Withers Without You

Rick Rubin is the guest on episode 649 of the Tim Ferris show and this is one of those podcasts you really want to listen to.

“Look for what you notice that no-one else sees.”

Robert Henri’s quote is quoted and man, this is sitting with me all day every day:

“The object isn’t to make art, it’s to be in that wonderful state that makes art inevitable”

This is a good listen.

Craig Hockenberry, of Icon Factory and Twitterific fame, unloads on Space Karen.

In 1978, neurologist Dr. James Austin proposed that there are 4 types of luck:

(1) Blind Luck (2) Luck from Motion (3) Luck from Awareness (4) Luck from Uniqueness

Sahil details them in this tweet thread.

Passport Photos is a very fun and cool photo series by Max Siedentopf.

Steve Jobs on how asking for help is a superpower:

“I’ve never found anybody that didn’t want to help me if I asked them for help. I called up Bill Hewlett (founder of HP) when I was 12 years old. He answered the phone himself. I told him I wanted to build a frequency counter. I asked if he had any spare parts I could have. He laughed. He gave me the parts. And he gave me a summer job at HP working on the assembly line putting together frequency counters. I have never found anyone who said no, or hung up the phone. I just ask. Most people never pick up the phone and call. And that is what separates the people who do things, versus the people who just dream about them. You have to act.”

Polina Pompliano with 15 People on the Most Important Question They’ve Ever Been Asked.

“Would you do this if you weren’t being paid?”

I’ve never felt more inadequate and stupid as a person whilst reading this essay and list of recommendations for writing good English prose by David Bentley Hart.

My favourite fiction/not-really-not-fiction book of 2022 was Russian Sleeper Cell by Nathan Monk 📚

Reading Publishers Weekly top twenty-five bestseller list is something I’m finding depressing, not because of the content of the list, but the numbers. So few books are being read. Props to Colleen Hoover, someone I’d never heard of before now, for having eight books on that list, it sounds like romance still sells.

It’s been twenty years since Bill Gates expressed his frustration at his own operating system and the team behind it on how hard it was to install Windows Movie Maker and honestly, computers are only slightly more useable today.

In every intellectual relationship there’s the person who recommends podcast episodes, and there’s the other person who doesn’t even listen to the recommended episodes.

In my and Scott’s relationship, I’m the recommending party.

But as is the fashion of the other person the two episodes of the one podcast that Scott recommended I listen this week, this is a banger.

Hallelujah, an episode of Malcolm Gladwell’s Revisionist History, is possibly one of the most thought provoking 30 minutes of my life.

The single idea that at the point of release, the moment of deliverance, the second you ship this creative work, that it’s more than likely not done yet, terrifies me.

We live a life today where I do a thing and it’s done and we move on.

Contemplating that Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah took the journey documented in this podcast, I’m going to sit with this for so long.

Please listen to this, then message me and let me know what you thought.

Seth Godin in his post, The platform and the curator, on the difference between current platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok and traditional platforms like radio, newspapers, and TV:

“Platform leaders understood that their decision to promote something instead of everything was a key part of their job.”