“Busyness serves as a kind of existential reassurance, a hedge against emptiness; obviously your life cannot possibly be silly or trivial or meaningless if you are so busy, completely booked, in demand every hour of the day.”
How to Improve Your Email Habits
“Making a behavior harder to do makes it less likely to occur. I looked for ways to make opening email more difficult. Surprisingly, I found just adding a few extra steps makes me less likely to check my email.”
101 Books Ted Talk Speakers Recommend
This one doesn’t require much of a summary.
How to Write Engaging Headlines
“Curiosity drives shares. But the trick is to find a way to spark that curiosity in every headline. It’s why headlines that start with ‘Here’s why…’ or ‘The one thing that will make you…’ work really well. Because they spark instant curiosity.”
Why the Attention Economy Is Broken
“‘Fake news’ isn’t a Russian conspiracy to undermine our democracy; it is, instead, the end-state of an unhealthy race-to-the-bottom for consumer attention.”
8 Ways To Get People To Pay Attention To Your Work
Attention isn’t free.
To get attention for our creations, products, or messages, we have to give our time, effort, and resources.
I’ve kept this in mind as I’ve attracted the attention of more than 10,000 subscribers to my For The Interested newsletter in the past year and thought I’d share exactly what I’ve given to get that attention.
If you apply them to your own projects, they will help you attract attention for whatever you create.
10 Ideas For The Interested This Week
“Every day has the potential to be the greatest day of your life.” — Lin-Manuel Miranda
How to Make It Easier to Stick to Your Budget
“The entire concept of budgeting is flawed. Your emotional brain responds to the word budget the same way it responds to the word diet. The connotation is deprivation, suffering, agony, depression.”
Why You Should Manage Your Energy Instead of Your Time
“The top 10% of employees with the highest productivity didn’t put in longer hours than anyone else — often they didn’t even work eight-hour days. Instead, the key to their productivity was that for every 52 minutes of focused work, they took a 17-minute break.”
How to Improve at Anything Using the Plus-Equal-Minus Method
“The simple mantra, ‘I know nothing’ has helped me so many times in the past seven years. I owe any success to those simple three words: I. Know. Nothing.”