Chris J Wilson

🎧 Ask Daily Stoic: Ryan and David Epstein Talk Range & Resilience A fun discovery having recently read Ego is the Enemy and Range. One of my favourite parts is when David gives the advice he recieved on how to become a writer.

“Go live on a russian fishing boat for 5 years.”

The point being “live a life worth writing stories about.” It reminded my of a writing course I took. Instead of producing great writers, it seemed to churn out writers who wrote about writing. I remember discussing it with a friend at the time and he commented that the problem was there were too many people who wanted to say something, without having anything to say. I keep thinking about that critique, I know it has been true of me. In fact, six years ago it made me take a pause from writing. I knew that I needed to start having more experiences to write about. I don’t think I’m perfect in this respect, but I am keen to aware doing the thing about the thing situations (i.e. writing about writing, sharing about how I’m productive in my business about productivity, making sketchnotes about sketchnoting.) There’s nothing intrinsicly wrong with any of that, but it’s certainly a path that leads to really strange stuff.

Yesterday, I started a list of my mentors in Obsidian.

This list is split in two, Long-term mentors (those who have much to glean from) and temporary mentors (those who are teaching me a specific skill or approach).

I have pages for each mentor in Obsidian so I can see the beautiful knowledge graph that emerges as I learn more from each person and create additional notes.

With very few exceptions, I have no actual relationship with these mentors. Instead, they mentor me through their blogs, books, podcasts, and other content. My approach has been inspired by how Ryan Holiday, Derek Sivers and Patrick Rhone approach unoffical mentorship.

At the same time, I do have an offical mentor here in Krakow. Going for coffee and lunch with him is a fantastic opportunity to learn.

Greg Morris asked for my opinion on Substack as I have been using it for my newsletter Learn Create Share. I started to type a response but when I wrote “Substack review” as a subheading, I knew it was a blog post. So here it is.

TLDR - yeah, it’s okay.

“I’m using it because I had set it up (I moved from revue as [Substack] has no subscriber limit for free) I like it but think I may move but I’m trying to focus on doing the newsletter and not think too much about the tool) it’s so easy to get into tool mindset and so avoid creating.”

Substack’s philosophy

Substack is different from a lot of email services in that it’s not really an email service. It’s a way for writers (and content creators) to get paid by dedicated fans. Substack makes money by taking a cut off payments to its users. Users get these payments by offering benefits to subscribers or simply asking. Substack encourages exclusive content as the way to encourage payments but doesn’t make it mandatory, you could just ask. In exchange, Substack gives its users a free platform with email, that’s also hosted online on a .Substack.com subdomain and even throws in a beta feature of podcasting. It’s worth noting the way they make money as that influences substack’s approach and services.

Substack really wants you to charge for your email

To get some custom header features, you need to accept payments. I’ve considered setting up optional payments just to get this feature but…

Substack wants you to charge a proper amount

I tried to make a dollar amount plan, Substack said no. It had to be $5 a month or more, with a minimum of $30 for a year plan. Both are entirely reasonable price points and also probably show how Substack gets charged on credit card payments and so smaller amounts may cost it too much. At this price, some people may support out of the goodness of their heart, but really, you’ve got to offer something extra.

Exclusive content.

What’s Substack like as an email service?

It’s good. It does the job. You have basic web formatting with h1, h2, strong, em, and all that jazz. You can add links, you can make buttons, insert images and videos too. There aren’t any web embeds of content (which can cause issues if you copy and paste embedded content from a notion embed preview) but you can certainly make a good looking email.

Is Substack a blogging service or a email service?

It’s… complicated. Unlike most email services which provide you with iframe embed forms, possibly landing pages and in rare cases web versions of emails that subscribers can view, Substack has a web archive on your Substack domain. In fact, you could use Substack as a blog which emails new posts to your subscribers. Unlike other blogging services, Substack provides very limited customization. You can adapt your about page, the description of benefits, some limited colour options, and set a custom subdomain. That’s basically it (I’m sure I’m forgetting something though).

There’s Podcast stuff?

I think I’m right in saying it’s still in Beta and I certainly haven’t tested it yet. Just like the email and blogging features, it’s completely free though. Unlike the email features, I have no idea how easy it would be to move to a different podcast host. Still, the potential is that you could run a media group who puts out articles, emails and podcasts all hosted for free and with multiple collaborators.
The price is building on someone else’s platform and the heavy encouragement to follow the exclusive content model.

What else is different about Substack

There are some other differences between Substack and other email service providers.

• There is mo segmentation other than paid/free (no target email marketing for you!)
• Substack has a real community about it including resources for writers, their own newsletter and even grants to support creators.
• Substack has a leaderboard showing the most popular newsletters and publications from the week. This can help new subscribers to find your newsletter…but you have to get enough likes to get on the leaderboard…so the biggest newsletters profit the most.

Do you like using Substack

Hummmm. I don’t really know. I love how generous Substack is. You literally never have to pay to use it in exchange for Substack taking a cut of paid subscriptions. I don’t like how I feel like I have to offer a paid version of my newsletter and that I can’t set it up on my own domain nor customize the look and feel more. I think a premium version with those options would be very interesting but I understand that this is the monetization model they have chosen and it’s all about building their name, getting more users on, profiting off the ones who do build an audience who will pay.

Some aspects of creating a newsletter in Substack are really fantastic, but…other aspects are only okay. The editor is solid, but Ghost probably has a better one. It’s easy to create a newsletter with interesting links from the week like Learn Create Share, but Revue is probably better. The real distinction is the website articles but I would like to have more options over how they look.

So are you going to move email service provider?

My wife and I have some really exciting ideas about [Learn Create Share](Https://learn create share.net). In fact, we hope to announce something that will really embody the name and ethos in the next edition of the newsletter, but I’m not making any firm promises yet. We probably could use Substack for that purpose but I have a Sendfox account that I may start using for this purpose. That would provide us with a couple of extra options (some limited segments) and we’ll have more control over the webpages and sign up forms etc. Sendfox has a pretty great pricing model too: there’s a limited free option, 5000 contacts for a $49 one time fee, and then an extra $10 a month for every additional 1000 contacts and to get extra features like no branding. Sendfox isn’t perfect either (sendfox branding unless you pay a monthly fee, even after the one time fee. Not as great an editor, etc) but it feels like the right choice for us now.

Regardless, one of the best things about email services is that it is easy to export a CSV file and then switch service. This really helps with ownership even if a service dies.

I’m not a developer and I suspect that some of these might not be possible/easy to do, still here are some ideas for the better developers who use MB.

1. Hide post under 280 character from the main page
2. Sharing of some sort (I was thinking like the typical WordPress share sheet but options for read later or quotebacks, medium style highlighting etc would be cool.)
3. Third party commenting systems (I guess some people might like that. I wouldn’t really but I’m struggling to think of ideas)
4. Gated content (why not add a Ghost feature for kicks)
5. “Clapping” I kind of like this idea from Medium, it’s a fun interaction.

Derek Sivers new book — Hell Yeah or No — is now live on his site. You can only buy it through him and it’s $15 for the ebook and audiobook, or $19 for the paperbook as well as the digital formats. Last year I read and enjoyed [Anything you want] by Derek so buying this book was an easy, hell yes.
I love that he has the ability to publish this way, and the options here. DRM free digital versions, and you get them included with the paperback. I’ve wondered why Amazon doesn’t offer some sort of upsell of kindle and/or audiobook versions of a book when you buy a paper or hardback.

There are three note applications and systems on my mind at the moment.

1. Evernote

Old faithful. Despite some dark times, Evernote is still solid and reliable as it always has been. I’ve been on the beta recently and there are some good changes coming soon. Evernote still does a few things extremely well.

• Capture (from webpages and other services)
• Sync (I rarely have conflicts and notes show up almost instantly)
• It’s everywhere
• it’s easy to start with But, it doesn’t have some of the latest ideas like the two other apps I’ve been playing with.

2. Notion

Notion sucks as a note-taking/data storage app. The apps are slow web views and it never feels like you are working with text. Exporting notes isn’t easy and there is a steep learning curve… BUT

• The organising tools are amazing
• Collaboration is great
• The whole idea of Databases is extremely cool
• You can have notes and project management tools in one place I hate capturing data in notion, but I’ve been using it to organise writing my newsletter and it works so well for this. There is a web capture tool but it feels a bit awkward which sums up a lot of Notion. It’s cool but awkward.

3. Obsidian

Roam research, but local and using markdown files. I was just writing a note in Notion and wanted to make some relational notes as you can in obsidian. Unfortunately, Notion doesn’t work that way. I started using obsidian on my Work PC, with an iCloud folder so in theory, I can add markdown notes anywhere (using drafts on my iPhone) and I’ll get all the benefits of obsidian. but…

• obsidian doesn’t have a tool to save webpages
• obsidian doesn’t have a mobile app (so it’s all just plain text on iOS)
• obedian doesn’t connect to third-party services for easy imports I could probably save webpages as PDFs and then link to those files, but that isn’t quite the same.

So… what do you want to do?

I guess I could …

• Use multiple apps, each for its own strength… But using one app would be simpler.
• Settle for just Notion, not have relational notes (maybe they’ll come later?) and deal with the other issues.
• Settle with Evernote and use a task manager (todoist?) for project management
• Use Obsidian and be a cool tech guy who does everything in plain text…and maybe use PDF version of saved web pages…

Or maybe there’s another app like DEVONThink…but that’s an Apple exclusive…

I’m weighing up three different email newsletter services.

I realy can’t choose.

And then I had a thought:

“When you can’t choose between two options, go for the one which is easier to use. The easier it is to use, the more you will use it.”

Suddenly, that decision doesn’t seem so tricky anymore. I suspect this principle would work for other tool decisions too.

P.s. Yes, I know there are times when you need “more power” and so the simplest isn’t the best. But you can only need more power if you’ve started using something, so start with simple.

Avoid adjectives and adverbs. Choose precise verbs and nouns.

Yes, there is adjectives in this tip, but sometime there’s no alternative (please do prove me wrong!). Also I break this rule all the time and it dilutes my writing.

I really hate that the next couple of months of Apple podcasts will be almost completely about unreleased features and the beta. I get that there is demand for this content (doing for the clicks) but it just feels kind of pointless. Especially with the condescending advice that you shouldn’t download the beta (unlike us experts) but here are all the things you should wish you had. Then again I find the endless speculation to also be kind of pointless. I really enjoy the podcasts where you learn what you can do with the technology you have and not endlessly dream and complain about what you don’t have.

Dear Tim Cook Clause, This year I’d like…

iOS updates

• Fix whatever the hell happened to editing in text fields with mobile safari
• A ‘Worktime" feature to compliment “Downtime”
• Adding start dates to reminders
• iMessages on windows (I have to use windows at work…so this would be like a glass of water in hell)
• a bit more refining of how to search through photos (It can be really tricky to get to the right photo and you never want to accidentally go to the start of your photostream)
• Siri improvements (I too can use Google…it’s not that impressive Siri)

iPadOS updates:

• Improvements to “desktop class safari”
• some new homescreen improvements (widget stuff?)
• Keyboard short cuts for multitasking windows
• Keyboard shortcuts to trigger shortcuts
• FinalCut for the iPad
• A magical fix for the dead pixel in my iPad screen

WatchOS updates

• More faces
• 3rd party faces (that don’t majorly drain the battery)
• Sleep tracking built in
• more rings (Like a mindfulness one and a sleep one)

Mac Updates

• stablity. Sorry, Bug fixes and performance enhancements.
• ARM Macs

Hardware

• ARM Macbook air type thing
• Homepod Mini
• Homepod with screen
• Apple watch 6 with new sensor

Thank you Tim Cook Clause Here are some cookies

p.s. The thing with Hey sucks. Don’t be that guy.

I honestly can’t believe Apple’s attitude to Hey. I really hope this is one or two people in Apple who’ve misunderstood certain policies but that’s happened before. While there are many areas where Apple appears to set the standard that other tech companies follow, this is not one and is horrifically anti-competitive. It seems utterly crazy that this should all emerge when Apple is rumored to allow the ability to set non-Apple apps as the default. I wonder how this will all shake out…in the meantime, maybe I ought to look at companies like fairphone again.

I really want a new camera…I really don’t need a new camera but I want one. Features I -need- want that I don’t have

• weather sealing
• 4k video
• more pixels (because why not)
• the new fuji film simulations espeically acros

Camears I want:

• Ricoh GR iii (has non of the features I listed but has IBIS and I do love my ricoh gr)
• Fuji X100v (the obvious choice. I REALLY love my x100t…but price)
• Fuji X pro 2 (lacks some of the features of the V and is bigger…)
• Sony A7 of some sort (I don’t know why I want this one…but I do)

I really should think about x100V… but all the others are so tempting.

I didn’t feel like sharing this earlier in the week with everything going on but I made a little ebook and course of 30 creative prompts. These are fun little challenges to get you thinking differently and exercising your creative muscle so you can be creative on demand. It was a little creative challenge from my wife and was suppose to take me a month to do…well, life happened and it took a few extra months to actually put it together and get it up, but draft one is here. In the future, I hope to add more prompts and perhaps show some examples. It’s normally $10 but for Micro.Blogranauts, I have a special discount where you can get it for $1 (plus tax). Just use the code MICROBLOG.
Enjoy!

I’ve never seen a twinky, so they can’t exist. Sure, sometimes one appears on TV in a fictional series or on the news but that doesn’t mean they are actually real. Many of my friends have never seen a twinky either and I suspect those who say they have seen a twinky really saw something else. Even if twinkies were real, which they are not, just because there are some twinkies doesn’t mean all food is a twinky and I’m definitly not a twinky eater. And really, even if there are some twinkies out there, that doesn’t mean I should do anything about it. After all, I’m not a twinky eater. The real problem is those anti-Twinky advocates and protestors. They are the real twinkey eaters and if only they’d shut up about twinkies, maybe we could finally live in a world without twinkies… In summary, twinkies don’t exist.