Updated 9/19 —

Medium has a wonderful array of charts that you can use to understand how your stories are doing, but sometimes those aren’t enough. Sometimes you just need to get your data nerd on. There are a number of tools to get the high-level stats of your Medium stories (for example…

Thoughts on Creating Through Burnout I’ve started coming to grips with the fact that I am completely burnt out. I have allowed the well to run dry and now I must wait for it to refill. Burnout like this doesn’t come quickly, it takes months to accumulate, for you to…

My favorite term from science-based weight management is non-exercise activity thermogenesis (NEAT). This mouthful of jargon refers to all the calories you burn from activity that is not exercise, like cleaning your house. NEAT is cool because it’s regulated unconsciously to maintain a certain weight. If you have a hard time gaining weight, there can be unconscious increases in NEAT through fidgeting.

Connectivity vs Sensitivity — In How to Do Nothing, Jenny Odell introduces an idea from Franco Berardi: the difference between connectivity and sensitivity. “Connectivity is the rapid circulation of information among compatible units” i.e. any post on social media. “Sensitivity, in contrast, involves a difficult, awkward, ambiguous encounter between two differently shaped bodies that are themselves ambiguous — and this meeting, this sensing, requires and takes place in time. Not only that, due to the effort of sensing, the two entities might come away from the encounter a bit different than they went in.”

Grow like a plant, not like a virus — Exponential growth is not a good model for personal development. Yet, a lot of our current language about growth is driven by the idea of exponential growth. Take for example the one-percent better idea popularized by James Clear. If you get 1% better each day, you’ll be 37 times better…

75Hard and Our Culture of Disconnection — I’ve spent the last week or so obsessing about how bad the TikTok craze 75Hard is. For those that aren’t familiar, 75 Hard is a “transformative mental toughness” program where participants are expected to follow 5 rules every day for 75 days. The rules: 1. 45 minutes of exercise, twice…

A Lesson on Growing for the Long Term The 70 percent rule states that when you do something you should do it at 70% of your capacity. A good starting point to understand the principle is with stretching your muscles. If you hold a stretch at 70% of your range…

Puzzles Are a Great Metaphor for Puzzles — I love finding simplifying metaphors–something simple that gives insight into something complex and potentially scary. Every time I sit down to do a jigsaw puzzle, it seems like the perfect simplification of the often daunting task of solving large problems that require creativity. …