> Donating stem cells was a moving experience. A teacher I had in high school used to say that everyone has an abundance of something in life, be it money, connections, friends, confidence, or something else, and that everyone should use their abundance to help others. Donating stem cells felt like a way to express gratitude for my own health by giving it to another person.
A beautiful sentiment. The world would be a better place were everyone to think this way.
This is great. Especially agree with the part about not being on your phone - sometimes the basic cliche productivity advice (exercise, get off social media, etc) is the most powerful. It's cliche for a reason!
I get the Thinking About Things newsletter [1], which focuses on sending out articles by lesser known blogs. I don't know how they do it but they seem to know about all the fascinating blogs before they make it big. It's been a great way to discover interesting but not sponsored, SEO'd-to-death content.
Self-promotion: I run Thinking About Things [0], a simple newsletter that is a single link every other day to something interesting. Many subscribers have told me they've learned about a diversity of new blogs through the newsletter.
A video recently went viral of David Bowie in 1999 saying that the internet was going to be the future. We're at a similar place with newsletters - a frontier that is on the verge of exploding.
I run Thinking About Things [0], a simple newsletter that is a single link every other day to something interesting. The response has been astonishing - it's gotten thousands of subscribers in a single year with no marketing. It started as a way to send articles to family and friends and yet the simple act of triage and curation seems to be something that many find valuable.
It's impossible to underestimate the degree to which curation is becoming the differentiator in the digital economy; those who can be trusted to provide valuable content from the fire hose of all that's available on the internet will become the new information brokers.
I balance the two by reading longform articles that convey a single idea well, rather than books that take too long to read and clickbait articles that provide instant-gratification but nothing of lasting value. (I highly recommend the Thinking About Things newsletter [0] and LongReads [1] for finding these kinds of articles.)