What can hand writing actually do? →

Published 16 Hours Ago  ·  All posts on Jun 9  ·  

I’ve been keeping a personal journal and tinkering with notebooks, lists, prompts, and reminders for decades. The longer I’ve done it, the more convinced I am that hand-writing isn’t a quaint preference — it’s a different way of thinking. The pen slows you down. The page absorbs what your head keeps re-running. You stop having to remember things you’ve already worked through. It’s not magic. It’s just paper. But over years I believe it has changed what my mind does in any given hour.

This thread runs through how the practice actually works for me — what hand-writing changes about attention, what the daily routines look like, why the lists matter, what reflection adds, and what shows up years later when you rummage through an old notebook. The book Hand-Write. Think Better. is the one-place compression of all of that and this thread is the longer conversation behind it.

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What About Digital Tools? →

Published 6 Days Ago  ·  All posts on Jun 3  ·  

People ask about digital note-taking tools. Notion, Obsidian, Roam, whatever the current favorite is.

Those tools are fine. They solve different problems.

The notebook works because:

  • Writing by hand is slower, which forces clearer thinking
  • It’s always available (no boot time, no battery, no “let me find the right app”)
  • There’s no temptation to organize before you write
  • You can’t accidentally delete it
  • It works the same way in 20 years

Digital tools work because:

  • They’re searchable
  • They’re backed up
  • You can reorganize
  • You can share
  • They integrate with other systems

Different trade-offs.

For thinking through problems and capturing thoughts in the moment, I’ll take paper. For building reference systems or collaborative work, digital makes sense.

You can use both. They’re not competing. They’re solving different problems.

The question isn’t “paper or digital?” It’s “what are you trying to do right now?”

ɕ

This is part of a series about Hand-Write. Think Better.—a method for using paper to think more clearly. Get the book →

Fasting — what I’ve actually learned →

Published 7 Days Ago  ·  All posts on Jun 2  ·  , ,

I started in 2008-ish by cutting refined carbs. Intermittent fasting — 16:8 — came later. I’m still over-weight. I’m not selling anything. The pieces below are the ones I keep pointing to when someone asks me what I think.

This thread is sequenced for someone wondering whether to be more intentional about when they eat. None of it answers that question for you. It just tells you what an honest version of the n=1 looks like over a long timeline, and suggests things you might want to try.

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A state of mind →

Published 7 Days Ago  ·  All posts on Jun 2  ·  

Is wild determined by your distance from the nearest city? Does it mean there is no plane passing overhead, no boat offshore, no light on the horizon? As I explored the far reaches and, later, those closer to home, I learned that wild is not a place, it is a state of mind.

~ Ian Shive

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What's that perspective like?

What’s that perspective like? →

Published 9 Days Ago  ·  All posts on May 31  ·  

This little guy was just off to the side as I was perambulating lost in thought (and probably talking to myself.) When I noticed them, I snapped this photo (with some telephoto so as not to completely terrify them.)

And then I was thinking: What must their perspective be?!

They were probably just about to cross that big, barren roadway of the gods (the cinder trail I was on)—that roadway that is different from everything else, and goes so unimaginably far in either direction that no turtle knows the start or end of it. And **yikes** here comes one of the towering, impossibly thin—how does it not immediately fall over?!—gods, making those sonorous, booming, incomprehensible noises… “oh, shit! It’s seen me…” **freezes**

My brain is like the Secret Life of Walter Mitty, except I’m imagining the inner world of everyone and every intelligence I encounter.

ɕ

Desires, left behind →

Published 10 Days Ago  ·  All posts on May 30  ·  

Every pleasure saves its greatest delights for its last moments. The most pleasurable time of life is on the downhill side, just before the drop-off. Even the time that stands at the very brink has its own pleasures, I believe. Or if not, then it has this instead: One no longer feels the need of any. How sweet it is to have worn out one’s desires and left them behind.

~ Seneca

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Aiming is the secret →

Published 10 Days Ago  ·  All posts on May 30

You don’t get ready and then aim high. You aim high, and the aiming makes you ready.

~ Nini Nguyen, from The Moon was Never the Point

That’s something which took me many years to understand.

I’m fond of saying that ideas are worthless. What matters is what you do with your ideas. Share them freely. Engage with others. Make a plan and see it through.

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There’s just life time →

Published 11 Days Ago  ·  All posts on May 29

Figuring out how to have sustainable, fulfilling existence seems like it should be the goal, no?

~ John Warner, from Produce or Perish?

Somewhere there’s a quote about how we don’t have “work time” and “play time” but rather there is only life time. Warner’s article gets it.

I hope you have gotten it too.

ɕ

Dismantling our creative potential →

Published 11 Days Ago  ·  All posts on May 28

And then the newest erosion – the AI rabbit hole. Everyone deep in their own individual loop. Getting more productive. Getting more fluent. And getting, incrementally, more disconnected from the people around them. The half-formed question that used to get asked out loud – I’m stuck on this, has anyone dealt with something like this? – now goes to a chatbot. The same technology that was supposed to unlock creative potential is, in its default form, dismantling the sidewalk ballet entirely.

~ Zoe Scaman, from Creative Mycelium

Yes. But, see also Schizoid Kairos for a view of the situations where it’s also a novel new paradigm.

As with every technology—every tool—humankind has ever picked up, it matters what you do with it. Sure, I want to live in that “sidewalk city” where my ideas mix with others’. If only those scenes still existed.

ɕ

Perseverance is something larger →

Published 12 Days Ago  ·  All posts on May 28  ·  

If persistence is attempting to solve some difficult problem with dogged determination and hammering until the break occurs, then plenty of people can be said to be persistent. But perseverance is something larger. It’s the long game. It’s about what happens not just in round one but in round two and every round after—and then the fight after that and the fight after that, until the end.

~ Ryan Holiday

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