Chris J Wilson

🔗 Overthinking? Try this iOS Shortcut.

As usual, I found myself overthinking this week about small details and not getting much done on the big stuff. It’s been happening too often lately, delaying my newsletter and book projects. But this week, I decided to do something about it. I built a kind of break-glass-in-case-of-emergency shortcut for whenever I’m stuck in a rut and overthinking.

I really like this idea from CJ Chilvers. I think I might steal/adapt.

The Big Three - The Accidental Creative

Keeping a shortlist of open creative loops in front of you consistently will help you stay focused on what matters, and prompt your mind to be looking for potentially useful creative stimuli in your environment.

I’m reading (well, listening on Audiobook) The Accidental Creative by Todd Henry and he shared this simple idea above.

I love it.

Creativity insight so often comes by looking at problems from a different perspective or noticing a connection with something else. Keeping a list in front of you with three problems where you need some insight helps invite these connections and perspective shifts.

I’m trying it, and I’ll report back.

The end of secularism is nigh - UnHerd

All of which should serve as a wake-up call to the West that it is not only its financial, economic and military muscle that is currently atrophying. So too is its ability to market its culturally conditioned assumptions as universal. The concept of the secular is not, as many in West like to think, a neutral one. Quite the opposite. As the very word betrays, it derives from the distinctive theology and history of Latin Christendom: for ‘saeculum’, the word given by the Romans to the endless flux of things, was counterpointed by St Augustine and his heirs to the religio, the ‘bond’, that, so Augustine had taught, joined the pilgrim Church on its journey through the centuries to the radiant eternity of the City of God.

I thought of the XKCD standards comic, where people try to unify things by a standard but just add another competitor in the process. I wonder if that’s how the future will see secularism. Admittedly many different religious systems have already passed away (which is different from the standards comic), and I’m sure there are other issues I haven’t thought of.

Posing for selfies - Seth’s Blog

The irony is that the people we’re most likely to want to trust and engage with are the ones who don’t pose. They’re consistent, committed and clear, but they’re not faking it.

Figure out what you want to say, the change you seek to make, the story you want to tell–and then tell it. Wholeheartedly and with intent.

Posing is unnecessary.

🔗 A look inside Paradise Street — Hoxton Mini Press

This week we’re looking inside Paradise Street. This uplifting, irresistibly nostalgic book, the fourth in our Vintage Britain series, celebrates, among other things, the physicality of spending time outdoors.

Enjoy the look back in time.

The forgotten political roots of Bridge over Troubled Water - BBC Culture

Simon talked about using the primetime opportunity as a Trojan horse for “a home movie about where he thought the nation was”. Directed by actor Charles Grodin, Songs of America used the duo’s hits to soundtrack footage of riots, marches and the war in Vietnam, much to the horror of sponsors AT&T, who demanded their $600,000 investment back.

More after today’s post on Bridge over Troubled Waters.

🔗 Expert sandwich tips that will change your lunches for ever - BBC Food

Got to try some of these!

Dashboard was a technically unviable photoshop mockup that was very easy to kill. We had to choose between shipping on time, and making a fancy dashboard. We chose shipping.

Some people are still upset about it today.

Those people will never ship.

• John O’Nolan, founder of ghost sharing some of his anecdotes from 7 years of Ghost on Twitter

I remember backing the ghost Kickstarter and being extremely excited about its potential and possibility but the initial version really did disappointment. I don’t think it was just the dashboard for me, but it felt not as blog focused or friendly as the Kickstarter had made out. I kept track of ghost, intending to use it, but it seemed to shift to be more for businesses and not blogging focused like the original vision (and ironically the exact critique it leveled at WordPress). Despite having a year of ghost pro hosting from my backer level I never redeemed it and now it seems impossible to do so. Funnily enough, just last month I spun up a digital ocean server to give ghost a go after seeing the 3.0 version and being impressed.

I always try to give makers the benefit of the doubt, you never know the real reasons behind what they are doing or the data they have in their hands that we don’t. At the same time, sometimes people just made bad choices.

Regardless of the dashboard and merits of shipping, it’s not a great sign for the head of a company who makes a blogging platform to choose to write a tweet thread rather than a blog post. He could, of course, do both.