Russell Davies

Useful

Take this with a pinch of salt, because it's obviously nonsense, but it's a place to start.

For the last several years I've pursued, in the background, a couple of different projects:

1. Collecting and sharing things that are interesting
2. Collecting and sharing things that are useful*

The first one has been a bit more successful. I did the conferences. I still own the twitter account. But the second one has been bubbling along quietly.

Whenever someone asks me for coffee/chat/advice I normally end up saying random useless nonsense in the moment but then emailing a couple of days later saying "Actually, this book/quote/link might be useful for that thing you were wondering about." I have a large collection of that stuff, scattered across this blog, various google docs, Pinboard and Readwise. It's a sort of distributed commonplace book.

I've recently wondered whether I could just dispense with the coffee stuff and share the whole collection in some useful way. And I've been wondering how to get it all together. I tried Scrivener, so it could be a book and Roam, so it could be networked and modern and Obsidian, so it could look like a spaceship. But none of them seemed to stick.

I even tried building webpages festooned with links and tags like I was building Xanadu, but I've read about that.

So I gave up.

And then, the other day I found myself saying to someone "Just do it as a blog, it's never exactly what you want, but it's always good enough." And that reminded me of these lines from How to Change by Katy Milkman.

"In psychology, there’s something called the “saying-is-believing effect.” Thanks to cognitive dissonance, after you say something to someone else, you’re more likely to believe it yourself."

So I'm going to saying-is-believing myself and just stick stuff on here, collect it all together and add thoughts it I have them. And then we'll sort it all out later. A blog is always good enough.

Why am I telling you this? No good reason. I'm blogging about blogging. That's what bloggers do. I'm leaning in.

*For very weedy definitions of useful. ie: it won't help you save lives or be happy. But it might help you secure a promotion inside a moderately-successful packaged goods company.

This week

52 singles; The Bud Powell Trio

This week

52 singles: E.U., E.U. freeze

This week

A lovely piece

 

52 singles: CHAI, Donuts Mind If I Do

I can't remember how I came across this. Possibly in Wire? It's wonderful. Very chill. And what a message: "When you’re feeling vigorous, when you’re feeling sick, You like what you like! No changing that! Even if what I like is as simple as a donut.”

Get to the chorus

(And this)

"Favreau, a self-taught pianist who studied classical music in college, delights in the comparison of his work to pop song writing. “A good line in a speech is like a good piece of music,” he said. “If you take a small thing and repeat it throughout the speech, like a chorus in a song, it becomes memorable. People don’t remember songs for the verses. They remember songs for the chorus. If you want to make something memorable, you have to repeat it.”

Hit Makers - Derek Thompson

Disguised repetition

(Putting this here so I can link to it later)

“People find things more pleasurable the more times you repeat them, unless they become aware that you’re being repetitive,” Huron said. “People want to say, ‘I’m not seduced by repetition! I like new things!’ But disguised repetition is reliably pleasurable, because it leads to fluency, and fluency makes you feel good."

Hit Makers - Derek Thompson

This week

Agree. Good film.