Another adventure into what’s going on in my head and what I’m doing. It’s day 3 of the Daily Digest. I’m not sure when I’ll stop numbering these.
SLEEP!!!
Yesterday I talked about how I wasn’t getting enough sleep. Last night, I decided to put on my headphones and listen to two sessions of Headspace meditation. I took my earbuds out and was asleep within 5 minutes. The last few nights, I’ve been up for hours. It was great to finally get to sleep early and…
GET UP EARLY
I woke up almost two hours earlier than normal. I read 20 pages of Titan – the biography of John D. Rockefeller. I had a few conversations with my wife. I sat down with my dog. It was a great morning.
The Case For Reading Full Books
I read books for the eureka moments – when things just click. When I was reading The Checklist Manifesto, I had a eureka moment on page 170 of a 190 page book. Those eureka moments don’t happen from summaries. It’s something that only happens when you take time to read an entire book and you give ideas a few days to percolate inside your head.
Austin Kleon’s thoughts about Writing
I was listening to the second interview with Austin Kleon on The Writer Files earlier today. He had two very interesting suggestions.
1.) Read what you write outline
I’ve never tried this. I think this is a good idea for a final edit – especially for short pieces.
2.) Print out your writing – and edit them on paper.
I’ve been doing this since expository writing freshmen year of college. Since I’m writing more now, I even bought a printer – first time I’ve owned a printer in 8 years.
Stripe API for disputed charges
I was working with the Stripe API at work for the last few days. We’re trying to get a hold of credit card disputes in our financial reporting system. This is a really interesting topic and it’s been fun learning more about how Stripe handles chargebacks and disputes. It’s always fun working with APIs. There’s a level of exploration and discovery that you don’t always get with non-API work.
How Businesses and People Rank Themselves
- “The 9th Best Barista in the world”
- “4th Best Cheese in the World”
- “2014 Best of Boston Nominee”
Don’t forget that people are always putting their best foot forward. If someone labels themselves as the “9th best barista in the world” – you don’t know how they came to that number. It could have been a competition that took place 6 years ago (maybe they were 623rd last year?). It could be something where they mail in a recipe. It could be something where people vote online. Whenever you see things like this, always know there’s a lot of leeway and people always put their best foot forward. It’s always a good idea to look deeper to see what the designation really means.
There is a large part of the first half of But What If We’re Wrong by Chuck Klosterman that talks about things like this. How will we rank “the best musician” in 50 years? How do we rank that type of vague description today?
Taste by Ira Glass
I think we’ve all heard the video of Ira Glass talking about taste and creative work. I started to think about how this applies to building products – something that’s I hadn’t previously thought of as creative work. Building products fits into this category. People who build products have good taste and their work often doesn’t live up to their taste. This is why many people don’t ship as early as they should – or at all. The difference is that you can always improve a product. You should know that the current iteration is not where the product will end up as.
2 Acre Farm in a Shipping Container Startup
I saw this on HN a few days ago. I think this startup is pretty damn cool. People had some negative comments on the hacker news comments thread. If anything, that’s probably a good sign. I remember when everyone talked about how they could make Dropbox on their own…
That company is called Farm From a Box. Make sure you check them out!
There’s also a company in Boston using a shipping containers to make agriculture more efficient – Freight Farms. Check out this video of what they do. And yes, one of the nicest people on Twitter – Trish Fontanilla – works at Freight Farms!
Productive Procrastination
I’ve been playing around with this term over the last few days. I know that I should be doing things to push my ideas forward for what I want to do with Curtact, but instead, I’m reading. I’m learning to draw. I’m writing posts like this (but I’m getting more efficient at these!).
I am clearly procrastinating, but I am being productive because I’m not wasting time and vegging out, I’m improving myself.
What The Hell is Curtact, Anyway?
Curtact is a side project I’m working on without a clear mission. I know I want to build things for either sales, marketers, or SEOs – specifically the people who reach out to potential customers. Here are some ideas I’m tinkering with:
1.) A content API – get every piece of content (article/video/slideshare/podcast) someone created based on a social media profile or email address
2.) Email personalization platform – automatically personalize an email to make it look like you spent an hour researching them, but it only took 20 seconds.
3.) Handwritten Notes API – I’m starting to see the power of a handwritten note. This would be an api like MailLift to help make it easier to write notes to your customers.
4.) Content Email Outreach Campaign Creation Consulting – a mouthful – but I would create an email outreach to help promote someone’s content (post/video/slideshare/etc…).
That’ll do it for today!
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