Reflections on two years without social media
What a hell of a year it’s been. A global pandemic, an economic crash, and two polarizing seasons of political demonstrations, with both left and right taking their turn.
Although honestly, without social media, these things weren’t that big a deal. They are objectively a big deal, of course, but living without social media (and intentionally avoiding news outlets) makes me one of the last people to hear the news. When I do, it comes in the form of an outraged anecdote from a friend, to which I usually reply “Oh wonderful, another fucked up thing happened.”
The 5 keys to writing an influencer pitch that will get your product noticed
As an online writer, I receive a lot of pitches from entrepreneurs who are looking for free press for their new product. They often arrive in the form of a cold email or cold LinkedIn message from someone I’ve never met, often to “let me know” about a new product or service they are launching.
I’m not special in this regard. Any content creator with an audience of a few thousand people or more gets these pitches. They range from generous offers to beta-test software to purely self-interested requests for us to feature their product or service in our writing.
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Behind every societal ill, from slavery to wealth inequality, there’s always a corporation turning a profit
I’ve been an avid reader for a few years now, but ever since 2021 began, I’ve been reading even more than usual. We are not even halfway into February and I have already read 14 books, watched 20+ documentaries, and read countless internet articles. The bulk of my day is spent learning. I’ve been learning about topics like…
- Personal finances, budgeting, economics, the stock market, market crashes, and investing.
- The environment, climate change, ecosystems and their interdependence, species variation, the history of the biosphere on earth.
- Psychology, mostly psychoanalysis and modern therapy techniques.
- Modern-day slavery and humans rights violations.
- Pharmaceutical…
Her new three-question model changed the way I think about productivity.
Marie Kondo has done it again. After writing The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up and following it with the wonderful Spark Joy, Marie Kondo has written a new book called Joy At Work: Organizing Your Professional Life⁰.
Joy At Work is about what any Marie Kondo book is about — tidying up your surroundings so you can lead a life that sparks joy. This particular book focuses on tidying up your work life, showing you how you can bring joy to your desk, emails, meetings, and every other part of your working day.
Budgets are like diets — nobody likes being on them, and they never work anyway. Make a spending plan instead.
For the longest time — and still to this day — making a budget never worked for me. Every time I tried, I would spend a few hours making a fresh budget only to completely forget that budget existed by the end of the week. Months later, I would discover my failed attempt and berate myself for not getting it together yet again. Many times, this would spawn another failed attempt at making a budget.
I‘m not the only person who suffers from a chronic failure to budget. …
People aren’t buying GME to make money, they’re doing it to punish billionaires who crashed the market in 2008.
The first time someone mentioned GameStop’s stock to me, I didn’t even listen long enough to hear about what was going on. To me, the kind of person who enjoys living under a rock, this seemed like more passing pointless news. But it was mentioned to me again and again, so I decided to look into the matter. And what I found was amazing.
The most common understanding of GameStop’s performance seems to be something along the lines of “a bunch of Redditors realized stocks like GME and AMC were over-shorted and are orchestrating a short squeeze to get rich.”
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If you build a reading habit, it will transform your life too
It’s nearly February, which means there are a lot of people who set reading goals for themselves at the beginning of the year who are already falling short. They’re encountering obstacles — or one obstacle, really, the obstacle with a thousand different faces: lack of motivation.
Building a reading habit can be difficult, so I wanted to share with you my motivation. I’m motivated to build and maintain my reading habit because reading has transformed my life in a number of ways. Here are ten of them.
1. Revealed the secrets of the world to me
If I ever want to know the truth or reality behind how something…
Learn to play great offense and great defense, not only one or the other
When you study the lifestyles of wealthy people, what you learn will make you lose faith in the human race.
Most people who are not wealthy imagine wealth works something like this — the more money you make, the wealthier you are. People who make $150,000 a year are wealthier than $50,000 a year, people who make $500,000 a year are wealthier than people who make $150,000 a year, so on and so forth.
The stark reality is that this just isn’t true. There are plenty of people who make $80,000 who have upwards of $3 million in the bank……
Most people who look wealthy are not. Here’s how to tell the difference.
One of the most disturbing financial realities in America is that the vast majority of people who look rich — people who live in upper-class neighborhoods, drive luxury vehicles, have country-club memberships — are actually as poor as your average lower-class worker. Both live paycheck to paycheck, both have nothing saved for a rainy day, and both live in fear of losing their job.
And on the flip side, there are many rich people scattered around who don’t look rich at all — multimillionaires who live in $150,000 homes and drive Honda Accords, highly wealthy professionals who wear secondhand suits…
These lessons have made me over $50,000 in the past 3 years
I’m coming up on my third anniversary as a Medium writer (it’s in March), and it’s been a wild ride. 16,000 followers, 3,000 email subscribers, and $50,000 later (yikes! Where the hell did all that money go!?), and I’m finally starting to ask some big questions about what is making it all possible.
Most of what made it possible was out of my control, of course. I didn’t find Medium, invent the internet, or manufacture the Apple Macbook. But there was a lot within my control — and there is a lot within your control, too.
To the upcoming writers…
