11 Comments
Nov 8, 2023Liked by Adam Singer

Loved it. The bonus video was the miracle for me. My daughter is a 5th year architecture student doing her thesis now. Dami is a perfect inspiration and illustration of great audience building. thanx Adam for your writings and twitter musings.

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My calendar is the exact opposite of Tetris haha. I've largely made the choice to keep it that way because when I was loading it up with "to do" work I was more susceptible to pumping out material that I ultimately didn't feel needed to necessarily exist.

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Funny how this is the opposite of how most of corporate America functions

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Yup

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I love efficiency and working smarter, but I don't want to optimize or plan every 30 seconds of my life. I am mostly focused on getting the best outcome possible with the least amount of risk/friction.

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Nov 7, 2023Liked by Adam Singer

This reminds of a quote I have heard but unfortunately do not know who came up with it. “If everything was efficient, so much would be lost.”

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I'm pretty skeptical of podcasts, in general, as knowledge acquisition vehicles, whether one listens to them at normal speed or at double speed. It's just a super low bandwidth way of conveying information, relative to text. Byrne Hobart makes a lot of good points here about why reading is the best way to learn: https://byrnehobart.medium.com/read-2c3d4fba90ab

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We evolved to listen to stories, it's lindy!

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Went into this thinking I’d be guilty of more, but seems like I’m doing okay 😅. Podcasts are 1x for me... Audiobooks often a 1.2x. I feel like they force the authors to read unnaturally slow, so I gotta pep them up a bit haha

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To do anything great requires the opposite of optimizing. Effective creativity can’t be efficient. This is a great article. The only thing I “optimize” for is time to mess around and follow my curiosities. Grinding has its place but as support for one’s life not the way to live it.

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Excellent, couldn't agree more. Reminds me of convo I had about why people get addicted to short form video content but not audio content.

Its bc video is info dense so ideas can be consumed so fast the stimulus is addictive. Even though you dont retain as much when doing it quickly.

But something like a podcast unfolds slow like reading a book. It cant be rushed without losing understanding so its harder to retain a short attention span. That inherent slowness is apparently a feature in the age of hurry sickness.

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