How do you encourage people to read your whole article or book?

Or watch your whole video? Or listen to your whole podcast?

One way is "the unanswered question." Atlas Shrugged opens with the question:

"Who is John Galt?"

You don't find out until ~700 pages later, and the character of John Galt encompasses the philosophy of the novel.

Going from writing non-fiction blog posts to writing a non-fiction book has been harder than I expected.

Here are 9 things I wish I had known before starting... 1/ Tweets and articles have ruined your internal locus of writing motivation.

When you get a rush of dopamine every day or week as the payoff for your work, it will be excruciating to go for months with none.

I think making a conscious effort to spend as much of my day outside as possible (even while working) has done more for my day-to-day sense of well-being than almost any other change.

Here are a few ways I've found to sneak it in...

https://twitter.com/drorpoleg/status/1616436761038815233?s=20&t=1wNwL7dE3119GD7Wl0rrww

1/ Working outside.

This is the big one. Having a desk outside in the shade I can work at makes it so much easier to get a few additional hours of outdoor time in.

Buying a standing heater + a fan makes it work in almost any temperature, too.

https://twitter.com/nateliason/status/1375479239936516099?s=20&t=s95EP-mR6J1oogMOe7LVxQ

I’ve never written a novel before, but I want to this year. 

So I’ve read ~10 books on the fiction writing process in the last couple of months.

Here’s the best guide to outlining an idea for a book I’ve found:

(From Conflict & Suspense by James Scott Bell) 1/ Start with your LOCK:

a LEAD character worth following.
an OBJECTIVE with physical, spiritual, or professional death on the line.
a CONFRONTATION with a stronger opponent (antagonist)
a KNOCKOUT ending that surprises & delights the reader

Write them all down on a notecard.

I spent way too many years focused on just weight lifting and HIIT. 

There’s nothing quite like how your body feels after a very long run or bike.

Not just for hours. Days. The persistent feeling of hunger is incredible, too.

Like your body is constantly looking for fuel.

My 5:30am morning routine breaks all of the normal rules.

But 9 days out of 10, I'll get 2,000 words of writing or 4,000 words of editing done by 7:30, and I feel fantastic for the rest of the day.

Here's the routine. 1/ Wake up and look at my phone.

Yeah yeah, you shouldn't look at your phone in the morning...

But idk, if you can't focus after looking at your phone for a minute, you have bigger problems.

Plus, I gotta see how many people liked my tweets from yesterday to feel alive.

Is productivity a worthwhile goal?

As someone who used to be obsessed with productivity, I'm increasingly moving into the camp of:

No, it's not worth it. There's a line I love from Finite & Infinite Games:

"An infinite player does not begin working for the purpose of filling up a period of time with work, but for the purpose of filling work with time."

If you feel overwhelmed or anxious about everything you need to get done, this is the book for you.

It was the best "productivity" book I read last year, but it's sneaky.

It's not about checklists, goals, habits, or even "here's how to be more productive"...

👇 It's about recognizing our drive for productivity as part of our eternal struggle with mortality.

Our "Denial of Death," as Ernest Becker might say.

And how that struggle creates the overwhelm and anxiety you might be experiencing.

"I don't debate with myself, I'm not negotiating, the thing goes off, and I'm doing what I'm supposed to do."
@jockowillink said that on @hubermanlab, and it stuck with me as powerful advice for improving self-control and waking up earlier.
Huberman was asking... @jockowillink @hubermanlab What happens when you wake up? Are you full of energy? Do you need to get yourself out of bed?
Jocko typically gets up at 4:30 and works out, so how does he do that every day without fail? What's the trick?

I recently read "Metaphors We Live By," recommended by @danshipper

It changed how I think about our perception of the world as shaped by language, and how powerful the language we use is for affecting how we interpret life.

Here's the core idea... Almost all concepts in life are understood, in part, by other concepts.

"Time" is not an isolated idea.

One of the most common ways we conceptualize time is as a valuable resource. That's why we "spend" time and "save" time and talk about something being "worth" our time.

Considering that once you graduate you have ~50 years to build a career, but only ~15-20 to start a family, you should spend way more time in college dating than going to class. Like you will *never* be surrounded by thousands of people your age with similar-ish backgrounds and intelligences and unlimited free time and in walking distance EVER AGAIN.

Don't waste it! Learning and working is way easier after college anyway.

Our 1 y/o hasn’t woken us up once in the middle of the night since ~3.5mo old.

She sleeps from 7pm to 7am every night. Falls asleep in minutes.

We didn’t get lucky, we just followed a methodology we picked up from a few friends.

Here it is. First, a mindset shift. You don’t have a good sleeper or a bad sleeper.

Your baby has either learned how to sleep or hasn’t.

It’s your responsibility to help them learn.

And it's one of your most important jobs in the first year.

I have a DNS / domain / HTTPS problem I've been unable to resolve that I could really use someone's help on.

Happy to pay, sign up for a service that solves this, w/e necessary.

Basically, I've been helping @RDEliason move his newsletter from WordPress to @SubstackInc

But... That meant moving his domain, sidebarsblog.com, from WordPress to Substack.

Easy enough, go into namecheap, change the CNAME settings, done.

But, a problem.

Wordpress allowed it to be on the non-www domain. Substack doesn't, it has to have www.

Okay, fine. So...

So far the biggest from these AI tools is how artificial the intelligence is of threadbois regurgitating surface-level insights.

But we already knew that 🤣

Here are the 20 essential things you MUST do to be happy.

(Thanks LEX) 1. Define what happiness means to you

Happiness means different things to different people.

Once you know what happiness means to you, you can start working on achieving it.

I asked an AI how to build a successful company. Here's the 10-step thread.

I wrote/edited less than 5% of this. First, you need to have a great product.

This seems obvious, but many companies fail because they don’t have a product people want to buy.

You need to be solving a real problem that people care about. If you aren’t, you don’t have a great product.

The locus of entertainment: or why I might give my daughter an iPad

The problem with the popularization of phones, TVs, computers, is not the screens themselves, it's the type of entertainment they enable.

We've shifted from... primarily enjoying internally-generated entertainment, to turning entertainment into a passive, consumptive process, through which our ability to entertain ourselves has atrophied

I worry that a major consequence of social media is how thoroughly it has neutered us against taking meaningful action.

Being outraged online did not end police violence.

It has not changed gun laws.

It did not scare away Russia.

It won't change abortion laws. While I disagree with many of @AOC's views, I deeply respect her for doing something rare these days: taking political action as a young person.

That to me is the biggest problem right now.

We’ve chosen virtue signaling over virtuous action.

If I were in BlockFi or any other CeFi, custodial yield service, I'd be getting out of that ASAP.

BlockFi, Gemini, Cryptocom, if you have crypto in a centralized thing that is giving yield that you can withdraw it from I would be pulling it out right now. Not financial advice do your own research don't listen to cartoon avatars on the Internet good luck have fun have a great summer never change

I recently finished "End the Fed" by Ron Paul for an episode of Made You Think with @TheRealNeilS and @adilmajid.

I'd say the book is just okay, mostly interesting as a primer on how the Fed works. (4/10)

Here are a few favorite passages and ideas: The Fed is not in the job of keeping inflation in check, its job is to create inflation.

Well, it has officially been one year since I stopped drinking.

It has been an overall good experiment.

But not a complete win, and I'm going to try something else next.

https://twitter.com/nateliason/status/1400159335792222211?s=20

First, the pros.

Abstinence is much easier than moderation.

Once I decided this, it was extremely easy to say no to alcohol. There was never a "should I?" question. It was always simply "no."

Hey I made it on Bad Medical Takes!

https://twitter.com/BadMedicalTakes/status/1532140183684108289?s=20&t=W3wdZWdMhPin7jd9yzHGOw

This does highlight something I find kinda frustrating with saying partial beliefs on Twitter... I'm not sure where my confidence level is that you don't need (and maybe should avoid) sunscreen most of the time with proper conditioning.

It's not 100%, it's not 0%. Maybe ~75%.

There is also lots of nuance around avoid burning, limiting time in the sun, etc etc