Hey ya’ll. I’m excited to try something new here. I’ve been blogging since 2010 and sending email newsletters for almost as long, but to be honest, it’s been starting to feel stale.
Part of it is because I’ve gotten better as a writer and my standards are higher for what constitutes a “proper post”. Part of it is because I am further into my career and I haver greater expectations for what “someone like me” should be writing or saying.
This is a chance for me to do a fresh start. It’s going to be a lot more raw and whatever’s top of mind. Kevin Yien asked me what the difference in medium was.
My response was:
As McLuhan said, the medium is the message. Email is read in private, mimics a letter, can easily start a dialogue, is not meant to be made public, flows like water rather than standing like blocks (public blog posts)
What the heck will I be writing about?
- Tech - this will lean further towards the tech industry rather than the development of new technology
- Fitness - thoughts on working out, health, athletic performance, and esoteric sports like gymnastics
- Product thinking - these are comments around software and occasionally non software products, how they work, and how they can be improved
- Org design - this is effectively ideas around how teams and organizations can best assemble and work together effectively
- Nerd culture - this is a broad category that includes video games, scifi, comic books, superheros and the like
- Persuasion & behavior change - how do you convince people to think or act in a new way? Marketing, psychology, sales, interpersonal relationships are all fair game here
I’ve been inspired by people like Visakan and Cedric “Eli James” (both Singaporeans oddly), the incredibly prolific Venkatesh Rao, as well as a bunch of Substack folks I’ve started following (waves to Dan Shipper, Nathan Baschez, Byrne Hobart) and my friend Ricky Yean for getting into this idea.
My academic background is in biology, the messiest of the sciences. Experimentation is the name of the game because nature does not follow any hard and fast rules. So let’s give this a shot and see what happens.
Some ground rules (which I may or may not deviate from quickly)
- Write as if talking/emailing a friend
- Ask questions, respond to readers (which means you have to write back!)
- Embrace tangents - not everything has to fit together thematically
- Cadence - something goes out every week
