This weekend was the 8 year anniversary of writing this daily blog. It's hard to imagine that it has been this long. Perhaps because COVID has accelerated the last little while and made it difficult to remember what day or year it is sometimes.
I am often asked what the end game is for this blog. What am I hoping to get out of it? The truth is there is no real end game. I like reading and writing. I like being constantly curious about the world. I like discipline. I like meeting and connecting with new people. And I like having my own little place on the internet, however small it may be.
I get dozens of emails each week from people and companies wanting to pay for sponsored posts on this blog. I'm not sure how legitimate these inbounds are, but I ignore all of them. That's not what this blog is for or about.
In the early days of writing this blog it was called Architect This City and the focus was a bit narrower: real estate, design, planning and all things cities. That is still more or less the case, but I do often stray from these topics. Sometimes into personal topics. Sometimes into my photography. And more recently into the world of crypto and blockchains. This is one of the reasons why I decided to move to just blogging under my own name. There's more flexibility.
Sidebar: I recently bought my first NFT -- a CryptoBabyPunk. I'm not at all suggesting that you should do the same. It could be worthless in the future. But I continue to be fascinated by what's happening in this space and I've committed myself to experimenting and learning a lot more.
Writing something each day is extremely difficult. Some days it only takes 15-20 minutes. And other days, when I'm not in the mood or I'm exhausted from doing too many other things, it can take over an hour. It's a big time commitment and on more than one occasion I've questioned whether my time was better spent elsewhere. But then I think about all of the benefits that I derive from this daily practice.
They say that the definition of a habit is that you don't feel normal until you've done it. And this blog has certainly become a habit of mine. It forces me to wake up every morning and consider at least one interesting thing that may be happening in our cities and our world. I don't intend to stop anytime soon. So thank you all for reading over the years.
I thoroughly enjoy the way that Paul Graham reasons through arguments. There's something hyper rational about it. And even if you happen to disagree with his position(s), you still end up appreciating the way he has taken you through his logic. I guess that's what you get when you combine a computer scientist with someone who clearly likes to write.
His latest essay is about how to do great work. Conventional wisdom, he explains, has it that you really need two things: ability and determination. That's how you win. And that's how you create new things. But Paul makes the case for a third ingredient -- one that is arguably even more telling than the first two. Here's an excerpt:
If I had to put the recipe for genius into one sentence, that might be it: to have a disinterested obsession with something that matters.
Aren't I forgetting about the other two ingredients? Less than you might think. An obsessive interest in a topic is both a proxy for ability and a substitute for determination. Unless you have sufficient mathematical aptitude, you won't find series interesting. And when you're obsessively interested in something, you don't need as much determination: you don't need to push yourself as hard when curiosity is pulling you.
He refers to this as his "Bus Ticket Theory of Genius," because bus ticket collectors are an example, in his view, of a group with a "disinterested obsession." They're not collecting bus tickets for any particular reason, other than because of interest. And when you have this kind of obsession with things that (ultimately) matter, it can lead to important discoveries.
Think Darwin and his obsession with natural history.
But the other reason this topic resonates with me is because it makes the case for passion projects, side hustles, creative pursuits, and all other irresponsible things that seem to get harder to fit in the older we all get. I am believer in this. There's tremendous value in indulging in the things that stoke our curiosity, even if they might seem to silly to others.
And so I will leave you all with this final thought/excerpt:
It might be at least as useful to ask yourself: if you could take a year off to work on something that probably wouldn't be important but would be really interesting, what would it be?
I finally did it. Over the weekend I ported this blog over from Tumblr to WordPress. I had been thinking about doing this for a while, but kept putting it off (1) because of the work involved and (2) because I was worried about my permalinks changing. About 35-40% of the visits to this blog come from organic search. I'm on the first page when you Google "real estate developer."
I had been using Tumblr since I first started writing this daily blog back in August 2013. But it started feeling increasingly limited. It isn't great for longish-form blogs like this one and it is terrible at handling photos and other embedded content. (I plan to post more of my photography now.) The last straw for me was the inability to blog from a mobile device. I tried that over the weekend and it was bad.
I was also starting to feel like the product was on the decline. Yahoo acquired Tumblr in 2013 for $1.1 billion. Tumblr hadn't yet figured out how to effectively monetize its platform and Yahoo needed a cool social product in their portfolio. But that deal doesn't seem to have gone as planned, at least not for Yahoo.
So here I am on WordPress. I'm still working out some of the kinks, but I think we're almost there. If you're reading this post in your inbox, it should be business as usual. If you're reading this post on the web, you'll notice a few differences (I'm still fine tuning the design).
Regularly scheduled programming will resume tomorrow now that we're just about setup.
This weekend was the 8 year anniversary of writing this daily blog. It's hard to imagine that it has been this long. Perhaps because COVID has accelerated the last little while and made it difficult to remember what day or year it is sometimes.
I am often asked what the end game is for this blog. What am I hoping to get out of it? The truth is there is no real end game. I like reading and writing. I like being constantly curious about the world. I like discipline. I like meeting and connecting with new people. And I like having my own little place on the internet, however small it may be.
I get dozens of emails each week from people and companies wanting to pay for sponsored posts on this blog. I'm not sure how legitimate these inbounds are, but I ignore all of them. That's not what this blog is for or about.
In the early days of writing this blog it was called Architect This City and the focus was a bit narrower: real estate, design, planning and all things cities. That is still more or less the case, but I do often stray from these topics. Sometimes into personal topics. Sometimes into my photography. And more recently into the world of crypto and blockchains. This is one of the reasons why I decided to move to just blogging under my own name. There's more flexibility.
Sidebar: I recently bought my first NFT -- a CryptoBabyPunk. I'm not at all suggesting that you should do the same. It could be worthless in the future. But I continue to be fascinated by what's happening in this space and I've committed myself to experimenting and learning a lot more.
Writing something each day is extremely difficult. Some days it only takes 15-20 minutes. And other days, when I'm not in the mood or I'm exhausted from doing too many other things, it can take over an hour. It's a big time commitment and on more than one occasion I've questioned whether my time was better spent elsewhere. But then I think about all of the benefits that I derive from this daily practice.
They say that the definition of a habit is that you don't feel normal until you've done it. And this blog has certainly become a habit of mine. It forces me to wake up every morning and consider at least one interesting thing that may be happening in our cities and our world. I don't intend to stop anytime soon. So thank you all for reading over the years.
I thoroughly enjoy the way that Paul Graham reasons through arguments. There's something hyper rational about it. And even if you happen to disagree with his position(s), you still end up appreciating the way he has taken you through his logic. I guess that's what you get when you combine a computer scientist with someone who clearly likes to write.
His latest essay is about how to do great work. Conventional wisdom, he explains, has it that you really need two things: ability and determination. That's how you win. And that's how you create new things. But Paul makes the case for a third ingredient -- one that is arguably even more telling than the first two. Here's an excerpt:
If I had to put the recipe for genius into one sentence, that might be it: to have a disinterested obsession with something that matters.
Aren't I forgetting about the other two ingredients? Less than you might think. An obsessive interest in a topic is both a proxy for ability and a substitute for determination. Unless you have sufficient mathematical aptitude, you won't find series interesting. And when you're obsessively interested in something, you don't need as much determination: you don't need to push yourself as hard when curiosity is pulling you.
He refers to this as his "Bus Ticket Theory of Genius," because bus ticket collectors are an example, in his view, of a group with a "disinterested obsession." They're not collecting bus tickets for any particular reason, other than because of interest. And when you have this kind of obsession with things that (ultimately) matter, it can lead to important discoveries.
Think Darwin and his obsession with natural history.
But the other reason this topic resonates with me is because it makes the case for passion projects, side hustles, creative pursuits, and all other irresponsible things that seem to get harder to fit in the older we all get. I am believer in this. There's tremendous value in indulging in the things that stoke our curiosity, even if they might seem to silly to others.
And so I will leave you all with this final thought/excerpt:
It might be at least as useful to ask yourself: if you could take a year off to work on something that probably wouldn't be important but would be really interesting, what would it be?
I finally did it. Over the weekend I ported this blog over from Tumblr to WordPress. I had been thinking about doing this for a while, but kept putting it off (1) because of the work involved and (2) because I was worried about my permalinks changing. About 35-40% of the visits to this blog come from organic search. I'm on the first page when you Google "real estate developer."
I had been using Tumblr since I first started writing this daily blog back in August 2013. But it started feeling increasingly limited. It isn't great for longish-form blogs like this one and it is terrible at handling photos and other embedded content. (I plan to post more of my photography now.) The last straw for me was the inability to blog from a mobile device. I tried that over the weekend and it was bad.
I was also starting to feel like the product was on the decline. Yahoo acquired Tumblr in 2013 for $1.1 billion. Tumblr hadn't yet figured out how to effectively monetize its platform and Yahoo needed a cool social product in their portfolio. But that deal doesn't seem to have gone as planned, at least not for Yahoo.
So here I am on WordPress. I'm still working out some of the kinks, but I think we're almost there. If you're reading this post in your inbox, it should be business as usual. If you're reading this post on the web, you'll notice a few differences (I'm still fine tuning the design).
Regularly scheduled programming will resume tomorrow now that we're just about setup.
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