Category: Asides

One financial lesson they should teach in school is that most of the things we buy have to be paid for twice. There’s the first price, usually paid in dollars, just to gain possession of the desired thing, whatever it is: a book, a budgeting app, a unicycle, a bundle of kale. But then, in order to make use of the thing, you must also pay a second price. This is the effort and initiative required to gain its benefits, and it can be much higher than the first price.

[…] But no matter how many cool things you acquire, you don’t gain any more time or energy with which to pay their second prices—to use the gym membership, to read the unabridged classics, to make the ukulele sound good—and so their rewards remain unredeemed.

[…] This scarcity feeling creates one of the major side-effects of our insurmountable second-price debt: we reflexively overindulge in entertainment and other low-second-price pleasures –- phone apps, streaming services, and processed food — even though their rewards are often only marginally better than doing nothing.

Everything Must Be Paid for Twice by David Cain

Nice essay by Kelsey McKinney to remind us that the internet has – despite growth and broad adoption – become too small and limiting in recent years. It’s a call to action for us to break out of our echo chambers and embrace the vastness and potential for growth that the internet can offer.

It is worth remembering that the internet wasn’t supposed to be like this. It wasn’t supposed to be six boring men with too much money creating spaces that no one likes but everyone is forced to use because those men have driven every other form of online existence into the ground. The internet was supposed to have pockets, to have enchanting forests you could stumble into and dark ravines you knew better than to enter. The internet was supposed to be a place of opportunity, not just for profit but for surprise and connection and delight. Instead, like most everything American enterprise has promised held some new dream, it has turned out to be the same old thing—a dream for a few, and something much more confining for everyone else.

Source: The Internet Isn’t Meant To Be So Small | Defector

Simple framework for a weekly status update. I’ve been tinkering with quite a few of these recently in the context of commentary for OKRs and this one looks intriguing.

• Progress: What have you accomplished in the last few weeks?
• Plans: What are your upcoming plans for the next few weeks?
• Problems: What challenges or blockers are you facing?

Lyft’s 3PIs ritual: How 5k employees tune in to what’s actually important

“Not long ago, the web was still the future. It was a big deal for companies to have their own site, much less individuals. Technology evolved. We picked up a few HTML and CSS tricks, discovered the wonders of Flash. We started spinning up our own sites, complete with guest books and visitors counters.

[…]Having my own website says I care about what I do beyond clocking in and out and cashing a paycheck.

[..] In those days, our website was our home. An extension of ourselves. Every day we visited our page, tweaked it a bit here, adjusted something there, stood back and admired it. Our site was a little corner of the internet we could own.”

A love letter to my website – DESK Magazine via Instapaper

Austin Kleon is reflecting on 15 years of blogging and why he is still excited about it. It’s concise and insightful. His three main points:

1. To leave a trace
2. To figure out what I have to say. 
3. Because I like it.

15 years of blogging (and 3 reasons I keep going)

It’s a short read worth its time. It also contains great quote from Marc Weidenbaum on using writing to figure things out:

Don’t leave writing to writers. Don’t delegate your area of interest and knowledge to people with stronger rhetorical resources. You’ll find your voice as you make your way. There is, however, one thing to learn from writers that non-writers don’t always understand. Most writers don’t write to express what they think. They write to figure out what they think. Writing is a process of discovery. Blogging is an essential tool toward meditating over an extended period of time on a subject you consider to be important.

Bring Out Your Blogs

I don’t write a lot on this blog. Not nearly as much as I’d like to. But over the years there are now 60ish little artifacts that I found interesting to either collect links to or write up myself. It’s a nice little scrapbook that continues to grow over time.