Issue #199 | Subscribe

Happy New Year! 🎆

Each new year brings with it the opportunity to leave the previous year's mistakes and obstacles behind and reinvent yourself, meet your long-hanging goals, be a better family member and friend, and, in general, be a better you.

But when we set the tone for the new year, we often get wrapped up in chasing vanity metrics.

A hundred books to read. A thousand followers to gain. Increase team productivity by ten percent and so on.

While goals like these look like a good target to chase, they are meaningless if they're disconnected from your intended purpose.

For example, a few books well read and the underlying lessons implemented in life are far better than speed reading a hundred books to show off.

Keep this in mind as you set your goals for this new year.

Let's not chase vanity metrics. Focus on the big picture instead.

Now, before you move on to the rest of this newsletter issue, here are a few words from:

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Your Next Read

Thriving

Range

Deliberate practice, putting 10,000 hours into a specific field, can make us an expert in that field. But to be better equipped at handling the ever-changing world around us, we need to expand the range of our abilities.

Apps & Services

Flashback

Make a time-lapse video from your camera roll

The app does what it says on the tin. Shoot or select photos from your album for every day of a month or so, and the app creates a lovely flashback video. This will be a nice tool to create a 2025 flashback video to share with friends or as a personal memory. Available on iOS for free.
Feather

Draw on an interactive 3D canvas

This app feels like Procreate but with 3D superpowers. You get a 3D plane where you can draw illustrations from every angle, effectively turning them into an artistic 3D model or scene. Available on iPadOS for $14.99 one-time.
PixelPlayer

A beautiful music player for Android

A while ago, in Issue #193, I shared Jewelcase, which is a fantastic iOS app to play on-device music files. This app is an even more beautiful Android equivalent of that app. Available on Android for free.

Handy Shortcut

⌃

⌥

Up

Move the selected event up by 15 minutes in the macOS Calendar app.

Interesting Reads

A Letter to the Future You

2 min read

Firesides

In October last year, I wrote an email to my future self to check in on how I was doing by the year's end. Here's how it went, and how you can try something similar this year.
How to Live an Intellectually Rich Life

37 min read

Even the most well-read of us often fall into the echo chambers of our expertise and beliefs, unwilling to accept anything new. This post, told through an illustrated journey, is a refreshing reminder to challenge our views once in a while and keep our minds open.
The Lucretius Problem: How History Blinds Us

3 min read

I’ve never seen worst-case scenarios in this light before. And now that I’ve read this piece, the problem makes sense and is something I’ll keep in mind when visualising worst-case scenarios in the future.
How to Be Grateful…For Everything

6 min read

Every year comes with its share of good and bad moments. This article is a nice reminder to appreciate the times things won’t go your way this year and the lessons we can draw from those tough times.

Watch Next

This video is an apt visualisation of just how spectacular the technology in our everyday gadgets is and a testament to human capabilities.

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