Our bias is to always add more. More rules, more procedures, more code, more features, more stuff. Interdependencies proliferate, and gradually strangle us. Systems want to grow and grow, but without pruning, they collapse. Slowly, then spectacularly. When a piece of trash drifts across the beach, it is our duty to pick it up so the next person...
Bees collect nectar to make honey. Beekeepers collect honey to make money. Honey helps bees survive winter chills. Money helps beekeepers pay the bills. Beekeepers leave enough honey in the hive for the bees to survive. Beekeeper-keepers leave enough money in the bank for beekeepers to survive. Bees do not think about beekeepers. Beekeepers do...
Love is magic, it defies explanation. To the most rational and logical among us, this may be confusing. Its elusiveness is its significance. Love isn’t an illusion to be broken, but a miracle to bask in. Not everything needs to be understood, to be appreciated. You are the audience, and the magician. Love is an idea. A moment of love can be...
The edge of a sheet of paper slices through the tip of your finger and blood begins to flow from the wound. This injury, as small as it may be, must be repaired. Blood cells rush to the site, clotting, scabbing, healing. You never asked for it, but a few days later your finger is as good as new. It has been said that humans are passengers on...
Why Obsidian is 100% user-supported and not backed by VC investors: We want to stay small, we don’t need to hire lots of people We follow strict principles that we do not want compromise Our users are happy to support us, we don’t need VC money Obsidian will not exist forever, no app will. However, the files you create in Obsidian are...
Around the age of twenty-two I realized that my worldview had been deeply imbued with pessimism and cynicism. It was the culture I grew up in. A hostility to new ideas, to anything that strays from the norm. An assumption that if things can go wrong, they will go wrong — that malice is pervasive. One day, I decided to become an optimist and life...
I have found it useful to group positions on artificial intelligence into five axes, each of which has a spectrum of perspectives. I find that understanding someone’s opinion about each axis helps reveal their hopes and fears about AI. AI bad — AI good AGI far — AGI close Slow takeoff — fast takeoff Decentralize — centralize ...
As a child, you touched something hot, and it burned you. That pain gave you a piece of information: be careful touching hot things. When you sign up to run a marathon, you are signing up for pain. But whether or not you keep running is up to you. It’s been said that “pain is inevitable but suffering is optional”. You can choose pain without...
Quality software from independent makers is like quality food from the farmer’s market. A jar of handmade organic jam is not the same as mass-produced corn syrup-laden jam from the supermarket. Industrial fruit jam is filled with cheap ingredients and shelf stabilizers. Industrial software is filled with privacy-invasive trackers and proprietary...
Whenever I buy things I try to prioritize cost per use. Sometimes I consider other priorities such as cost per smile, cost per thrill, cost per externality, and cost per lesson. Cost per use Cost per use is a heuristic that helps me make decisions about most non-perishable purchases such as clothes, vehicles, tools, devices, and even services....
Oscar Wilde once said: “Consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative.” When it comes to ideas, I agree — allow your mind to be changed. When it comes to process, I disagree. Style emerges from consistency, and having a style opens your imagination. Your mind should be flexible, but your process should be repeatable. Style is a set of...
If you want to progress faster, write concise explanations. Explain ideas in simple terms, strongly and clearly, so that they can be rebutted, remixed, reworked — or built upon. Concise explanations spread faster because they are easier to read and understand. The sooner your idea is understood, the sooner others can build on it. Concise...
There is a parasite, I see it everywhere. It consumes your health and wealth. It preys on ignorance and is easy to catch. It’s so common you may not even notice you have it. The parasite has a simple and attractive proposition: let me take care of this hard thing for you. Trust me, I know better. Instead of understanding it yourself, you choose...
There is a feeling I search for: being in good hands. It is the feeling I look to give and the feeling I look to receive. I know I am in good hands when I sense a cohesive point of view expressed with attention to detail. I can feel it almost instantly. In any medium. Music, film, fashion, architecture, writing, software. At a Japanese...
How many individual electric motors are part of your daily life? Count your electric toothbrush, air conditioner, blow dryer, refrigerator, washing machine. Count the tiny motors that control the focus and zoom of your phone camera. A modern car has at least thirty motors powering windshield wipers, electric windows, side mirrors, and various...
There’s a French expression I like: L’appétit vient en mangeant Appetite comes when you eat. Nibble and your appetite will grow. Appetite can be the hunger for any kind of thing, not just food. Some days I wish I had the appetite to write, to read, to exercise, or even go outside. Procrastination is the state of waiting for motivation to come....
File over app is a philosophy: if you want to create digital artifacts that last, they must be files you can control, in formats that are easy to retrieve and read. Use tools that give you this freedom. File over app is an appeal to tool makers: accept that all software is ephemeral, and give people ownership over their data. In the fullness of...
For the past seven decades, computers have been designed to enhance what your brain can do — think and remember. New kinds of computers will enhance what your senses can do — see, hear, touch, smell, taste. The term spatial computing is emerging to encompass both augmented and virtual reality. I believe we are exploring an even broader paradigm:...
One of my first industrial design jobs was working on a headset that never shipped, for a now defunct startup. It used two micro-OLED displays similar to the ones in Apple’s Vision Pro, but with clear, see-through optics reflected into the eye through a kind of one-way mirror lenses (beam-splitters). In retrospect, it was crazy to think that a...
Every week I create a weekly note, and write my to-dos for the week. I may add more items to it during the week. If any items didn’t get done I roll them over to the next weekly note or drop them. That’s it. I usually write my to-dos from scratch without looking at the previous week’s list. This helps me decide which items I should drop. If I...
Tools convert something you can do into something you want to do. A pencil converts hand movements (what you can do) into markings on paper (what you want to do) with the purpose of conveying an idea. New tools cause revolutions when they make costly things cheap. But making something cheap usually means making something else more expensive....
Specialization is too heavily encouraged as a career path. Becoming a generalist is one alternative, but there is another path less discussed: become a hybrid. The hybrid path means developing expertise in two or more distinct areas. Having several specialities allows you to see patterns that no one else can see, and make contributions that no...
When I think about editing images, a vast array of options come to mind: contrast, saturation, sharpen, blur, airbrush, clone stamp, etc. Even basic image editors offer dozens of useful image manipulation tools. When I think about editing text, a much narrower definition comes to mind: cut, copy, paste, find, replace, spell check — nothing that...
The cover of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy has two simple words of advice for intergalactic travelers: Don’t panic. Panic is my least favorite feeling. I much prefer calm. Calmness is a superpower that is useful in many situations. When you feel anxious, or stressed, or angry, you can choose to be calm. People like to be around others...
Evergreen notes allow you to think about complex ideas by building them up from smaller composable ideas. My evergreen notes have titles that distill each idea in a succinct and memorable way, that I can use in a sentence. For example: A company is a superorganism All input is error Calmness is a superpower Concise explanations...
Emerging generative AI art tools such as Stable Diffusion, DALL-E and Midjourney have given rise to a new artform. I call it synthography. A revolutionary new kind of camera was recently invented. Instead of turning light into pictures, it turns ideas into pictures. The traditional camera replicates what your eyes do. It works by receiving...
Every year I ask myself 40 questions that help me make sense of what happened over the past twelve months. I love working through that exercise and discussing it with friends and family who do it too. As we enter a new decade, I’ve been pondering what the 2020s will hold for us. I remembered that some time ago I had answered Proust’s famous...
Last year, on Earth Day 2020, I started Slash Packaging — a directory of companies that have created a /packaging page, to make their packaging sustainability commitments easily accessible. One year later, it’s time to reflect on our progress, and what’s next. Over the last 12 months, 60 companies have added a /packaging page, from small...
Today is the 50th anniversary of Earth Day. To celebrate I brought together 30 ecommerce companies to launch slashpackaging.org, a movement to make packaging information accessible to all. I hope you will join too. Most websites have a /about page, Slash Packaging is a growing directory of businesses that have a /packaging page....
How many days have you been alive? Yesterday I found out that I have been alive for 12,431 days. If each day I split off into a new person those 12,430 previous selves would fill a stadium. If I live to 90 years old, there will be 32,850 selves in that stadium. That’s 20,420 more of us than there are now. Today, I am the one on stage. The things...
For years I’ve had a fascination with the idea of digital paper. It’s a concept that people have been working towards since the dawn of computing. Before the mouse was invented there was the aptly-named Stylator and the RAND Tablet. Over time, we’ve gotten closer and closer to creating digital paper, which requires solving several problems: ...
When did the word “compromise” become vilified? Compromise is neither good nor bad, it’s something we do every day. It’s decision making. Prioritizing. Deciding that one thing is more important than another. It’s finding the right balance between two competing desires. Which compromises you make — that’s what matters. Choosing the right...
Getting encouraging feedback from lots of potential customers is not the same as having product-market fit. On the bright side, you’re probably on the right track. You may know what product market fit will look like, but you don’t actually have it yet. You’ll know you have product-market fit when any capacity you add is immediately consumed and...
Methodologies for problem-solving are fairly well established. The scientific method is perhaps the best problem-solving template we have. However, finding good problems to solve is a different skill altogether, one that we don’t teach. Problem-finding is about looking for an area that you can invest your problem-solving skills into. It’s the...
When trying to jumpstart a new habit, the only thing that matters is making consistent progress. It’s easy to get in your own way by setting the bar too high. Instead, set the bar as low as possible. Any progress at all is a good thing. What is the smallest unit of progress you can make? Do one push up Read one page Write one sentence ...
One of my end-of-year rituals is asking myself these forty questions. It usually takes me about a week to work my way through all of them. I find it to be one of the most valuable exercises to reflect on what happened, good and bad, and how I hope the year ahead will shape up. These questions are available in Markdown format and in 26 languages....
I saw a wonderful exhibit of Ishiuchi Miyako’s photography. Her series “Scars” particularly struck me. "Scars" by Ishiuchi Miyako The images are hard to look at without wincing. The oversized prints were even more painful to witness in person. But after the initial shock washed over me, I began to appreciate the photography itself. There is...
There’s a saying you may have heard called Hanlon’s razor: “Never attribute to malice what can be explained by stupidity.” The word “malice” is perfect because it says nothing about the severity of the act. It could describe anything from someone cutting you off in traffic to an accident that blows up the Earth. On the other hand, I find that...
When Google Maps first came out, it blew me away. It still seems like one of the most magical technologies we have today. I wonder what Ferdinand Magellan would think if you showed him Google Maps on a phone? The entire world mapped in detail, with photos of every building in every city. I sat in an airport listening to Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky...
The term “vanilla” is often used to describe something ordinary, plain, or standard. In my book, there’s nothing less vanilla than vanilla. Vanilla beans are the fruit of a rare orchid native to Mexico. Their aroma and flavor comes from a compound called vanillin. Each vanilla flower blooms just one morning out of every year. The orchid can only...
A professor of mine used to often quote Bob Dylan: “He not busy being born is busy dying” Some are comfortable making the same thing the same way their entire career. not. But that approach is fragile, susceptible to unexpected events. The documentary Jiro Dreams of Sushi is a lesson that masters in their craft are always learning, always...
Stream of consciousness A world where knowledge is captured and categorized, interpreted by the masses almost instantaneously digested, regurgitated, masticated, ruminated… and immediately available to access, pre-chewed. We become increasingly eager to process and catalog everything, beginning with the superficial and slow-moving, but...