An essay all online writers should read, from Patrick McKenzie

Patrick is an inspiring entrepreneur and writer who generously shares what he learns. His writings have taught me how to be a smarter, more effective business person.

“Making Your Writing Work Harder For You” is one of my favorites. Please read the whole thing; in the interim, here are some of my notes!

  • calling it “content” often devalues it
  • write things which retain their value over time (less news-y, less sensational)
  • remove dates from your work
  • call your best work “essays” or “comprehensive guides”, not blog posts
  • build your best work into the core navigation of your site so it’s easy to discover
  • have a goal for each piece of writing; often, it’s to continue the conversation via an email newsletter
  • provide something of immediate value to readers for giving you their email
  • build a library of your best content that you can re-use and remix (e.g., a case study, data)
  • types of content:
    • high-quality beginners’ guides (e.g., Moz’s beginner’s guide to SEO)
    • next steps for intermediate learners
    • dedicated task-oriented content (e.g., how to setup Rails on your new MacBook)

2 of my all-time favorite Reddit threads

Reddit was the original Secret. It continually reminds me that while we’re 99.999% the same, that 0.001% can be soooo fascinating…

Throwaway time! What’s your secret that could literally ruin your life if it came out?

Some excerpts:

I run a cake business. I charge people hundreds for wedding cakes… Every last one is made using Pilsbury cake mix I buy for $1 a box at Walmart. I suck at baking. Every time I’ve ever tried to make a cake from scratch it sucked. But baking is like.. My whole deal. My friends all call me the cake girl.

Two and a half years ago I was in dire financial straights, so I sold my home to keep my struggling business afloat. I neglected to tell the owners that they have an 800 sq. ft. bunker on the property that I built about seven years ago. The bunker that I’ve called home since I sold it. The entrance to it is well-hidden, but I still come and go very early/very late in the day.

What is your biggest secret desire that you are ashamed of telling anyone?

I work as a nursing assistant at a retirement home, and the one thing I’ve always wanted to do is break a bunch of residents out. Something like a Ferris Bueller’s Day Off kinda day where me and about a hundred old people have an awesome day. Give them something to enjoy so close to their ends.

I want to be a house husband. All I want to do in life is write my novels, cook, clean, keep the finances, keep a nice house and fuck my wife when she wants.

Mihaly C. on how to achieve flow and why you stop feeling hungry or tired

Great talk from Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (yeah…I had to just copy and paste this one), the man who invented the concept of flow.

Some brief notes and two useful screenshots for y’all:

  • ecstasy is an alternative reality
  • when we view monuments of the past (Chinese temples, Greek stadiums and theaters), we are really viewing places designed to elicit ecstasy (eg, you go to a sports stadium to feel moments of ecstasy and bliss)
  • the nervous system can’t process more than 120 bits at a time, which is why we can only process 2 people talking to us; when in flow, so many of those bits-slots are focused on the act that you literally cease to exist — you stop feeling hungry or tired, you stop paying attention to what’s around you (I bet some people get like that just playing Flappy Birds, though)

Flow diagram(flow comes when you are skilled at doing something, and are challenged by your current task; not enough skill and you feel anxious; not enough challenge and you feel bored)

Happiness stays fixed at 30%(despite society’s increasing income levels, self-reported happiness has stayed constant; this may be due, in part, to the relativity of happiness — if everyone’s income is higher, my relative income hasn’t changed)

Recent books: One World Schoolhouse and Tao Te Ching (The Book of Tao)

I’m reading more books, but finishing fewer of them. The trend needs to stop, but like a shopping addict at a Bloomingdale’s friends and family sale, I just can’t stop buying books! Books on books!

Some of my current reads: Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast (short stories of his years in Paris), Kazuo Ishiguro’s Remains of the Day, Kevin Kelly’s What Technology Wants

And I just bought Knausgaard’s My Struggle (Book 1), a series which is all the rage in Scandinavia and has finally landed State-side. Excited about this one.

But on to completed books, just two in May and June:

One World Schoolhouse by Salman Khan

This book tells Sal’s now widely-known story of how he started Khan Academy, and his vision for education which includes sensibly innovative proposals (eg, mixed-age classrooms) that most students will probably never see in their lifetimes.

It’s short, easy to read, and full of memorable anecdotes. My heartiest recommendation.

Tao Te Ching (The Book of Tao) by Lao Tzu

What can I say…it’s old (written in the 6th-century BC) and it’s a foundational text for taoism and Chinese philosophy.

Reading it is like walking on the staircase in that Escher painting. You think you’re going up, only to arrive back where you started, or worse, you don’t even know if you’re going up or down or if its a staircase at all.

But you can feel the beauty and power of its words. I’m on my second read-through, but like reading the Bible or any other old and influential and “mystical” text, its meaning comes to you in tiny bits and pieces as you chew on it, savor the flavor, and let it soak in life’s saliva. Yeah…you’re welcome.

Good friends, good books, and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life. – Mark Twain

The rich now work more than the poor

A recent Economist article explains how this happened.

Centuries ago, working long hours was generally seen as something done by the poor and uneducated.

Today, the opposite is true. As we’ve shifted from a manual labor society to a knowledge society, richer peoples’ work hours have continually grown while poorer folks’ hours have stagnated or even declined.

Some notes from the article:

  • In the 1800s, the average English manual laborer worked 64 hours a week
  • In 1965, the unemployment rate for high school graduates was 2.9% higher than college graduates; today it’s 8.4% higher
  • In 2005, college graduates had less leisure time than those with only a high school diploma
  • In 2013, college graduates worked 2 hours more each day than those with only a high school diploma
  • Why has this happened?
    • 1. Substitution effect – higher wages increase the opportunity cost of leisure
    • 2. Changing views on work – leisure used to be a badge of honor, something most people strived for; those with plenty of leisure time, such as the aristocratic/landed/upper class, spent their time doing things like writing, philanthropy, and art; today, hard work is viewed in a similar way
  • Employment prospects have declined for the poor, for those with low skill and low education levels

“I come to work to relax,” one interviewee tells Ms. Hochschild. And wealthy people often feel that lingering at home is a waste of time.

“Less educated people are not necessarily buying their way into leisure,” explains Erik Hurst of the University of Chicago. “Some of that time off work may be involuntary.”