As 2025 began, I made a soft agreement with myself to try to meditate 300 hours in the year. I’d try an hour most days, and figured I’d miss a day here or there.
Now I’ve meditated an hour a day more than 365 days.
In the past, I deliberately avoided holding a streak – I purposefully quit my first hour-long meditation challenge after 89 days, to avoid the psychologically-significant “90.”
I’ve been holding onto this streak mostly because not meditating now feels like not brushing my teeth, or not sleeping. I get so much out of each session, I don’t want to miss it.
By far the biggest revelation has been my accidental discovery of something I guess they call “somatic release.” I started feeling the urge to lean into tension in my face and body, leading to some strange facial expressions and postures.
It looks and is simple, but I have to warn that the tension patterns it releases have been very deep. I could see how it could really mess someone up mentally and physically. The first weeks after unlocking this I felt very shaky and emotionally fragile. I had severe hip pain – I thought I had uncovered a latent injury. So try at your own risk and maybe there are professionals you could consult?
Now I’m glad to have worked through that initial phase. I feel far more emotionally resilient. I get less angry, feel less insecure, and take things less personally. It shouldn’t be a surprise that also makes me feel a bit less ambitious – at least in my previous understanding of ambition. But in my writing I feel more capable of seeing an idea or feeling from all possible angles to really find the contours of what’s interesting.
The best way I can describe this process is as like sorting through a library of memories of not just the worst things that ever happened to you, but also the thousands of tiny moments of discomfort that pile up and get “stored” in your body. It also feels like sorting through experiences you haven’t personally had, but that are locked into the human nervous system through the experiences of your ancestors. Sometimes it’s accompanied by the actual emotions, but a lot of times it’s like you’re “acting” the emotions – such as by shedding tears but without sadness.
During each session I release a lot of this tension, but the next day there’s always still more to work through. Maybe someday it will all be gone.
If there’s any one revelation this far into this process it’s that all the emotions are okay: rage, humiliation, lust, elation, self-pity, and more. Many are not justified, but they are okay, a product of being in a human body. Few are worth acting on, but all are okay to feel, at least for that hour.
I wish more people had an hour a day to meditate, because you reach a point where it’s like driving with a new windshield.
Book:Slow Productivity (Amazon) is Cal Newport’s manifesto for knowledge work at a sane pace, which Mind Management lovers will enjoy.
This may feel too obvious to mention, but I can’t get over how some of the most valuable things can be made with the cheapest tools.
Larry David and Jerry Seinfeld wrote the most successful television show ever with BIC pens on yellow legal pads. (If you want to take it really far, Socrates just talked.)
So I find it entertaining to try to find the cheapest possible paper and pen. It is just so damn cool to me that I can use them to write a book that sells thousands of copies, or write the script for a reel with millions of views.
The cheapest I’ve found yet is 10 BIC pens for $1.29 (when I bought them 6 months ago, at least), and a 200-page notebook for 3,800 COP (~$1) at a neighborhood papeleria.
There’s definitely something to be said for a nice pen and paper, especially when you’re looking for a reminder that your thoughts are valuable, and worth writing down.
But this exercise does something else for me. I think it spreads to other areas, where next time I’m thinking of buying a new camera or audio equipment, I tell myself to snap out of it. Using cheap tools reminds you not to be too precious – that you’ll have to do a lot of work to get good at the stuff that matters, and that – maybe this is uncomfortable to admit – you already have what you need to get started.
Aphorism: “To one who can understand reason, you will find ten who admire wit.” —Maria Edgeworth
Cool: These acoustic blankets pack a lot of sound-dampening into simple (but heavy) blankets.
Best, David P.S. A tool that is perhaps even cheaper in the long run and very much still worth writing on is a typewriter.
We wouldn’t want a plane engineer to forget the laws of physics. We wouldn’t want a doctor who rejects the fundamentals of biology.
But the scientific method which has gained us this knowledge seems to distract us, like a magician’s sleight-of-hand preventing us from seeing the rabbit under the table.
There have been times and places when the burning questions amongst the smartest people were not as much about what could be precisely measured and reduced to a formula – Ancient Greece, Renaissance Florence, Early India and China.
The questions were instead about what is a life well-lived, what trade-offs should a society make, and how do you navigate consciousness and this existence of fortune, desire, suffering, and elation?
None of these questions have concrete answers, which is understandably frustrating in a world where we have a name for the protein that causes this or that heretofore mysterious malady.
But it’s strange that people sat around and asked these questions, figured out and recorded pretty-good answers that are freely available to us, and most of us just struggle through life only to, if we’re very lucky and live a long time, come to the same conclusions the hard way.
Aphorism: “Is the resolve to be so scientific about everything perhaps a kind of fear of, an escape from, pessimism? A subtle last resort against – truth?” —Friedrich Nietzsche
We jump into projects because we think they’ll go well. They seem to always be more difficult, less fun, and take longer than we had expected.
This is one reason we get stuck in a cycle of starting, abandoning, starting, abandoning, without ever finishing.
But I’m beginning to think this is as much a feature as it is a bug.
One of the things I appreciate about ChatGPT is it gives me the confidence to take on projects, thinking it will do most of the work. They still end up being difficult, but I wouldn’t have bothered otherwise.
And as I reflect on my own career, I realize there is nothing I’ve created I’m proud of to which the meme doesn’t apply: We do this not because it’s easy, but because we thought it would be easy.
So I do what I can to avoid drowning: Make and review predictions, ask myself what I might not be thinking of, and conducting little experiments to test my theories.
But there’s ultimately something motivating about getting in a bit over your head. It forces you to learn to swim.
Aphorism: “Who is it that, seeing the havoc of these civil wars of ours, does not cry out, that the machine of the world is near dissolution, and that the day of judgment is at hand; without considering, that many worse things have been seen, and that in the meantime, people are very merry in a thousand other parts of the earth for all this?” —Montaigne (1575)
Cool:Browse.ai helps you monitor and scrape data from any website, no coding required.
Best, David P.S. Thank you to JJ Thelen for having me on the JJ Thelen Show.
There’s no end to details that might make your work a little better.
If you’re publishing videos, your camera, lighting, and mic could be better. There’s a dozen ways to cut and zoom, thousands of motion-graphics templates, and a million options for b-roll.
If you’re writing articles, there’s no limit to the hours you could spend finding just the right combo of animated GIFs, and there are just as many ways to break it up with headings and sub-headings. When you’re done, you can spend the rest of your day following related accounts and leaving comments so people can discover you.
Or, lose the crutches. There’s no end to the bells and whistles you could add to make your work a little juicier, a little more noticeable.
But when you place constraints on yourself, such as that for now you’ll only talk to the camera or not use images or bullet-points, a couple things happen.
One, you have a lot more energy to focus on the core of the work that makes all the difference. Two, you have no choice but to build that core skill beyond what you would have bothered when it was propped up.
Yes, it’s harder, and that’s the point.
Aphorism: “Being able to hover calmly and objectively over our thoughts, feelings, and emotions (an ability I’ll call mindfulness…) and then take our time to respond allows the executive brain to inhibit, organize, and modulate the hardwired automatic reactions preprogrammed into the emotional brain.” —Bessel van der Kolk
Cool:Wise helps you get paid in different currencies.
I don’t drink anymore. Not as a conscious rule, just because the majority of times I’ve considered having a drink in the past ten years, not having it has seemed more appealing. That calculus has prevented me from having even one drink for well over the past year.
I’ve never been an alcoholic, but the more I reflect on my behavior when I was drinking, the more I think to myself – why is that okay?
Why is it okay to spend the equivalent of a working day going from bar to bar? Why is it okay for every romantic connection to be facilitated by alcohol? Why is it okay to be less happy and effective the next day because you drank too much last night?
Lots have asked this lately, which is not where I’m going with this.
Where I’m going is, for how much other stuff are many of us a 2 or 3 out of 5, but we keep going as we were because it doesn’t qualify as a pathology?
It seems most of us are a little alcoholic, anxious, depressed, agoraphobic, sex- and love-addicted, etc.
Not enough to be a “problem,” and I think I know why.
Because for something to be a “problem,” it has to interfere with our work and relationships, etc. In other words, it has to interfere with our roles in capitalist society as contributors and consumers.
I’m not here to deliver an anti-capitalist screed or even suggest a conspiracy, but maybe 3/5 actually is a problem. And the only reason it’s not considered so is because our consumption hits the optimal balance when we’re just a little addicted, anxious, sad, lonely, out of control.
Aphorism: “No project can, of course, be more time-consuming than self-discovery.” —Harold Rosenberg
Book:Notes From Underground (Amazon) is Dostoevsky classic exploration of the human psyche, through the lens of an alienated and ostracized man.
Best, David P.S. You’ve got about a day to get 60% off Kit for your creator business’s email marketing.
Through sheer happenstance, I found myself in Silicon Valley, circa 2005–2007. What was then known as “Web 2.0” is now what we now refer to – often with derisive stank – as social media.
Meetro.com/Women 2.0 pool party, August 26, 2006 – the friends I made threw a party in my honor because I apparently looked like the “40-Year-Old Virgin”
It’s not surprising social media became a big deal, if for no other reasons than I personally found exciting how it broke me out of my Nebraska shell and there was electricity in the air, but I don’t think anyone expected it to turn out like this.
How could it possibly shape politics negatively, stoking tribalism, brewing divisions, becoming a vector for inter-state meddling, and creating the perfect conditions for mis- and dis-information?
Surely it was for connecting people around shared interests – no way would it form millions-to-one parasocial relationships and “influencers” would be more interesting to us than our real friends and family.
No way it would become dominated by one or two giants. Surely there would be room for all the fun little networks that popped up, like Dogster, Catster, and Consumating.
At the time, if you came to Silicon Valley to get rich, you would be laughed at. The pain of the dot-com bust was still fresh. Joining a startup was certainly not the respectable alternative, to coastal elites, to investment banking or becoming a lawyer.
We were just excited to use technology to meet people and put together parties.
What passed for a cell-phone photo I took at the “Flickr turns 2” party, February 11, 2006
Overall, it’s been a positive contribution to humanity – some forget, are too young to remember, or were born into a physical location that suited them.
Though the biggest surprise that’s dawning on me is maybe we didn’t want to meet like-minded people after all. Maybe we just want the information that serves us, whether for utility or self-validation, and if there’s a real person purveying it or it’s attached to a relationship, that heretofore has just been an inescapable inconvenience.
But I hope I’m wrong.
Aphorism: “If something cannot go on forever, it will stop.” —Herb Stein
The bulk of people’s attention seems to be currently consumed watching short video clips, thus making reels the hottest channel out there.
I’ve had some success with reels, gaining a decent following on TikTok and Instagram, some reels generating over a million views.
Here are the main things I’ve learned about producing good reels:
Reels are a low-status game: Anything that hints you think you’re better than the viewer is instant swipe away. This can be something as subtle as having a nice mic in front of you or high-quality video and lighting. (More pronounced on Gen-Z-focused TikTok than Millennial-focused Instagram.)
The first three words fight for their lives: Your hook is everything. If you start with, “I was thinking…”, “Uhhh, yeah, so…”, anything not compelling, you will lose 80% of viewers within literally two seconds.
Make it about them: Find a way to make the subject about them. One of my best reels starts off with, “Are you a Raphael who gets things done, or a Leonardo who starts project after project and never finishes anything.” Who doesn’t think of themselves as a Renaissance master?
Yes, write a script: Unless you’re gifted with off-the-cuff speaking, you’re better off writing/reading a script. Yes, it takes practice to not sound like a robot but that’s not a deal-killer anyway because, remember: low-status. Robot beats stumbled delivery.
Watch the engagement graph: Obsessively check the engagement graph to see where people drop off. This is such a gift because as a writer, there’s no more direct feedback mechanism to know exactly which word lost people.
Self-promo is death: I haven’t cracked the code on getting lots of reach and promoting anything. I’ll just say balancing engagement with promotion is a difficult art. Get as many views as possible, then self-promo in the comments and bio.
Those are the basics of creating engaging reels without bells and whistles such as effects, trending sounds, etc., which generally don’t work your writing muscles anyway.
Book:Story Maps (Amazon) shows you how to write a great screenplay.
Cool:Your Favorite Movie Sucks is a podcast that pairs Raanan Hershberg’s movie insights with those of his fellow-comedian friends.
Best, David P.S. If you want personalized advice on your reels – or writing – feel free to book a call.
P.P.S. I’ll be in Austin this weekend, doing a casual self-publishing workshop with the ATX Writing Club. Details and registration here.
Lots of people with a scrolling habit would rather have a reading habit.
I was in this same position years ago – and sometimes I relapse. But here’s how I turned scrolling into reading.
The scrolling habit is hard to break because the path to scrolling is the path of no resistance. You pick up a phone or, let’s be honest, the phone is already in your hand for some other reason. You go from being bored, to not.
For reading to compete with scrolling, you need to remove the resistance.
Carry a book at all times. When you find yourself reaching for the phone, reach for the book instead.
Read books with short chapters.Instead of, I don’t have time to start reading, you can jump right in. Daily Rituals worked for me. Look for “epistolary novels” – novels made of letters or journal passages. Dangerous Liasons and The Perks of Being a Wallflower, for example.
Don’t finish books. If you feel you must finish every book, you will start none. Open it in the middle, read only what interests you, quit when you get bored. It’s better to not finish a book than to finish scrolling.
Invest in reading. Buy all the things that make reading comfortable, easy, even luxurious. I bought a $600 lamp, which was more than enough to get me to say, Well, I spent all that money on this reading lamp…
Overall, I found I had beliefs and habits about reading that were no match to the introduction of scrolling. When you flip the equation, reading gets easier.
Book:Familia Romana (Amazon) uses an innovative approach to teach you Latin while “thinking” in the language.
Cool:Screen Aware graphs how much of your life you’re looking at a screen.
I used to subscribe to the “aspirational hourly rate.”
You set some unusually high “hourly rate” for your time, and anytime you have a chance to save time for that amount or lower, you take the hit. So if your aspirational rate is $300 an hour, and hiring someone to clean your apartment saves an hour, you can easily afford to pay $200. Or if you buy some headphones for $50 and they don’t work, you just buy a new pair instead of spend fifteen minutes processing a replacement.
I have to admit, this way of thinking does wonders to undo irrational cultural programming. If you grew up in a family with the mentality of, We can’t spend five more minutes at lunch because then parking would cost 50¢ more – not because we can’t afford it, but simply because it’s an amount – it can help you realize not eating in a rush is more valuable than 50¢, or that debating between two cans of soup with a 5¢ price difference is a waste of energy.
But, I’ve found the aspirational hourly rate has limits, and now rarely use it.
For all its supposed valorization of sanity, it’s actually a pretty stressful way to live. Things you try to outsource never go as smoothly as you had planned. You ordered that Uber just as the plane landed because 15 minutes waiting is worth $75, but now you’re scrambling to get there before your car is cancelled.
The aspirational hourly rate is a trap for creators, especially. The idea was popularized by Naval Ravikant, a startup investor. In that context, supposedly you’re using that time and energy to do high-leverage deals that one day retroactively make your time worth, say, $5,000 an hour.
But as a creator, you get the most leverage from having high-quality ideas. If you’re good at working according to the stages of creativity, and allowing incubation to improve your thinking, a la Mind Management, Not Time Management , time isn’t your bottleneck. If anything, strategically-placed chores such as washing the dishes or folding laundry can be high-leverage activities.
And a long financial runway is a must for creative endeavors. I don’t look at $20 avocado toast and think of the down payment on a house that could have been made – I think of the novels that could have been written. Money spent foolishly is creativity squandered.
So now I think the aspirational hourly rate is a somewhat-useful mental tool – but ultimately, for creators, a trap.
Aphorism: “Haste is universal because everyone is in flight from himself.” —Friedrich Nietzsche
Cool:Otter.ai is an AI note-taker. I use it to generate transcripts of brain-dumps as I walk, which I then discuss with ChatGPT.
