Craig Constantine

Show your work →

I return often to Kleon’s matra of “show your work“.

I always fade out from the process. I think the reason is that I’m not necessarily doing something related to podcasting every day. (Which is fine.) Without a strong habit of podcast-specific work (for example, “I do podcast stuff at 9am every day”) I don’t get in the habit of doing the extra little bit of work to capture something showing my work…

I’m convinced, my work would be better—and it would help others too—if I showed my work more. But I can’t seem to crack this nut.

Zooming out, away from podcasting . . .

I keep thinking: I don’t have a clear, single thing that is “my work” — it’s not podcasting, it’s not blog writing, it’s not community building [here], … For example: Here’s some notes I took, over the course of an hour thinking about coaching movement, based on a long conversation I had with a coach I respect. We had a coffee meeting where I wanted to pick his brain…

I post all sorts of things here, on the ‘ol blog. In recent years, my posting grew, become a weekly thing which I cleaved off to be the 7 for Sunday weekly email. Here I continue to post new quotes from my collection, copies of all the podcast episodes I do [all shows, anywhere], and a lot of “this is interesting” links that I find.

This morning, I’m thinking: My blog has long been the place where I work with the garage door up. Maybe I should lean into that?

…develop the habit of showing something (anything, from any project I’m working on) there on my blog. 🤔

Education →

Published May 13 · All posts on May 13 · Self-improvement, Quotes

What is defeat? Nothing but education; nothing but the first step to something better.
~ Wendell Phillips

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Private →

Published May 12, 2025 · All posts on May 12 · Cogitants

But it’s consciousness in the experience sense – what philosophers refer to as phenomenal consciousness – that I’ll be focusing on in the remainder of this Guide. This kind of consciousness serves as a fundamental part of our existence, perhaps even the most fundamental part of our existence. But despite its fundamentality, and though we are intimately aware of our own conscious experience, the notion of consciousness is a perplexing one.
~ Amy Kind, from How to think about consciousness

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The current tools so breathlessly referred to as artificial intelligence, are still only tools. They have no agency, no goals, and critically they are not consciousness. Or, so we think. “Is conscious” is exceedingly important to determine, and it turns out it’s really hard to do the less like us (think: bats, dolphins, octopus, bacteria, …) some living thing is.

The discard pile →

Published May 11, 2025 · All posts on May 11 · Creativity

I think part of being a designer is to fail every day, to try things that don’t work out. In a way, every project fails every day until it succeeds! That’s what the iterative process of design is about. The projects that don’t launch, this is sometimes due to the fact that they’re too early but that doesn’t mean they don’t come back a few years later as ideas integrated in different projects. Timing in many ways is key.
~ Yves Béhar, from Yves Béhar – The Talks

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I’m reminded of the idea of one’s discard pile. Béhar’s work can fail (the idea of success versus failure in trading with others is baked into the way we use the word “work”), so he’s aware of “failure” as a salient feature of his creative efforts. Here on the ‘ol blog, this isn’t about “work” so it’s not possible for it to “fail.” But I do often think about the discard pile: I don’t actually create blog posts and then discard them rather than post them. But I do often read and find things, imagine what I could post about them… and then I don’t post it.

Deep dive into agency →

Published May 10, 2025 · All posts on May 10 · Cogitants

Over the last decade, I’ve watched AI challenge — and augment — humanity in astonishing ways. Every few years, a new innovation seems to raise the same questions: can we compute human intelligence? Can our labor be automated? Who owns these systems and their training data? How will this technology reshape society? Yet there is one question I rarely hear asked: how will AI change our understanding of ourselves?
~ K Allado-McDowell, from Am I Slop? Am I Agentic? Am I Earth?

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This article—from the ever-interesting halls of The Long Now Foundation—got me thinking about intelligence from a new direction: instead of a tool or collaborator for us, a new way to learn about ourselves.

Fonts. 600 photos. omg →

Published May 9, 2025 · All posts on May 9

In 2007, on my first trip to New York City, I grabbed a brand-new DSLR camera and photographed all the fonts I was supposed to love. I admired American Typewriter in all of the I <3 NYC logos, watched Akzidenz Grotesk and Helvetica fighting over the subway signs, and even caught an occasional appearance of the flawlessly-named Gotham, still a year before it skyrocketed in popularity via Barack Obama’s first campaign.
But there was one font I didn’t even notice, even though it was everywhere around me.
Last year in New York, I walked over 100 miles and took thousands of photos of one and one font only.
~ Marcin Wichary, from The hardest working font in Manhattan

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What. WHAT? WAT?! Words fail me… there are 600 photos in this article. I couldn’t stop staring at the technology parts, and keyboards—so much of that reminds me of my youngling days. I leaned in for the photography, which is gorgeous macrophotography. And fell headlong into the nostalgia.

What is the actual thing? →

Published May 8, 2025 · All posts on May 8 · Creativity

As someone who writes a lot about knowledge work in the digital age, I’m fascinated by this model of cooking, which I define as follows: a workflow designed to enable someone with a high-return skill to spend most of their time applying that skill, without distraction.
~ Cal Newport, from Let Brandon Cook

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For a decade I’ve been aware of this point. I’m, basically, a one-person creative process. If one leans into this way of thinking, then you immediately want to start figuring out how to not do all the other things. Which is fine if I were a one-person business process. But I am not. I’m not only a creator of valuable (in some sense other than money) work. I’m also the person who is nourished, enabling said creative work, by the random other parts. Whichever way you think of it though, Newport makes interesting points.

Automatic, clickable time-references in our show notes?! →

Published May 7, 2025 · All posts on May 7 · Podcasting

Well this is interesting! I’ve been adding time-references to quotes when I include them in show notes. I simply put the <minute>:<seconds> after the quote.

Today I realized that Overcast auto-magically makes those time codes clickable — touching the time code jumps play right to that point!

This is amazingly great for the listener.

For years there’s been discussion about chapters in podcast episodes. They are supported, yes. But there’s complicated to actually set up. The original way, is to embed the information within the mp3 audio file—that requires either special software which does just that, or your DAW has to support marking the chapters as you’re editing. Either way, a bit tedious.

But if this little feature of link-up-time-references in the notes works across more players… this is HUGE.

So: Take a look at your favorite player. Find an episode (any episode of Podtalk, for example) that has time-references in the show notes… and tell me if it works in your player.

Two different purposes →

Published May 6, 2025 · All posts on May 6

There’s two different main purposes for routines, and advice-givers mix them up. They lump these two quite different things under “morning routine” and it causes trouble when you try to design your own.
~ Mckinley Valentine, from The Whippet #185: Shielded and flower-like

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Partly, I include this because The Whippet is a sometimes quirky, often insightful, but always interesting little missive that I enjoy following/reading.

But also, WAIT WAT! …how is it I’ve never heard this idea/distinction before? Scroll down about 2/3 in issue № 185 to find this neat stuff about habits.

Momentum with Robin Waite →

Published May 5, 2025 · All posts on May 5

How can podcasters build meaningful relationships that expand their reach, create new opportunities, and grow their shows—without relying on promotion or algorithms?

A five-step method helps you land dream collaborations by being helpful, not pushy.

[One little shift?] That’s it. If I hadn’t have gone to that event, if I hadn’t have just dumped my coat and helped direct people, if I hadn’t offered to help for free, if I hadn’t got to know the team, if I hadn’t, if I’d asked for the wrong thing or too much or too, I don’t know if I’d got the ask wrong, any one of those things could have ended up being like a Sliding Doors [the 1998 film -ed] moment where I then I go from 3000 leads to just going about my life as a coach.
~ Robin Waite (15:00)

Robin Waite shares how he reinvented his business growth strategy by focusing on building partnerships rather than following conventional marketing playbooks. Feeling burnt out by social media and traditional outreach, he adopted an “outside-in” approach—intentionally targeting people he admired, getting in the same room with them, and offering help without expectation. His approach centers on showing up, adding value, and making intentional asks that are aligned with what others actually need.

He illustrates this with a detailed story of how he ended up as a guest on Ali Abdaal’s Deep Dive podcast, which generated over 3,000 leads and $300,000 in business. Key elements included making himself useful at events, building relationships with team members, and being ready with a modest but well-timed ask. Waite expands on this philosophy by identifying five steps: be intentional, get in the room, be helpful, find the inside person, and offer something on a silver platter. The conversation underscores the power of authentic connection, strategic generosity, and long-term thinking in business development.

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