# On Living a Life of Purpose In Your 20’s
source: https://ift.tt/BvsbpwE tags: #literature #living-well uid: 202207101532 —
PLACE A PREMIUM ON YOUR TIME. PLACE A HIGHER PREMIUM ON YOUR ATTENTION
EMBRACE UNCERTAINTY
I already feel like this! Planning on talking about this here. 202207101325
Life becomes peaceful when you do. The rush dissipates. Life becomes more enjoyable once you live it slowly, noticing the abundance of beauty surrounding us daily.
IF IT MAKES YOU BETTER, FASTER, OR MORE PRODUCTIVE - BUY IT
This is something that I embody hard! It’s something that’s changed my life! 202207101325
You should write because knowing that you’re going to make art changes the way you live. Knowing that I’m going to sit down to write each morning allows me to see the world differently. It makes you more inquisitive, and you seek a deeper understanding of how the things around you work.
My goal is to get to this point. I want to get to the point that when I learn about something, I’m subconsciously thinking about how I can explain it in some blog post because writing about something is the best way to learn something. 202204102301
PROBLEM AVOIDED > PROBLEM SOLVED Stop trying to solve problem after problem and learn to avoid problems instead. For every problem solved, a new one is invariably created. Problem-solving is good, but problem avoidance is better.
Once you realize there’s no speed limit, you know it’s possible to achieve incredible things. A lifetime is so much time. Twenty years is so much time. One year is so much time. The work you do today determines the life you live tomorrow. Do the work needed to live the life desired.
Wake up each morning and take one step closer to what you want. Stop messing around and put in the effort required. When you do that daily over the years, achievement becomes inevitable rather than just possible.
Reasons I Might Be Procrastinating
| Reasons why I might be procrastinating | Possible solutions |
|---|---|
| I missed it on my task list | Internalize the habit of regularly checking the task list |
| I don’t plan a time and place to do the task | Plan a specific time/place for the action, or link it to an action that you do already. |
| I don’t want to do the task. | Why is the task on my task list in the first place? Is it a real obligation or an imagined one? |
| The task is too vague or ill-defined | Try and break down the task to its most atomic steps, and make it quantifiable |
| The task is too big | Break down the task to its smallest steps. |
| The task isn’t quantified or time-bound | If I know how much I must do, or how long the task will take, it will be much easier to complete. |
| I don’t realize I’m procrastinating | Remind myself of what the task is before I start, and if I get distracted, shut out all distractions (using my Alfred extension) and return to the task at hand. |
| I’m “productively” procrastinating | If something is taking too long to do, take stock, and evaluate why I’m doing it. If it’s related to what I want to do, then persevere - if not, then I may be productive procrastinating. |
| I’m tired / stressed | Take the time off to do something else. |
uid: 202207101335 tags: #productivity
# Show Your Work! by Austin Kleon: Summary, Notes & Highlights
source: https://ift.tt/qtSwx1O tags: #literature #writing uid: 202207100236 —
Carving out a space for yourself online, somewhere where you can express yourself and share your work, is still one of the best possible investments you can make with your time.
The minute you learn something, turn around and teach it to others. Share your reading list. Point to helpful reference materials. Create some tutorials and post them online. Use pictures, words, and video. Take people step-by-step through part of your process. As blogger Kathy Sierra says, “make people better at something they want to be better at”
Find a Scenius - We need to move away from the lone genius myth of creativity. “Scenius” is a healthier way to think about creativity - “a whole scene of people supporting each other, looking at each other’s work, copying from each other, stealing ideas, and contributing ideas”. Anyone can contribute to the scenius. You don’t have to be an expert.
Share your successes, and more importantly, your failures. Help others who want to be on the same path.
Become a documentarian of what you do - As Gary Vaynerchuk says, “document, don’t create”. Share screenshots as you’re going along. Take photos of your process. Write down your thoughts in a notebook. Whether you share it or not, documenting your process has its own rewards.
Sharing vs Oversharing - Share stuff that might be helpful or interesting or entertaining to someone on the other side of the screen.
I think of it as “Will this potentially help at least one person in the world? If so, I should share it.”
Share other people’s work - We all like different things. If you can share the stuff you like, if you can curate it for others, good things will happen.
People want to read (and hear) good stories. You’ll become more effective at sharing yourself and your work if you can tell a good story.
Teaching people doesn’t take away from what you do, it adds to it. When you teach someone how to do your work, you’re actually generating more interest in your work. People will feel closer to it because you’re teaching them what you know.
The vampire test - “Whatever excites you, go do it. Whatever drains you, stop doing it” - Derek Sivers
When you put stuff out there, you’re going to get a bit of criticism. This is natural. Learn to take it. Don’t let the fear of haters stop you from putting yourself out there. They’re a tiny minority, and they have no real power over you.
What’s Unique About The Archive (Relative To Nota)?
I really enjoy working with both The Archive 202207051453 and Nota 202207051532. At the moment, my primary note-taking tool is The Archive, although I’ve been playing around with Nota and I’m starting to like using it more and more. I’m going to try enumerating the advantages of each to help better understand which one I should be using.
Advantages of Nota
- Go to the heading
- Better support for multiple workspaces
- Folders for categorically different things (as well as templates).
- Doesn’t use the UUID wikilinks, instead linking directly to the note title, which is what most note-taking apps do these days. This doesn’t mean that my The Archive notes are locked in 202207051341, but it does mean that the notes aren’t interoperable.
- Has auto-complete built in, so basic operations like autocomplete while doing wikilinks and tags work better. It’s yet to be seen if this will make a practical impact in how smoothly I can use the app, but it’s something to note.
- I like that it has the Tangent 202207051621 feature of having red links for notes that haven’t been created yet. It just looks really cool.
- Search results seem to be somewhat intelligent. In The Archive, search results seem to be returned in the default sort order (reverse chronological). This isn’t that big of a deal however.
- Having backlinks visible by default on a side-panel is a UX game-changer. I didn’t even realize what I was missing out on by not having this. I think would increase the depth of my traversals by quite a lot.
Advantages of The Archive
- Better-feeling search — links as searches feel extremely natural
- Nota doesn’t have anything like Saved Searches.
- Has a well-developed URL scheme. It doesn’t seem like Nota has anything like this. #update 12-31-22 — this is no longer true
- Most of my notes are already in The Archive. I’m going to have to convert them if I want to use Nota, and it’s not very easy to do so. #update 12-31-22 — this is no longer true.
- Creating a daily note feels a little clunky in Nota 202207051532. You have to name the note before being able to create it.
- The wikilinks in Nota don’t work very naturally. If you link to a file in another folder, the wiki link itself doesn’t contain any information about the other folder — you would think that the link is to a file in the same folder. To be clear, this behavior is totally fine, it just makes converting from
- Better tag management system. (To be clear, The Archive doesn’t come with any tag management by default, but the ecosystem I’ve created on top of the app makes it so that tags aren’t half bad to use. Nota currently has auto-complete built-in for tags once you start typing
#, but there’s no other way of interacting with tags or seeing all of your tags in the same place.) - There isn’t a dedicated way to go to the previous note in Nota. (There’s a way to go to the last edit, but it doesn’t work super seamlessly.) As a result, basic navigation doesn’t work super well.
- A native app, so it’s easier on the battery. (Not that this matters so much with my current computers, at least for the next few years)
- It’s a native app, so auto-correction while typing works beautifully well. Electron apps don’t have this, and it’s so nice. I can type fast without worrying about typos, and my notes will be perfectly formatted.
- I’ve figured out a way to sync Instapaper highlights directly into the app, which I’m really happy about. (To be fair, I could also do this with other local file-based apps like Obsidian 202006031443, Nota 202207051532, and Tangent 202207051621).
- Nota doesn’t have a way to go back to the last note / search / browsing context. (There’s a way to go back to the last edit, but that is definitely not what I’m looking for.) This makes recovering prior contexts in Nota very difficult. The Archive doesn’t do this perfectly - it has some weird behavior with the back button - but it still works so much better.
Created from: The Archive 202207051453
uid: 202207051535 tags: #notetaking
What Do I Care About In My Notetaking App?
Source: https://workflowy.com/#/7d20bfd61536
- Compare note apps: Workflowy, Logseq, Craft - NoteApps.info
- Being able to zoom into blocks, and view them as an isolated unit.
- Grammarly integration
- How easy the notes are to share with other people.
- How readable the notes are, and how much I enjoy writing them out. (Themes)
- Access to a mobile app.
- Daily notes; as a corollary, how easy it is to just get thoughts flowing within the note-taking software. ** #update 07-05-22_**: Daily notes don’t feel so important anymore 202207051407
- How easy it is for me to link to things using Hook. (Is it zero friction?)
- Is it 100% reliable? Am I likely to lose my notes, or for backlinks to suddenly stop working?
- Is it easy for me to find things? Is it likely that I’ll take some notes and they’ll get lost in the shuffle of things, somewhere?
- How well do backlinks work? Can I use them as a seamless way to view information about something?
- Readwise integration — can I use it as a source of truth.
- How easy it is to export to different formats (formatted, HTML, Markdown). Also see: Issues With Closed Notetaking Software 202207051341
- Is it easy to send back and forth between formats, since I’m so fucking indecisive about which apps I want to use?
- Table features
- Extensibility (plugins) — essentially speeding up the feature development process since we’re no longer just dependent on the developers
- Reasonable todo management within the app.
- Well thought out keyboard shortcuts.
- Does it satisfy a niche that other apps don’t provide? For example, Gingko feels just so natural and mentally smooth to use to organize information, and to go from outline -> draft -> final product. What are the unique pieces that each app gives me that I can’t get from the other ones? What specifically am I missing out on?
- Templates
- Having a notion of a side panel, and being able to view multiple pieces of information side-by-side.
- Once I’ve just added things to a page, brain-dump style (like I’m doing now), how easy is it to go through and clean up the page so that it conveys meaningful ideas?
- Can I use the app to take long-form notes about articles and such? Is it easy to read and digest?
- Apps that I want to compare:
- Workflowy
- Craft
- Logseq
- Roam?
- Dynalist
- Potentially Dropbox Paper
- Mem
uid: 202207051347 tags: #notetaking #update
How to ask good questions
Bloom argues that we should use non-empathic compassion (creating the desire to help) rather than empathy. Feeling another’s pain affects your ability to judge objectively. Compassion allows you to dig more deeply and ask questions about the other person rather than about you, which will allow you to help.
“Feeling another’s pain affects your ability to judge objectively”. What is compassion then?
Listening begins with setting your intention for a conversation. There are three primary intentions, which you can switch between in conversations:
- The ‘I’ intention — what do I make of this? This is where you engage with the situation by considering what you would have felt or done in a similar situation. This type of position often triggers a fix, or advice.
- The ‘You’ intention — what exactly do you mean? Listening with this intention reminds you that there is a lot you don’t know (the other person’s experiences or perceptions). You really try to understand the other person’s way of thinking. You never give advice or explain how you would have dealt with the situation. Your questions focus on getting deeper.
- The ‘We’ intention — how are we doing? This is a meta position, observing you and the other person as if from above. You are conscious of how you are feeling and how the other person is doing. Is the conversation going in circles, how is the body language (relaxed, fidgety, tightening)?
This gets into the more technical skills of how to ask questions. The author proposes a fascinating technique, which she calls questioning up and down. Questioning up refers to abstract concepts and downwards refers to concrete facts and reality. This technique should allow a person to move downwards until they establish the facts, and the ‘critical moment’, a key point/statement/fact/attitude around which the entire conversation revolves. Then the questioner can repeat the data they have heard and move upward to establish the underlying beliefs.
Upward questions (towards concepts and underlying beliefs):
Why is that? What do you mean by x? What does x have to do with y? Downward questions (towards facts, events, statements)
When did this happen? What exactly did z say? What happened from there? The idea is to ask downward questions to establish the facts of a situation. Then move upwards to understand the beliefs and concepts that influence the person’s thinking.
A why question can seem like a direct assault, like a detective shining a light into the face of a suspect. “Why did you vote for X party”? “Why do you associate with Y”? Instead, try to soften this effect by using what. “What is it about party X that causes you to vote for them”. “What makes Y a good person to hang
Vague questions — where it’s unclear what the questioner is looking for. This is often because they use a concept which is personal to them, like good, or high, or appealing. It’s difficult to know what the questioner means by those words. For example, “was the concert good?” may get a different answer from ten random participants. Instead of asking “Is that tower high”, ask “how high is that tower”, or instead of “was the meal tasty”, ask “how did the meal taste”?
don’t ask vague questions!
tags: #relationships #insights #howto uid: 202207041750