Founder of the Social Media Escape Club
Back on the 10 mile per day grind, this time by way of walking and running. Also interesting to note that this year is the 10 year anniversary of when I started running at the age of 40. I can’t believe 10 years has zipped by this quickly.
I finally have a “books I wanna read list” finally (below), and also built a little tracker in Notion to so I retain more of what I do read in a given year.
So it worked out nicely that Josh Spector just shared an easy way to read more in the new year:
When you go to watch YouTube videos or scroll your social feed, pick up a book and read for 5 minutes first. Connecting a thing you want to do more of to a thing you already do too much of is a great way to build a new (and improved) habit.
On my list for 2026:
Favorites I read in 2025:
The line “if you don’t know us, you shouldn’t” is gold. Then Austin Nasso the tech bro vibe codes them a website.
It’s literally so millennial to have a website. HAH!
Watch the YouTube short here.
Mirella Stoyanova from ‘Author Platform Follows the Work’
“While author platform is important, I think new writers are particularly vulnerable to getting the order of operations wrong.
The author platform follows the work. Not the other way around.
Notably, none of the authors I admire had particularly robust social media platforms before they became successful.”
2025: NETWORKING WITHOUT SOCIAL MEDIA
2024: BYE, INSTAGRAM
2023: OVEREXTENDING FOR WHO?
2021: PUT YOUR HEALTH ON YOUR CALENDAR
2020: NEW YEARS DAY ADVENTURES
2019: DEFINE YOUR OWN SUCCESS IN 2019
I forgot all about that very adventurous New Yeas Day in 2020! Wild to think how that year turned out.
On the first of the month I’m reminded to download my photos from my iPhone. I do this so I don’t have to keep paying Apple a monthly fee that just keeps going up, and I just like having my photos right where I can see them, in folders.
For December I have 215 photos, 54 screen shots, and 18 videos. I’ll keep that saved locally on my MacBook Pro (just 3.5GB), and start a new folder for January where I’ll dump the photos from my Nikon throughout the month.
Then, in February, I’ll move this January folder to my external hard drive.
My folders goes all the way back to 2002, but it’s not nearly as organized. The total is about 57,000 photos, which takes up 207GB on my 2TB drive, backed up regularly to BackBlaze.
Yeah, I miss the search functionality (finding all the photos of bikes, or cats would be great), but I love only paying .99 cents per month for iCloud instead of $120 a year.
From Cory Doctorow
“I have one piece of advice: if you read a book you love, tell other people about it. Tell them face-to-face. In your groupchat. On social media. Even on Goodreads. Every book is a lottery ticket, but the bezzlers are buying their tickets by the case: every time you tell someone about a book you loved (and even better, why you loved it), you buy a writer another ticket.”
Collin Brooke from ‘You gotta be in it to win it’
“There’s an extent to which the influencer industry is basically a machine that generates confirmation bias at scale. That is, every influencer is, at the very least, a walking advertisement for the idea of becoming an influencer.”
Sometimes you just wake up at 4am and can’t get back to sleep so you start planing out a podcast series that you’d announce and launch on the day you host a big online event. What if?
Chelsea Bradley from ‘Your Content is Killing Your Brand‘
“When should it be posted? If the event is tomorrow, the answer is not tonight. Most people won’t see it until two days from now – it’s too late. Like when restaurants post their daily specials at 6 pm – great, hope your dinner service was wonderful. I saw it at noon the next day, and it means nothing to me now, I wish I had known about it sooner so I could plan.”