Presence

The impact of an essay is how much it changes readers' thinking multiplied by the importance of the topic. But it's hard to do well at both. It's hard to have big new ideas about important topics. So in practice there's a tradeoff: you can change readers' thinking a lot about moderately important things, or change it a little about very important o... See more

Whatever you say should also be at least somewhat novel to you, however old you are. It's not an essay otherwise, because an essay is something you write to figure something out. But whatever you figure out will presumably be more of a surprise to younger readers than it is to you.

with few exceptions, anything that becomes commoditized and ubiquitous - from shoes and clothing to watches and cars - spurs demand for a more scarce and meaning-infused version (often with brand/story and quality driving the premium).

this is now happening to content.

If you want to sound smart at parties, and make good decisions about SEO, you only need to know two things:

1. Google isn’t good at understanding content. When Google crawls your website, it’s creating a summary of what it’s about based on keywords, metadata, and links. But it doesn’t read and evaluate how good it is like a human.


2. Google learns what’s

... See more

It’s way easier to rank for 100 low volume searches than a handful of lucrative, popular ones, especially early on.

Here’s an example:

• We recently published a tutorial on setting up analytics for Electron apps.


• There’s an estimated 30 searches a month for “electron analytics”. That’s tiny.


• Ahrefs gives every search a keyword difficulty score out of 1

... See more

This raises the need to understand what your audience aims to do when they scroll a given social platform. After all, they’re definitely not scrolling in hopes of resharing others’ content. They might be scrolling to:

Be entertained. If they’re scrolling for entertainment, does your content deliver on that? If you’re aiming to be funny, you need to ... See more

things to do AT the dinner

• we covered this already but good reminder: have one-conversation and a moderator


• have a specific end time for the dinner and stick to it


• get photo of everyone at the dinner and send to them afterwards


• bonus: give a little gift to everyone.

the best dinners have LOTS of laughter

if it is a lunch or a board meeting, then get d... See more

people LOVE going to small one-conversation dinners — so definitely let people know this is a SMALL dinner and will be one conversation — you will get a much higher quality of participant.