This is my weekly newsletter Stuff Worth Sharing where I share with you some great content I found on the World Wide Web. I hope you enjoy it.
Notes on China by Dwarkesh Patel
The popular podcaster Dwarkesh Patel shares his notes from a two-week visit to China. It is a very intriguing perspective as Patel is well-read and tries to prove many of the points which western countries have regarding China.
He met many people and asked them about their life. Young people are very stressed, as he had noticed, often moving away from big cities where you have to be an over-achiever to get well-paid jobs (9-9-6 and so on).
He also travelled to Chongqing, which is an incredible interesting city. I’d like to travel there some time in the future. Just search for some videos from there, everything is big and flashy.
Regarding the internet, Patel criticised the low bandwidth and the Great Firewall, which blocks most of the popular websites in China.
But this also has its advantages: Being unable to communicate with the outside world, he could focus his thinking on important matters without distractions. He closed the article with the following words:
“It’s a good reminder that what’s lacking in life is not time. It’s focus. If you’re working on what matters, you can advance leaps and bounds in 8 hours. And if you’re just clearing the slog, you can spend a lifetime staying in the same place.”
The Power of Radical Candor: Kim Scott — Wisdom From The Top with Guy Raz
One exciting podcast episode I’ve listened to this week was Kim Scott’s visit to Guy Raz’ podcast Wisdom From The Top. As Kim’s book currently lies on top of my books-to-be-read stack, I anticipated the podcast highly. And indeed, I was not disappointed.
Kim shared multiple stories from her life, including one were she tried to promote one of her employees to a higher position, which he did not like. This resulted in a good worker to leave the company and Kim to have a lesson learned that not every worker likes to go into management roles.
I Kinda Hate The Internet Now by Stephen Moore
On Substack, my Notes feed gave me this gem. Stephen Moore reminisces over the internet in the old days. That is not the case anymore these days: “I feel no sense of joy using it. No curiosity. No intrigue. No excitement. That feeling of tapping into an endless world of possibilities is gone, replaced with a begrudging realisation that I’ll have to enter it again and battle to find what I need, trudging through ads, paywalls, vitriol, disinformation and more”.
Ads, paywalls, trackers, clickbait, now AI-generated content — everything led to an internet which is not really enjoyable anymore. The text really resonated with me, as I have the same opinion. It will be interesting to see where the current hype around AI and the ease of creating (fake) content will lead us. Hopefully, Stephen does not have to write a post with even worse problems in five years…
I am rich and have no idea what to do with my life by Vinay Hiremath
Vinay Hiremath, the founder of Loom which was recently acquired by Atlassian, shares his thoughts over what his life will be like after he sold his company and got wealthy overnight.
He felt a kind of emptiness which resulted in him giving up his relationship, climbing high mountains in the Himalayas, facing his insecurities and starting (and quitting after some weeks) a job at Elon Musk’s DOGE.
In the end, he realised that studying physics in Hawaii is the base for his future growth.
After reading “Never Enough” by Andrew Wilkinson, this post once again showed that money does not equal happiness. Even though this kind of money can offer you many opportunities, it does not fill an internal void inside of you.
Forever Notes by Matthias Hilse
Inspired by Ryder Carroll’s Bullet Journal Method, Patrick of New Perspectives’ Forever Diary, and Tiago Forte’s PARA method, Matthias invented a framework to take notes directly in Apple Notes. Using features like the native inter-note-linking, he created a method which does not need any additional tools at all.
While I’m currently pleased with only using the PARA method (maybe looking into johnny.decimal soon to spice things up), possibly I will try out Forever Notes in the future.
Using tools like Obsidian, Logseq, Notion etc. always led me into the configuration trap. Countless amounts of hours were spent just to utilise the endless customisation options while not writing down anything.
This is not a problem one is confronted with in Apple Notes, as the app itself is very barebones and straightforward.
While writing this, I noticed that I should write down my findings regarding different productivity tools in a dedicated blog post soon.
That’s it for this week’s episode. I hope you’ve enjoyed reading it and maybe read some of the stuff I’ve shared. I wish you all a nice Saturday, wherever you might read this!