Chuck Grimmett

Archives

Month: October 2018

  • How I Approach Social Media

    On a recent episode of Office Hours, a listener asked about the purpose of social media. Isaac and TK recommended taking a pragmatic approach. Here is my take on what that looks like.

    How I approach social media in general

    • Consumption and projection, not discussion – I find things people share and share my own work and things I find interesting, but I very rarely participate in discussions. Meaningful discussion is very difficult online, especially on social media. I prefer to take discussions to more direct, personal mediums like Messages, Slack, and Voxer. I prefer in-person when that is possible.
    • Sparingly and intentionally – I’m not a Waldenponder. I get a lot of value out of social media. But I don’t recommend indiscriminately spending time on it, either. It is designed to keep you there so they can serve more ads to you. It is inherently manipulative. Some (like Twitter) are so full of negativity that you’ll get worked up if you aren’t careful. Photo-heavy services distort reality and have the unfortunate effect of making you feel like your life sucks. Social media is a dangerous place, so make sure you engage sparingly and intentionally. Know what you want to get out of it. Put blockers in place so you don’t spend more time than you pre-determine is worth it for you. I recommend 1Blocker (Safari on macOS and iOS) and StayFocusd (Chrome). Remove the apps from your phone (best) or at least put in limits with iOS 12’s new Screentime feature.
      • I prefer to replace social media time with reading and podcasts as much as possible.
    • Whenever possible, post from a third-party service – Most of my Facebook and Twitter posts come from Buffer. This keeps me from having to log in or have the service’s apps on my phone.

    Here’s how I use the major social channels:

    Facebook

    I like Facebook less every week. I only hop on a few days a week now. The content there is mostly trash. I go on to keep up with friends from high school and college, as well as family. I rarely comment and I almost never engage in a discussion there. It isn’t as toxic as Twitter because you generally have closer ties with someone involved in the thread on Facebook, but it is still usually bad.

    I think people waste too much time on Facebook unintentionally and would do well to delete the apps from their phones and only check it from one specific device that you use only as a secondary or tertiary device. For me that is my iPad. I keep Facebook blocked on my computer and my phone to reign in my unintentional time wasting.

    Twitter

    Twitter is my second favorite social service to browse. It is where I get a lot of recommendations, find out about new apps, and get my news. I don’t read traditional news outlets unless I find an interesting story linked on Twitter or a blog I read (see below).

    I curate who I follow pretty regularly, so I have a pretty good “content to garbage” ratio, or at least one I’m willing to tolerate enough to check out during breakfast and lunch.

    Mastodon

    I still want something like Mastodon to take off, but I haven’t found any communities that are active enough to invest in. I prefer using the internet as a place to consume (find recommendations, keep up with what friends and family are doing, learn new things) and project (write and share my own stuff), but not converse. Most of the internet is a terrible place for conversing. It just isn’t set up for that. Perhaps Mastodon can fill that gap if I find the right community?

    I’m trying out https://refactorcamp.orgArchived Link right now and having a pretty high hit rate of good content. Still not great for discussion, though.

    If you have any Mastodon communities you recommend, I’d love to hear about them.

    Instagram

    I’m photographer. I love posting to Instagram. It is probably my favorite social service to browse, too. So much good stuff in my feed! That said, it is the one I’m most likely to waste too much time on because I like it so much. So I delete it from my phone most of the time and only download it when I want to post to it, keep it around for a few days with 15 minute time limits set with Screentime, then delete it until I want to post again.

    Reddit

    Oh, Reddit. I want to love you, but I can’t. The comments are so toxic, even in decent subreddit communities. Every subreddit I start getting involved in inevitably devolves to inside jokes, gatekeeping, and beginners asking the same question covered hundreds of times. (On the Kombucha sub, it is always “is my scoby okay?!?!). It gets tiring.

    I love reading AMAs, but I never get there in time to ask a question. And when I did ask questions in AMAs a few times, I got banned for asking for a month because I asked the same question each time: What are you reading right now? Apparently that isn’t allowed.

    Also, the search is completely terrible. There is probably tons of useful stuff locked away in threads that no one can find, forever lost to the ether.

    I’m over Reddit. My RescueTime stats show that I visit the site less and less each year.

    Pinterest

    I don’t use Pinterest. I can’t reliably find anything in that awful sea of ubiquitous images. You have to sift through a pile of garbage to find one useful thing. I prefer to avoid the whole mess in favor of other services. I use http://Are.na as a personal pinboard.

    YouTube

    I only watch YouTube videos I find embedded elsewhere or that someone sends me. I can’t remember the last time I went directly to YouTube.com to just see what was happening. I don’t like the video medium unless I’m trying to learn something, and I tend to find those videos through search engines. I don’t watch YouTube videos recreationally.

    Likewise

    This is too small right now to be super useful, but I’m hopeful for it. A service dedicated to book, show, and restaurant recommendations. Requests for this sort of thing on regular social media tend to get lost in the sea of other garbage and algorithmic timelines, so people often don’t respond until days later. Likewise keeps these asks front-and-center. You should join me on Likewise! https://likewise.com/invitedby/5bbe223985965466d44255eb

    Hacker News

    Great tech news source. I don’t participate in the comments/community there. I’ll often click through to the comments section to get a tl;dr of the article or get hot takes on current events. I find a lot of products and tools here that I bookmark and end up using or recommending later.

    Product Hunt

    There was a period where I checked Product Hunt daily and found a lot of cool stuff there. Now I check it maybe once a week and only find a fraction of the cool stuff I once found there.

    LinkedIn

    I hate it. I refused to be on it for years. I have a profile now to set a good example for Praxis participants, and I may even cross post one of my articles there, but I get very little value from the service.

    Quora

    I went through a phase where I answered questions on Quora, but I got bored by it pretty quickly. I didn’t invest enough to get over the hump and get a large return, so it just felt like I was wasting my time. Plus, there are so many shitty answers on there by people who just spend all day answering questions they only know a little bit about. Costless question asking and costless answering lead to a pretty low quality of content. The early days were cool because it was costlier to be in a small community like that instead of elsewhere. But now it sucks.

    Stack Overflow

    I’ve never asked a question on SO, but I sure am glad it exists. I’ve had dozens, maybe hundreds, of questions answered by previously existing questions there. I have chipped in and answered some questions there, but I don’t make a regular habit of it.

    Where else do I get media?

    • Blogs – marginalrevolution.com – kottke.org – daringfireball.net – macstories.net – ribbonfarm.com – complete-review.com/saloon – stratechery.com
      • lesswrong.com
      • seriouseats.com
    • Podcasts – Conversations with Tyler – Data Stories – Design Matters – The Knowledge Project – Longform – Mac Power Users – The Memory Palace – Presentable – Recode Decode – The Speakeasy – The Talk Show – Waking Up – Cortex – Hello Internet – Thoroughly Considered – Planet Money – This American Life – Office Hours – Serial – Accidental Tech Podcast
    • Newspapers and magazines – I don’t read newspapers often, but I occasionally like to pick up a NYTimes or WSJ on the weekend and spend an hour going through it. – I like reading the short fiction in The Atlantic and The New Yorker. We don’t subscribe to them anymore, but I’ll pick one up at the news stand in Grand Central occasionally. – I read Lucky Peach for a few years until they shut it down. I loved it. I’m looking for a replacement. Any recommendations?
    • Newsletters – Breaking Smart – Ryan Holiday’s Reading List – Studio Neat Gazette – MacStories Weekly – Tim Ferriss’s 5-Bullet Friday

  • What work/life balance means to me

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    I have a certain capacity for creative output. That level may increase or decrease over time, but it stays relatively constant day-to-day.

    You can think of this capacity as tokens that I have available to spend each day. I can either spend these tokens at my full-time job, at a side gig, or on a personal project.

    I feel most balanced when I use 80% of my creative capacity at my full-time job and 20% elsewhere.

    When I use 100% of my capacity at my full-time job for an extended period of time (say 2 weeks or more), I feel unbalanced. My overall creative capacity starts to decline. Some might call this feeling burned out.

    When I use more than 20% on personal projects or side gigs (i.e. less than 80% at work) for more than two days in a row, I feel unbalanced, like I’m neglecting my work responsibilities. Like I’m falling behind and my output isn’t up to par.

    I’ve never taken complete breaks from creating things. The manifestation just tends to shift. On vacations I tend to pick up photography and journaling to fill the creative gap. Sometimes drawing. During the holidays I tend to make more elaborate meals and try making new cocktails.

    I’ve also never shifted 100% of my capacity into personal projects for an extended period. I haven’t been unemployed for more than a week in the past 7 years. Vacations are breaks from personal projects as much as traditional work, so that is why the output tends to shift to photography, journaling, and drawing.

    I routinely go 3-4 weeks at a time at a 95/5 split on work/personal. Those times my personal creative output tends to be listening notes from podcasts and cooking. Days during high work periods where I manage to put out a longer blog post, I’m almost certainly eating leftovers or takeout. (Tonight, for instance: 3 blog posts plus curating a bunch of book recommendations on Likewise and I ate leftover soup for lunch and made a taco salad from leftovers in the fridge for dinner.)

    I radically cut down the amount of side gigs I take on in order to prioritize personal projects. In fact, I have no side gigs going on at the moment.

    What would my creative output look like when focused 100% on the personal side? I haven’t experienced that since high school and college, but the photography projects I focused on during those periods still rank among what I consider my best. Even periods where I’ve shifted to a 20/80 split on work/personal resulted in projects I’m proud of and look upon fondly.

    In the next few years, I’d like to take a complete month away from full-time work and focus on personal projects for the entire time. Deliberately throw myself out of balance in a way I’m not used to and see what I create.

  • On Creative Blocks

    Creative people commonly lament about being “blocked,” perpetually stuck and unable to produce work when necessary. Blocks spring from the imbalanced relationship of How and Why: either we have an idea, but lack the skills to execute; or we have skills, but lack a message, idea, or purpose for the work. The most despised and common examples of creative block are the latter, because the solution to a lack of purpose is so elusive. If we are short on skill, the answer is to practice and seek outside guidance from those more able until we improve. But when we are left without something to say, we have no choice but to either go for a walk or continue suffering in front of a blank page. Often in situations like these, we seek relief in the work of others; we look for solace in creations that seem to have both high craft and resounding purpose, because they remind us that there is a way out of the cul-de-sac we have driven into by mistake. We can, by dissecting these pieces, begin to see what gives the work of others their vitality, and better understand the inner methods of what we produce ourselves. If we are attentive, with just a dash of luck, we may even discover where the soul of our own work lies by having it mirrored back to us in the work of others.

    But we must be careful not to gaze too long, lest we give up too much of ourselves. Forfeiting our perspective squanders the opportunity to let the work take its own special form and wastes our chance to leave our fingerprints on it. We must remember Why we are working, because craft needs objectives, effort needs purpose, and we need an outlet for our song. If we stay on the surface and do not dig deep by asking Why, we’re not truly designing.

    From Frank Chimero’s The Shape of Design

  • Jerry Saltz on The Longform Podcast

    Podcast: http://longform.org/posts/longform-podcast-311-jerry-saltz

    Notes:

    • This was a breath of fresh air for me. Saltz didn’t start writing until he was in his 40s. Now he is one of NYC’s top art critics, if not one of the world’s top art critics.
    • Saltz’s thoughts on being nice to gallery staff, always signing the book, and the need for ushering in a new generation of artists, gallery owners, and critics made me think about what it takes to start the next generation in any well-established field.
    • Real criticism needs both praise and critique, but must be completely free from cynicism.
    • Saltz’s art criticism is a breath of fresh air. It is free from the nonsense jargon and faux deep meaning/symbolism that made me think art writing isnt for me. His writing is approachable and I finish his articles having learned something.
    • His openness about his background and current financial situation is was eye-opening, too. Real people can become art critics and use that as a means to make a living, not just rich people with too much time on their hands.
    • His instagram is a great way to find up and coming artists.
    • I’ve added his weekly column to the list of things I read each week.

  • Notes on Office Hours: Debate and Unmotivated Friends

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    1: The Value of Debate, Is Self-Improvement Overrated, and Dealing with Haters

    Notes:

    • The question: Is debate valuable?
    • I side with TK here on the value of debate. Most debates suck, but there is some value in the format if done well. The Sam Harris/Jordan Peterson debate is a great example of this. There were able to map out where they agree and find the boundary along which they disagree, which helps both of them better understand the other and helps the audience decide the correct arguments for themselves. That would have been impossible with separate lectures.
    • Debates done well should look more like a spirited but respectful conversation between friends. Not just signaling for crowds.

    2: What to Ask In a Job Interview & Is It Worth it to Help Unmotivated Friends

    Notes:

    • The question: How do you deal with friends who have ideas but never take action on them?
    • I think the best way to deal with friends like this is to take their claims seriously. They may be signaling other values with their actions, but if we take their claims seriously, we give them the opportunity to confront their reality, which can take two forms: 1) Take their own claims seriously and take actions necessary to make them a reality or 2) Put those claims to rest and embrace others that align with their true values.
    • A few ways to do this are to show them paths to get to where they want, talk through their ideas with them, show examples of others doing similar things, and encourage them to take the first step. Perhaps even taking the first step with them.
    • I don’t think you must do this, but I do think you have the responsibility to do this if you’ve confronted the question of whether or not to do it. You are free to reject the responsibility, but taking hold of that responsibility is an opportunity to strengthen your friendship and help someone change their life in a positive way.
    • A few ways this has helped me when others took this approach:
      • Cook Like Chuck was born out of encouragement and help taking the first step by my best friend. I tossed around the idea for about a year, until one night he said, “You should take photos of this and it can be the first recipe.” Then an hour later he said, “Let’s buy the domain. What do you want to call it? I think Cook Like Chuck would be a great name.” – At the end of that night I had the skeleton of the site set up and half of the first post written. Without that catalyst it would have taken me another year to get to that stage.
      • Back in college, I wanted to blog more, but wasn’t consistent about it. My suite mate started a 365 day photo challenge on his own blog a few months earlier, so he encouraged me to join in starting Jan 1, which was a few weeks away. He talked me through how he makes time, how it strengthened his photography skills, and how people naturally started following his site. That put me over the edge and put me into a situation where I grew dramatically through that year-long challenge.
      • You could argue that I might have done these things anyway, but I’m grateful to those friends and I greatly appreciated the marginal push that got me past the hang up. I want to do the same for my friends. Not in an annoying or judging way, but in an encouraging way.

  • Series are eclipsing movies

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    Cameron Sorsby asked the Praxis staff today what our top 3-5 favorite movies are, off the top of our heads. I came up with 3 easily, but none were recent. Then I realized that no movie I’ve watched for the first time in the last four years is memorable. Series are getting so much better and eclipsing movies since they are free from networks and ad breaks.

    What will the next leap forward for movies look like? Netflix/Amazon Prime hasn’t changed much for that format. What’s next?

  • Not Unreasonable Podcast interview with Tyler Cowen

    Podcast: https://www.buzzsprout.com/126848/814311

    Notes

    • I enjoyed hearing Tyler Cowen speak about his new book from Stripe Press, Stubborn Attachments, which I preordered a while back.
    • I admire Cowen aligning his actions to his beliefs and optimizing his life with things that bring him joy, including constant learning.
    • The number of times they used the word “Straussian” got on the annoying end of the spectrum
    • Writing for different audiences in different lengths and styles is a great way to make sure you understand a subject.
    • The interviewer did very little naval gazing/meta commentary on the interview, which is one reason I liked this episode much more than Cowen’s episode on The Knowledge Project podcast.

  • Legends & Losers 212: Mike Maples, Jr.

    Podcast:

    Notes:

    • Networks need rules from the beginning. Imposing after (like Twitter) is a mess.
    • You need a sense of purpose other than growth, or else you’ll build things that addict people. Addicted people without a sense of purpose lead to fake news, spam, and vitriol.
    • We do have an inequality issue in the world right now, but it is probably not wealth (outcome-based) inequality, but rather opportunity inequality. Some people have more opportunities than others. Race, social status, gender, and other things play into this. Fixing the opportunity inequality issue will go a lot further to raising income and wealth for everyone than redistribution.
    • It is time to start a media company that focuses on something specific. Don’t go the HuffPo model of no rudder, ad-based. Go the Stratechery model of focused on a single topic, direct pay model. Most media sucks right now. Lots of opportunity.