The Bullet Journal Method


The 5,4,3,2,1 Exercise:

> A great way to get motivated is by realizing just how limited your time really is. The _5,4,3,2,1_ exercise is designed to help you contextualize your goals in terms of time. It will quantify your objectives by breaking them down over the short, mid, and long term. If you’re struggling to tackle your goals, give this a try.

The TL;Don’t want to read again: write down all of your goals, no matter the scale or feasibility. Make to spreads, one for personal, one for professional. Make a line across both pages marking off:

- 5 years
- 4 months
- 3 weeks
- 2 days
- 1 hours
  Map your goals to those blocks. Pick the highest priority one in each block. Those are your goals.

> Giving your page its Topic provides that opportunity to pause. What will you capture in this space? What’s its purpose? What value will it add to your life? These may seem like superfluous considerations, but I can’t tell you how many times I’ve sat down to make yet another list, only to realize that it simply wouldn’t add anything meaningful to my life. Does tracking the TV shows I’ve watched this year ad any real value? No. I can reinvest that time I saved into something that does. Other times, that pause has helped me refine my aims, keeping the content of my Bullet Journal focused and relevant. Topic by Topic, pause by pause, we’re honing our ability to focus on what matters.

> Being busy can be likened to tumbling down an existential staircase: stimulus, reaction, stimulus, reaction. This frenetic cycle of reactivity holds our attention hostage, limiting our ability to recognize opportunities for love, growth, and purpose. These are the things that add value to our lives, yet they’re easily obscured by the rush of our busy lives.

> In the bad old days, when we spent most of our time, you know, trying not to die, pleasure was limited and practical. Nowadays it’s a commodity, marketed as a substitute for happiness, and it’s on demand.

> Your notebook does not have to be beautiful to be valuable. Design should always serve a purpose. If it also happens to be beautiful, great! As long as it does not get in the way.


The Hilarious World Of Depression


I thoroughly enjoyed this book, the quotes I highlighted were somewhat random.

> Jen had to go sit on the bus for the rest of the field trip, too traumatized to taunt the actors like the rest of the kids, asking the 1600s costumed characters if they had VCRs at home.

I know why I highlighted this: it’s about Plymouth Plantation, my dad did this to the actors there, insisting that one of their fake felled trees could have never been cut down with a handsaw.

> Being the funny one was shrewd, too, because all four of us kids were comedy nerds. My older siblings understood shows like _Monty Python_ and _Saturday Night Live_ and I watched too, smiling, laughing when they laughed, and usually falling asleep. By going as hard as I could into something everyone liked, I thought, I would therefore by loved. Solid logic, confused little boy!

> Landing Atticus meant that I was good at something and that I had proven my worth. Only decades later would it dawn on me that normal people who never deal with depression have a sense of self-worth automatically. Just by being a person on the earth, they fell themselves worthy of respect and love and all that other cool stuff.

> If I write plays, on the other hand, I can type out my own dreams for others to inhabit, allowing me to stay home and isolate myself from the world. It sounded a lot easier, and I could wear those sweatpants. Of course, now, the idea of isolation and sweatpants is a dead giveaway for depression, but at the time it seemed very sensible. I announced to anyone who would listen that I was now a writer, and since no one ever checks and there’s no official state certification for that, people believed me.

> “This is common for people with all the different things that we have,” she said, “which is that if I can do it, then it must be dumb. If I can do it, it’s not that hard. So everything I ever did that was like a big deal, I’d be like, oh well, I guess it’s not a big deal. I though that would be a big deal, but it’s not because I could do it. So that means any idiot could do it, so on to the next thing that I think is hard. And then if I achieve it, then I guess, Yeah, that turned out to be not really important either….

> I’d grown up in a house with substance use issues, traumas both inherited and generated, and a series of cultural beliefs that silenced any meaningful conversation or action to deal with them. I thought a strong undercurrent of pain and toxicity was part of being in a family. If I think it’s normal but it has always felt fundamentally bad, it’s not really normal at all. It is a problem. The problem has a name. The problem’s name is depression.

> Mentally healthy people can intuitively regulate the time they spend in self-contemplation and balance it with time they spend just living. Normies such as these might do some yoga or meditation, possibly make lists of goals, read the occasional self-help book, but then they’ll hang out with friends drinking Chablis at Olive Garden or seeing a Bradley Cooper movie. Look, man, I don’t really know how the norms spend their time. They don’t have to worry about getting trapped in their own worst thoughts or running from those thoughts for years at a time; they parry away those thoughts with languid élan. It’s an instinct for the norms, like being able to show up to parties.


Glass Hotel


> ….but there’s a difference between being intelligent and knowing what to do with your life, also a difference between knowing that a college degree might change your life and a willingness to actually commit to the terrifying weight of student loans, especially since she’d worked alongside enough bartenders with college degrees to know that a college degree might not change anything at all, etc. etc….

> There’s something in it, he decides later, standing in line for dinner. It’s possible to know you’re a criminal, a liar, a man of weak moral character, and yet _not_ know it, in the sense of feeling that your punishment is somehow undeserved, that despite the cold facts you’re deserving of warmth and some kind of special treatment. You can know that you’re guilty of an enormous crime, that you stole an immense amount of money from multiple people and that this caused destitution for some of them and suicide for other, you can know all of this and yet still somehow feel you’ve been wronged when your judgement arrives.


American Hippo

Finished this in a day, hard to put down. Time to watch the movie on Netflix.

I'm Thinking Of Ending Things

Some reading notes from Range by David Epstein.

Range


> As one oncologist put it, “The difference between winning at _Jeopardy!_ and curing all cancer is that we know the answer to _Jeopardy!_ questions.” With cancer, we’re still working on posing the right questions in the first place.

> Mostly, though, students get what economist Bryan Caplan called narrow vocational training for jobs few of them will ever have. Three-quarters of American college graduates go on to a career unrelated to their major — a trend that includes math and science majors — after having become competent only with the tools of a single discipline.

> Vivaldi wrote oboe parts specifically for Pelegrina, but in her sixties her teeth fell out, abruptly ending her oboe career. So she switched back to violin, and continued performing into her seventies.

> Compared to the Tiger Mother’s tome, a parenting manual oriented toward creative achievement would have to open with a much shorter list of rules. In offering advice to parents, psychologist Adam Grant noted that creativity may be difficult to nature, but it is easy to thwart. He pointed to a study that found an average of six household rules for typical children, compared to one in households with extremely creative children. The parents with creative children made their opinions known after their kids did something they didn’t like, they just did not proscribe it beforehand. Their households were low on prior restraint.

> It can even help to be wildly wrong. Metcalfe and colleagues have repeatedly demonstrated a “hypercorrection effect.” The more confident a learn is of their wrong answer, the better the information sticks when they subsequently learn the right answer. Tolerating big mistakes can create the best learning opportunities.

> Platforms like Medium and LinkedIn are absolutely rife with posts about shiny new, unsupported learning hacks that lead to mind-glowingly rapid progress—from special dietary supplements and “brain-training” apps to audio cues meant to alter brain waves. In 2007, the U.S. Department of Education published a report by six scientists and an accomplished teacher who were asked to identify learning strategies that truly have scientific backing. Spacing, testing, and using making-connections questions were on the extremely short list. All three impair performance in the short term.

> “Above all, the most basic message is that teachers and students must avoid interpreting current performance as learning. Good performance on a test during the learning process can indicate mastery, but learners and teachers need to be aware that such performance will often index, instead, fast but fleeting progress.

> Winston Churchill’s “never give in, never, never, never, never” is an oft-quoted trope. The end of the sentence is always left out: “except to convictions of honor and good sense.”

> Seth Godin, author of some of the most popular career writing in the world, wrote a book disparaging the idea that “quitters never win.” Godin argued that “winners”—he generally meant individuals who reach the apex of their domain—quit fast and often when they detect that a plan is not the best fit, and do not feel bad about it. “We fail,” he wrote, when we stick with “tasks we don’t have the guts to quit.”

> Psychologist Dan Gilbert called it the “end of history illusion.” From teenagers to senior citizens, we recognize that our desires and motivations sure changed a lot in the past (see: your old hairstyle), but believe they will not change much in the future. In Gilbert’s terms, we are works in progress claiming to be finished.

> Rose framed it more colloquially: “If you are conscientious and neurotic while driving today, it’s a pretty safe bet you will be conscientious and neurotic while driving tomorrow. At the same time . . . you may not be conscientious and neurotic when you are playing Beatles cover songs with your band in the context of the local pub.”

> Paul Graham, computer scientist and cofounder of Y Combinator—the start-up funder of Airbnb, Dropbox, Stripe, and Twitch—encapsulated Ibarra’s tenets in a high school graduation speech he wrote, but never delivered:
> “It might seem that nothing would be easier than deciding what you like, but it turns out to be hard, partly because it’s hard to get an accurate picture of most jobs…..Most of the work I’ve done in the last ten years didn’t exist when I was in high school…..In such a world it’s not a good idea to have fixed plans.”

> Even though he was revered by then, Yokoi had to push and shove internally for his “lateral thinking with withered technology” concept to be approved for the Game Boy. “It was difficult to get Nintendo to understand,” he said later. Yokoi was convinced, though, that if users were drawn into the games, technological power would be an afterthought. “If you draw two circles on a blackboard, and say, ‘That’s a snowman,’ everyone who sees it will sense the white color of the snow,” he argued.

> “Do not be an engineer, he said, be a producer. “The producer knows that there’s such a thing as a semiconductor, but doesn’t need to know its inner workings…. That can be left to the experts.”

> Eminent physicist and mathematician Freeman Dyson styled it this way: we need both focused frogs and visionary birds. “Birds fly high in the air and survey broad vistas of mathematics out to the far horizon,” Dyson wrote in 2009. “They delight in concepts that unify our thinking and bring together diverse problems from different parts of the landscape. Frogs live in the mud below and see only the flowers that grow nearby. They delight in the details of particular objects, and they solve problems one at a time.” As a mathematician, Dyson labeled himself a frog, but contended, “It is stupid to claim that birds are better than frogs because they see farther, or that frogs are better than birds because they see deeper.” The world, he wrote, is both broad and deep. “We need birds and frogs working together to explore it.”

> Taylor and Greve expected a typical industrial production learning curve: creators learn by repetition, so creators making more comics in a given span of time would make better ones on average. They were wrong. Also, as had been shown in industrial production, they guessed that the more resources a publisher had, the better its creators’ average product would be. Wrong. And they made the very intuitive prediction that as creators’ years of experience in the industry increased, they would make better comics on average. Wrong again.
>
> A high-repetition workload negatively impacted performance. Years of experience had no impact at all. If not experience, repetition, or resources, what helped creators make better comics on average and innovate?
>
> The answer (in addition to not being overworked) was how many of twenty-two different genres a creator had worked in, from comedy and crime, to fantasy, adult, nonfiction, and sci-fi. Where length of experience did not differentiate creators, breadth of experience did. Broad genre experience made creators better on average and more likely to innovate.

> Griffin’s research team noticed that serial innovators repeatedly claimed that they themselves would be screened out under their company’s current hiring practices. “A mechanistic approach to hiring, while yielding highly reproducible results, in fact reduces the numbers of high-potential [for innovation] candidates,” they wrote.

> The integrators outperformed their colleagues on pretty much everything, but they especially trounced them on long-term predictions. Eventually, Tetlock conferred nicknames (borrowed from philosopher Isaiah Berlin) that became famous throughout the psychology and intelligence-gathering communities: the narrow-view hedgehogs, who “know one big thing,” and the integrator foxes, who “know many little things.”

> Incredibly, the hedgehogs performed especially poorly on long-term predictions within their domain of expertise. They actually got worse as they accumulated credentials and experience in their field. The more information they had to work with, the more they could fit any story to their worldview. This did give hedgehogs one conspicuous advantage. Viewing every world event through their preferred keyhole made it easy to fashion compelling stories about anything that occurred, and to tell the stories with adamant authority. In other words, they make great TV.

> A hallmark of interactions on the best teams is what psychologist Jonathan Baron termed “active open-mindedness.” The best forecasters view their own ideas as hypotheses in need of testing. Their aim is not to convince their teammates of their own expertise, but to encourage their teammates to help them falsify their own notions. In the sweep of humanity, that is not normal. Asked a difficult question—for example, “Would providing more money for public schools significantly improve the quality of teaching and learning?”—people naturally come up with a deluge of “myside” ideas. Armed with a web browser, they don’t start searching for why they are probably wrong. It is not that we are unable to come up with contrary ideas, it is just that our strong instinct is not to.

> In a study during the run-up to the Brexit vote, a small majority of both Remainers and Brexiters were able to correctly interpret made-up statistics about the efficacy of a rash-curing skin cream, but when voters were given the same exact data presented as if it indicated that immigration either increased or decreased crime, hordes of Brits suddenly became innumerate and misinterpreted statistics that disagreed with their political beliefs. Kahan found the same phenomenon in the United States using skin cream and gun control. Kahan also documented a personality feature that fought back against that propensity: science curiosity. Not science knowledge, science curiosity.


The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up


> But when we really delve into the reasons reasons for why we can’t let something go, there are only two: an attachment to the past or a fear for the future.

> Clutter is caused by a failure to return things to where they belong. Therefore, storage should reduce the effort needed to put things away, not the effort needed to get them out.

> The fact that you posses a surplus of things that you can't bring yourself to discard doesn't mean you are taking good care of them. In fact, it is quite the opposite.


The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time

essentialim

Smarter, Faster, Better


> “Internal locus of control has been linked with academic success, higher self-motivation and social maturity, lower incidences of stress and depression, and longer life span,” a team of psychologists wrote in the journal _Problems and Perspectives in Management_ in 2012. People with an internal locus of control tend to earn more money, have more friends, stay married longer, and report greater professional success and satisfaction.

---

> “A lot of poker comes down to luck,” Annie told me. “Just like life. You never know where you’ll end up. When I checked myself into the psych hospital my sophomore year, there’s no way I would have guessed I would end up as a professional poker player. But you have to be comfortable not knowing exactly where life is going. That’s how I’ve learned to keep the anxiety away. All we can do is learn how to make the best decisions that are in front of us, and trust that, over time, the odds will be in our favor.

---

About [Project Oxygen](https://hbr.org/2013/12/how-google-sold-its-engineers-on-management), from Google:
a good manager:

1. Is a good coach
2. Empowers and does not micromanage
3. Expresses interest and concern in subordinates’ success and well-being
4. Is results oriented
5. Listens and shares information
6. Helps with career development
7. Has a clear vision and strategy
8. Has key technical skills

---

> That’s one of the reasons why your cable company asks all those questions when you sign up for service. If they ask if you prefer a paperless bill to an itemized statement, or the ultra package versus the platinum lineup, or HBO to Showtime, you’re more likely to be motivated to pay the bill each month. As long as we feel a sense of control, we’re more willing to play along.

---

> Every choice we make in life is an experiment. Every day offers fresh opportunities to find better decision-making frames. We live in a time when data is more plentiful, cheaper to analyze, and easier to translate into action than every before. Smartphones, websites, digital databases, and apps put information at our fingertips. Bit it only becomes useful if we know how to make sense of it.

---

> The EI had worked because instead of passively absorbing data, teachers made it "disfluent"- harder to process at first, but stickler once it was really understood.

> “Something special happened inside those data rooms," said Macon, the principal. South Avondale improved not because teachers had more information but because they learned how to understand it. "With Google and the Internet and all the information we have now, you can find answers to almost anything in seconds," said Macon. “But South Avondale shows there's a difference between finding an answer and understanding what it means.”

---

> “Creativity is just connecting things,” Apple cofounder Steve Jobs said in 1996. “When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them. after a while. That’s because they were able to connect experiences they’ve had and synthesize new things. And the reason they were able to do that was that they’ve had more experiences or they have _thought_ more about their experiences than other people.” People become creative brokers, in other words, when they learn to pay attention to how things make them react and feel.

---

> There were, however, two behaviors that all the good teams shared.

> First, all the members of the good teams spoke in roughly the same proportion, a phenomenon the researchers referred to as “equality in distribution of conversational turn-taking.” In some teams, for instance, everyone spoke during each task. In other groups, conversation ebbed from assignment to assignment — but by the end of the day, everyone had spoken roughly the same amount.
> “As long as everyone got a change to talk the team did well,” said Woolley. “But if only one person or a small group spoke all the time, the collective intelligence declined. The conversations didn’t need to be equal every minute, but in aggregate, they had to balance out.”
> Second, the good teams tested as having “high average social sensitivity” — a fancy way of saying that the groups were skilled at inviting how members felt based on their tone of voice, how people held themselves, and the expressions on their faces.

---

> As her research continued Edmondson found a handful of good norms that seemed to be consistently associated with higher productivity. On the best teams, for instance, leaders encouraged people to speak up; teammates felt like they could expose their vulnerabilities to one another; people said they could suggest ideas without fear of retribution; the culture discouraged people from making harsh judgements. As Edmondson’s list of good norms grew, she began to notice that everything shared a common attribute: They were all behaviors that created a sense of togetherness while also encouraging people to take a chance.


The Happiness Project

Big Magic


> People convince themselves that they have been robbed when they have not, in fact, been robbed. Such thinking comes from a wretched allegiance to the notion of scarcity — from the belief that the world is a place of dearth, and that there will never be enough of anything to go around. The motto of this mentality is: _Somebody else got mine_. Had I decided to take that attitude, I would surely have lost my dear new friend. I also would have collapsed into a state of resentment, jealousy, and blame.

> Going into massive debt in order to become a creator, then, can make a stress and a burden out of something that should only ever have been a joy and a release. And after having invested so much in their education, artists who don’t immediately find professional success (which is most artists) can feel like failures. Their sense of having failed can interfere with their creative self-confidence — and maybe even stop them from creating at all. Then they’re in the terrible position of having to deal not only with a sense of shame and failure, but also with steep monthly bill that will forever remind them of their shame and failure.

> Quit your complaining. It’s not the world’s fault that you wanted to be an artist. It’s not the world’s job to enjoy the films you make, and it’s certainly not the world’s obligation to pay for your dreams. Nobody wants to hear it. Steal a camera if you must, but stop whining and get back to work.


My Year of Meats


> I started collecting local stories and would test them on the boys as we drove around in the van. If they liked a story or found it surprising, I would use it in the show. I was a full-fledged director now, and I’d promised Ueno I would do my best to satisfy the “unique sensibilities” of the Japanese television audience; since I wasn’t Japanese, I used the boys as my barometer. Traveling across America, they were astonished at how deeply violence is embedded in our culture, how it has _become_ the culture, what’s left of local color. We are a grisly nation.


Code


I finished [Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software](*https://www.microsoftpressstore.com/store/code-the-hidden-language-of-computer-hardware-and-software-9780735611313) by Charles Petzold this morning. I’ve been reading a chapter or two each morning for a while now. It does a great job of breaking down how a computer works, by explaining conceptually why humans created things like morse code, braille, binary, boolean logic, electromagnetic gates, the [Jacquard loom](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacquard_machine) (!), until we ended up combining a lot of those concepts and creating computers. Some of the middle chapters hurt my brain a bit: the jump from sending a signal down a diverted wire to light up a light bulb, to storing state in a loop, to computer RAM... it’s well explained, but if there was some planet-wide disaster tomorrow don’t expect me to start the first fabrication plant.

As someone who writes software but doesn’t have a CS or EE degree, and as someone who grew up mostly using computers with GUIs, this book filled in some of the gaps in my brain, like why hex values use the colors they use, how memory addresses work, how CPU frequency is determined and what it means, why the computers I used growing up gave you a choice between number of colors and resolution, why JavaScript is bad at math, the list goes on. There’s a one line note about Java, a language I generally despise, but after an entire chapter on languages communicating with machine code and operating systems communicating with hardware, I can appreciate Java and the JVM considerably more.

The book was published in 2000, and the later chapters move from the general to the specifics of the early days of Intel/Motorola and IBM/Windows/Macintosh, and it feels a little like opening a time capsule because of that. Petzold references Radio Shack as a place to buy computer parts, which made me intensely miss the feeling of browsing the bins at a Radio Shack. Steve Jobs and the Macintosh are mentioned in the context of managing hardware requirements to provide an entirely graphical operating system, an oft repeated story about the philosophical differences between Windows and Macs, but it’s interesting to think that in 2000 I had a Windows PC, and today my watch, phone, TV, the speaker closest to me, the tablet I’m writing this on, and the computer upstairs all run on variations of Apple operating systems built for Apple hardware.

Speaking of the, speaker, Petzold mentions the idea of virtual assistants late in the book, although not by that name:

> Everybody knows from science fiction movies and television shows that computers of the future converse with their users in spoken English. Once a computer is equipped with hardware to digitally record and play back sound, everything else involved in this goal is a software problem.

The book ends on the theme that once you have the capacity to digitize things (numbers, text, music, movies, photos), everything becomes a software problem. There’s probably another book to be written here that once everything becomes a software problem, all software becomes a social problem. There’s exactly one paragraph on the internet, which serves to nicely tie the end of the book to the beginning (I won’t ruin it, read it yourself).

Also of note — the pronunciation of GIF:
![](/assets/images/book_notes/gif_or_jif.jpg)


How to Do Nothing


> Politics neccessarily exist between even two individuals with free will; any attempt to reduce politics to design (Thiel's "machinery of freedom") is also an attempt to reduce people to machines or mechanical beings. So when Thiel writes of "new technologies that may create a new space for freedom," I hear only an echo of Frazier: "Their behavior is determined, yet they're free."

> As much as I might want to live in the woods where my phone doesn't work, or shun newspapers with Michael Weiss at his cabin in the Catskills, or devote my life to contemplating potatoes in Epicurus's garden, total renunciation would be a mistake. The story of the communes teaches me that there is no escaping the political fabric of the world (unless you're Peter Thiel, in which case there's always outer space). The world needs my participation more than ever. AGain, it is not a question of _whether_ but _how_.

> Back in 2013, students in my first art classes at Stanford were surprised that I didn't know about "Stanford duck syndrome." This phrase, which imagines students as placid-seeming ducks paddling strenously beneath the water, is essentially a joke about isolate struggle in an atmosphere obsessed with performance.

> It may be that refusal is only available as a tactic to people who already posses a great deal of social capital, people whose social standing will endure without Facebook and people whose livelihoods don't require them to be constantly plugged in and reachable... These are people who have what [Kathleen] Noonan (2001) calls "the power to switch off."

> Spacial and temporal context both have to do with the neighboring entities aorund something that help define it. Context also helps establish the order of events. Obviously, the bits of information we're assailed with on Twitter and Facebook feeds are missing both of these kinds of context. Scrolling through the feed, I can't help but wonder: What am I supposed to think of all this? How am I supposed to think of all this?

> But because apologizing and changing our minds online is so often framed as a weakness, we either hold our tongues or risk ridicule. Friends, family, and acquaintances can see a person who lives and grows in space and time, but the crowd can only see a figure who is expected to be as monolithic and timeless as a brand. Having worked for an old and widely recognized clothing company, I know firsthand that the pillars of any brand are internal coherence and consistency over time. (That's literally what we called them at work: "brand pillars.") For a brand as a for a public figure —which, as we now know, any Twitter user can accidentally become overnight—change, ambiguity, and contradiction are anathema. “You have one identity,” Mark Zuckerberg famously said. “The days of you having a different image for your work friends or co-workers and for the other people you know are probably coming to an end pretty quickly.” He added that “having two identities for yourself is an example of a lack of integrity.”

From [Community Memory](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community_Memory):

> Our intention is to introduce COMMUNITY MEMORY into neighborhoods and communities in this area, and make it available for them to live with it, play with it, and shape its growth and development. The idea is to work with a process whereby technological tools, like computers, are used by the people themselves to shape their own lives and communities in sane and liberating ways. In this case the computer enables the creation of a communal memory bank, accessible to anyone in the community. With this, we can work on providing the information, services, skills, education, and economic strength our community needs. We have a powerful tool—a genie—at our disposal; the question is whether we can integrate it into our lives, support it, and use it to improve our own lives and survival capabilities. We invite your participation and suggestions.

> I think often about how much time and energy we use thinking up things to say that would go over well with a context-collapsed crowd—not to mention checking back on how that crowd is responding. This is its own form of “research,” and when I do it, it feels not only pathetic but like a waste of energy.
> What if we spent that energy instead on saying the right things to the right people (or person) at the right time? What if we spent less time shouting into the void and being washed over with shouting in return—anymore time talking in rooms to those for whom our words are intended? Whether it’s a real room or a group chat on Signal, I want to see a restoration of context, a kind of context collection in the face of context collapse. If we have only so much attention to give, and only so much time on this earth, we might want to think about reinfusing our attention and our communication with the intention that both deserve.

> Behind them rose the skyline of San Francisco, with its new Salesforce tower and its high-rise condos. If I squinted, I could just make out the building where I used to work, where they might have been discussing “brand pillars” at this very moment. Back there, things moved so quickly that we had separate catalogs for Spring 1, Spring 2, and Spring 3. but the pelicans made all of that seem like a joke with no punchline. Based on a fossil dating from the Oligocene Epoch, the general design of the pelican appears not to have changed for 30 million years. In the winter, as they have for countless ages, the pelicans will be heading south to the Channel Islands and to Mexico to build the nests who designs, too, have remained largely unchanged.


2020 Reading

The Bullet Journal Method

The Hilarious World Of Depression

Glass Hotel

American Hippo

I'm Thinking Of Ending Things

Range

The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time

essentialim

Smarter, Faster, Better

The Happiness Project

Big Magic

My Year of Meats

Code

How to Do Nothing

Bowlaway

24/6

True Grit

The Unicorn Project

An Absolutely Remarkable Thing

Talking to Strangers

Words of Radiance