In 2010, Derek Sivers gave a short-and-sweet TED talk that changed my understanding of leadership forever. Showing a short clip of a shirtless guy dancing by himself at a music festival, Derek explains: “First, a leader needs the guts to stand out and be ridiculed.” Well, that part I knew. It’s the part every movie, […]
The first train connection from my parents’ house to a larger city where I transfer runs through the middle of nowhere. The second stop is a town with a school. Often, many kids get on the tiny, two-wagon train. So for the next 40 minutes, I’ll sit there, tucked away quietly between three dozen high […]
When the Pokémon hype gets real, trying to buy new card sets throws me right back to the 90s. Except instead of driving to a store on release day, hoping to get some product, I’m checking various Discord servers and online shops ten times a day. “Is it live yet?” Naturally, I often end up […]
Asked why he went back to drinking coffee after living without it for 30 days and seeing many benefits, Tim Ferriss said: “I use coffee as a security blanket when my life gets hit with something unpredictable or things seem a little out of control. So even though I realize, intellectually, that it’s counterproductive […], […]
Before she can finally save her siblings from their shared, haunted past that is Hill House, Eleanor “Nell” Crain pays the ultimate price—but it does allow her to send a message, and, sometimes, a message is enough. Having realized that the house constantly played tricks on not just their minds but time itself, Nell explains: […]
Yesterday, I met someone at a party who, as it turned out, was in my year during undergrad. Same college. Same classes. Same exams. “Oh, but you must have never studied at the library then,” she said. “Actually, I was in the library all the time, often from 7 AM to 10 PM,” I responded. […]
The Crain family is anything but a normal family, mostly because they lived in an anything-but-normal house. At one point in the spooky TV series telling their tale, however, the estranged father Hugh shares some advice with his son that works just as well for normal people as it does for those haunted by the […]
In 2019, I posted every day on Substack for four months straight. My newsletter went from 0 to 4,000 subscribers. It was 100% organic growth with almost zero promotion. Five years later, in 2024, I started a new, different newsletter on the platform. I again posted every day for four months straight. And again, I […]
My inbox keeps warning me that my storage is near its limit. Of course, Google would prefer I throw some money at the problem. “Just pay us $30/year, and we’ll give you more digital space!” I usually react by relentlessly deleting old files, but here, I’m tempted—because email is different. My emails go back all […]
Yesterday, I checked my blog analytics so I could share last year’s 10 most popular posts based on views. I learned some lessons, but first, here they are: As I was going through the data, I noticed some patterns. Five observations stood out: It is turning out to be a multi-year process for me to […]
The customer in front of me kept asking the barista about their café’s expansion. One tiny corner shop had turned into a three-room venue already, replete with a bakery and a space to give classes. Now, they had opened another, even bigger location elsewhere in town. How did they do it? All the barista could […]
Today, our apartment has no water for eight hours. The irony? Outside, it’s raining all day long. But there’s a difference between water coming out of the sky or the ground and fresh H2O pouring out of your tap, and you only realize how big of a difference it is when you’re left without your […]
The movie Sully deals with the complications of becoming a hero. To the public, the situation was obvious: Chesley Sullenberger landed a jet plane with no functioning engines on the Hudson river and saved 155 people’s lives—give the man a medal, and let’s be grateful for some good news. According to the movie, however, it […]