Prefer to read (or listen to) this newsletter in your browser? Click here. 💡 The Big Idea: You Don’t Have to Wait for Someone Else to Fix It Anymore A few weeks ago, an Obsidian update quietly broke one of my favorite plugins. A small tweak to the app destroyed every custom callout in my vault overnight. As frustrating as this was, it’s not the first time something like this has happened. Right before I released LifeHQ, a plugin called Query Control was broken in the exact same way. Last...
about 2 hours ago • 4 min read
Prefer to read (or listen to) this newsletter in your browser? Click here. 💡 The Big Idea: The better the tools get, the more the only thing that matters is what you bring to them. There’s a section near the start of Four Thousand Weeks that I can’t stop thinking about. Oliver Burkeman opens the book with a bold prediction made by the famous economist John Maynard Keynes. Back in 1930, Keynes stood in front of a room and told everyone that technology was about to make us roughly eight times...
14 days ago • 7 min read
Prefer to read (or listen to) this newsletter in your browser? Click here. 💡 The Big Idea: The Basics are Pretty Basic A few weeks ago, David & I were recording a Focused feedback episode, and the topic of a minimum viable productivity system came up. And it dawned on me that we really don’t need a whole lot to make sure that we stay focused on what really matters. A calendar. A task manager. A place for notes. That’s basically it. Every workflow, every system, every tweak and optimization...
21 days ago • 7 min read
Prefer to read (or listen to) this newsletter in your browser? Click here. 💡 The Big Idea: How I Learned to Name and Face the Fear That’s Been Running My Business. Last week, I attended The Growth Intensive by Darrell Vesterfelt & Corey Wilks. Darrell is a growth strategist who helped scale ConvertKit (now Kit) from $1m to $7m in 15 months, and Corey is a clinical psychologist who helps founders break patterns of self-sabotage. I got to spend time with both of them when I was at Sponsor Games...
28 days ago • 9 min read
Prefer to read (or listen to) this newsletter in your browser? Click here. The Big Idea: Your PKM Practice was Secret Tastemaking Training for the AI Era. There’s a recognizable pattern to AI slop. And once you see it, you can’t unsee it. The “It’s not just X, it’s Y” sentence structure used over and over. The smooth, generic, vaguely helpful tone that could have been written about literally anything. The five-bullet structure where every bullet starts with a strong verb. The “Let me break...
about 1 month ago • 8 min read
Prefer to read (or listen to) this newsletter in your browser? Click here. 💡 The Big Idea: How Sahil Bloom Created a New York Times Bestseller Using a Pocket Notebook The author of an instant New York Times bestseller. A newsletter with more than 800,000 subscribers. A back-cover endorsement from the CEO of Apple. These are pretty impressive accomplishments for any creator. And Sahil Bloom proves you can achieve these kinds of results without a complicated system. He doesn’t have a vault of...
about 1 month ago • 10 min read
Prefer to read (or listen to) this newsletter in your browser? Click here. 💡 The Big Idea: You Need an Ideal Week Template For years, I’ve been doing something every quarter that almost nobody else I know does. It’s not flashy. Twenty minutes of work sets the architecture for the next twelve weeks of my life. It’s quietly one of the most important planning rituals I have, and the one that makes the biggest difference in whether I actually have time for what’s most important. I sit down with a...
about 2 months ago • 7 min read
Prefer to read (or listen to) this newsletter in your browser? Click here. 💡 The Big Idea: Playing to Play vs. Playing to Win I love me a good quote. I’ve got a whole collection of them inside my Obsidian vault. And the other day, I came across a doozy by Rick Rubin (author of The Creative Act): “We’re not playing to win, we’re playing to play. And ultimately, playing is fun.” When I heard that, it kind of stopped me in my tracks. Because I think most of the PKM advice out there quietly...
about 2 months ago • 4 min read
Prefer to read (or listen to) this newsletter in your browser? Click here. A couple of years ago, I built my own habit tracking dashboard in Obsidian. But looking back, that version had a few problems: It relied on a plugin called Tracker that added friction (and occasionally broke when Obsidian updated) It was painfully slow to load whenever you viewed your data Customizing the charts was a pain and meant digging into hard-coded snippets So with an assist from Claude, I rebuilt the whole...
2 months ago • 8 min read