Hey there 👋
Oversimplified is a digest of the best links I stumble upon each week, and any new posts from me. If this is your first issue, welcome! You can subscribe with the big blue button below:
✍️ Notes on Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman
I had a lot of fun reading this book, as it recounts the adventures of Richard Feynman, a Nobel Prize-winning and especially charismatic physicist. Highly recommend checking it out.
📚 Forgetto Mori
This “medley” from Nat Elison echos a lot of ideas that have become increasingly important to me. In fact, I’m actually in the process of writing up a post on them now. But while that’s still baking, consider this a more concise and better-written preview of an idea that has made me ~10% happier over the last 6 months.
📚 Where Ideas Go to Die
Few tribes of people are more passionate about their workflows than the notetaking crowd, of which I count myself a member. The question is: “What’s the point of writing notes if you don’t revisit them?” Honestly, I don’t know. But it still feels valuable to me. And that’s enough for now.
📚 Reality Has a Surprising Amount of Detail
When you are doing something new, it's easy to mistake details for noise: “Such details aren’t automatically visible, even when you’re directly running up against them. Things can just seem messy and noisy instead.”
🔗 Hacker Laws
Lots of gold here. Check out my personal favorites if you aren’t familiar: Gall's Law, Dunbar's Number, and Conway's Law.
🔗 New Compensation Models
This tweet from Nathan Barry got me thinking. They handle compensation a little differently at ConvertKit, with a big emphasis on profit sharing for short-term, performance-based incentives. Makes a lot of sense for a startup.
Food for Thought
“We are taught to ignore sadness, to stuff it down into our satchels and pretend it isn’t there. As adults, we often have to learn to hear the clarity of its call. That is wintering. It is the active acceptance of sadness. It is the practice of allowing ourselves to feel it as a need. It is the courage to stare down the worst parts of our experience and to commit to healing them the best we can. Wintering is a moment of intuition, our true needs felt keenly as a knife.” — Katherine May
Until next time
As always, if you're enjoying Oversimplified, I'd love it if you shared it with a friend or two. If anything stood out, whether good or bad, I would love to hear about it. Reply to this email or tweet at me and let’s chat.
Until next time,
Conor