I’ve written about this before but I’ve always had an inconsistent relationship with side projects. I get super interested in something and then do a bunch of tutorials or basic exercises and then seem to drop off. Part of this is that learning is hard and hype cycles are real. But the other part is that we live in a society filled with distraction. Not only is there distraction to work on the next shiny thing - be that a new coding language, interest in filmmaking and storytelling, or even focusing on writing consistently (whoops) - there is also a lot of distraction in how we go about learning new things to begin with.

A quick YouTube search for learning Javascript will show that the top results aren’t just about learning the language but learning Javascript FAST (all caps for that CTA of course). No one wants to wait to learn something because time is money. We don’t really care about the process, we just care about the outcome. I want to get past all the basic stuff so that I can start building the cool stuff that’s in my mind.

I’m not sure when I became such an urgency monkey. Maybe it’s only have a few hours to dedicate to these other projects and wanting to make sure I use my time in the most efficient way possible. Maybe it’s actually society pushing me to think I always have to be hyper efficient and anything else is not good enough. Maybe it’s forgetting how I used to be as a kid when my goals were to go to school, do some homework, play basketball for an hour outside, watch some TV, and go to bed. Sure the responsibilities were less back then but the mindset was also much different. When you’re stuck in a world where everyone is trying to wring out ultimate productivity from every second, you find yourself trying to “LEARN JAVASCRIPT in 20 MINUTES FAST!” on YouTube. Spoiler alert: you won’t learn in 20 minutes and you won’t get those 20 minutes back.

So I’m back on nights at the hospital, and in the spirit of moving slower I’ve decided to attempt to go deeper into topics rather than jumping from one thing to the next. Going deeper means having more focus and more concentration and learning about the boring parts of something. It means understanding the foundations before doing all of the “cool” stuff.

And that’s where hour long YouTube tutorials come in. Because you can’t learn Javascript in 20 minutes. But you can learn about neural networks from an expert via multi-hour videos where he walks you through a basic problem building a neural network from scratch.

Multi-hour tutorial videos probably don’t have great retention curves. I don’t know that for sure but I can take a wild guess. They aren’t fast paced and don’t keep users engaged the same way that quick cuts, fancy graphics, and in-your-face thumbnails do. But multi-hour tutorial videos is where the real learning happens. It’s how you take the first step into actually understanding something you’re interested in. Experts make multi-hour tutorial videos because they understand that learning the skill that they are teaching takes multiple hours!

So the next time you’re trying to learn something, like really trying to learn and understand it - look for a multi-hour YouTube tutorial. It’ll be hard to sit through and you’ll find yourself reaching for your phone to look at Twitter or switching to different tabs because the lecture is so slow. But if you put in the time and pay attention - if you understand that learning takes time - you’ll walk away with some real knowledge.

The most recent one has been a slew of people jumping into the AL/ML space. I’ll be honest - prior to all of this I hated (read: detested) when people dropped the words AL/ML or AR/VR into everyday conversation. It felt very much like consultants leading a meeting at a tech company where everything was about “circling back” or “iterating and innovating.” Gross.

But alas, I find myself now interested in the space. I want to say that it’s because of genuine interest in the potential of the tech behind the hype but I’d be lying to myself if I don’t acknowledge the fact that hype is a significant part of my interest.

So that begs the question: Are hype cycles bad?

Eh, in the scope of things it’s probably not that big of a deal. You get a bunch of nerds online who find something cool and then research the heck out of it and then want to incorporate it into every single aspect of whatever they are building.

At the greatest extreme it leads to the Geeks vs MOPs vs sociopaths problem. There comes a group that sees a trend as a way to make a bunch of money and then the trend becomes a way for them to exploit other people for a quick buck. We’ve seen hype cycles from pyramid scheme/MLM companies all the way to crypto (which you could argue is its very own MLM). Taking advantage of people is bad and one of the reasons why when a trend gets to this extreme we tend to see lots of division between people on how good it is for society (funnily enough, if you trace the money you can usually see who is for a trend and who is against it).

But what about hype cycles at a personal level. There are loads of people on the internet who are what I call serial beginners. These are the people who have broad interests and want to dive into the next big thing. They see the hype sure but they also see the potential and more importantly they see what it looks like to be an expert in the field because the experts are making the cool stuff (side note: I’m definitely guilty at being a serial beginner in more than one domain).

There is nothing wrong in being a serial beginner - it’s exciting and exhilarating and you genuinely want to learn about this new thing that everyone is talking about. And let’s not forget about the dopamine hit from said new thing. You’re not necessarily in it for the money, though that never hurts if you make something people think is cool, and more than that you get to meet some cool people along the way who are also interested in the same thing. Life’s short, why not have some fun?

The issue with being a serial beginner is that you never go deep into the topic. Going deep is hard and going deep takes time and effort. It’s also usually not fun. This is why lots of people who are learning to code are really great at Codeacademy but not so great at staring at a blank screen and building a project from scratch. Once you get past the initial hype, the road to learning about a topic is a long one.

So how do you fix this problem? Surely you don’t want to be in a state where you’re learning about something that is boring and doesn’t inspire you after the initial hype. And how do you make yourself not chase the next big thing? As with most things in life, it’s about slowing down.

Let’s take an example (maybe a personal one from my life lol). The big hyped thing right now all over Twitter is AI/ML. All anyone can talk about is GPT-3 this and Stable Diffusion that. Cool, sounds fun and I’m into it because the tech actually looks awesome (heck, I’m writing this in Lex which is a writing tool powered by AI).

Now let’s say you want to get deeper into the space. You’ve seen the applications of what this tech can do so how do you actually go about getting involved with it? Finding your own niche or vertical is one answer. I’m a resident physician so AI/ML in medicine is a natural connection and maybe more specifically since I’m interested in critical care I should learn about what this tech can do in the ICU environment. That seems pretty niche and will probably take me down several rabbit holes to explore and find a place where I may even be able to get involved.

I’m also interested in creative work, so thinking about creative tools and how AI/ML can influence that is another area that seems interesting. If I’m thinking about writing as a creative process, this would likely lead me to read and learn about LLMs (still don’t know what the heck these are yet) and how the tech works to impact creative work.

The big takeaway: get away from Twitter and go to other sources.

These can be blogs, articles that others in the space have written, YouTube channels and videos dedicated to specific topics, textbooks (online or written), or research papers about the space. The idea is that getting away from Twitter and the quick dopamine bursts you get from every tweet is how to go deep. And if you can’t get away from Twitter at least subset it and create a dedicated list of people to follow who are trying to get deep (this has been my solution because I have no self-control and tend to doom scroll at 3 AM at the hospital when I’m working an overnight shift).

Next, set your expectations practically. You’re not trying to learn everything and you’re definitely not trying to go quickly. You can’t become good at something by going fast. It’s easier to follow this when you’re in a structured environment or path say medical school to residency to fellowship to attending (your life is carved out for you). It’s much harder to have this discipline in creative areas because no one is telling you what to do and you have to find that discipline on your own.

It’s also okay to not have the same discipline in your creative work. Creative work is about jumping from thing to thing at times but it’s important to come back and work to go deep on something that you truly care about. Once you pass the hype and then get over the suck of realizing that thing you like is actually pretty complicated and requires work, you find the enlightenment of actually becoming good at the thing. I’m slowly getting there with medicine (residency still has a lot of suck but the medicine is coming to me faster and easier day by day), and I’m hoping to get there more in creative work.

So go out there and find the hyped up thing and get involved in it. Go deep and go slow. Find communities of people who are ahead of you in level and even people who are at the same stage as you. Learn from them and push them as well. You’re in it for the long haul.

Subscribe now

Now that NFT season is over for the most part and I am holding my bag of cartoon profile photos that probably will never have any use (whoops!), I thought I would take the time to deep dive into different parts of the Ethereum ecosystem. I’m still interested in the actual technology behind Eth and the different use cases that could come of it (currently learning about DeSci) so it makes sense for me to have a better understanding of how things actually work instead of just riding along with rest of crypto twitter saying gm to each other every second of the day.

I’ve also had a lot of time on my night shifts to get through my article backlog and feel like writing to learn seems like a good mindset to be in. Lots of crypto stuff can either be overly technical or way to vague so putting what I learn into my own words is a good reinforcing mechanism to make sure that I really know what I’m reading (this is probably a good idea to do for anything I’m trying to learn but let’s start here).

So today, I want to talk about The Merge, which first of all is a dope name so props to whoever came up with that. It’s also the thing that I hear about all of the time be it on twitter or podcasts or articles. Everyone has been awaiting The Merge and it keeps getting delayed. Let’s talk about what it is, why it’s important, and will it actual happen soon.

Proof of Work vs Proof of Stake

To understand The Merge we first need to talk about proof of work (PoW) vs proof of stake (PoS).

There are lot of resources and articles that go into the details on the difference between these two models and why one is better than the other and because I don’t want this post to go on forever I’m going to simplify it a bit so that you can understand the gist of what they each entail.

The goal of both models is to create a way to validate transactions on the blockchain. Proof of work approaches this problem by presenting complex math problems to miners who try to solve them. Whoever is able to solve the problem gets to mine that specific transaction and in return they get the miner’s fee. These problems take a lot of computational power to solve i.e. they take up a lot of energy which is one of the reasons people say that crypto isn’t the best for the environment. The other downside of a PoW model is that because the problems take lots of resources to actually solve, we see a few big companies that have the capital to devote to solving these problems taking over. This means that a few players control all of the mining which not only creates single points of failure but also goes against the thesis of decentralization that crypto is known for.

Proof of stake works differently. In a PoS model, validators stake their eth and based on amount and time staked are randomly chosen to validate a block on the blockchain. There is some more technical stuff into how this actually happens and what it takes to be a validator but essentially if you are a validator and confirm a transaction you get a reward in eth. After a block is validated, others will attest or confirm that block. You need 32 eth to become a validator but if you don’t have that then there are pools you can join to get a percentage cut of being a validator. One of the biggest draws to a PoS model is that it gets away from the energy consumption issues in a PoW model and also adds a layer of randomization into who gets to be a validator (so that it’s not just the miner with the most resources who wins every block).

We won’t go into the PoW vs PoS debate here but in terms of The Merge, the goal is to go from PoW to PoS.

The Merge

Now that we have the basics of PoW and PoS and we know that one of the goals of The Merge is to move to a PoS model, let’s talk about how the heck that is actually going to be done. The Merge has three parts: Beacon Chain, Merging Mainnet and Beacon Chain, and Sharding.

Beacon Chain

Beacon Chain is actually already live and has been since 2020. It’s a mirror chain to Mainnet, but it operates on a PoS model. As a consumer you can stake your eth right now to become a validator on Beacon Chain and get rewards for it. We’re not using Beacon Chain to run everything that we see on Mainnet right now but it serves as a validation tool to test and show that PoS is working and to figure out kinks and bugs before moving the entire system to a PoS model. Think of it as a test run that moves along with Mainnet while we are in this transition state.

Merge

The meat of the operation, the second step of The Merge is to actually merge Beacon Chain with Mainnet. This is the part of the process that has experienced several delays (and maybe will continue to experience delays) because they want to get it right. Lots of things depend on Mainnet running well and so merging it with Beacon Chain would mean that any bugs or errors could cause issues for any consumer or project running on eth. The stakes (pun intended) are high, so they want to get it right.

The other part of this is getting people to move away from PoW to PoS and staking their eth to become validators. To help with this, there is something called the difficulty bomb which is some code that will make the math problems required for PoW to become much harder and more computationally intensive. So much so that the energy and money needed to solve them won’t be worth the rewards you get from “winning” a problem and getting the mining rewards. The thought is that miners will stop pursuing PoW since it won’t be profitable anymore and instead switch to become validators in the new PoS model.

Sharding

Sharding is the third part of the process and isn’t due until 2023 (for now). This will happen after we move to a PoS model and is actually the part that sounds most exciting to me.

Ethereum has struggled with network congestion and high gas fees in the past and sharding is supposed to help with that. It’s all a little vague (at least to me) right now, and I’m sure more details will be brought to light post merge when this becomes the main thing that everyone is focused on. I’m still trying to learn and comprehend what sharding means and what it will unlock so take this next bit with a grain of salt.

The goal of sharding will be to help with network congestion and gas fees and also investing into scaling layer 2 systems (which will also help with the congestion and gas fees). On top of this, sharding will help create subsets of the data that lives on Mainnet. This means that a validator can choose to only validate certain parts of the blockchain and won’t have to access all of the data in order to run a node to validate on. This increases scalability since you could potentially validate by using your computer or smartphone which also means that validation will be spread across more devices leading to, you guess it, more decentralization.

On top of this, sharding is supposed to help increase the number of transactions that can happen on the network per second which has always been one of the downsides of using Ethereum versus other networks such as Solana.

This is all still a ways away but it’s exciting to look ahead and see what is possible with Ethereum in just a few years time.

Wen Merge?

So that’s The Merge. It’s complicated with a lot of moving parts and that’s why it’s also been delayed many times and hasn’t happened yet. So when do we think it will actually happen? Well for now, everyone is saying that September 2022 is a possibility. We don’t know if that’s going to hold or if it will be delayed once again, only time will tell. The other big question in everyone’s head is also if The Merge is baked into the price of Eth right now. If it isn’t then we could see a big jump in price post Merge (whenever it happens) so people may be wanting to buy more Eth right now in anticipation of it. However, everyone already knows that it is happening so maybe the price is baked in? Who knows - maybe the best strategy is still to just DCA into Eth. Don’t ask me, I used to buy cartoon profile photos with my eth.

If you enjoyed this post, feel free to subscribe below or forward it to a friend you think you would like it. I’m just an internal medicine resident writing in my free time to keep me sane from the beast that is residency so any support is much appreciated!

Subscribe now

Subscribe now

There is an old tale about Picasso that goes like this:

A woman sees Picasso in a restaurant and approaches him, asking if he can sketch something on a napkin for her. She says that she is happy to pay whatever it's worth. He accepts, draws something quickly on a napkin and asks for $10,000. “$10,000!?” the woman replies in shock, “But you just did that in 30 seconds!” “No,” Picasso tells the woman, “It has taken me 40 years to do that.”

More and more today it feels like everyone is chasing quick results. We want 10x gains in crypto, viral videos on YouTube and TikTok, and tweets that get us thousands of followers overnight. The internet has become about sound bites and quick memes that will engage the masses. Why spend time listening to an hour long podcast when you can watch three 20 second videos and get the highlights. Move fast and break things, they say.

The only downside of this is that great things take time. Quick engagement grabs that generate thousands of views overnight don't stand the test of time. They fade away into the abyss just as quickly as they rose to glory. But real greatness requires time. You can't have one without the other. You hear see it over and over again in history. The Picasso story is one example but even current generation creators like Peter McKinnon talk about how their "overnight success" was actually 10+ years in the making. My favorite example is of course The Black Mamba - in this iconic video, Kobe talks about why putting in the work in practice and showing up every day, multiple times a day is what will really separate you from the rest of the pack.

A quick word about "greatness" because it's not a word that I love. Greatness doesn't mean that you have to be super well known and famous or that you are the best at whatever thing you are doing. Greatness to me just means that the output that you create - be it art, writing, coding, film, whatever - creates a feeling of awe, wonder, inspiration, or emotion. As in, when you see the output or outcome, you know that it is great. It could mean that others resonate with what you are doing, but for me it's about you yourself seeing it and saying to yourself "Wow I'm really proud of that and it's something that's really meaningful to me." Maybe quick hits can fulfill that requirement for some, but not really for me (the dopamine will fade at some point).

So on that note, I'm trying to adapt the mindset of greatness taking time, or as I'm calling it "The Long Game," into multiple parts of my life (hence the newsletter rebrand). The first and most obvious one is my profession as a doctor. I recently finished medical school and started my residency in internal medicine. I'm still very early in this game but the compounding effects of spending hours and hours in the hospital and seeing lots of patients across different parts of the hospital has already become so evident to me in just my first month as a doctor. Medical culture definitely has its flaws and areas that I disagree with and want changed, but I will say that putting in the hours and taking care of patients (really sick ones where I work) is the best way to become a good and competent doctor.

But the easy part of medicine is that the long game is built in. You don't really have a choice because there is a path that is already laid out if you want to be a doctor - pre-med, medical school, residency, fellowship, attending. There are lots of exams in between and hoops and obstacles to jump through, but if you can do it then you know that putting in 10+ years will get you to attending status.

However, the long game is not as well-defined in other domains, especially creative work. This makes creative work even harder because you don't know the outcome going in. There is no attending physician paycheck and lifestyle at the end of the road waiting for. In fact, it's more likely that your work may get better over time and you may even think it is great but it probably won't generate tons of income or be recognized in the way that you think it deserves to be. Furthermore, the internet generally rewards quick wins. Hop on a trend and it's way easier to grow your channel. There are balances here of course - some creators create some things for the algorithm and some things for themselves, but it's not easy or guaranteed in any way.

On top of this, we tend to be creatures of comparison. We see how we are doing and where we are in our creative journey and immediately compare it to others who are posting online. For example, I'm trying to learn how to code (for maybe the one millionth time). I'm really good at watching YouTube videos on how people learned to code in 6 months but not as good at sitting down and putting in the time it takes to actually learn how flexbox works because I think I should already be better at this by now. I learned it at some point but because there hasn't been constant practice, those skills go away and you have to start back at square one.

To remedy this, I'm trying two different strategies. One is to understand that the internet is an onion. There are layers to whatever you see. YouTube will only show you 0 to Google engineer in 6 month videos but won’t show you that same person staying up till 2 AM trying to figure out how for loops work for the first time on week 2. It's kind of like seeing Kobe play in Game 7 and not thinking about how he practiced four times a day for 10+ years to actually get there. The internet is an onion. You have to peel back all the layers to see the truth.

The other strategy is to truly enjoy the process of learning, building, making, creating. If I like writing this newsletter, I'm more likely to do it again and again. Same with making videos. Same with coding. If you can fall in love with the process then you've already reached the outcome that you desire. Easier said than done but here is me putting it out into the world. It's a tough pill to swallow when you write something or make a video and only 3 people read or watch it. You put a lot of time into that thing and crave the dopamine of views. But the goal is to associate the dopamine with playing the long game in the first place. If you can do that, then you've already won.

Are you playing any long games? If so, I'd love to hear about them! Thanks for reading and if you think someone else would like this post feel free to share it with them!

Share

It's been a while since I last wrote something here. To be honest it's been a combination of life stuff (i.e. finishing up med school and applying to residency) and not wanting to write in the name of many (read: too many) other creative projects that I wanted/still want to do.

I went back and read some of my old writing and felt like I didn't want to just write about specific topics but rather whatever I feel like writing about. I think that's the best way for me to feel motivated to write. It's selfish (maybe) but I think it's what's right (write? ha!) for me in this moment in time.

Of course, I don't want to waste anyone's time so if you were here for note taking app reviews or spicy thoughts about healthcare just know that although those topics may come up, they aren't the sole focus of this newsletter anymore. If that's not your cup of tea, no worries! You can unsubscribe here (I hope this link works) and I promise I won't take it personally. If you decide to stay, I appreciate you letting me take up another row in what is I'm sure an already overflowing inbox of email.

I turned 30 recently. I don't know about you but I always thought that the older I got, the more I would have figured out. And as we all clearly know - that is not the case. I remember being an elementary school kid spending my evenings at Jamatkhana (place of prayer for Ismaili Muslims) and seeing the 25-30 year old "adults" who seemed to have everything put together. They were active in the community, volunteered to help teach religious education classes, had jobs that gave them real money, and of course always looked super cool and suave. To a 9 year old, all of this was a very big deal.

As I went through my 20s, I came to quickly realize that everything I witnessed as a 9 year old was not how it seemed. I'm sure the people I saw in Jamatkhana had their lives somewhat put together but I can be pretty sure that they did not have everything exactly, perfectly figured out. This was a big realization for me because I was brought up with the idea that if you keep building on knowledge you'll eventually get to a point of figuring things out. The most obvious example of this is school - you take Bio 1 to understand and do well in Bio 2 and you take Algebra and Pre-Cal to understand and succeed in Calculus. My thesis was that if I put in the work, positive outcomes would come out of the other side.

Turns out that though the carrot and stick model works relatively well for school (given that a million other circumstances are also sorted out in your life and you have the ability to actually focus and be empowered at school), it does not translate as well into actual life. Almost everyone I've spoken with who is around my age has or is going through periods of self-doubt and general wtf-is-going-on (WTFIGO henceforth). For some, this is about career decisions and professional growth. For others it's about relationships. It can be about anything but it's there for everyone.

For me personally, my WTFIGO journey took me from general tech to health tech to medicine with part-time tech and now residency with some thoughts about what long term life looks like as a doctor with many interests outside of medicine and a strong fear of burning out. It's a lot to think about and sure it's overwhelming but turning 30 has actually brought me more comfort in this process. My 20s were great and I feel really lucky to even have the chance to try so many things and pivot and change what I want to do with my life. I learned a ton from everything I experienced and a lot of my life was ambition driven - what felt like chasing one thing after another, looking for the carrot after each stick.

Turning 30 has given me an opportunity to reevaluate a lot of things. The turn of a new decade is always an opportunity to start fresh and finishing up medical school as I turn 30 only emphasizes that further. Instead of going after the chase in this new decade, I'm hoping to slow down. I'm realizing that doing everything and doing it well may not be the goal that I am after but rather doing the things I want to do with real intention is what will make me happy (not to mention be a lot better for my mental health).

I'm also a lot more okay with the idea of not having everything figured out. It's easy to see now that this is what life is but I also wouldn't want it to be any other way. The obstacles and troughs of our experiences are what make the peaks so valuable and there is so much to learn no matter what point of the curve you're on. I want 30 to be the year of intention. That doesn't mean that I still don't have a ton of things I'm confused about because I want to do medicine, art, programming, etc. etc. etc. - I do want to find my way in all of my interests (a discussion for another time!) but doing so with intention and going slower is what I'm hoping to achieve as I start this next part of my journey.

Subscribe now

It’s Apple hype season right now with WWDC 2021 revealing iOS 15, iPadOS 15, macOS Monterey, and watchOS 8. The software updates are fun and exciting and I’ve already download 3 of the 4 betas and suffering the consequences of having to charge my phone not even halfway through the day.

However, there were actually some great Health related updates that never get the kind of love they deserve. So that’s what we are going to do today. I’ll go through some of the Health updates that Apple put out, how they can help people today, and what could make them even better as they keep getting updates.

Data In & Data Out

Healthcare ~data~ was one of the bigger focuses at WWDC this year. To start, there have been improvements made to help users better understand the data that they are importing into the Health app. For example, if you add your Quest account to get your labs imported into the Health app, there are nice visualizations and explanations showing how your data is trending over time (e.g. what your LDL was, currently is, and how it has changed). In addition to lab data, you can also store immunization data so that it can be easily accessed later (because I know you have no idea where your Covid vaccine card is anymore).

This is good. Patients should of course have access to their health records and data and the 21st Century Cures Act that will require EHRs to provide APIs so that more can be done with the data that is sitting inside these EHRs. This will only add to the trend of patients being able to be more in the know of what is going on.

However, there is always a flip side of the coin and I’m sure this increased access to data and especially explanation of numbers changing will probably cause an initial spike in patient questions for their doctors. The Health app integration for importing your data is hidden in the settings and so I can’t imagine a lot of people will use it (I only just recently added my Quest account), but it is something to think about as we move to a world where your healthcare data will hopefully be given to you in an understandable format.

In addition to better explaining your healthcare data to you, another big update is Health Sharing. With iOS 15, you can now choose to share specific data points from your Health app with your family members and even your doctor (or any other contact for that matter). When you walk through the setup, it will ask you what buckets of data you want to share and show you a preview of what the recipient will see.

The nifty part about this is that the people that you share your data with can also get notifications if something changes or happens to you (e.g. if you heart rate is too high or low). From the disclaimers I got when setting this up, these notifications are not real time and I’m not entirely sure how iOS knows what may be an abnormal finding vs me just becoming out of breath when walking up the stairs. Maybe there will be more information on this as the final version is released but for now it seems to be a black box and my initial concern is for a lot of false positives to go through.

An even better layer on top of all of this would be if you could get really granular with these notifications (e.g. set boundaries for heart rate, only get heart rate notifications at a certain time of day or no notifications if the person is working out, etc.). I doubt we will ever see this level of customizability from Apple since it may confuse the end user more to set everything up but in theory it sounds pretty cool (not sure how useful though).

Trends

Outside of data import and sharing, Trends was the other big highlight for Health updates. When you open the Health app in iOS 15 you will now see a dedicated Trends section showing how you are doing in areas like Exercise Minutes, Steps, Standing Hours, etc. Apple says there is trends analysis available for 20 types of data but who’s counting right?

Tapping into a specific trend will pull up a chart and you can change the time window to see how you are doing over different time periods. There is also a section to manage trend notifications but it isn’t robust at all and just gives you a toggle to get a notification when there is a new trend available.

Honestly, this update seems very hand-wavy and I don’t know what I would even do with Trends data. There is no Apple Health widget for me to see my trends displayed on a home screen if I wanted. I just have to remember to go into the Health app every once in a while to see how I’m doing.

There is also no call to action (at least yet). Trends could be useful if Apple could tell you to take certain actions based on your trends. For example, if it sees that your exercise minutes are going down, it could recommend Apple Fitness workouts for you to do. If it sees a dip in your sleeping average then there could be a trigger to help you set up a night routine or some kind of resource to help you manage your sleep better.

None of this is there yet and it makes sense. In the grand scheme of things that Apple is working on, this is very low yield. It may create a slightly better user experience but Apple isn’t trying to become a healthcare company. It is trying to add bells and whistles to the overall ecosystem and essentially build a higher gate around its castle.

With that said, I still think there is some incentive with Apple Fitness that could push Apple to invest more time in its Health app updates (especially since Peloton is gaining market share in the home/remote fitness market with its app + bike).

Slow and Steady

The other health updates weren’t that big in my opinion but still worth mentioning. Walking Steadiness is a new “custom algorithm” that warns users of their fall risk by using the iPhone’s sensor. The interesting part about this update isn’t the update itself but rather that it uses data from the Apple Heart and Movement Study with more than 100k participants (looks like study results are not posted online yet). That’s pretty remarkable and I’m going to dig into how Apple was able to get so many people to sign up (or not opt out lol) of something like this. Yet another benefit of the ecosystem.

Update: Looks like it was voluntary to join the study via the Apple Research app and that there was an invitation to volunteer (i.e. probably a push notification)

“Participants will self-enroll in this trial, if they meet inclusion criteria, and there will be no active recruitment of any particular population. Invitation to volunteer.”

Apple Watch Updates

Finally, watchOS 8 brought with it some mini updates as well. The Apple Watch can now measure respiratory rate during sleep - so add another data point into your health app.

There is also a new Mindfulness app with a Reflect mode and a Breathe mode. It isn’t really that different from the previous Breathe app. There are some new visualizations that show up when you reflecting or breathing but to be honest, I turned off the daily notifications for this on my watch almost immediately.

Well, that’s the Apple Health Roundup! There were a lot of great and unique features introduced and I think Apple investing more resources into Health is going to be overall net positive for patients. The next big step for Apple will be to take all of these inputs and work to provide meaningful action from them. A hard task to do for sure but if any company is well positioned to do this, it’s definitely Apple.

Thanks for checking out the newsletter! If you have thoughts on this or other things you saw at WWDC 2021 I’d love to hear from you. If you found this useful, I’d appreciate if you could share this with someone else! And if you were forwarded this from a friend and want your own, you can subscribe below. Take care and have a good week!

Subscribe now

It’s been some time since I last posted here. Third year of medical school picked up and I was going through different rotations at the hospital so the hours to write were few and far between. I’ve also had a creativity block lately where I find myself wanting to create more but keep jumping in between things I’m interested in only to never do any of them (currently it’s writing and learning how to draw on Procreate, whoops). However, I’ve decided to just stop worrying about growth and what will come out of a creative pursuit and just do it (#nike) instead.

I’ve also decided to change up this newsletter. Originally, it was called Tools for Growth and I wanted to write about my interests in apps and productivity tools and share my thoughts with you. I still want to do this but I’m also interested in other topics (e.g. healthcare, tech, life) and I didn’t want to pigeon hole myself into one specific domain because then I get bored and don’t want to write anymore. I thought about putting together a new website and built something in Ghost but then just thought I should come back here and let the 200+ people who subscribe to this newsletter know that I want to write about other things too.

So knowing that not all my posts will be about productivity tools and apps, if you’re still interested to hear my thoughts I’m very grateful to have you. But if you don’t want something in your inbox about various topics from tech to healthcare to productivity tools then I definitely understand and you can unsubscribe here.

With that out of the way, today I want to talk about healthcare as a service and the rise of niche healthcare companies going after specific aspects of primary care. Let’s get into it!

Subscribe now

Personalized Care Solutions

Everyone likes a good digital health tool. Heck, I love a good digital health tool. In a world where healthcare systems (let’s be honest) suck and systems are definitely not built with user experience in mind, it feels good when a tech company comes along and creates a solution for a specific problem that a patient might be facing and actually helps solve it.

Nikhil Krishnan aka healthcare thinkboi wrote an article a while back about a company called Thirty Madison that has four products (branded as different companies) to increase convenience for solving problems such as hair loss, migraines, acid reflux, and allergies. It was a very well written article and I think the companies definitely solve a problem and improve access and convenience for patients that may not get it at all in the first place because the current healthcare system is too difficult to interact with.

However, it also got me thinking that what Thirty Madison is doing is basically unbundling primary care. Each of the sub-companies is taking one piece of primary care and working to solve that piece in a way that creates a wonderful user experience. The user gets onboarded, is given the right medications, and gets a care team experience if they have questions and for follow-ups. I agree - this is good. But I think it is good for a specific type of patient and also only for the short run (more on that later). Here is a tweet thread with some good healthcare banter we had about this article.

Take it one step further and you have more complete services that are trying to overhaul primary care altogether. One Medical was one of the first big names in this field but others like Forward and The Lanby are popping up. They are working to recreate the whole experience of what primary care is - essentially take the current model and improve the design. Think of it like the Apple approach - take something like personal computing that is clunky and not a good user experience and make it ~just work~ and delightful.

This all sounds well and good and seems to be pushing things forward right? Yes and no. Let’s dive into what I think are some issues with these types of models.

A System-Based Approach

Before we get into it, I want to caveat that every system will have issues. There is no silver bullet that will solve every problem in healthcare for everyone. This is true in the US (duh) but I would say this is true even in other countries with single payer models that I support. So this isn’t just me saying “well policy will solve all of this!” because I don’t think it will. However, I do think that a systems-based approach (which I will explain since that is a very vague and hand-wavy term) could help.

In my mind there are two big issues with unbundling primary care services into smaller individualized companies and products. The first is all of these services typically live outside of insurance. They are subscription based products and most of them you pay for out of pocket. This means that you still have to have insurance + these other services because insurance will still be needed for things like hospital visits, labs (depending on the service you pick), and emergencies (i.e you have to go to the ED). Probably not a huge deal for the target demographic of these products (which I’m guessing is younger, healthier, wealthier populations) but overall costs will likely go up.

The larger issue is that too much unbundling can lead to further segmentation and fragmentation of healthcare. Imagine if you are a person with multiple subscription services from different companies. You have to pay for them all individually and they likely don’t talk to or share data with each other unless there are explicit partnerships. Lack of data sharing is already a huge issue in healthcare and solutions like this can eventually lead to more fragmentation for the patient.

Even if you get past the increased cost and data fragmentation issues, a big issue with companies like this is that patients may forgo primary care altogether because they were able to take care of the one thing that bothered them through this specific product. Now the argument definitely stands that many patients don’t have primary care to begin with and so this is at least some kind of touch point for these patients. However, I still think the way to fix this is to inherently fix primary care itself rather than pick off parts of it.

For example, if you purchase an Evens subscription to help you with your acid reflux, you may never follow up on your hypertension that also needs management or your A1c levels that could help prevent diabetes and its complications. The reason primary care is important is because it works to help you not only with acute issues that are causing symptoms today but also works to make sure that preventative care is in place so you are less likely to develop chronic conditions down the line. The model doesn’t work perfectly yet but unbundling will only make this process harder.

How do you fix it?

The ultimate question: how do you fix it? Well of course there is the policy route. Give everyone access to a primary care physician via a single payer system so that they can get the care they need for a PCP and then any follow-ups or referrals as well and don’t have to be burdened by extreme costs or dealing with insurance that makes the system difficult to navigate. This is probably most helpful for the patient but also the most difficult option because it requires a government solution that could take years to become a reality.

My friend Nikita actually suggested that an ideal solution (that some companies are working to employ) is to have these services be the acquisition channel for new users (many of whom may not be interacting with the healthcare system currently because it is so complex) and then transitioning those users to partner organizations who can manage things like complex care or comorbidities that the company itself can’t take on.

That is to say if Evens has a ton of users who are there for acid reflux but also have hypertension or diabetes it could partner with a healthcare system and essentially refer those patients to practices that can help manage them. This is a great solution and if you partner with organizations that accept insurance it would even help cover cost because you wouldn’t add another subscription service for the patient to subscribe to but just refer them to a doctor that takes their insurance (of course you’d have to deal with insurance routing which is a beast itself and hence single payer would again solve for this).

I actually think that is a great idea and if companies like Thirty Madison are going into these ventures with that mindset then more power to them. However, my hunch is that all of that coordination costs a lot of additional money to manage with not as great of a return for the company (Evens doesn’t profit from you having your diabetes managed by a partner org unless there is some kickback fee or maybe increased word of mouth marketing because patients and providers like Evens). It’s not impossible but lots of things would have to go right for a deal like to be valuable to a company like Evens.

Overall, I think that that rise of new healthcare as service companies should be looked at with some caution. It is easy to see a pretty landing page and attractive Instagram ads bundled with an easy onboarding and user experience and think that there will be a net benefit to the healthcare system. There are definitely a lot of positives that come from these services but it is also up to the companies behind them to take it upon themself and make sure that they are not only focusing on one specific aspect of a patient’s health but have ways where patients can get holistic and complete healthcare that primary care provides them with. It’s a fine line and one that should be walked carefully.

Wow thanks for making it to the end and checking out this post. It’s the first time I’ve written something at length about healthcare and it’s fun to sit down and think about issues like this that I read about but don’t really always take time to critically think about and process.

If you liked this post, I’d appreciate if you could share it so that others can also check it out. Also, if this was sent to you and you’d like to get your own newsletter from me you can subscribe below! You can also always say hi to me on Twitter.

Subscribe now

Subscribe now

A case study on Matter - a mobile reading app

I spoke about this in last week's newsletter issue but wanted to expand my thoughts on why good design should be valued over extensive features especially for beta apps in a crowded space. There is value in winning early users over with good design as you work to develop more extensive features. Transparency is still key here with what you plan to make but design will keep average users happy and pro users engaged as new features are being built out. You can read the full article here.

Matter is already delivering on their promise of feature development and is keeping their user base happy:

TextSniper

As a student, a lot of the things I view on a day to day basis come in the form of PowerPoint or PDF. I have to learn from these mediums and incorporate the information into my own notes. This has traditionally been a copy/paste workflow which can be tedious - so tedious that it sometimes turns into a screenshot workflow that is not helpful in the the long run since I can't search images for text.

Recently, Brandon Toner showed me a tool called TextSniper that solves this problem. It’s an app where you can take a screen shot of any static text and convert it to actual text that you can then copy and paste into word processing apps like Roam. It has improved my workflow drastically and I can now guarantee that my notes are not full of screenshots but rather searchable text that I can reference later. It is well worth $6.50 I paid for it.

Nat Eliason's Online Community

I've written in the past why I think we should all join online communities.

It's a great way to meet likeminded people who are interested in the same things you are interested in. There is a feeling of accountability but also belonging. This is especially important as the world becomes more digital and more so in this time period of quarantine and social distancing. Humans need social connection and online communities are one way to achieve this.

One added benefit is of course "access" to people who's work you respect and want to learn from. Nat Eliason recently launched his community on Circle (I'll do a roundup of community apps at some point), and I immediately joined.

Some key benefits for me will be:

• The ability to learn directly from Nat and understand more about his process

• Connecting with new people who are interested in similar spaces that I am but also staying connected to friends I have made online who also joined the community. It's nice to have a crew!

• Being able to support a creator that you think provides value

The last point is an important one and something that I think we often overlook. My favorite photographer, Andrew Kearns, used to have a Patreon that I instantly backed. Not only was it was great to learn photo editing tips directly from him but there was also value in supporting someone who is doing good work. I felt that he had given me so much value already and I wanted to be a part of his journey. It almost felt like I was coming full circle.

I recently listened to a podcast that was talking about the future of creators and how it would make a lot of sense (financially) for current creators to invest in and bring up future creators. There could be a world where Nat Eliason is able to help other creators rise and grow and essentially be the person who "discovers" them. Similar to music artists who find new singers and songwriters, current creators could actually invest in future creators as they work to help them grow. This would not only help develop the next generation of creators but also be a good model of growth for current creators. They already know what good looks like and have a process that has helped them get there. Creators today are mostly monetizing what they create, but their biggest asset lies in what they know about the creation process.

With this mindset, having a community is almost a no-brainer if you're a current creator and also a great way to join the next wave of creators if you're aspiring to do so. It's a win-win for both sides.

Inputs

• Chess channels - GothamChess, GMHikaru, Eric Rosen, John Bartholomew, Botez sisters - I've been getting back into chess and this week spent some time learning the Slav defense to play against Queen pawn openings like the Queen's Gambit. Of course, this led be down a rabbit hole of different chess YouTube accounts and there is so much educational stuff out there. Check out the accounts linked if you're interested!

• Nobody Tells This to Beginners: An oldie but a goodie that I visited this past week as I'm working to continue writing online and starting a YouTube channel (two videos done!). Worth the watch if you're starting out in something.

Thanks for making it to the end! If you enjoyed the newsletter and got some value out of it, I'd really appreciate it if you could send it to one friend. We are at 175 subscribers as of today and rounding out 2020 with 200 subs would be a nice feeling! Also if you want say hello or drop me a line, you can find me on Twitter!

Share Tools for Growth

Subscribe now

Smartblocks in Roam42

If you don't know what Roam42 is, then you should definitely check out my write-up of how I use it in my article about the Top 5 Underrated Features in Roam. This past week, Roam42 (created by RoamHacker) added a much awaited feature called Smartblocks.

In a nutshell, Smartblocks is Alfred Snippets built into Roam with Roam specific customization. I was lucky enough to be part of the initial alpha testers and seeing this tool make it live to the greater Roam community is awesome.

You can create predefined templates that run with keyboard shortcuts to automate things like Daily Templates and Weekly Reviews. However, the power of Smartblocks comes with advanced features like bringing in mentions of a specific tag or creating if/then statements (e.g. if you set up a smartblock with an if statement to only show specific outputs on Tuesday vs Wednesday the smartblock will give you specific outputs based on what day you run it). For a quick glimpse of what Smartblocks can do, check out RoamHacker's YouTube Video. Here is one of my Smartblocks to quickly create my template when writing a new newsletter (all of this runs on its own after I select the “Newsletter Metadata” smartblock).

If this all sounds a little complicated, it's because it is! But don't fret, there is great documentation on the Roam42 site. It's still in beta so things are a little wonky but based on the early feedback and how different people are implementing it, the future looks very bright.

Good Design vs Extensive Features

Recently I posted a *hot take* on Twitter about good design being more important than an extensive feature set.

I thought of this because I've recently been using a mobile reading app call Matter that is extremely well designed but lacks all the bells and whistles of other mobile reading apps like Instapaper or Pocket.

Essentially, I'm still drawn to using Matter because the design is so good. However, the discussion on Twitter made me realize that good design is worth it over extensive features but only if needed features will eventually be built. Basically - if your app is in beta then good design will keep me supporting it, if you're working to build it out further.

In the case of Matter, I won't ever fully switch to it as my only and main mobile reading app until it builds out things like highlighting and Readwise export (which the team is working on!). BUT - because the app had good design right out of the gate, I didn't just drop it and move on. I'm keen on seeing how the app develops over time.

Mixing things up to stay creative

As I mentioned in the newsletter last week, I’ve started creating YouTube videos again. Currently I have one video done and another one going through edits. This has all been very exciting but I have found myself writing less as a result.

Initially, I thought that this was bad. I felt like I had decided to become a “writer” and needed to actively work to ship out articles and build up a backlog of content on my website. But then I remembered actually tweeting about something similar when thinking about what I wanted to write about:

Essentially, I needed to take my own advice and expand this thought to multiple creative channels. Making YouTube videos is still making something. It involves writing and much more - recording and editing!

But more importantly, I should create what makes me happy. Making things is therapeutic for me and even though it’s great that people read and engage with what I put out there, going through the process is the most fun part. I shouldn’t have to focus on shipping things for the sake of shipping them. If anything, the more I enjoy making something, the better it will turn out.

I think it’s great that I have multiple channels of creativity available to me. It keeps things fresh and let’s me express myself in multiple ways. When I get bored of writing, I can edit videos and when I get tired of editing, I know I can write up an interesting article. Making something is the foundation and as long as I’m building consistently (this newsletter is one of those mechanisms), the gains will happen on their own.

By the way, here is the thumbnail for the first video I’ve made so far. You can sub to the channel here! Pro tip: It’s super easy to turn blog posts into scripts for YouTube vidoes. Then you can also link the video in your post and you’ve got a win-win.

Inputs

• Tweet: Choose Your Own Adventure in Roam: An interesting take on how Roam can be used for different versions of “Choose Your Own Adventure.” This could be useful in contexts like virtual conferences, classrooms, and even in going through patient simulations in medical school.

• Ali Abdaal’s Final Cut Pro Course on Skillshare: I took this course a while ago when I was initally getting into video editing but didn’t end up documenting anything so forgot everything I learned. Going through it again as I’m learning FCP and it has been great. Documenting my notes heavily in Roam and the goal is to post them online for others to take advantage of as well.

• True Alogorithms of Thought Have Arrived: Cortex Futura talks about how Smartblocks will transform the way you create algorithm of thoughts for yourself in Roam. His primer article on what algorithm of thoughts are and why you should care is also great and worth a read.

Thanks for checking out this week’s newsletter! I hope you got some value out of this one and enjoyed the hodgepodge of updates I had for you. If you don’t mind sharing this with one other person I’d really appreciate it! I am very close to my 2020 goal of 200 subs and your help would mean a lot to get me there. As always, you can pop by and say hello to me on Twitter!

Share

Subscribe now

I wanted to thank everyone who gave me feedback on the recent website design and launch. It’s great to see people engage with something I spent time on and it makes me want to continue to create. I really appreciate it! And to top it off, the website traffic was at an all time high (haha since it just launched) after I put out my latest article. Look at these stats!

This week I also shared on Twitter that I’m thinking about starting a YouTube channel! I’ve dabbled in YouTube before but only made a video here or there because it was so much work and effort and the gains take time to come.

Well recently a lot of my Twitter friends have been getting into the YouTube game and this has rekindled my desire to make videos! I do enjoy using my camera again and messing with editing and recently recorded the first video I’m hoping to put out. I even went all out and created a Notion tracker! If you’d like to subscribe ahead of time (aka the true believers!) you can do so here!

Top 5 Underrated Roam Research Features

This week’s article is dedicated to the GOAT of note-taking apps - Roam Research. There are numerous tutorials out on Roam Research already and even some full length courses. However, I think there a ton of features and add-ons that are underutilized by most people who use the app. I wanted to compile these and create an Underrated Feature Guide.

I’ve received some good feedback on this and a lot of people have said that they hadn’t heard of most of the add-ons linked in the list. If you’ve been using Roam for a while or are even just getting into Roam as a beginner, check out this list for some added functionality to make your experience in the app even better.

Collector to Creator Week 2: Collection

This week in the Collector to Creator course was all about creating a collection inbox. This is essentially a system to collect all of your inputs and then come back to read, highlight, and process them. Mine of course is combination of Instapaper, Hypothes.is and Command Browser on mobile for saving, reading, and highlighting and then Readwise to Roam for importing notes.

Everything I listed above is called “note taking.” It’s the easy part of the process because it is all consumption and no processing. “Note making” is the next step where you take your highlights and process them, adding notes in your own words. This takes a lot longer but is more valuable in the long run for both retention and understanding as well as creation. I’ll be honest - I am a much better note taker than note maker and it is one of the things I want to get better at as I go through this course.

Someone asked a great question during the live session about how they should dedicate their time to a backlog of notes to process vs taking in new content. Anne-Laure Le Cunff answered this beautifully by saying that you can either go through and figure out if you want to process your old stuff or just set aside dedicated process time (which is what she does) and eventually you will get through the backlog.

However she noted one really important point - even if you don’t ever get through the backlog, this is fine! This just means that those notes aren’t valuable to you right now and you don’t need them. Don’t get into the trap of having to process everything. If there are notes and ideas that you truly need, they have a way of finding you.

Inputs

• Avatar: The Last Airbender: I recently watched a few episodes of this show and wow am I late to the game! It’s so well done and the story line is so engaging. It gave me the old Dragon Ball Z vibes which I used to love watching as a kid. If you’re looking for a something light and fun to watch that is engaging, definitely check it out.

• Gary Kasparov’s Masterclass: Everyone has been on the chess hype lately thanks to The Queen’s Gambit. I played chess as a kid a long time ago but got into it again in 2018 when I started med school because my roommate was really into chess (competed as a kid and tutored students). We ended up starting a chess club at a local elementary school through our medical school’s community service program and I got more into the theory behind the game. I was playing pretty consistently on chess.com and hit my 2019 goal of getting to a 1000 rating. I’ve come down since but The Queen’s Gambit hype has got me back into it! I found this class on Masterclass and man oh man it’s great. Learning from a Grandmaster is already awesome but the production quality is unreal. I definitely want to do a deep dive into Masterclass and how it fits into the online education ecosystem.

• Means of Creation: Future of Online Education and Universal Creator Income: Speaking of online education, I really enjoyed this Means of Creation episode that talked about how online courses are evolving and a new platform being built for teachers who want to do live cohort courses (e.g. BASB, Write of Passage, Part Time YouTuber Academy). Nathan and Li always spark a good discussion and this was no different. They also touched on models for new creators to grow and why they think that there is a place for established creators to invest in and bring up the next generation of creators.

Thanks for checking out this week’s newsletter! I would really appreciate it if you can share this issue with one friend if you found something valuable from it. As always, if you have thoughts or just want to say hi you can find me on Twitter!

Share

But don't fret - I'm back (there was a Baby, I'm back reference there somewhere but I did not find it). I'm on my family medicine rotation now (primary care) and am actually doing telehealth which means I should have more time to do more creative work. Looking forward to writing more frequently again. As always, you can also find me on Twitter.

Subscribe now

Also another quick update - I built a website! You can find it here. It's a work in progress (peep the Change Log tab for updates) but all of my long form content will now live there instead of just going through the newsletter. I'll still link to all my articles in the newsletter so that you can easily read them. If you have feedback and suggestions on the site, find things that look wonky, or just want to give me your two cents, I'd love to hear it!

How Learning SQL Taught Me to Think Systematically

This week I've written an article on the benefits of learning SQL and why I think you should learn it even if you don't directly interact with databases in your day job. I picked up SQL to do side projects at my first job and liked it so much that I ended up working in analytics and data at two different startups.

There is an obvious benefit to learning SQL if your company has data that you can interact with - it removes the bottleneck of having to wait on data scientists or engineers to parse through data that you need. However, even if you don't work with data daily, the lessons learned with SQL help you become a systematic thinker. Like any programming language, you learn to be more structured and develop frameworks to solve problems. Having this skill alone can help you in domains like project management, communication, and even medicine (if you're like me!).

I also make the argument that SQL is more accessible to the average person who doesn't code because it is much simpler than other programming languages and we all have a general understanding of how tables work (especially if you're an Excel user). You can check out the full article here.

Collector to Creator

This week I started Ness Labs' new course Collector to Creator. I've never done a live online course before (mostly because of time and price) but I've been a fan of Anne-Laure Le Cunff's work for a while now and thought it was worth it to spend the time learning about her process (she was also very kind and hooked me up with a student discount).

So far, we've had one session and it's great to be present with like-minded people who are also trying to write, grow, and learn. It's also great to see familiar faces and names since I've met so many people just by being a part of the Roam community on Twitter.

Online courses are all the hype these days especially in the time of Covid and I want to write a longer post about the pros and cons of online courses and what the future may look like for them. For now I'll say that I think the biggest gains come from "breakout rooms" but also there is value in keeping smaller groups together over time to cultivate a relationship and group vibe. I've seen this happen with my small groups in medical school, on clinical rotations, and even in my past jobs. Staying with a small team allows people to open up overtime and cultivates better relationships over time.

Inputs

• Podcast: Breaking Benford: Radiolab has been one of my favorite podcasts because they do such a good job of doing background research and storytelling. This episode is all about Benford's Law and how it has come up in the recent election. If you don't know what Benford's Law is, it's basically the idea that there are more numbers that begin with 1s and 2s vs 8s and 9s in the world. So across anything (baseball stats, bank account balances, etc.) most numbers will start with 1 or 2. However, this isn't the case in elections!

• Podcast: Dispatch 3: Shared Immunity: Another great Radiolab episode, this one is from early this year when Covid was getting started and is about the idea of plasma transfusions and why people were looking into transfusions as a way to treat Covid. My favorite part is the end where they interview an oncologist who talks very bluntly about death and Covid and why it is especially difficult.

• Podcast: Roam FM with Joel Chan: This one is a shoutout to #roamcult - Roam FM always does a great job with his interviews and this one with Joel Chan was no different. Highlights for me include talk about analog note taking systems (i.e. what Darwin use to do) and also the idea of focusing too much time on your productivity system that you don't actually get anything done. I can definitely relate to that!

Thanks for checking out the newsletter! It feels good to be back writing and I hope that you found something valuable from this issue. If you ever want to reach out with feedback or just say hello, you can find me on Twitter. Also, I'd greatly appreciate it if you shared this issue with one friend that you think would enjoy reading it! Helps me out a ton to grow the newsletter and keep putting out issues!

Share

Subscribe now

A Quick Update

I started my internal medicine rotation this past week and am having a blast. I finally feel like I’m “practicing medicine” since it requires me to take everything I learned in the first two years of medical school and use that knowledge to help treat patients. (For those who don’t know, Internal Medicine is basically the general hospital + some hospital specialties - so what you think about when you think of a doctor in a hospital).

Something I found interesting is the team structure. There are medical students, residents, and attending physicians which is a hierarchy but we also have pharmacy students and pharmacy residents, as well as nurses. There is a kind of unsaid hierarchy (attending physician at the top) but it is fascinating to see team dynamics and how people work together. I’ll probably write about this at some point. 

Since I’ve moved mostly to weekly curation instead of longer essays, I’d love to stay in touch with you where I’m most active - Twitter! You can find me @akiffpremjee. On to the inputs from this week!

The Abdaal Brothers - Not Overthinking

I’ve started going through the archives of this podcast because I like the banter between the Abdaal brothers. Ali is big on YouTube and Taimur is working on his own startup. Two episodes stuck out to me this week:

• Why Do We Seek Permission: This was an older episode where the brothers discuss a classic question that anyone creating on the internet has: Am I qualified enough to be posting about this? It essentially goes through why creators feel a sense of imposter syndrome and worry and think that they may not have the credibility to comment about a given topic because they are not the “expert” on that topic. Taimur answers the question well by framing it as a permission issue based on labels that society puts on different individuals. 

• Book Discussion - The 4-Hour Work Week: This one is all about talking through Ali’s highlights from The 4-Hour Work Week - a book he says changed his life. It’s interesting to go through because it seems that the reasons people want to work less and invest in passive income now are so much more different from what they were when Tim Ferris wrote the book (i.e. less focus on living on beaches and being remote and more on being able to do what you’re passionate about and find a community you can live long term in).

Creation and Building an Audience

Since this is something that I’m working on, each week I try to find some good resources for being more creative and growing an audience. Recently, Nathan Barry and the a16z Podcast have been great places for this type of content. 

• Consistently Deliver Value to Your Audience with Brennan Dunn - The Nathan Barry Show: Nathan Barry is the founder of ConvertKit and his show dives into different topics about creating online, growing an audience, and monetization. This episode with Brennan Dunn talks about building online courses and then how Brennan has gone about creating funnels and email campaigns to sell these courses over time. It’s far from where I am today but his process and how he has built a machine that pumps out all the work for him is incredible. 

• The New Fan Club: Creators, Fans, and the Power of Markets: A fascinating episode on the a16z Podcast about creators and crypto. I had never thought about how crypto currency could be tied to an individual creator but the argument they make is that fans should be able to “invest” in creators early and profit when a creator becomes big. Startups attract early employees via stock options today in this exact way and this is model should be translatable to the Creator Economy as well.

Habits and the Limitations of Systems

Habits, Identity, and Mental Models: Brandon Zhang had James Clear on his podcast for this week’s episode and boy I took a lot of notes on this one. There is of course talk about the compounding effects of habit and how things that you do become more valuable over time in ways that you may not expect, but my biggest takeaway was how important it is to think about the generalizability of any system that you build and findings its limitations. This is a key exercise so you where holes exist and things may fall through the cracks. James says that this is an exceptionally important skill to have, especially as a writer, so that you can identify where your argument fails and to acknowledge that ahead of time.

That’s all for this week! Thanks for checking out Inputs and I hope you found them interesting. I’m working on an essay about Why SQL is a skill that everyone should learn and also in the process of editing the Digital Studios tour with Andy Henson. If you liked what you read, please subscribe down below. I’d love to share my work with you. 

Subscribe now

I’m still hoping to post a more long-form topic based piece each Wednesday but won’t feel as bad if I miss a week here or there. I also want to have a short update for you all each week with what’s going on in my world since this audience is growing and I feel like I should share a bit more about what I’m doing in medical school. 

For daily updates you can follow me @akiffpremjee on Twitter!

So with that, let’s get into it! 

Subscribe now

Update

I just finished up a two week elective in the NICU (Neonatal ICU). It was very different from anything I’ve done before since it was a lot of premature babies with specific conditions and the main goal is to make sure they are on pace for getting enough nutrients and growing so they can leave the NICU. Had a great time and learned a lot of new things about that population that isn’t generally covered in medical school.

This week I start my Medicine rotation which is one of the tougher ones. It covers essentially every body system and is probably what you think of when you think of patients in the hospital. Hoping to keep you all updated on a weekly basis with interesting findings! 

Inputs

• The Discipline: I learned about The Discipline from Andy Henson on Twitter and I’ve been super intrigued by it and hoping to incorporate it into my workflow soon. Essentially this is a framework for how to spend your free time. You work in 10 day periods called “decades” and each day in the decade has a preset category. The categories are Create, Read, Study, Play, and Create. Since each day is predetermined (e.g. today could be a Read day), you don’t have to spend time thinking of what to do in your free time (you just read). I love the idea of removing friction from decision making and just doing something that’s been predetermined for you. I highly recommend you check it out and also follow Andy on Twitter. I also just interviewed Andy for my Digital Studios series so be on the lookout for that in a future issue! 

• How to Start a Blog That Changes Your Life: I originally read this post by Nat Eliason when it came out but revisited it this week to take more detailed notes. I’ll probably come back to it again and again as I keep growing my writing and audience but right now my main insight from it is to make writing a habit and keep at it for at least 1 year. This in itself should bring about good results. Monetization, SEO, etc. can all come later with time but having a good foundation to start with is what seems to 80% of the process. 

Roam Roundup

The rest of the inputs are from the world of Roam which had a big week.  

• Roam’s CEO, Conor White-Sullivan, made three big announcements on Twitter (after already having a big week raising $9M at a $200M valuation). These include API and multiplayer Roam launching, a fellowship program, and a Roam Fund for makers building Tools for Thought. 

• Roam’s Road Ahead: Nathan Baschez of the Everything Bundle had a good write up on Roam’s recent funding round and what he thinks it could mean for the future of Roam. He laid out two possible paths - creating a team-based tool and following a similar route to other note-taking apps like Notion or creating a new type of internet where things are interconnected and linked and you can essentially have a view into the Graphs of other people. Option 1 is what he says is most likely but also doesn’t truly vibe with the values that the Roam team seems to operate by. 

• Daniel Wirtz’s To-Do List System in Roam: I’ve been trying to find a better way to manage my to do’s in Roam besides copy and pasting from Things 3 and manually moving things around. Daniel Wirtz has created a great framework for this using queries and tags that he walks through in this video. If you’re looking to up your Roam productivity game, give it a watch. 

• A lot of people enjoyed this Tweet about creating a [[twitter.com]] page in Roam which will pull in every tweet in your Roam as an unlinked reference. Make sure you write something on the page though because I’ve had a blank page get auto-deleted on me! 

That’s all I’ve got for the first issue of Inputs. I hope you found some of these highlights interesting. I’m hoping that writing this each week also forces me to read varied and interesting things that I can then share with you all so that you can learn something you may not have known before! 

As I mentioned before, I just interviewed Andy Henson for the next Digital Studio Tour. Here is a link to the first one in case you wanted to see what they are like. If it’s something you’re interested in, definitely subscribe below! 

Subscribe now

Quick warning: This is a long post and a new concept that I’m experimenting with. Please feel free to jump around to different parts of it that you find interesting! Also, if you have thoughts or comments you can always find me on Twitter @akiffpremjee. I’d also love if you subscribed to the newsletter and join me through my writing journey!

Subscribe now

If you’re a productivity nerd like me, then more than actually being productive (haha!) you enjoy seeing how other people set up their productivity systems. This is basically the nerd equivalent of people watching gamers on Twitch.

Some time ago, I found series made by Sara Dietschy and MKBHD on YouTube where they would explore the physical studios of different creators. MKBHD did an episode of this where he went into Casey Neistat’s NYC studio and walked through how Casey organizes his space but more importantly what he uses different aspects of his studio for and how it helps his creativity.

I recently had the idea that it would be cool to do this for Digital Studios - the same idea but instead of looking at physical spaces, taking a dive into digital systems that creators use to create. I put the idea out on Twitter with a brief outline of what I was thinking and had a great response (so far 8 people are down to be interviewed!).

Now I actually have to do the series! So to kick things off, I thought I would do a self-reflection and “interview” myself and share my Digital Studio.

Overview

Here is what we will cover (feel free to jump around to what interests you):

• What’s the goal?

• Hardware and OS

• Plan: To-do lists, calendars, and daily templates

• Capture: How do I save information to dive into later?

• Consume: Tools for reading articles and books? Audiobooks and podcasts?

• Process: Note-taking and building a second brain

• Create: What do I make and how do I make it?

What’s the goal?

The goal of my Digital Studio includes three things:

• Learn about new and interesting topics to broaden my knowledge (very vague)

• Output one newsletter post for Tools for Growth each week

• Organize tasks that need to be done for life + school

Ideally everything in my system contributes to one of these three goals.

My first goal is vague and broad on purpose. “Learning” can encompass basically everything. In a more perfect world, I would have an area that I am focused on learning about and utilize my system to learn about that specific thing (e.g. health policy, productivity systems, healthy eating and exercise habits). However, I like that it’s broad so that it doesn’t limit me in what I’m learning about in a given moment. More opportunity to discover new things.

The latter two goals are more easily quantifiable as they can be tied to outcome metrics (Did I publish a post? Did I get my tasks done?). I’ll dive into the tools I use to make each one of these goals happen below.

Hardware and OS

I’ve committed to the Apple ecosystem. Currently, I’m using my iPad Pro full time due to some computer issues but will be back on a Macbook Pro by the end of the month. I’ve got an iPhone 11 Pro and an Apple Watch as well. The ecosystem has captured me fully (Airpods Pro and all).

MKBHD made a great video about the Apple Ecosystem that talks about how once you’re in the ecosystem, you basically can’t get out. I used to be on Macbook + Pixel but iMessage is what brought me over to the dark side. I haven’t looked back since.

Outside of my Apple devices, the main pieces of hardware I have are my Kindle, Dell monitor, DAS Keyboard 4 Professional, and Logitech G502 Gaming Mouse (not for gaming but mapping buttons to it is great).

I’ve found that having hardware that makes work more pleasurable helps with getting more work done (at least that’s what I tell myself!). I enjoy good aesthetics and setups so I’ve done my best to create one for myself that was within my budget.

Plan: To-do lists, calendars, and daily templates

Planning is probably the area that I’m strongest in. Partly because I’ve been doing it for a long time and partly because I’m a crazy medical student that has to stay on top of 532 different things at the same time always. I have a pretty simple setup and it consists of three apps: Things 3, Fantastical, and Roam.

Things 3

Things 3 is my go-to to-do list app. I’ve tried tons of to-do list apps (even tried to build my own) and ended up paying for Things 3 on all my devices because I really liked it. There are three reasons why I use Things over other to-do list apps:

• Great design and UI. It looks really good on all devices which I want in an app I’m going to be looking at multiple times a day.

• Keyboard shortcuts! I can navigate the entire app with my keyboard and don’t have to use a mouse to do anything. There is also quick capture from anywhere on my Mac (and iPad and iPhone with Siri Shortcuts).

• Having just Areas and Projects is perfect for me. I don’t need layers and layers of granularity in a to-do list app. Keep it simple, stupid.

Fantastical

I only recently started using Fantastical and the killer feature is of course it’s natural language engine where I can add an event to my calendar by saying something like “Dinner with Wesley on Thursday at 8 PM at Prince Street Pizza” and Fantastical will fill in everything in the event correctly. Saves a ton of time and I highly recommend it.

Roam

I started using a daily template in Roam because I wanted it to be the central hub of my workflow each day. Each morning I open Roam and run a command (via Roam42) to create a daily template. I then go to Things 3 and copy over to-dos from my “Today” view into my daily template. These are the only to-dos I’ll be working on in a given day. Getting them out and away from my to-do list app gives me piece of mind and I know that I won’t have to look at a million to-dos I’m not getting to that day.

My Roam template also has other areas like Notes, Consumed, and Inbox where I take notes on things I find interesting, add articles I consume each day (though this is phasing out due to Readwise to Roam automation), and Inbox where I tag high priority articles I want to read (more on that below). Here’s what that looks like:

Capture: How do I save information to dive into later?

This is still a work in progress. Mostly because I’m trying to become better about reducing what I take in and instead being more focused about my reading. I discuss this in my essay on How to Survive the Age of Information Exhaustion.

Right now I use a combination of open tabs, email (for newsletters), Instapaper (to quickly save articles), and a personalized Inbox I made in Roam for higher priority articles I want to read (you saw it in the image above).

In terms of how I find content to read, Twitter is my go to source. I have a Twitter list of ~50 accounts that I use as my primary feed. If one of these people shares an article or resource, I value it higher since this is a filtered list of people I’ve decided to primarily follow on Twitter.

I’ll open links in Twitter I find throughout the day and quickly browse. If it’s something I may want to look at later I’ll add it to Instapaper. If it’s something I definitely want to read, I’ll take the extra step to add it to my Roam Inbox. I rarely do this and it’s mostly for longer pieces or series of posts that I want to dive into. I’ve found that since it takes more steps to add content to my Roam Inbox, it has to be something I think is higher quality and worth my time when I sit down to read a longer piece.

Consume: Tools for reading articles and books? Audiobooks and podcasts?

Let’s start with articles.

I actually prefer reading articles in a browser. Instapaper puts them in a readable format but I like to see how the author wanted the article shown on their site. It feels more personalized that way.

I’ll open an article in browser on my computer, iPad, or iPhone and decide if it’s something that I eventually want in my Roam database. Roam is where I want all notes and highlights to eventually end up. I don’t feel strongly that everything I read should be in Roam so if I see an article I find interesting and just want to read but not save forever, I just read it and then close the tab, simple.

However, if I find something that I want to highlight and take notes on later I use Hypothes.is which works both on desktop and mobile and, importantly for me, is free #studentbudget. I like using Hypothes.is because my highlights are synced to Readwise which then imports directly to Roam. Readwise has been a complete game changer for me in terms of pulling together all sorts of highlights and then adding them to Roam. (If you’re interested in how to use Readwise, Blake Reichmann wrote a guest post last week on his workflow.)

Books are simpler.

I’ll be honest. I haven’t been the best about reading books. I want to read more of them but I don’t make the time to do so with school and everything else, but it’s really just an excuse. I’m hoping to get better at this but wanted to put that out there and be honest with you.

When I do read, I either read physical books or books on my Kindle. Physical books get some highlighting and note taking in Roam though I haven’t built a full system for this yet. I’m experimenting with Readwise’s photo capture feature where I can take a picture of the text and Readwise will do text detection and add highlights. I like this so far and it’s another way for my highlights to end up in Roam.

For Kindle, the workflow is to highlight in Kindle and then sync to Readwise and then Roam (are you seeing a pattern here?).

Podcasts

My podcast game has improved drastically since discovering Airr. This is one of my new favorite app and I’m always excited to use it. The premise is that you can take AirrQuotes as you are listening to a podcast. These are small clips that get tagged in the podcast. Airr can then sync these clips with Readwise and they end up in, you guessed it, Roam.

This is already awesome, but the game changing feature is Transcripts in Airr. If a podcast has a transcript, then that also gets pushed to Readwise and Roam so you have the text available for when you want to take notes and don’t have to re-listen to clips if you don’t want to. If a transcript isn’t available you can request one (though there is a daily and weekly limit on this right now) and if one ever becomes available in the future, it automatically gets added to your Readwise and Roam as an update.

Airr has truly changed the way I listen to podcasts because I feel like I can actually learn from them now rather than just passively listening to interesting content. For more info, you should definitely check out Nat Eliason’s article on Airr.

Process: Note-taking and building a second brain

The name of the game is Roam.

As you’ve read in the previous sections, all of the tools I use are to optimize for everything ending up in Roam. I’m treating Roam as my “second brain” and the ideal state is for all inputs to make it into Roam so that I can then process and refine them further into my own thoughts that can then ideally be used in other areas (writing blog posts, making connections between different topic areas, keeping a personal medical repository as I go through medical school, etc.).

The Process stage is also the stage where I lack the most growth (for now). This makes sense of course because it is much easier to take in content than to spend time going through highlights and developing my own insights. This takes time and work but it is something I am excited and want to do.

In order to improve this for myself, I’ve turned it into a sort of game. Everything that comes in from Readwise gets a “To Process” tag. Right now I have 53 items that need to be processed. So anytime I have a free moment (and hopefully soon to be added to a nightly routine), my goal is to process 1-2 items from the “To Process” tag. This includes adding metadata and tags, cleaning up titles and formatting, and then working to formulate a few unique thoughts on whatever I am processing. I will then mark that item as “Processed” which gets filtered out of my “To Process” page.

I’m not too worried about extreme progressive summarization right now (maybe I will in the future) because as long as I have good tags on a page, I will be able to resurface it and think about it later when I need to use it for writing or connecting with another topic I come across. This not so strict structure also makes me want to process through things because I know it won’t be a super long task to complete. The goal is to make sure that I’m having fun maintaining my second brain. If it’s not fun, I won’t want to do it.

Create: What do I make and how do I make it?

So it’s pretty obvious that I write a newsletter each week (smash that subscribe button!). Because all my notes are in Roam, I also use Roam as my writing tool where I create outlines and drafts for each post.

Roam is useful for two phases of my writing: brainstorming and actually writing. Because of the tags and links, I can quickly open up multiple pages in the sidebar to find interesting things to include in a post that I’m writing up. This is great for inspiration and to uncover topics that I read about previously but may have totally forgotten about.

The side bar is also a good tool for having my outline open as I write an article. This saves me from having to scroll through the document again and again or having multiple windows and switching between them. It lets me just write without any interruption which is exactly what I need.

Here’s what it looked like to write this article in Roam. Note that I have my outline open in the sidebar on the right and I’m writing the article on the left. Being able to collapse bullets and focus in on a specific part of the article is also very helpful and makes my writing much more efficient.

After I write my post in Roam, I use Roam Tools built by Ryan Guill to post-process and clean up the Roam formatting and then paste my post into Substack. This is also where I do my editing and any additional link and photo adding. I like doing this here because it gives me a better idea of what the post will also look like when it goes out. Once I’m happy with the way something looks, I ship it!

Oh one other great use case for Roam in terms of creation: Tweet Threads. Sometimes, I’ll watch a webinar and want to create a Tweet Thread for it. I’ll take my notes in a Roam page and then have that page open in the sidebar as I write my Tweets into Roam (you can also use a command to count characters to see how long they are). There is some talk about Tweeting directly from Roam but I prefer to copy and paste to Twitter even though it’s slower just so I can see what the the thread will look like before I tweet.

And there you have it. That’s my Digital Studio in a nutshell. Thank you for reading and checking it out! I’m hoping to do more of these posts with various people I meet online both so I can learn how to improve my workflow but also so that you can get a glimpse into the Digital Studio of someone else.

If you enjoyed this post, I’d love if you could share it with one friend! And if you haven’t yet subscribed you can do so below!

Subscribe now

Blake also writes his own blog that you can find here and don’t forget to give him a follow @lbreichmann on Twitter.

Subscribe now

Have you ever read a book that inspired you to take action, only to have your motivation fizzle out a few days later? Or maybe you tried to explain a concept you recently read about only to discover that you can’t recall more than a few vague ideas.

For the number of hours it takes to read a book, you’d hope to earn a better return on your investment. But books are, without a doubt, still one of the best tools for learning how to do something or for understanding a new concept.

So why is it so difficult to remember what you read?

How to Remember What You Read

Perhaps books aren’t to blame, but rather, it’s how we read that makes learning inefficient. Reading for understanding is inherently flawed because it’s based on the faulty assumption that we learn by transmission—absorbing knowledge by reading words on a page.

If you really want to understand something, you can’t stop there. You need to see reading for what it really is: only the first step in a larger process. To get the most out of books, you need a system for transforming what you read into meaningful action and lasting insight. What you need is a reading workflow.

Reading Workflow

Like the books you choose to read, your reading workflow will ultimately be unique to you, but it can effectively be broken down into three steps:

• Capture: Having a reliable system to capture meaningful ideas you discover from various sources, so you don’t have to keep track of them in your head. You want a system for funneling ideas through a common channel that’s easy to access for later review.

• Review: Revisiting the ideas you’ve captured. Your review process should be quick and simple to perform while consistently exposing you to your most important ideas.

• Integrate: Turning your ideas into working knowledge. Whether it’s making connections between seemingly random ideas to create something new or gaining sudden inspiration to act on an idea you’ve read, your goal is to convert your hours of input into meaningful action.

And while you could perform all of these steps manually, there is a tool specifically designed for improving each stage of your reading workflow. That tool is called Readwise (affiliate link), and it helps you get more out of what you read by resurfacing your most important ideas and creating repeated opportunities for you to use them.

Readwise Review

Readwise is software built on top of existing reading platforms—such as Kindle, iBooks, and Instapaper—that allows you to capture all of your highlights for later review. While all of these reading platforms have a highlighting feature built-in, Readwise’s suite of features helps you get the most out of what you read.

Let’s dive into some of these core features.

Highlighting

Readwise automatically syncs your highlights from a variety of sources such as ebooks, articles, PDFs, Twitter, Medium, podcasts (via Airr), and other apps like Liner, Pocket, Instapaper, and Hypothes.is. You can also manually input highlights from physical books or other physical sources that might not have a digital copy. Here’s how it works for some of my popular mediums for learning:

• Kindle: Reawise automatically syncs my highlights to its platform.

• Instapaper: Anytime I come across an interesting article or newsletter, I save it to Instapaper for later reading. I’ll then read the content in Instapaper and use their native highlighting tool, which automatically syncs with Readwise.

• Physical books: I haven’t discovered how to automate this process, but Readwise lets you manually input highlights. If you’re an iPhone user, you can even download their iOS app to capture highlights from paper books using your camera and optical character recognition (OCR).

• Twitter: You can save your favorite tweets and Twitter threads to Readwise by connecting to your Twitter account. You can save an individual tweet by replying to the tweet with “@readwiseio save” or save an entire Twitter thread by replying to it with “@readwiseio save thread.”

• Audiobooks: You can’t actually highlight an audiobook, but Readwise will add your audiobooks to your library. Once added, Readwise will auto-suggest highlights from those books based on popular highlights sourced from other readers. 

Once synced, you can either browse your highlights by source or use the search bar in the app to search for a particular highlight by keyword or phrase. Being just a few clicks away from all of your highlights means no more having to search for that one specific highlight by flipping through every page in a book or scrolling through that lengthy PDF ever again.

Tagging

Readwise also has a native tagging feature for organizing your highlights around topics of interest or for creating more advanced filters for review. You can use tags in various ways such as helping you recall a passage’s content, reference a topic worth exploring, highlight good copy that you want to imitate, or select particular highlights that merit a specific review time.

I find the tagging feature particularly useful when reading syntopically, or reading many books and articles on a given subject to improve understanding. Once I’ve added highlights from multiple sources, I’ll give them a tag referencing a topic I’m exploring or a project I’m working on. This keeps me from jumping back and forth between multiple books and articles to search for a particular idea. Instead, I just click on the Tags page in the app, find the tag I want to explore, and filter through all of my highlights containing that tag.

Readwise also has an inline tagging feature that lets you make special tags while reading on Kindle or other e-reader devices that automatically converts into a tag when opened in Readwise. To create an inline tag, simply highlight a passage and add a note beginning with a period (.) followed by a single word without any spaces.

For example, if you wanted to tag a highlight with the keyword “investing,” you would first highlight the passage, then add the note .investing. When the highlight gets imported into Readwise, it will be tagged accordingly.

Export to Evernote, Notion, & Roam Research

If you’re a fan of Personal Knowledge Management, you’ll be pleased to know that all of your highlights can be automatically exported into Evernote, Notion, and Roam Research. Having all of your highlights sync automatically with your favorite knowledge management tool is a massive time-saver.

I’ve also found that having all of my highlights live in the same space where I take notes has been critical for my creative process. It’s much harder to connect seemingly random ideas when your highlights and notes live across multiple platforms. Having a common place where your ideas can mingle is the key to sparking creative insight.

Automated Emails

Dubbed as “your daily dose of wisdom,” Readwise will resurface your best highlights as an automated email for your daily review. You can control how often (if ever) the emails get sent, what time they’re sent, and even how many highlights are shown in each email. Each email selects highlights using their resurfacing algorithm of “probabilistic spaced repetition” to maximize your retention.

You can also configure your preferences to adjust how frequent highlights from each article and book you’ve read are resurfaced. I find this to be particularly useful since not all books are created equal when it comes to how valuable their ideas are to me. There are also a few books whose ideas I no longer find useful or relevant, so I updated my preferences to never show them again.

Mastery

The Mastery feature applies both active recall and spaced repetition to your highlights. Together, these two efficient learning principles will help you remember the ideas you read. Readwise incorporates active recall using two different methods: Q&A and cloze deletion (fill-in-the-blank) to maximize retention (think Anki, but automated).

Once you’ve reviewed a highlight using an active recall method, it will prompt you to select how often, if ever, you wish to review the highlight again. Having control over how often you review a highlight ensures you’re reviewing your most important ideas. You can also tune how often you see your highlights from each article and book you’ve read.

Other Cool Features

Two more features that aren’t necessary for improving your reading workflow but are worth mentioning are streaks and the highlight share button.

Your streaks are represented by a flame icon with a number next to it in the web app’s upper right-hand corner and are for keeping track of how many days in a row you’ve performed your daily review. You can also click on the flame icon to see which days you’ve completed your daily review and view your entire review history from the day you joined Readwise.

When reviewing a highlight, you’ll notice a share icon in the bottom right-hand corner. Clicking on it will give you the option to either share the highlight to Facebook, Twitter, or download an image of the highlight to use it how you best see fit. I prefer to occasionally share some of my favorite highlights from a book I’m reading on Twitter to create an online discussion around some of the ideas.

Limitations of Readwise

While Readwise has easily become one of my favorite productivity tools, some limitations need to be addressed. Specifically, their lack of an Android app and subscription price.

As of this published date, Readwise only has an iOS app. But there is an Android app coming (perhaps very soon since there's an early access app now available in the Google Play Store). It's a little disappointing that Android users still have to wait, but Readwise offers some instructions for adding your daily review to your home screen to hold you over until their app officially launches.

As far as price is concerned, Readwise offers two subscription plans: a full version and a lite version. The full version includes features such as highlight exporting, tagging, Mastery, and early access to beta features (such as Notion and Roam export) but is a bit pricey at $7.99/month. If you don’t need access to those listed features, you can sign up for the lite version for $4.49/month. If you’re unsure about which plan is right for you, you can also upgrade or downgrade your subscription at any time.

Getting Started

I’ve been using Readwise for over two years now, and it’s still one of my favorite emails I receive each day. Seeing my highlights resurface in the daily email has encouraged me to be more proactive with my highlighting and note-taking. As a result, I end up retaining more of what I read while simultaneously organizing the concepts and ideas I’m interested in learning.

So if you’re a voracious reader who finds yourself regularly highlighting sections of a book, then I recommend giving Readwise a try. If you’re still unsure if it’s worth the price, you can try Readwise for free for the first 60-days (affiliate link) to see just how much it improves your reading workflow. It's time to stop forgetting what you read.

I hope you enjoyed that guest post! A little different from the regular scheduled programming but I thought that this content from Blake would be extremely valuable to you. I’ll be back next week my regular scheduled post, but in the meantime feel free to reach out to me on Twitter if you have any thoughts about Readwise!

If you’re new here or were forwarded this post and like what you saw, feel free to subscribe below for future issues!

Subscribe now

Subscribe now

I started writing this newsletter back in June. My initial goal was to stay consistent and publish once a week. I had read enough productivity articles and watched enough Thomas Frank and Ali Abdaal videos to know that consistency was king. If you want outputs, do something over and over again and eventually the compounding effect will create growth. Seemed simple enough. 

I was 10 weeks in and pretty proud of myself for staying consistent. I dedicated Monday evenings to writing to make sure that I published something by Tuesday. I pushed away studying on Monday nights and also built accountability with my friend Wesley, who is also building a writing habit. 

Everything was going well. I was enjoying writing, publishing and the dopamine hit of having a 10 week streak. I had a Notion dashboard to track my progress, fully built with an idea pipeline. I was engaging with people on Twitter and growing my audience there. I was approaching my secret goal (that I told myself wasn’t my goal) of 100 subscribers by the end of 2020. 

And then life happened and I missed an issue.

My 7-year-old dog, Luna, passed away suddenly due to complications after a surgery. On top of keeping up with family who were going through an emotional time because of all of this, I was also moving to a new apartment which ended up taking two days and an all-nighter because of odd times that I could get access to a UHaul truck. I was also in the last week of my Pediatrics rotation and had to study for the final exam which I ended up cramming for two days before given all that had happened with Luna and moving apartments. It was the perfect storm.

It’s safe to say that the newsletter didn’t come together last week. 

I knew that not publishing my newsletter wouldn’t impact any of my readers. It’s not like I’m a huge publication and people are waiting to see an email from me in their inbox each week. However, I felt defeated on a more personal level, as if I had let myself down. I had been doing something I was proud of and maintained it for 10 weeks in a row and was seeing results. Missing a week wasn’t something I wanted. 

But then I thought about it and just said, it’s fine. 

Hustle culture has taken over our feeds and makes us feel like that we have to always be on and working. If we’re not, then we aren’t trying. I really don’t like that mindset. I can’t tell you how much I cringe when I see a GaryVee clip saying that you have to work 15 hour days to get results and that hustle is life. I couldn’t disagree more. (Nat Eliason wrote an article on this if you’re interested)

I think it’s okay to not be “productive” all the time. We are not robots or machines that are built to consistently work. We need time to recharge and regroup. However, more fundamentally than that, I think we approach productivity in the wrong way. We think of it as what we should be doing in any given time to have the greatest output. Instead, if we think about productivity from a different lens, I believe we will actually be both more productive and more content with what we are doing with our lives. Productivity should include the following aspects:

• Find what you enjoy

• Reframe productivity

• Account for life happening

Find What You Enjoy

Instead of creating goals and aspirations based on what everyone says you should be doing, figure out the things that you want to be doing and enjoy doing. You will inherently be better at these things because you are intrinsically motivated to do them.

This makes sense logically in any other area of life - if you want to be healthy then find healthy foods that taste good too you. You wouldn’t eat broccoli instead of cauliflower if you really hated broccoli and liked cauliflower right? So then why are we doing similar things when it comes to productivity? Find what you enjoy and do that. 

Michael Ashcroft described this as “non-coercive-productivity” in a recent tweet and phrased it in a way that I really appreciated:

If you just take a look around Twitter and the varied amount of people who are building in public you see the outputs of this. People spending time on work that they appreciate and like benefits them in two ways:

1. They are more prone to engage with their work and create better products and outputs. 

2. Audiences and consumers like to see a creator’s journey, leading them to engage with and support whatever that creator is building. Everybody wins. 

Y-Combinator famously said “Build something people want.” Well, I think this is changing to “Build something you want.” The people will follow. 

Reframe Productivity

Productivity shouldn’t just be about work that leads to outcomes in your professional life but should also include things that benefit your personal well-being. There is no reason why working out, spending time with your family and friends, or even relaxing for an evening watching a TV show to recharge your brain can’t be seen as productivity. 

Limits are the key here, and I think we confuse not having limits in place with being unproductive a lot. I think it’s okay (and even necessary) to take time to recharge but having a plan and knowing what you want to get done by when is also important. 

I had this experience this past weekend. I had just finished my Peds rotation after a tough week of moving and family stuff going on and decided to take Saturday and Sunday off. I did a few tasks (e.g. unpacking) and got on a couple of calls that excited me but outside of that I didn’t do much and instead watched David Blaine’s Ascension with a friend.

I think a lot of people (myself included) see a holiday weekend as an opportunity to catch up and be productive on all of the things they’ve been putting off. I took a different approach this time and treated Labor Day Weekend as a holiday and vacation from doing anything I would usually call productive. The result is that I feel great going into this week as I start my NICU elective and am recharged to work on my side projects - something I wouldn’t have felt if I had just put my head down and worked all weekend. 

Account for Life Happening

Life happens to all of us. 

I had a lot going on last week that came in the way of me being “productive” for my newsletter. But I can’t say I wasn’t being productive or doing meaningful things. Supporting my family through the passing of my dog, moving apartments to decrease my rent and increase my living space, and studying for my Pediatrics exam were all activities that led to positive outcomes that I needed in my life last week. Just because I couldn’t fit in my newsletter doesn’t mean I wasn’t productive. 

This goes back to reframing productivity but also knowing that there will be times where things will happen and we won’t get anything done. We won’t be able to focus because a loved one passed away or we may be feeling drained from everything that is going on in the world today and just want to sit in bed and eat ice cream. 

We feel super guilty about doing this because we think: “Others are able to get through stuff like this so why can’t I?” Well, let me be the first to tell you that others don’t just get through stuff like this. We’re human and when human things happen to us, we need to take time for ourselves. I’m here to tell you that you should “do you” when you need to. 

Life happens and sometimes we can’t account for everything. That’s okay. 

Inputs

• Alex Honnold on Human Performance: Free Solo is one of my favorite movies and I really enjoyed this a16z podcast episode with Alex Honnold on the limits of human performance and how they exist but why we are nowhere near them yet in many domains. 

• Paul Millerd on Avoiding Hustle Traps, Squads, From Politics to Seminary & More: Paul Millerd wrote a great piece this week also speaking about the traps of hustle culture and our relationship with our work. I feel like it ties well to this article and the concept of non-coercive-productivity.

• The Visualize Value Story & the Serendipity of Twitter: Season 2 of Brandon Zhang’s podcast has been awesome to listen to. On this episode, Jack Butcher from Visualize Value talks about his start and how he found success building an audience on Twitter.

 Thank you for reading this week’s issue and I hope you’re having a great week! If you think that this issue could be valuable to someone else please do share it with them. I’d also love to hear your thoughts on what it means to be productive and how you work through things when life happens - feel free to reply to this email or leave a comment. And if you haven’t subscribed to the newsletter yet but want to keep getting updates from me, you can do so by entering your email address below!

Subscribe now

Subscribe now

One of the best things to come out of 2020 for me has been doubling down on and improving my Twitter game. I had always been a casual Tweeter - more of a viewer, scroller, and liker rather than a writer, conversationalist, and idea-getter. However, finding #roamcult and like-minded people interested in topics like personal knowledge management pushed me to find better ways to use the app.

Twitter is full of golden nuggets but also a lot of noise. This is the first of a series of posts that will help you find the nuggets and avoid getting trapped in endless scroll. To start, let's talk about Twitter Lists and why they are the best way to curate your feed.

Why I Started Using Lists

I generally try not to follow too many people on Twitter. Not only do I want to maintain that ~ratio~ but also I feel like following too many people clogs up my feed with useless stuff that I don't really care about. Lately I've been trying to avoid Information Exhaustion so have really been focused on finding ways to not endlessly scroll through my feed. Even by limiting the number of people I follow (currently 400), I still found the sheer number of tweets to be too large.

My friend Anil Chitrapu phrases it well:

Enter Twitter Lists, which seem to have been designed to solve this exact problem. Lists are exactly what they sound like - filtered feeds that you make to segment your following so that you are not overwhelmed by one giant feed when you open the app. I started using them much more in the past few months and they have helped achieve two things:

1. Get to the content I'm more interested to read much faster

2. Spend less time mindlessly scrolling on Twitter (i.e. avoid the noise)

If you're finding yourself spending too much time scrolling Twitter to the point where it's starting to feel like Instagram, I highly recommend Lists to help focus your feed. That way you can start extracting more value from Twitter instead of just giving it your mindshare for nothing in return.

To paraphrase David Perell:

How I Use Lists on Mobile

I mostly use Twitter on my phone since I'm away from my laptop for most of the day so my Lists are structured in way that is mobile friendly. This means that I only have one List that I call "Focus."

My Focus List consists of 30-40 accounts that I have hand picked and want to see more of in my feed. I keep it pretty fluid, removing accounts if I think I'm seeing too much from them or if I don't find the tweets as inspiring and adding new accounts I find through replies or browsing threads that I find from my Focus List.

I like curating my feed this way because my Focus List serves as my jumping off point to find new accounts and content and I'm more strict in adding accounts to my Focus List. I may still follow someone that I find interesting but that doesn't mean I have to add them to Focus. This puts me at ease because I know that my feed won't continuously get bloated if I happen to follow a bunch of new accounts.

Lists on TweetDeck

When I'm on my computer, TweetDeck is another great use case for Lists. This is a website that helps you manage and view your Twitter feed in Kanban style boards where you can have a board for your main feed, Lists, Searches, Notifications, Messages, etc. I like having my Focus List up on TweetDeck because again I can quickly see if the core set of accounts I really want to look at are publishing anything I find value in. Here's a look at a couple of panels in my TweetDeck:

I used to have many more Lists than just Focus. When I started using Lists, I split them up by domains I was interested in including Healthcare, Tech News, Current Events, Finance, and Medicine. However, this didn't exactly work for me when I decided that I wanted to use Twitter more as a way to find new ideas from individual people rather than a news aggregator site (which is definitely a way you can use Twitter and that's totally fine - just not for me).

Right now, I feel very content with the system I've come up with. I find myself finding great value in the accounts that are in Focus and 30-40 seems to be a sweet spot so that there isn't an endless amount of scrolling where I end up wasting hours on Twitter. I'm sure my strategy will change over time but using Twitter this way has dramatically changed my interaction with the app.

What Lists Should You Make?

You're probably wondering how you should go about making Lists and what should you even include in your first List. The wonderful part about this is that it's totally up to you! There is no right answer.

If you're completely new to this, I recommend finding Lists in your Menu bar (tap on your profile photo in the Twitter app and select Lists) and adding a few accounts you want to learn from to a List. See how this feels and add more accounts as you see fit.

Alternatively, make a couple of Lists about topics you're passionate about and add specific accounts in those niches. There is no wrong way to do this. The goal isn't to figure out the perfect framework of Lists, it's to try and break through the noise on Twitter so that you can find what you are really looking for.

Experiment as you go and you'll find something that works for you. The goal is to learn and the best way to learn is by doing!

Inputs

Changing up inputs this week with a couple of findings outside the productivity landscape. Let me know what you think!

• What Should Physicians Consider Prior to Unionizing?: A great read on the ethics of physician unions and what ideas must be considered before physicians decided to form unions. I found this after having an interesting conversation with one my residents about joining a union during residency to have more leverage for negotiating things like salary.

• How to Remember What You Read: My Readwise Review: This is a great primer on Readwise written by Blake Reichmann. I just created an account this week so it was a good read right before I took the dive in!

• Justin Timberlake Acapella Medley: Cause who doesn’t want to listen to a mashup of JT songs sung in perfect harmony?

Thanks for reading this week's issue! If you enjoyed this post and would like to see more, please consider subscribing below. Also, if you think someone else could benefit from this, please feel free to share it with them!

Subscribe now

Subscribe now

I have a problem.

I read and watch too many things online. And I'm sure you do too. It's 2020 and we are in the Age of Information Overload. Actually, according to Tiago Forte, we are in the Age of Information Exhaustion.

What does this mean? Basically it means that we have more information to take in now than we ever have before. I'm not just talking about blog posts, news articles, tweets, and tiktoks. This also includes email, contracts, memos, text messages, and hospital electronic medical records (if you're me).

Taking in large volumes of information is the new norm. We're expected to do it and because everyone is doing it, no one questions it. However, it is leading us to feel overwhelmed by all that we have to take in, and, moreover, it is preventing us from creating output and thinking critically about what we are consuming.

In today's newsletter, I want to unpack the balance between Inputs and Outputs and why we need to be more deliberate about creating more than we consume. I also want to leave you with some practical systems for how you can do this. Let's get into it.

The need for balance

There is no shortage of content to consume today. News sites are updating us with breaking news every few minutes and social medial companies like Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok are trying to capture every moment of our attention by curating addicting and endless feeds.

We know all of this and have heard it time and time again. The important question to ask here is:

Is this bad?

Well, not entirely. There are numerous benefits that come from consuming content online. It's how we stay connected with world events happening each day, discover advocacy movements that drive change forward, and gain knowledge that helps our minds grow. We need consumption.

However, the key (just like most things is life) is moderation. Let me tell you a little secret. Humans are terrible at moderation. Really terrible. We may think we are not and have the willpower to set boundaries for ourselves but we really can't.

It's not our fault. The science shows that our brains enjoy the dopamine hit we get from consuming information. It feels good so we do it - over and over.

The irony of all of this is that we tell ourselves that we are actually learning by consuming. This is so far from the truth. Endless consumption leads to new information at the top of our knowledge funnel, but what we forget is that the bottleneck is us processing this information. We essentially overload the funnel so much that we stop focusing on what is supposed to come out of the other side: understanding and growth.

Growth requires us to process information and spend time thinking about what we have learned. My friend Ammar Mian said it well in his latest newsletter: "you write in order to think"

For me, this thinking and processing is best achieved by creating - taking what I have learned and using it to put something out there that is an original thought based on my inputs. I create by writing but creating can be anything that pushes you to process what you have consumed.

Why you should create

So creating helps you process things. That's cool I guess. But what are other benefits of creating? We know that creating takes way more time than consuming so there better be value that comes out of it, right? Don't worry - there are lots of good reasons that we should create more.

• Creating takes us from theory to practice: I went down a Wikipedia hole the other day around the theory of Andragogy versus Pedagogy. This basically states that adults tend to learn better via andragogy (learning by doing) rather than pedagogy (learning via didactic teaching). This is also how I view creating. It takes us away from the theoretical aspects of something (i.e. what we have read) and forces us to create output based on what we have learned. This is precisely why reading about coding is not as helpful as spending the weekend building a personal website.

• Creating pushes the boundaries of our understanding: If you know about the Feynman Technique then you know that the best way to test your understanding about something is to explain it to someone else in simple terms. If you can't do this, then you don't actually understand what you are talking about. Creating forces us to go through this process of synthesizing and putting what we have learned into our own words. If we can output a coherent piece of work and teach someone else what we have learned, we know that we actually understood it.

• Creating in public leads you to like-minded people and different perspectives: The #buildinpublic and #learninpublic movements are growing now more than ever. By putting your output into the public sphere, you are opening yourself up to instantaneous feedback (which can be a lot to take in) and the chance to learn from different perspectives (which is great). The beauty of the internet is that there are so many people out there who are passionate about the same areas that you are passionate about but might have a different take on a concept you are thinking about. Finding this people is key to broadening your own horizons and growing in your thinking.

• Creating is net positive for the world: The utilitarian thought process would argue that we have a duty to create because the act of creating and putting ideas into the world that could then drive the growth of others is a net benefit to society at large. So do your fellow human a favor and publish your work!

Building a System for Inputs and Outputs

Before I share my own system of managing inputs and outputs, I want to share one that I came across in the Superorganizers newsletter. It is from the co-creator of the newsletter Flow State and it's very simple: document your inputs and outputs as they happen. Seeing things written down is beneficial for two reasons:

1. You have a log that you can look back on

2. Balancing ins and outs becomes much easier when you can physically see an imbalance.

A look into how the co-founder of Flow State tracks inputs and outputs

I use a similar system but index more on tracking inputs since this is what I'm currently trying to reduce. My tool of choice is Roam Research (of course) where I keep a page called "Consumed" present on every Daily Note. Everything I take in on a given day gets logged and linked to the "Consumed" page. This has helped me decrease the amount of content I'm reading and watching each day because I physically don't want this list to get too long.

This was my “Consumed” list from August 11

I also use a double filtering system for new content. If I find something online that looks interesting as I'm going about my day, I initially save it to Instapaper. However, I also have a second Inbox in Roam where I tag things I really want to read from my Instapaper saves. I use RoamMonkey to generate a daily template each morning in my Daily Note which includes a query showing me what's in my Roam Inbox.

The Inbox acts as my filtered list of content to consume

If I have some down time, this is my priority list for information consumption. Since I'm already in Roam to find this list, I'm also primed to take notes on what I'm reading. Win win.

Once I clear my Roam Inbox, I can go back to Instapaper and add more items to it. I find that the added friction of this system forces me to be more thoughtful about what I'm spending my time consuming.

My system for creation right now is primarily this newsletter and Twitter. I've built habits around publishing each week. I recently created a 2020 goal for myself to not miss a week of publishing my newsletter. My best friend is also trying to build a writing habit right now se each week we set deadlines for outlines and drafts. Having this accountability forces me to deliver output. Lastly, since I like pretty dashboards, I made one in Notion to organize my newsletter pipeline. Moving an article through the stages of creation is definitely a dopamine hit.

How do you manage your inputs and outputs? I'd love to learn about your system. Feel free to message me on Twitter or reply to this email if you have thoughts!

Inputs (haha!)

Another reason keeping track of what you consume is great is that it makes filling out this section really easy for me each week.

• How to Crush it on Twitter: I recently watched this webinar with David Perell and Matthew Kobach on Twitter best practices and shared my learnings from it on Twitter. Seems like it resonated with a lot of people because it became my most viewed, liked, and retweeted thread!

• Talk Therapy: Dan Shipper and Nathan Baschez of the Everything Bundle have a podcast I've been following for a while about their journey in building their newsletter company. They recently got feedback from an investor that they need to be more vulnerable so released a couple episodes talking about topics like how they compensate creators and how they decide what to publish. I thought it was great insight into how they are thinking about their business

• a16z Podcast: Writers Writing, Readers Reading, Creators Creating: I really enjoyed this podcast by a16z that spoke about why independent writers and creators are the future of publishing and how building a community is so important for the success of a newsletter.

Thanks for checking out this week's issue! If you liked what you read and want to read more, definitely subscribe to the newsletter below. Also, if you think this post can benefit someone else, I'd appreciate it if you could share it with them!

Subscribe now

Subscribe now

It's been about 1.5 months since I launched this newsletter and started writing online consistently. It's been a wonderful journey thus far. I've met great people, joined communities, and learned a lot about what it takes to build an audience.

I've also come across "resource overload."

If you're at all into apps and tools you know what this is. It's that need to want to look into every single tool that is posted on Twitter about how to start a newsletter and then going down the rabbit hole of YouTube videos and blog posts explaining why it's the best tool to do what you want and how you can set it up.

The obvious problem with this (that I know but yet still neglect) is that tools are a means to an end. The end, in this case, is taking ink to a page (metaphorically, lol) and writing to put my ideas out into the world. Your output should be your goal is what they say, and I agree with them.

However, I'm also someone who enjoys the process of learning about new tools and why specific people choose one tool over another. I mean let's be honest - I write a newsletter literally called Tools for Growth!

So in this week's issue, I'm going to take you through my journey of understanding the landscape of tools that are out there to start a newsletter in 2020.

Some caveats and notes up front:

• I decided on Substack pretty quickly out of the gate because I know that I have a tendency to fall into what I call "tool paralysis" where I spend most of my time analyzing which tool to use instead of writing. However, I will still tell you about what I'm thinking as I grow my writing and audience and the tools that are potential options for me in the future.

• At the time of writing this guide, I have 7 published articles and have 39 total subscribers. I know this isn't a lot but it's where I am in my journey (100 subs by the end of 2020?!), and I think it's important to have thoughts from writers early on in their writing. Here's my fun growth chart:

  

• With that said, I want to be transparent about these numbers so that you know where I'm coming from and that I have a lot of growing to do myself in this space.

Formalities out of the way - now let's get into it!

Newsletter Fatigue

I learned the above from a webinar hosted by Nathan Baschez and Li Jin of the Everything Bundle featuring Nathan Barry. I thought Nathan's response to the question around newsletter fatigue is so true.

Right now it seems like everyone and their grandma has a newsletter. I feel the same way. However, this is primarily because everyone I follow on Twitter is a part of "productivity Twitter" where newsletters are king. Sometimes I go over to #medstudenttwitter, another part of the birdy app I like to visit. And guess what? No one is talking about any kinds of newsletters there. It's just a bunch of students complaining about all the tests they have to take.

The moral of the story: newsletter fatigue isn't a real thing for most readers out there. It may feel like it to us but that's only because we are at the center of it. So if you're thinking about starting a newsletter - do it.

Newsletter vs Blog: What's the Diff?

Alright let's start with some (of my own) definitions.

• A newsletter is a piece of writing that is delivered to an audience via email.

• A blog post is something that lives on a website.

• Blog posts can be sent to an audience via a newsletter. Newsletters can be posted on a website as an archive.

Do you get it?

They are basically the same thing. It doesn't matter.

That was facetious but an important point to make. However, I will say that there are some structural differences with how people treat a blog vs a newsletter in terms of organization. Here are the two camps I've found:

1. Creators who keep their blog and newsletter separate. They have a newsletter that goes out each week and is more or less an aggregation and curation of content they have read, learned from, or want to plug. On the other hand, they keep their long-form essays separate as individual posts on their website. Examples of creators who do this are Salman Ansari, Brandon Zhang, and Nat Eliason.

2. Creators who write a newsletter each week (or whatever cadence) that is their sole post. This is essentially how the Everything Bundle operates with Dan Shipper and Nathan Baschez. Once you sign up for it, you get a detailed, New Yorker style article via their newsletter a few times a week. If you go to their site, it’s just an archive of all of their newsletters.

I don't think it matters which camp you’re in because you can build an audience both ways. I personally am in the second camp where my newsletter is my weekly blog post. I do this because right now I only have time to write one post a week (#medicalschool) but maybe in the future this will change.

My belief is that going the second route where you are at least sending a newsletter each week even without long form individual blog posts that live on their own is the way to start. The biggest thing is to start writing.

An email list is the Holy Grail

If you're thinking of getting into newsletters, then I'm sure you've heard that there is nothing greater than building an email list that you can keep with you for the long haul.

Why?

Because an email list is your personalized, self-selected, opt-in network. These are people who have trusted you with their email because they care about what you have to say and what you are dying. They are also the people most likely to support your work. So when you have a new course or e-book or even merch (!!), this is where you can go to market it.

An email list is your road to 1,000 True Fans (I had to).

Can we finally talk about the tools?

Okay, I know what you're here for. The tools for growth (see what I did there?) - so let's dive in.

Substack

I'm obviously a little biased here since my newsletter is hosted on Substack. But I really do think they've built something that lots of people can easily use.

Pros:

• Start writing fast - You get both a website and newsletter that takes minutes to set up. There are a few things you can customize (new subscriber message, color scheme) but the idea is to go from 0 to writing in no time.

• "Free forever" - Well kind of. There is no monthly fee for using Substack which is great for creators who are starting out. However, if you ever decide to make your newsletter paid then Substack gets a nice cut of 10% plus a small fee that you have to pay to Stripe who handles the payment processing. However, you can always export your email list and sell courses or products directly to your subscribers.

• Built in community and resources - There are a lot of writers on Substack and the company puts together good resources (and even fellowships) for their writers. It feels to me like a cleaner and better version of Medium, where you're joining a bigger group but have your own home on the web.

Cons:

• Minimal customizability - There is no custom CSS you add to your Substack so for the most part (besides the colors), your website looks just like every other Substack blog out there. This makes it harder to differentiate yourself and make it your own brand. Furthermore, there are no custom domains (yet), so every newsletter must use the name.substack.com format.

• Low discoverability - From what I've seen and heard, SEO for Substack isn't great. I think this is something that the company is obviously working and has to in order to surface more of its writers on the web, but it's just not there yet.

Webflow

The new kid on the block offers some good options but at a price.

Pros:

• Customizability at its peak - No-code customization is what Webflow is all about. You can build your site in any way that you want so that it will be a true representation of you.

• Ease of use + resources - As part of the no-code movement, Webflow is very easy to use. You have to know a little bit about the box model and how HTML and CSS work but it's very easy to pick up. Furthermore, they have wonderful, humor-filled videos at Webflow University where they walk you through everything about using the app.

• Good SEO - Again, I don't know much about SEO but Nat Eliason suggests using Webflow in his blog post about How to Start a Blog that Changes Your Life. If it's good enough for Nat, it's good enough for me.

Cons:

• $$$ - All the goodness comes at a price and not a cheap one. A site with a content management system for a blog with run you $16 a month, something that can definitely be overwhelming when you are just starting out.

• Since Webflow is just a place to build your site, you'll also need a newsletter management system that can plug into the site. We'll discuss those next but that also means more $$$ and more set up.

ConvertKit

This is the newsletter management system marketed for individual creators. The company has grown tremendously over the years and for good reason.

Pros:

• Simple templates - While Mailchimp is known for having lots of template options and customizability, ConvertKit gets rid of the noise. Their whole philosophy is that simple templates do better than complex ones so there isn't a need for extravagance. If that sounds like something you agree with, then this may be for you.

• Free 1k subscribers - I think it's vital for tools to be free for small creators starting out. Using ConvertKit for free until your first 1k subscribers is a great perk (though after that the price does jump up based on your total number of subscribers).

Cons:

• Low customization - What may seem like a feature to ConvertKit, may not vibe with your style. They're okay with that and you should be too. If you want more customization and templates then this isn't for you.

• You need a site - ConvertKit does offer free landing pages, but you'll need a place to store your writing (hence Webflow above). ConvertKit plugs into a lot of sites like Squarespace and Wordpress so if you already write on one of those platforms you can plug and play.

Mailchimp

We can't talk about ConvertKit without talking about the other big product in the field. This is the tried and true old school email newsletter platform that is still going strong today.

Pros:

• Templates on templates - Mailchimp touts itself on its templates and the ability to customize whatever you want. If you want a vast array of options then this is the go to.

• Free 2k subscribers - Not to one up ConvertKit (but actually to 1k up them), you get 2k free subscribers when you first start using Mailchimp.

Cons:

• Overly complex - If the ConvertKit manifesto is correct then not only is Mailchimp harder to use because of all of the options, the outcomes are also not as great. This of course is hotly debated but something to consider.

• You need a site - Same thing as ConvertKit. However, Mailchimp does have many more integrations which is definitely a selling point.

Wow that was a lot! There are a lot of tools, ideas, and frameworks out there when it comes to starting a newsletter in 2020. I've only touched on the aspects that have come across my journey so far. I know that there are many other options out there (Ghost, Squarespace, Wordpress, etc.) but I wanted to keep this as brief as possible for those starting out.

Twitter has also been a great source of inspiration for me so I'll leave you today with some Tweet threads I found helpful.

Thanks for taking the time out to read this week's post! I hope it was helpful to you. If you think that someone else could benefit from it, please do send it over to them. I'd also love to keep sharing my work with you. If you like to read about productivity apps and systems, then please do subscribe below!

Subscribe now

I played the viola in middle school and I was really good at it. I had never played an instrument in my whole life and had only picked up the viola because as a fifth grader I thought the visiting orchestra students from Fort Settlement Middle School were so cool. I didn't want to play the violin because that was too mainstream. The cello and bass were nice but I wanted to carry my instrument to school every day to look trendy. So I picked the viola. And I loved it.

I didn't know what playing the viola would be like and how I would learn. I didn't understand that I could eventually get to the point of playing soundtracks like Harry Potter and The Lord of the Rings. Heck, for the first 6 months all I did was pluck on the strings and didn't even use the bow.

But the important thing was that I played the viola every single day. I didn't miss a single day of practice (for the most part) and I continued to get better. My teacher taught us new scales and new notes one string at a time. I eventually did learn how to play with the bow. I took off my practice tape that told my fingers where to go after they learned on their own where they belonged. I perfected my vibrato. I became a true viola player.

All because I was consistent. Well, not only consistent but consistent with the right intention.

We've all heard the talk about consistency online and how it is the best (and sometimes touted as the only) way to get good at something. You see it in blog posts and podcasts. People reference the 1000 hour rule as if Malcolm Gladwell is some kind of God. Blah blah blah. We get it.

But why does it work and is being consistent enough? That's what I want to talk about today.

The Consistency of Fundamental Skills

The psychologist K. Anders Ericsson wrote a book in 2016 called Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise that synthesized his research on how one becomes an expert in something. I first came across Ericsson's work in a podcast interview of Andy Matuschak where he discussed the idea of deliberate practice. I read a little more about this in Andy's notes and found some compelling arguments.

The biggest point he made is that deliberate practice is needed to continuously build foundational skills with the idea that perfecting and implementing these foundational skills is what leads to expertise. He explains this through an example of how athletes and musicians do this:

"Top-tier athletes are fanatically disciplined about improving their foundational skills—skills which transcend any sport, the same kind of agility drills you might see an army recruit do. Top-tier musicians do likewise: Lang Lang, for instance, is still working on his scales after 30 years as a concert pianist. They’re not just doing rote drills: they’re working to improve those skills critically, poring over performance videos and working with coaches."

Basically this means that if you keep doing the basics and get really good at them, then you can use that to do more complex things and become an expert. Pretty obvious if you ask me. You have to walk (really well) before you can run.

However, if we think about what we typically do on a day to day basis in our jobs, things get a little more interesting. Andy notes the following:

"Sure, knowledge workers regularly take on “growth opportunities,” like a new job that will push them beyond their prior skill sets. But their day-to-day activities are focused on __doing the job,__ not (usually) on building whatever skills are deficient. This is akin to a soccer player only playing games as a way to get in shape, rather than lifting weights and running drills."

Our days are spent in email and meetings rather than building on foundational skills. This is mostly due to the fact that it's hard to define what foundational skills are for "knowledge workers" and partly because we don't think that investing in basic skills (like writing and synthesizing ideas) have immediate ROI.

If we really want to get better at "knowledge work," we need to do what athletes and musicians do and be consistent in the fundamentals. But of course, this is hard and we'll discuss why below.

Consistency vs Practice

I want to take a quick second to explain a key difference between consistency and practice. Practice is working on a specific set of skills over and over again. Consistency is essentially routine practice - making sure that you are showing up each day and at a minimum going through the motions.

For me in orchestra, this was measured in a weekly practice record I used to fill out and get my parents to sign. The grading was simple - if you practiced 540 minutes or more in a week you got a 100. Anything less you lost points. It was an easy 100 if you could just put in the time.

But there is a catch to all of this. Putting in the time is not enough.

“Consistency is necessary but not sufficient.” - Me

If you show up every day and do the same thing over and over, yes you are being consistent but you aren't getting better. Consistency is only helpful if you are also pushing yourself to the upper bound of your comfort zone so that you can expand it over time. Andy does an excellent job explaining this in terms of homeostasis (he got me with the science reference):

"So if you aim to develop a skill, you need to challenge homeostasis. By pushing into a ‘new normal’ beyond your current comfort zone, your body will respond by making that state easier. At that point, the ‘new normal’ will become the new homeostasis set-point, so you’ll need to push yourself even harder to keep growing."

It's interesting because this advice is so obvious when it comes to something like going to the gym and lifting weights. You would never keep lifting 100 pounds after it became easy because the next step up is 120 pounds and you know you need to do that to get stronger. However, with things like writing, thinking, programming, etc. the metrics aren't as clear so we forget that we have to keep pushing. We get complacent and are fine with the status quo and that's when we begin to stagnate.

This is where having a coach to guide you in your deliberate practice can come in handy. We don't all have this luxury but if someone is there to find your areas of weakness and help you come up with a plan to address those then you can keep getting better at something over time. In Andy's words:

"[P]ast a certain level of performance, effective [d]eliberate practice... typically requires an expert coach’s knowledge about practice methods, as well as their supervision and feedback. For instance, an expert coach (typically also or formerly an expert practitioner) will invent new tasks (based on their knowledge of practice methods) to overcome weaknesses."

Before I auditioned for region orchestra I took a handful of weekly viola lessons. My teacher made me practice out of a Suzuki book and do exercises I had never done before. He made me do them over and over again until I got it right and then gave me harder ones to do once I mastered the basics. It was a lot of work and many times I didn't want to do it. But I did. That year I ranked as the number 2 best viola player in the region auditions. I guess it worked.

Why is Consistency So Hard?

You already know why. It's hard because it takes effort and work. Effort and work are not as fun as play and so we don't want to do it. Go one step further and Twitter will tell you that you should love your work so that it doesn't feel like work and so you'll want to do it. This is nice in theory but everything - even things that you love doing - will be hard at some point and you won't want to do it. Why is that? Personally I think it's about delayed gratification.

I think there are two types of delayed gratification: certain delayed gratification and uncertain delayed gratification.

• Certain delayed gratification is like medical school for me. It's a lot of work and the gratification of being an attending physician doesn't come for many years. However, by just being in medical school I know that there is an extremely high chance that I'll have a stable job and it will all be worth it. Because of this and the intrinsic system of evaluation that is built into medical school, I show up everyday, am consistent with what I do, and work to continuously get better.

• Uncertain delayed gratification is like this newsletter. I'm putting time into it each week but don't really know what the outcome will be. Sure there is benefit in the act of writing and putting my thoughts on the internet, but I don't know for sure if this newsletter will grow or give me any opportunities in the future or even be a source of additional income so I can keep writing but at least make some money from it. Human beings are terrible with uncertain delayed gratification and it is what makes consistency so difficult. We question putting time into something that has unknown ROI because we think that we could instead put that time into areas that may not interest us as much but are more certain.

So how do we stay consistent given this uncertain delayed gratification but also knowing that consistency is important and can lead to positive outcomes?

How to be Consistent

The first step is simple and something the Phildelphia 76ers have been saying for years: Trust the Process

Of course that's easier said than done so here are some tangible actions you can take:

1. Find a partner or community: Accountability is like the older sibling of consistency. Whenever consistency starts to not do what he's supposed to do, accountability swoops in and makes sure that things get done. My best friend and I have recently been giving each other weekly writing deadlines to produce some form of written content each week. There are no consequences if we don't do it, but just seeing the other person also write makes me more likely to write.

2. Make your goal project focused: Learning how to code is a broad and vague goal but building a website that gives you food recommendations based on your location is a specific project that is more actionable. I've learned that taking skills I want to get better at and translating them to projects where those skills can be used is the best way for me to stay consistent. This is similar to the idea of playing basketball or soccer once a week instead of running on the treadmill. One has less friction for me than the other and I'm more likely to get my cardio in if I just go play some pick-up.

3. Track your progress: Human beings like to see check marks and streaks. So many habit tracker apps have capitalized on this notion and so have other apps like Snapchat and Anki. Here's my Anki streak from when I was studying for my board exam:

   

   I didn't want to miss a day of Anki because that would mean breaking the streak. (Though, clearly there has been some dropoff since the board exam ended.)

   I track the posts for this blog in a Notion Dashboard and find so much joy taking a post from the "Not Started" stage to the "Published" stage. I also like to see my "Published" column grow each week.

   

4. Share your output: Delayed gratification can sometimes be fulfilled in the short term with comments of praise and appreciation from people who see your output. If you're trying to lose weight and people know that and see that you are improving, they will comment on it and it'll make you feel good about your progress. The same is true for writing - seeing the Writer's Bloc weekly newsletter share my posts each week makes me want to keep publishing so that my work can keep being featured.

5. Be okay with slip ups: The most important thing to remember is that we are all human. We slip up and we lose streaks. Sometimes we don't want to be consistent and just want to take a break. This is completely okay. The name of the game isn't to never miss a day or a week. It's to get better over time and make progress. The best thing you can do is be okay with times where you aren't consistent and get back up and keep going for it.

Inputs

• Learning in Public with Salman Ansari: Salman takes us through how he is thinking through his website revamp. I like looking at how other people think through their website organization so I thought this was an interesting video to see his thought process.

• The Verge's summary of the Antitrust Hearings: I generally watch recap videos made by The Verge because I feel like they distill the relevant facts of what happened well. Really interesting to hear how the big 4 handled talking to Congress.

• RoamStack: RoamStack went live with their first post this week. This is a newsletter and site dedicated to showing Roam users tips and tricks with using Roam and highlighting workflows that may be useful to you as you learn the product. The first issue is all about shortcuts.

Thanks for checking out this week's issue. I hope you enjoyed it and I'd love to hear your thoughts on consistency and if you try to implement it in your life. If you'd like to see more of my writing please subscribe below. As always, if you think someone else could benefit from this post, definitely send it their way. Have a good week!

Subscribe now