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The Changelog - v0.7.0

For as long as I can remember, my browser always has tons of bookmarks. I used Firefox, Safari, Chrome, and now Arc.

At the beginning of this year, I was cleaning up my browser. I moved from Arc to Chrome. When I was cleaning up I rediscovered some amazing tools and resources I had bookmarked long ago. I did not want to get rid of them. But, I did not want them in my browser. So, I moved them to a Notion database for future storage and reference.

Well, now that I have a blog, I thought it would be a good idea to add them here for others to reference and discover.

I added them under a new "tab" called bookmarks.

Besides the new "bookmarks" tab, I started two new projects last week. I also started reading a new book on creativity.

Projects

  • awesome-readwise - a curated list of Readwise and Reader resources.
  • readwise-reader-api - A JavaScript client for the Readwise Reader API. Plan to add support to the Readwise API.

Creative Doing by Herbet Liu

Here are some of my highlights:

  1. Finding my creative purpose involved letting go of every impulse and habit that made me successful at my work projects, and shifting my focus away from results into the process. Process is about consistently making time and energy to practice every day, rather than intensely pursuing a creative project and then burning out, falling out of love with it, and becoming resentful. It’s about creating a lot of work that meets a standard I set for myself.

  2. Picasso said, “Inspiration exists, but it has to find you working.” *

  3. “Many people die with their music still in them,” physicist, poet, and polymath Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. said. “Too often it is because they are always getting ready to live. Before they know it, time runs out.”

  4. Spend three hours on Saturday reading a book outside of the genre you normally read. You may find that a clear answer emerges from expanding your horizons.

  5. In reality, we don’t need anything except our brains and bodies to practice our creative work. The goal is to put this reality into practice with the fewest tools possible, in any environment.

  6. “The most important thing I noticed today was that only in stillness can we recognize movement.” — Marina Abramović

  7. There is no universal creative process. But any creative process will involve various periods of incubation, or time spent not consciously thinking about the problem. You have likely experienced this phenomenon yourself when after hours at work spent agonizing over a problem, the solution pops into your head when you get home and take the dog for a walk. This is also known as The Shower Principle—ideas come to you when you’re doing something else, like taking a shower, doing the dishes, or working on another problem entirely.

  8. Throughout the years, we are conditioned to do things well and to constantly improve. If we’re not doing that, we’re led to believe we’re getting worse. If we regress, we are failures. These beliefs are all based on the flawed assumption that progress is linear. At an extreme, this could lead us to chase perfection. If we can’t do something perfectly, we just won’t do it. Perfectionism creates an impossible standard for us to meet. This is just one of many reasons we start procrastinating and get blocked.

  9. There will be a time and place to care about results—but it’s not while you do the work.

  10. As Wired co-founder Kevin Kelly writes, “Start by buying the absolute cheapest tools you can find. Upgrade the ones you use a lot. If you wind up using some tool for a job, buy the very best you can afford.”

  11. In 2018, the average Instagram user on Android spent 53 minutes a day on Instagram. Over the course of the year, that’s 322 hours, the equivalent of over eight full 40-hour work weeks.

  12. In the professional world, a popular productivity strategy is the Pomodoro method: set a timer for 25 minutes of uninterrupted time to complete a task, take a five-minute break, then start the timer again. After three of these 25 minute sessions, the person takes a longer 30-minute break.

  13. If you’re programming, restrict yourself to a set number of lines of code or a specific memory size. (Sizecoding might be an inspiration.)

  14. This is what Michael Saviello says of his process: “I do a painting in a short amount of time, but I think about it 24 hours.”

  15. This is how originality actually works: not through a mythological lightning bolt of insight, but through constant bricolage, rediscovery, and remixing of references.