Late October Vibes

Creative takeaways from the coolest things I've found this week.

A digital collage I prompted called “Fall Vibes”

Hey Friends! Thanks again for welcoming me into your inbox. Don’t worry if you leave for the weekend with unread emails. I won’t tell anyone.

Jake Varrone:

When I started writing on Substack, I thought that it was simply a better newsletter tool than Mail Chimp. I didn’t realize it was actually a robust social media platform full of thoughtful readers and writers. I’ve been so impressed with the discourse among Substackers in “Notes” (their version of Twitter), the thoughtful comments left by readers on posts, and conversations in their Chat tool.

If you’re only reading this via email, and you’re sick of street fight videos creeping into your social feeds, try Substack. It’s not just for writers.

One such Substacker, who has impressed me with his writing, is

Jake Varrone

. In one of his Notes, he wrote:

…mindless activities keep the conscious mind busy, leaving room for the subconscious mind to step in the light and bring ideas to the surface.

Sometimes I’ll get stuck on a problem. Usually it relates to coding (because I’m a pretty terrible coder, but know just enough to think I can do it), and I’ll find myself staring at my text editor trying to force something to work that just doesn’t want to. Invariably, the solution comes once I’ve distanced myself from the problem, taken to something else, and given my mind time to process the issue in the background.

Usually, my entire approach was wrong, and instead of trying to force it into working, I needed to come at the problem from a completely different angle.

If you’ve been stuck on something, maybe you need to do something mindless for a while.

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Movie Quote of the Day

Speaking of terrible coding, I built a thing I am actually proud of: moviequoteoftheday.com. Movie Quote of the Day, or MQOTD for short, is for movie nerds like me who annoy their family and friends by quoting lines from movies ALL THE TIME.

Here’s how it works: I give you a quote. You guess what movie it’s from.

I built it to explore how much better I could be a programming with the assistance of ChatGPT, and it turns out about 10X better. I never would have been able to leverage the Movie Database API to pull all the data that I needed for hints, nor would I have been able to write the JavaScript code that powers the logic of the app all by myself.

I also like working within constraints and viewed the challenge of building a compelling, single screen app as a worthwhile endeavor. I like it, my movie nerd friends like. Maybe you will like it too.

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Cornrows and Cyber Trucks

Sam Parr, of the My First Million Podcast, is frequently quick with a catchy turn of phrase. One that he goes to frequently enough that it’s burrowed its way into my brain is likening things to cornrows saying, “I’m glad they exist, but they’re not for me.”

It’s a funny take on a hairstyle that would admittedly look out of place on a Missouri farm boy such as himself, but it’s also a great mindset for creative work.

Some things aren’t supposed to be for you. You don’t have to like the Cyber Truck, Polka music, or Cilantro. No one is going to force you to drive one, dance to it, or garnish your dish with it if you don’t want to.

But others will want to.

If you’re questioning whether there’s an audience for your work, try to remember that the diversity of likes and interests among people is likely greater than you can possibly imagine.

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Connecting Dots

Adam Grant, organizational psychologist and New York Times best selling author, recently posted the following to X:

The hallmark of expertise is no longer how much you know. It's how well you synthesize. Information scarcity rewarded knowledge acquisition. Information abundance requires pattern recognition. It's not enough to collect facts. The future belongs to those who connect dots.

As a technology, business, and design teacher, I think about this concept a lot. I try to ignore the fact that our school calendar is modeled after an agrarian economy, and structured to produce workers for the industrial revolution, and instead try to focus on what is in my locus of control. At the beginning of my career, that generally meant preparing my students for knowledge work where one could thrive if they possessed an information advantage, but increasingly it seems computers will do all of that work for us (and with much better results too).

So what does that leave for the rest of us?

The optimist in me likes to think that we are on the cusp of a new age: the creative economy.

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Don’t Aim To Be The Best, Be The Only

Kevin Kelly stated on Tim Ferriss’s podcast once:

Don’t aim to be the best, be the only.

I’ve loved this quote ever since I first heard it, and it’s a message I try to share with my entrepreneurship students. To me, it speaks to the near impossible task of outperforming literally everyone. There will always be someone with better skills, drive, and natural talent, or more time, funding, and resources.

To try to be the best comes at an insane cost. Even if you reach the pinnacle, the only way to go from there is down.

But when you’re in a field of one, the competition is non-existent.

I don’t strive to be the best teacher. I may never win a Golden Apple award, and Michelle Pfeiffer’s never going to play me in a movie, but that’s ok.

What I am focused on is marrying my professional occupation with my personal interests. By bringing to the classroom my passion for startups, technology, and design, I bring a perspective to instruction, and my other professional responsibilities, that no one else possibly could. The areas where I’ve stood out have never had anything to do with my job description. They’ve had to do with the unique ways, I am unlike everyone else.

That’s all for now. Thanks for reading.