I always considered chess the game of decision-making. You need to be strategic, count on your opponent's reaction, and plan ahead. But as Annie Duke, professional poker player and psychologist points out, chess is far from real-life decisions. In chess, there is a clear good decision in every step. In life there are many. If you are lucky in chess it doesn't really matter on the course of the game. In life it does. ...
I hate self-help books in which the author picks a popular problem, shares his way of solving it, and creates a framework around his thinking. These types of advice are often not applicable to my life, so reading them turns out to be a waste of time. This is not the case for The Art of Possibility. The conductor Benjamin Zander and his therapist wife Rosamund Stone Zander did something remarkable with their book. Instead of picking problems they are telling stories from their life and career while sharing exercises on how you can shift your perspectives to enable a life of possibility. ...
Bad writing is frustrating for the reader and useless for the writer. It doesn't get the job done, it is not able to evoke interest or convey the message it is supposed to deliver. You can tickle the box in your productivity app which says "publish the article" or "send e-mail" but doing the busywork doesn't lead to a meaningful outcome. I have all of the problems above due to my lack of training in writing and the bad influence of creating long-form SEO articles for years. I am often putting too many unnecessary words into my articles and send e-mails that even I wouldn't want to read. ...
Reading stories about day-to-day challenges is boring. Reading a detective story is slightly more interesting. Reading a detective story of an everyday dude where the plot is made mystical with a touch of magic is the best. But Murakami Haruki always put some real-life parallels, and hard-to-decode metaphors into his books, so we can enjoy the story while thinking hard about what this all meant. It’s magical realism or what. ...
Ghost is a modern blogging platform with built-in membership functions, a newsletter, and a clean design that comes with great page performance and SEO. I am running this blog on Ghost for a while now and have written an honest review about the experience earlier. Today I want to take inspiration from big websites using Ghost and share my favorite newsletters with you. When you pick a tool - be it note-taking software or website CMS - you join an ecosystem. Every tool got its own constraints, capabilities, and communities. ...
Before jumping right into the overcomplicating, graph-inventing, best practice cursing part of my thought process, zoom a little bit out and see why the topic of creating demand versus capturing demand with your writing is important. Create demand like an Oscar-winning movieA strange movie with the strange “Everything Everywhere All at Once” name just won seven Oscars. I picked this movie this summer to watch because simply there weren’t any interesting alternatives in the cinema and I wanted to eat popcorn. ...
I feel a little bit tired. As an SEO I got used to constant change. Algorithm Updates come and go, organic traffic spikes and decreases, Google adds one more rich result to wipe out the traffic of organic searches, or big G adds a new requirement like Core Web Vitals. I came to the conclusion that SEO is the river you can not step into twice. This river makes the passenger's job every year a little bit harder. You need to find the shallow waters, you need to be more clever, and you need to swim faster. ...
I am in the team “do it under your name” for the last few years, but it does not mean that I did not try the dark side of content creation. I am the uncrowned king of buying random domain names, publishing five blog posts, and starting a new project a few weeks later. Having skin in the game and putting my name on my thoughts helped me to write consistently and have moderate success with blogging. ...
Even one narrow field is too complex to comprehend, let alone the whole world around us. We generalize, we make little rules, and playbooks to make our everyday more fluid. We can call them principles, assumptions, big theories, guiding stars, or beliefs. I have my own set of beliefs. They changed, some of them proved false over the years, and I am sure some of my current ones will be obsolete soon. But that means I will learn something. ...
I am an overthinker and a pessimist by nature. Reading extensively is part of my overthinking process. But for some mysterious reason, every book and every fact points to the direction that it makes much more sense to be an optimist. Save like a pessimist, and invest like an optimist when it comes to personal finance.Publish optimistic inflation and job market predictions to cool down the economy (if you are the government agency).Project a ridiculously high return on investment for your next campaign to get your marketing budget accepted.An even better reason to be an optimist, is that being grumpy all the time sucks. ...