Running your own business is the most powerful vessel for learning. Theory actualises itself into practical, meanwhile, you’ve placed a bet, you’ve made a sacrifice, on the learning.
An ever-changing and growing list of the top 50 life hacks at 50hacks.co
Muppets magic.
“I’d save every day like a treasure and then again I would spend them with you”
Cover of Jim Croce’s ‘Time In A Bottle’ as found on The Muppets in 1977. Also, weirdly, featured alongside another Muppet in an iPhone ad for the iPhone 6S and Siri.
Finally, how I feel about Britt. Love you xx
Salon Tom Weston’s Five Rules of Being A Grown-Up:
- You must not have anything wrong with you, or anything different about you.
- If you have something wrong or different about you, you really need to correct it. You need to be able to pass under all circumstances.
- If you can’t correct it, or change it in any way, you should just pretend that you have. It’s not a problem anymore. Good news!
- If you can’t even pretend not to have corrected the situation, you should just not show up, because it’s very painful for the rest of us to see you in your current condition.
- If you’re going to insist on showing up, you should at least have the decency to be ashamed.
How many fools you know that have specific global and Australian marriage law, rituals, traditions, and customs knowledge like this? Not many. If any?
On distrusting Instagram
Tavi Gevinson in NY Mag’s The Cut:
“There are plenty of well-documented reasons to distrust Instagram — the platform where one is never not branding, never not making Facebook money, never not giving Facebook one’s data — but most unnerving are the ways in which it has led me to distrust myself. After countless adventures through the black hole, my propensity to share, perform, and entertain has melded with a desire far more cynical: to be liked, quantifiably, for an idealized version of myself, at a rate not possible even ten years ago. I think I am a writer and an actor and an artist. But I haven’t believed the purity of my own intentions ever since I became my own salesperson, too.”
Outside our front door just now
A solid opportunity to transfer some of your wealth to me and for me to transfer some of my art to your walls at www.joshwithers.art
Y’all bringing your outdoor furniture inside after using it?
As an old nerd I find it fundamentally offensive when tech podcasts publish a 404th episode instead of skipping it, or maybe publishing a no-audio audio file.
Saturday morning coffee date
I’d rather have no phone than an Android phone.
Why is it ok for William Joel to be professionally called Billy Joel but it’s not ok for Joshua Withers to be professionally called Joshy Withers?
Science says we can all just stay at home and the Titans will still lose despite a home ground advantage.
Jerry Saltz is a gift to this generation, and his Vulture article: How to Be an Artist should be required reading for humans on planet earth:
“33 rules to take you from clueless amateur to generational talent (or at least help you live life a little more creatively).”
Matt Ruby (plus every wedding photographer I know):
Your grandparents have photos in a shoebox, but we’ll have nothing. Reminder: Just like every hard drive fails eventually, every business goes under eventually. Get a hard copy of anything you want to actually own and keep forever.
I never knew I needed a Transformer that transformed into a Canon R5 until now. now it’s all I want in this life.
Answers to the 10 most common questions people ask about us moving to Mexico
Answering the most common questions I’ve been asked about Britt and I moving to Mexico with our two kids:
- When do you go? October 10, 2022, then I come back for a month’s work around Australia Nov-Dec and then I’m back in Mexico before Christmas.
- Where will you go? I’ll let you know when we get there. We’re going to float around and do some housesitting gigs and try to find our place in the country. Honestly, it might not even be Mexico in the end. The goal isn’t to go to Mexico, the goal is to leave our normal routines and life, and Mexico seemed like as good as any place to get a residency visa. But of course, we are going to Mexico and I always think of the people that move to Australia and go to Sydney, I reckon those internationals miss out. I don’t want to end up in the Sydney of Mexico, or the Surfers Paradise. I’d love to end up in the Tugun of Mexico, somewhere small and beautiful and unique.
- When will you come back? We’ll let you know when we’re back.
- How will you afford it? Please book our house, The Tugun Pause, on Airbnb … plus I’d love for my photography to mean something financially - you can buy prints at art.josh.withers.co. Also, we’re still running the Elopement Collective and also mentoring celebrants at The Celebrant Institute.
- What about the cartels? What about the snakes, spiders, crocodiles, and dropbears in Australia? Mexico is a really big nation, the whole place isn’t Narcos. I would encourage you to develop a wider view and taste of the world if you think that Mexico is all drug cartels and people smuggling.
- Why Mexico? Why not?
- What will happen to our existing businesses? We’ll still lead and operate The Elopement Collective remotely and I’m still in partnership with Sarah at The Celebrant Institute so my celebrant training and mentoring efforts will continue. Being a celebrant, that’s on ice for a season. Consider it a sabbatical.
- Why? The last two years have destroyed us. This is an effort to take back who we are, who we want to be, and what kind of childhood we want our kids to have. We’ve lost more than our accountant could count through this pandemic, and we’re still on the same hamster wheel. I tried changing the hamster wheel to real estate, but the truth is I needed to actually get off all hamster wheels.
- Will you do weddings in Mexico? I’m currently without a work visa in Mexico, so no, but I’m exploring options. Nothing will really matter until I reach my goal anyhow.
- What’s your goal, seeing as though you just mentioned it? My goal is to not know what to do tomorrow. When I don’t know what to do tomorrow, I’ll allow myself to start planning for the next season with Britt and the girls as a team.
Finally, if you’ve gotten this far you probably care about us as a family and are interested in our story. I’m fairly whelmed with the state of social media’s business models, algorithms, data abuse, and advertising these days so I’m publishing and sharing everything here on the blog first. If you’d like a weekly digest of everything shared here, throw your email into the subscribe form here. One day if enough of my community is subscribed here I might even just delete all the social media accounts.
A fascinating element of modern web design is that developing/producing for the open web has actually gotten harder, not easier.
I remember the promise of Microsoft FrontPage, Apple’s iWeb, Macromedia Dreamweaver, that normal people could just make websites then upload the boring old HTML, CSS, and images to a directory on a web-facing file server and bam you’re online.
But today you’ve either got Squarespace, Wix, Wordpress.com or installing Wordpress on your own server - but then shit gets weird. Like someone I know was all excited for Astro and I look at the website and in the hero image area is the instruction to “npm create astro@latest” and I have no idea what that means?
Where’s the cool and hip web content creator of today?
Never forget that time the two largest mobile phone software companies partnered together and the Australian federal government said, yeah nah, and instead blew $21 million on an app that found two cases and is being deleted today.