Chasing sirens

Hey friends,

I’m working on an iPhone camera comparison video that’s taking a ridiculous amount of time to edit. On Friday night, I’d pencilled out the evening to work on the video, but a close friend came over to practice for a singing audition. We ended up chatting until midnight, and then decided to relive our university days and ended up at McDonald’s in Cambridge town centre at 2am.

When he asked to come over, a part of me thought ‘argh I need to get this video done’. But another part of me remembered the sage wisdom that relationships are the only things that matter in life. I realised I was coming close to chasing the sirens of #productivity #hustle and #grind for their own sake.

So I hung out with my friend. The iPhone video could wait.

Have a great week!

Ali

I’m hiring!

Things are quite exciting these days – I’m looking to hire the first full-time member of my team. It’s for the Head of Content role – here’s some more information about it. If you (or anyone you know) might be a good fit, I’d love to hear from you 🙂

PS: I kinda want to have a ‘team name’ of some sort. Is the “A-Team” too cheesy? If you’ve got any ideas, do hit <reply> and let me know 🙂

This week on Not Overthinking

Not Overthinking is the weekly podcast hosted by me and my brother. If you enjoy these emails, you’ll hopefully like that too. You can listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Castro (my favourite podcast app) or any other podcast app – just search for ‘Not Overthinking’.

Book Discussion: “The Magic of Thinking Big” | Not Overthinking

In this episode, we try a brand new format! We go through Ali’s Kindle highlights, from 4 years ago, from the book “The Magic of Thinking Big”. We end up talking about mental restraints, making good conversation, setting goals, and a smattering of other topics.

Stuff I enjoyed this week

1 – Podcast – I really enjoyed this episode of the Ezra Klein Show called When meritocracy wins, everybody loses. It made me think a lot about this system of meritocracy that we all implicitly subscribe to, and the various issues associated with it. Both Daniel (the guest) and Ezra (the host) were making such interesting points that I had to listen at normal speed (lol) and rewind several times to keep up with the discussion. Definitely worth your while, especially if you (like me) find yourself falling into the world of ‘I need achievement to be happy’.

2 – Blog Post – This new post by Derek Sivers brought a tear to my eye. Also, everything on his blog is great.

3 – Book – I rekindled (hehe) my love of The Faithful and the Fallen series by John Gwynne this week by starting book #3 (Ruin). It’s definitely eaten into my sleeping time but it’s just so good that I have to keep reading each night until I literally can’t keep my eyes open. It’s a nice way to fall asleep.

Kindle Highlight of the Week

People with neurotic lifestyles tend to sprinkle their speech with such words as ‘everyone’ and ‘always’ and ‘everything’. ‘Everyone hates me,’ they will say, or ‘It’s always me who takes a loss,’ or ‘Everything is wrong.’ If you think you might be in the habit of using such generalising statements, you should be careful.

From The Courage to be Disliked by Ichiro Kishimi and Fumitake Koga. Resurfaced with Readwise.

This week’s video