Month: December 2023

SO MANY PHOTOS

I’ve been thinking of getting a new laptop by the end of the year, sort of for tax reasons, but mostly because I’ve never been in love with my current MacBook Pro from 2020.

That said, I love having a 1TB harddrive. What I don’t love, though, is my Photo’s file over 350GB in size.

The baseline MacBook Pro with an M3 Pro chip comes with a 512GB HD.

So now I’m dragging my photo file thing over to my 2TB external HD.

I’ve got photos that are 20 years old in the Apple photos app.

From when I moved to NYC. Screen shots from my iPhone 4. Photos from when I biked across most of the US.

So many photos of my life, yet when I pass away this external HD will just get tossed in a dumpster and no one will remember any of it.

Happy New Year!

QUITTING SPOTIFY

Great post from Olivia Rafferty about quitting and deleting Spotify:

My final reason was this: I wanted to own my music again. I wanted to press ‘shuffle’ on my entire catalog and have it surprise me with my own taste. Spotify lets you ‘like’ albums, and save songs to playlists, but you’ll never get a full idea of what songs you have in your catalogue. And what if some artists pulled their work from the platform? I constantly reach for Joni Mitchell’s Turbulent Indigo and it’s not there. Owning your music means that you will never lose it at the whim of someone else’s business decision. And it will be a catalogue that exists in its entirety. All together, in one place.

She details how she’ll listen to music moving forward, too. Great read.

Read it here: …So I Finally Quit Spotify

WE’RE TIRED

Tis the season to hear from almost everybody how frazzled, burnt out, at wits end they are! No energy! No motivation! No drive! Exploited and driven to exhaustion, with no energy to make things better, let alone make dinner tonight.

ENERGY

Sam Altman on burnout:

This quote is the clincher for me:

“Oh, actually when I’m doing this thing that I like and that is working I have a huge amount of energy and I can get a lot of stuff done.”

When I am doing things I loathe, I have zero energy, drive, or ambition.

Takeaway – do more of the things that give you energy.

Be around people that give you energy.

Watch and listen to things that give you energy.

THE SOCIAL MEDIA TRAP

Why is it so hard to quit social media?

“(Social media) platforms are designed to trap viewers in a social media rabbit hole: They offer bite-sized content that makes it easy to quickly consume several videos or posts in a row, they often automatically suggest similar content, and many of them even automatically start playing similar videos, reducing the potential for interruptions.”

More, more, more. Unending more. This from ‘The Psychology of Your Scrolling Addiction,’ via The Trend Report.

STOP SHRINKING

Love this by @madebynelson from Instagram.

“Stop shrinking into places you’ve outgrown 🌸✨

It’s important to continue to plant ourselves in bigger pots and new gardens as we continue to grow and evolve.

Enjoy your week! I cannot believe it’s December”

See the full post here.

BRINGING PEOPLE TOGETHER

A wonderful interview with Tina Roth Eisenberg (Swiss Miss), talking about creating and hosting Creative Mornings, and so many other gatherings of people.

“Be really clear why you’re gathering people.”

It also mentions The Art Of Gathering by Priya Parker, such a wonderful book and something I’ve been re-reading as I’ve been hosting more Zoom calls.

I mean it – career / work wise I’ve been WAITING. Hoping that someone would come along and just drop the perfect job / gig / NEXT THING in my lap. That’s how I’ve been for many years in my career… fortunate enough that some things led to other things, but in the last decade a lot of that work was work I settled on because I needed the money, which duh – is plenty okay, of course.

But now, lately, in these past two years, I’ve been deliberately carving out something, and in the last few MONTHS I’ve leaned hard into this “why not get together more often with energetic people?” space, and I swear, things are buzzing for me now, and I love it.

MARKET YOU

From Mike Cessario, the CEO and co-founder of Liquid Death:

Most brands are marketing their liquid, not their company. Your company is your brand. You cant actually own your liquid. It’s easily replicated. But no one can copy your company, what you stand for, what you care about more than anyone else, what makes you laugh, what you love, what you hate. Making people love your company creates far longer term success than only being able to make them love your liquid.

Stop marketing your vinyl, your tour dates, your next class, your whatever, and sell everything that is YOU, through and through.

Riffs? I got riffs. How-to guides? Got a million on YouTube.

But I will support people with less flashy videos, with basic websites, because of who they are.