Presence

95% of content consumption is procrastination disguised as productivity.

Most people waste hundreds of hours consuming “just-in-case” content because it’s “interesting.”

Instead, you should consume "just-in-time" to answer a question keeping you from moving forward.

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.

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

III. Make your tweets as easy to consume as possible

Most tweets which go viral are very short and easy to consume. The exception to this tip is ‘essay’-style threads like the example shown above which have a different art to them. You should generally delete as many words as you can from a tweet, space out any sections of a tweet which are long, a... 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.

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

What and how do you write a personal site with the long-term in mind?... What sort of writing could you create if you worked on it (be it ever so rarely) for the next 60 years?