A trilogy comes to its conclusion 💎 Issue #0
Plus: a calculated tweet, Bryan Cranston, and another reason why Christmas is the best.
Hey you!
What’s up?
These are the first words that I’ve ever sent on a newsletter.
I expect to put an adorable email like this, every Friday from now on, on your inbox. Or until I make it to #25. I read this article How starting an email newsletter will change your life a couple of weeks ago, and don’t let the clickbaity title deter you, because it provides the best introduction to the ins and outs of launching your own newsletter, and most importantly, it gives us a why you should do it. It also challenges you to deliver 25 issues without missing one, so you know where I got that number.
This week I also finished my trilogy of articles on side projects. Roughly 6900 words, that brought 400 people to my site. That’s not so bad, right? I also shared these articles on Medium, and although I intend to report on it with more details in the future, they have been read more than 11k times already. I wanted these articles to be helpful and this some real encouragement to keep going.
New to me
An Irish guide to the 12 Pubs of Christmas | 3 min read
I don’t know if this tradition coming from Ireland will surprise anyone, but when you make it a game and include 12 rules to be observed in each of the pubs you get those little notes of accounting and tax returns filing that I’ve always missed in my beers.
The Missing Sounds of New York | 1 min read
Pretty sure this will be the first of many love letters to NY. The NY Public Library released a Spotify playlist for people who miss the sounds the city used to make when nobody knew what ‘social distancing’ was. The sound landscapes go through many of those places you associate with NY: the musicians in the subway, the walk and talk, the pigeons, the horns and sirens, and, surprisingly, the silences. That last part, with just the sounds of pages being turned and the city humming in background…I miss this city.
From the archive
Ordinary People Focus on the Outcome. Extraordinary People Focus On the Process. | 8 min read
This article is worth it even if Bryan Cranston's lesson at the beginning is the only thing you read. The Process vs Outcome dichotomy is one of my favorite frameworks to consider because it keeps me in check. It makes me focus on things that I can control, to place my bets on the trajectories available, rather than the targets down the line. And you, where are you focusing on?
These apps I discovered
TV Charts | If you binge on TV shows this one is for you. Pick your favorite shows and check the ratings of each episode side by side. I went straight to Parks and Recreation, which is one of the few that I remember only getting better with each season, and was slightly surprised.
Twiger | I use Twitter and Instagram and I already looked for a tool like this in the past. Just feed it a link to a tweet of yours and it will generate a beautiful representation of it for an Instagram story.
A most calculated tweet
Someone you have to meet
I first heard about Marc on a Reddit thread at the beginning of last year. I was a couple of weeks away from being a father for the first time, so from then on, he was more or less a constant presence in my life soundtrack.
More than a musician, I look at him as an entertainer, who happens to bring joy to people through his music. His setup is simple: with a keyboard, a loop machine, and too much improvisational skills for a single person, every song he makes is as much of a surprise to you as it is for him. And then comes his personality and his humor.
From 2+ hours live streams, where an impressive collection of robes gets displayed and discarded, to live performances on increasingly sized venues, it’s awesome to see this guy getting more and more appreciated while keeping true to his roots.
This one’s my favorite. You can see his whole process: a caller gives him a topic, and then it’s a sequence of experimentation, trial, and error until, finally, something special comes up. Patience will be rewarded.
This week in a gif
High note
I hope you enjoyed these last minutes as much as me putting this together. If so, I’d love if you shared it with some friends.
If you are one of those friends and someone shared this with you, you are in luck, buy them a beer next time you are together, and meanwhile, you can subscribe to This Week’s Worth here:
Until next week,
Filipe