goals, to develop skills, to be sensitive to feedback, to know how to concentrate and get involved—is that one can enjoy life even when circumstances are brutish and nasty. Being in control of the mind means that literally anything that happens can be a source of joy.
—Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi in “Flow”

While my journaling and self-therapy self-care routines helped, I was getting really emotionally tired of having to work through my issues myself with no seeming end in sight. So I did two things:

1. I started seeing a therapist in September

2. I actively worked on being autotelic—finding challenges and setting goals on every little thing I did

While seeing a therapist for someone from my background isn't normal, I’ve come to view it the way Morning Brew co-founder and CEO, Alex Liebermann, does: as mental sparring practice, done to improve long term fitness as much as address short term issues.

(Shoutout to my fellow Fil-Chi Cherry for helping me find my therapist through Inkblot Therapy.)

The other half is about becoming autotelic, which translated loosely, means “self goal”. After finishing the book Flow in November, I learned that:

The autotelic self is one that easily translates potential threats into enjoyable challenges, and therefore maintains its inner harmony. A person who is never bored, seldom anxious, involved with what goes on, and in flow most of the time may be said to have an autotelic self.

One of my goals moving into 2021 is to turn the bouts of anxiety into flow and treat them as a way to grow, instead of as a dreaded adversary.

6. Depth over breadth in life and in friendship

In October, I saw Netflix’s The Social Dilemma and afterwards, tore through Cal Newport’s Digital Minimalism.

The lessons from both cemented one key idea in my mind: Replacing my relationships with social media vastly diminishes the social boost I could potentially receive from my IRL relationships.

Because of this, I deleted Instagram from my phone. I also reached out to friends and my friend groups, with an emphasis on rich interactions and face-to-face conversations.

This led to a number of creative, socially-distanced activities, like learning to play Among Us with childhood friends from the Philippines, a Zoom Secret Santa with my university frisbee friends, and a bi-weekly book club with my capstone project team from university.

As Cal says in his book, “The problem, then, is not that using social media directly makes us unhappy. The key issue is that using social media tends to take people away from the real-world socializing that’s massively more valuable. The small boosts you receive from posting on a friend’s wall or liking their latest Instagram photo can’t come close to compensating for the large loss experienced by no longer spending real-world time with that same friend.”

7. Pursue enjoyment over pleasure

In Flow, Csikszentmihalyi writes, “Pleasure helps to maintain order, but by itself cannot create new order in consciousness. Enjoyment is characterized by this forward movement: by a sense of novelty, of accomplishment. We can experience pleasure without any investment of psychic energy, whereas enjoyment happens only as a result of unusual investments of attention.”

In other words, quality of leisure trumps the amount of hours spent. Here are 3 criteria I now use to vet whether or not a leisure activity is of a high quality:

1. Requires active mental or physical participation over passive consumption

2. Uses skills to produce valuable things in the physical world

3. Requires real-world, structured social interactions

The more of the criteria an activity fulfills, the more enjoyable it is.

For example, leisure in solitude is still enjoyable as long as there is a goal to fulfill and a way to challenge myself. I experienced it this year when I took Write of Passage. I felt this a similar surge of accomplishment when I finished reading Ron Chernow’s 800-page Alexander Hamilton –the longest book I’d finished in a while. In the same way, a passive activity like watching a show can go beyond pleasure and become enjoyable, if it’s done with others.

8. Simplest solutions, hardest problems, & frequent iterations

”Slow is smooth. And smooth is fast.—Jocko Wilink”

November was undoubtedly the most intense month of my year. Without going into details, I really struggled in the days that surrounded my 60-day milestone at work. (Incredibly thankful for my therapist and for my friends who helped scrape me off the floor, like a wad of unwanted gum.)

My working mandate of “simplest solutions, hardest problems, & frequent iterations” came out of that tough time. This encapsulation reminds to: 

1. Work on the hardest, most impactful problems I can solve day to day, even if that means saying no or pushing off smaller tasks

2. Solve the problem as quickly as I can with the tools, knowledge, and resources I already have on hand

3. Accept that my initial product won’t be perfect and will need to be reworked and improved over a period of time (this is where further research and more refined solutions come into play)

In other words, as long as I was working on the highest-impact project I could, I could settle for a B+ grade on my initial solution, in service of speed. I could always retake the test again and again in the future. 

9. Develop standards for relationships

The root of suffering is attachment. If it happens, it happens. If it doesn’t, it doesn’t.

This year I worked hard to cultivate people with whom I can go through life. I spent multiple, consecutive days with friends. I hosted my teammates for a sleepover during a tournament. I initiated a virtual Secret Santa and a book club.

I’m even more thankful for my current friendships when I recall several, less-than-healthy friendships I’d had in the past. Some were with people who didn’t respect my boundaries or who just weren’t as invested in the friendship as I was.

So to prevent future mistakes and pain, I developed two criteria for the kinds of people I want in my life:

1. They demonstrate that they value our relationship by investing attention into it

2. They inspire me to be a better person and I inspire them to be a better person

To achieve the 2 criteria, all parties must work to maintain a level of honest communication, trust, respect, and a mutual growth mindset. These two points help me identify people that I overlooked and to whom I should give more attention.

I still maintain contact with friends with whom it’s all just fun times or who fulfill one but not both. But the most rewarding friendships in my life fulfill both criteria.  

Of course, I also did my fair share of crossing lines and rebuffing the overtures of kind souls in the past. So I had to learn how to be a good friend myself this year, too.

I had to learn how to be vulnerable, without using it as a crutch to force closeness. I learned how to communicate and express how I felt in healthy ways. I learned how to step back and value solitude as much as I relished being with others. 

(Side note: I strongly believe in marrying your best friend, so it’s not a coincidence that these are also most of my criteria for a life partner.)

10. Let the old die to let the new thrive

Therefore if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creature; the old things passed away; behold, new things have come. 
2 Corinthians 5:17

People talk about what a dumpster fire 2020 was. But why wouldn’t you want to get rid of trash?

(Of course, we know it’s because dumpsters fires are harmful for the environment. But let’s not stretch the metaphor here.)

Just before Christmas, I had a lump in my throat that just wouldn’t go away. It subsided a few days before the New Year.

I’d had dozens of fearful, anxiety-laden, psychosomatic attacks like this throughout 2020. They had always threatened to come to the surface in previous years, but I’d always distracted myself with more work, more people, or more ultimate. 

But I couldn’t do that this year. The Great Dumpster Fire of 2020 stripped away the rubbish of which I wouldn’t let go.

I had to face the music. 

I had to face the truth that all my fear and anxiety was rooted in a lack of love and thoughtfulness for myself. And this held me from having healthy relationships and from loving others unconditionally.

Moving into 2021, I’ve have had to put a match to my old pathways of thinking. I had to dig into the dark places of my life and lovingly coax them to into the light. I’ve had to constantly remind myself, “That’s SELF 3.0 talking. SELF 4.0 wouldn’t do that.”

The heat of 2020 proved too uncomfortable for me to stick around with my old habits and creature comforts. It weaned the gold from the chaff in my life. 

I needed to let go, let the Old Me die so the New Me could live.

I’ll be taking this final lesson well into 2021 and beyond. 

Favourites & highlights

“Take a simple idea and take it seriously." —Charlie Munger

• Favourite song: "Good Things Fall Apart (with Jon Bellion) – Stripped" by ILLENIUM (Here’s the rest of my 2020 favourites)

• Favourite shows: It's Okay to Not Be Okay, The Queen's Gambit, Itaewon Class (all on Netflix)

• Favourite movie: The Old Guard (Netflix)

• Favourite purchases: Apple Airpods Pro & my Miele Espresso Machine 6350

• Most impactful books I read: Flow, Digital Minimalism, & Thinking in Systems

This post first appeared on RoxineKee.com.

Hey friends,

Yup, you read that right: This will be the last newsletter of 2020.

I initially planned on finishing off this season of the newsletter with the 52nd edition to make it a full year… But like most of the plans I made last year, 2020 changed my newsletter plans, too.

While it’s been a ridiculous year (to say the least), I’m so, so, so thankful for the privilege to share the craziness with you every week.

This said, I work best when I’m obsessing about one big problem at a time. And what’s top of mind for me right now is my new job.

I don’t want to send you a newsletter that I haven’t put enough love and attention into.

Because of this, I’ve decided to pause this newsletter earlier than planned, so I can focus on work.

I’ll pick this labour of love back up on Tuesday January 5th 2021. 

Last week’s newsletter had a 38% open rate. The top link you clicked was Lenny Rachitsky’s tweetstorm on managing up.

If someone forwarded you this email, you can subscribe below and get this every week

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Here’s what I learned, shared, and paid attention to this week:

1. Idea I’m digging — 

Personal User Manuals

I’m writing a personal user manual — a one-page Google Doc to help my teammates understand how I work. In addition to the distilled, single page version for work, I’ll be posting the full manual here on my blog.

As Anne-Laure Le Cunff explains, "A personal user manual is a short document outlining how you like to work, collaborate, communicate, and receive feedback.” If you’re curious about what these manuals look like, here are a few examples:

• “Leaders need “User Manuals” – and what I learned by writing mine”

• "Working with me — a ‘User Manual’” from Pete Vowles 

• GitLab’s CEO’s manual (my personal favourite)

2. Tools I’m Exploring — 

Personal CRM software

CRM stands for “customer relationship management”. This is a database that lets a company store details about each customer or potential customer.

I think every modern professional should have their own lightweight version of this contact database. As Derek Sivers said in his book Your Music and People, "Using a database is one of the most powerful things you can do for your career. Please don’t put it off.” 

For a simple personal database, you can use…

• Your phone’s Contacts app

• Index cards (like David Rockefeller), or

• A note-taking app like Roam Research

The problem with these simple solutions is that they’re just filing cabinets. They don’t encourage the action required to maintain relationships. They don’t remind you to rekindle relationships or follow up with people.

In addition to storing information, personal CRMs remind you to follow up with the people in your life. Here are 3 personal CRM tools I found that let you keep a database and remind you to keep in touch:

• Uphabit

• MonicaHQ

• Clay.Earth (still in beta)

3. Topic I’m Learning About — 

Remote Work

Thanks to COVID, most of us are familiar with the idea of working from wherever we want, whenever we want. But most of us haven’t taken full advantage of the freedom and flexibility of remote work, like:

• Working at a park

• Living the van life

• Going around the world in 6 months to visit coworkers

Just like any skill, being a creative and productive remote worker takes learning and practice. And the best places to learn are GitLab’s blog, their public company handbook, and Zapier’s blog.

4. Quote I’m Pondering — 

”Read what you love until you love to read." — Naval Ravikant

That's it for 2020!

Stay strong, stay kind, stay human.

A Happy Thanksgiving, Happy Halloween, Merry Christmas, and a Happy New Year.

Till next YEAR,

Roxine 👋

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Hi folks,

Just finished my first day at work. It was overwhelming, as all first-days are. But I’m hanging in there!

Last week’s newsletter had a 41% open rate. The top link you clicked on was Derek Sivers’ bookYour Music and People .

If someone forwarded you this email, you can subscribe below and get this every week

Subscribe now

Here’s what I learned, shared, and paid attention to this week:

1. Article I enjoyed — 

How the Head of Growth at Superhuman Does His Email by Dan Shipper 

Superhuman is one of the buzziest email apps in Silicon Valley right now. Part of its appeal is the prestige of getting off its waitlist and having the “Sent with Superhuman” email signature. But Superhuman’s core value proposition is its workflows that supposedly help you clear your email inbox in half the time.

Now, I was curious to how someone who worked for a company like that would handle their email.

Did they respond at the speed of light?

Were they always at Inbox Zero?

What’s their excuse when an email fell through the cracks?

The answers are more boring than you’d expect:

1. Tell your co-workers you’ll respond within 24 hours and never on weekends

2. Batch your responses into a single chunk of time

3. Schedule and limit how much you check your email so you get into flow as much as possible

In the end, your productivity boils down to your habits and processes. Unfortunately, not even a $50/month app like Superhuman can save you from yourself. 

2. Person I’m following —

Lenny Rachitsky

Because of my new role as a growth engineer at Convictional, I’ve been scouring the hackerwebs for business and people models to follow. Lenny is one of them. He is a former product manager at Airbnb and writes about product and growth in his excellent newsletter.

The newsletter is predominantly made up of paid posts, so here are five free gateway drugs to Lenny’s work: 

1. How the biggest consumer apps got their first 1,000 users 

2. How To Get Into Product Management (And Thrive)

3. What to do if you have extra time on your hands at work (Tweet thread)

4. How to manage up to your boss or manager (Tweet thread)

5. How Lenny did performance reviews at Airbnb (Tweet thread)

3. Quote I’m pondering — 

“If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up the people to gather wood, divide the work, and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast endless sea.”

— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

That's it for this week!

Stay strong, stay kind, stay human.

Till next week,

Roxine

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Photo courtesy of @viewfrommyinstax