My dog has these little crumbly treats I put into her food and she thinks they're just okay. Sometimes she doesn't even finish them all. But when I present one as a special treat she has to do a trick for, she devours it.
It seems silly—but I think people are the same way:
/1
Things you take for granted taste like blah. Adding gratitude makes them delicious.
If you're eating handfuls of nuts out of a bag & it kind of sucks, imagine finding one in the forest & spending 10 min cracking it open. Then eat them one by one and savor the nourishment.
/2
When about to have a mediocre sandwich, imagine it's a long time ago and you just traveled around all day painstakingly collecting and preparing every ingredient.
When you drink a glass of water, imagine you're stranded in the desert and just found an oasis.
/3
It works just as well on non-food.
If you're tossing and turning in bed, vividly remember the experience of trying to sleep in a middle seat on an airplane—and how badly you'd be fantasizing about being in a bed.
Or imagine it's the morning and your alarm just went off.
/4
When you use your phone, imagine it's 2007 and you're playing with a smartphone for the first time.
Imagine you take a time machine to show 1998 you how the phone works. You open each app, one by one, blowing your 1998 mind with what it can do.
/5
Imagine the experience of having a sore throat when you don't have one and enjoy the glorious lack of pain.
(Works for all injuries/health problems.)
/6
When you're in a hot shower, imagine those times when a shower's water devastatingly maxes out at lukewarm.
In a lukewarm shower, imagine how thrilled a 1750 person would be.
/7
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If you create art/content—songs, YouTube videos, articles, podcasts—think about people who come across your work as 4 categories of reactions:
1) Didn't like it 2) Thought it was solid / fine 3) Really liked it 4) Absolutely loved it
(1/3)
1s and 2s are gone forever. 3s might come back. 4s will subscribe and evangelize your work to everyone they know.
4s are what make your work take off, not 3s. A piece of work that yields 4s at a 20% vs 5% rate probably ends up with probably 10X (or 1,000X) the spread.
(2/3)
The thing is, content that yields a lot of 4s also usually yields a lot of 1s—more 1s is the cost of going for more 4s. Likewise, creators trying to minimize 1s also usually minimize 4s. So it's really two choices: the 1-4 strategy or the 2-3 strategy. 1-4 beats 2-3!
My hot sauce hall of fame (thread). In no particular order.
Tabasco. The og. Old faithful. My stuffed animal. If I was only allowed to have one hot sauce for the rest of my life, this is the easy choice. Family Reserve is a fancier and slightly hotter version I highly recommend. Also shoutout to green Tabasco.
Frank's, duh. So not hot it's almost not hot sauce. Just succulent sauce that I might drink a shot of if I'm hungry enough. While Tabasco is polite and just runs with the vibe of the meal, Frank's is a loud fuck who takes over the room.
I've gotten a ton of useful reader feedback while posting the Story of Us. But the most common feedback has probably been, "I really wish this were a book."
So we decided to make it a book. 1/
We're going for maximum impact with this thing, and making it both a blog series and a book (inc. audiobook) seems like the best way to do that. But turns out it's not as simple as just putting the existing series into a book. A book is a different animal than a blog series. 2/
So I've spent the past few months rewriting the whole series (with the benefit of lots of reader feedback) into a tighter, crisper, more book-like thing. Book publishing is a long process so in the interest of getting the book out as soon as possible, this became top priority. 3/
Around the early 1800s there were 128 random strangers on Earth, each of whose genes makes up 1/128 of you. Some prob. knew each other and had no idea they'd share a common descendant. There are 127 critical sex moments in this chart. If just 1 doesn't happen you never exist. 1/5
Of course if you keep going, things quickly get hectic. In the mid-1600s, you've got over 4,000 ancestors roaming the Earth. Some of them probably fucking hated each other. Also, now you're relying on 4,095 times people banged—if only 4,094 had happened, you wouldn't exist. 2/5
Keep going with this and you reach a weird contradiction. How is this explained? "Pedigree collapse," a euphemism for a whole lot of incest. Fun fact: 80% of all people who have ever lived have been born to parents who were second cousins or closer. 3/5