In response to my 2025 Things I learned post, my friend Mark tells me “You should do a meta post on how you come up with this list.”
Frequent readers of this blog probably know the answer to this already, but I’ll spell it out in more detail here. I’ve been very influenced by my friend / mentor Alex Komoroske who has an essential google doc called Bits & Bobs.
I more or less have copied what he does but adapted it for who I am and what I’m interested in.
Thought the week each week I keep a running note in Bear called Good Tokens YYYY-MM-DD.
I throw things in here throughout my day: links I like, observations, ideas baked and unbaked.
On Thursdays or Fridays, I go through and I process through that list. About 75% of it ends up as my weekly Good Tokens post and the rest of it gets sorted somewhere else or thrown out and then I post it to my blog here.
Whenever I post something, I have OpenAI tag it for me. Then starting about November 1st, I start going back through and looking at the posts tagged things I learned.
I dump all of these into a doc in chronological order and then start cleaning up the formatting and reading through them. As I do that, I start to see themes and then group and regroup them until I’ve got the post. I am to put it out more or less on December 1st.
Perhaps a better question would be why I do this. One answer is that I enjoy it. Another is that I really do find that it builds a habit for me of looking out into the world and considering it. A third is that it has helped me crystalize what I’m uniquely interested in and where I want to spend my time — which is a funny thing to say considering how weird and wide ranging these posts are, but the act of reflecting on it on a weekly basis does help me see patterns. A final reason is that I do think that the creative act is contagious. Like running, the hardest step is the first one and so having a habit of creation keeps me in the flow.
Yucca man. I’m a sucker for “does this Bigfoot like creature actually exist” stories (see season 1 of the Wild Thing podcast), but this one also has so many great Southern California places in it. Like taking a mini vacation.
Nuclear batteries. “A 157W Voyager-based RTG that launched in 1977 will produce about 88W today.” The clean up problem seems insurmountable.
Why Swiss Kids Walk to School Alone. This is one of the things that made me fall in love with Switzerland. They do this as 5 year olds! Part of it is safety but part of it is teaching agency. The walk to school is a part of the education. This should be our aspiration for American neighborhoods.
Your idea sets the ceiling for your videos potential and other good advice from Paddy Galloway.
Has some moments of real clarity and brilliance and some moments that seem self indulgent.
A great book to pick up in the middle of a life change. It isn’t going to tell you what to do, but will get you thinking. Will absolutely stay on my bookshelf.
The three chapters that resonated with me most this time around:
Einstein and relativity. His path of generating the theory stood out to me: in 8 years of thinking about the problem, he cracked it when he signed himself up for a series of lectures where he had to articulate it to others. “Finally, in the week before his last lecture, Einstein cracked it. At the end of the week, he stood up at the Prussian Academy and announced to the world the general theory of relativity he had figured out just days earlier.”
The SCARF Model: Status, Certainty, Autonomy, Relatedness, Fairness
Things I learned
More Romans were killed at Cannae than Americans in Vietnam or British on the first day of the Somme — The Rest is History
Musings
“To create anything worthwhile, you have to put God in it.” — Nabeel Qu
Over the years I’ve watched the fates of my HBS classmates from 1979 unfold; I’ve seen more and more of them come to reunions unhappy, divorced, and alienated from their children. I can guarantee you that not a single one of them graduated with the deliberate strategy of getting divorced and raising children who would become estranged from them. And yet a shocking number of them implemented that strategy. The reason? They didn’t keep the purpose of their lives front and center as they decided how to spend their time, talents, and energy.
And:
When I was a Rhodes scholar, I was in a very demanding academic program, trying to cram an extra year’s worth of work into my time at Oxford. I decided to spend an hour every night reading, thinking, and praying about why God put me on this earth. That was a very challenging commitment to keep, because every hour I spent doing that, I wasn’t studying applied econometrics. I was conflicted about whether I could really afford to take that time away from my studies, but I stuck with it—and ultimately figured out the purpose of my life.
And:
The lesson I learned from this is that it’s easier to hold to your principles 100% of the time than it is to hold to them 98% of the time.
I think this is the first time I've read this one closely since I've had children. At the very least, the first time since my youngest one was born. The grind of parenting is much more real to me now than when I've read this previously. I've described my life recently as a "5 on 3 power play where I'm the 3 and it doesn't reset when a goal is scored." It's good to have the reminder to keep some of my energy for my children and not to spend it all elsewhere.