Sitemap - 2023 - Mickmel
The Sunday Summary: Digital planners, legal spam, and fewer goals
A minute on the internet in 2023
A paper planner on a digital notepad
Some businesses just don’t have the value
What does your business do without?
Why should your website rank higher than theirs?
The Sunday Summary: QR code scams, magic emails, and taking suggestions from others
You can’t do it, or you’re still learning?
The downside of the “magic email”
You can’t just download information into your brain
The Sunday Summary: Frequency illusion, sharing notes, and the value of character
Early weaknesses lead to great trust
Character is worth more every day
9/11 caused 1,600 automobile fatalities
Intentional frequency illusion
The Sunday Summary: The gaps, networks, scripts, and adversarial interoperability
Google Tasks is finally decent
The Sunday Summary: Magical marketing, ruinous empathy, and gaps in our knowledge
I don’t know what I’m wrong about
Our customers don’t need more content
Values without expression are dead
The key is not the will to win
The attention span of a goldfish
Can your notes be read on a 60-year-old computer?
It’s very doable to be the most knowledgeable
Having mutual friends doesn’t justify a connection
The Sunday Summary: Impossible tests, no more goal setting, and finding new problems to solve
Problems need to be discovered
Reaching a goal is the penalty you receive for setting one
The State of Louisiana Literacy Test
You need to envy the entire life
The Sunday Summary: Good design, lack of nuance, and balance that isn’t 50/50
When creativity helps the most
Nuance doesn’t lead to attention
The Sunday Summary: Better schools, removing features, and Threads starting to pick up steam
Promote what you love, or bash what you hate?
Threads is starting to replace X/Twitter
No one will be there to explain it to the customer
Wanting to attend a better school is almost as good as getting into one
The Sunday Summary: Telling your story, the future of VR, and failing to bother to care
Sin is the failure to bother to care
First Encounters is Wii Sports
Information asymmetry no longer exists
The next round of VR will be the one to watch
The Sunday Summary: Branded searches, veneer, and saving 50 steps a day
The incredible value in some services
Know the other side better than them
The customer isn’t always the user
The Sunday Summary: Historical leverage, disloyal loyalty cards, and the amazing world around us
Understanding those that confound us
Your inbox is other people’s agenda
Marketing is not interrupting people
Do you think the world is good?
Loyalty cards don’t lead to loyalty
Learning from history is a form of leverage
The Sunday Summary: Doing intentionally unscalable things, creating knowledge, and picking up trash
The Muse sees the butt in the chair
Advice is often an average that hides the distribution
Access to knowledge is good, but creating it is better
It intentionally doesn’t scale
The Sunday Summary: Digital prep, brain changes, more Readwise, and more AI
Technology changes the focus of our brain
The Sunday Summary: Working on paper, quitting, and being clever
Is it clever or self-indulgent?
The Sunday Summary: Norman Doors, good design, and too much feedback
Obsidian “properties” to help sort your stuff
Too much feedback is a problem
The Sunday Summary: The internet, the mundane, and the degree of difficulty
Clear ownership in disagreements with your partner
Urgency is the opposite of hurrying
Degree of difficulty doesn’t count
You never have all of the facts
A good mental model of the internet is essential
The Sunday Summary: Processes, titles, taxes and stacking knowledge
The internet was better when people weren’t afraid to link out
Title it from their perspective
Kicking off “Stacking Knowledge” with “Think Again”
Tax the things you want to see less of
Emphasize the process over the results
The Sunday Summary: Context is key, no one is an expert, and schlep blindness should be avoided
There’s no such thing as like-minded
No one considers themselves an expert if they really know their job
Answers come from understanding, not knowledge
The Sunday Summary: Tennis balls, fresh eyes, and making the most of every book I read
The times we fight with ourselves
When is it for you, and when is it for someone else?
Getting more out of the books I read
The Sunday Summary: Mindlessness, foundations, reports and immaterial things
Retargeting and Remarketing aren’t quite the same
What matters is doing the right thing
Always build the foundation first
Writing the report is the important part
The ownership of immaterial things
The Sunday Summary: Spam, boundaries, and why free is way better than cheap
Simple solutions to weird problems
Social norms versus market norms
The Sunday Summary: Thought leaders, curiosity, confidence, and respect
Respect includes clear criticism
Confident answers can be problematic
The maddening ambiguity of upstream efforts
Thought leaders are everywhere
Multitasking makes learning difficult
The Sunday Summary: Cheap lights, worthless empathy, and wasted marketing
Obsess about your competitors, or obsess about your customers?
Your real customers are a level or two deeper
Wasting your efforts on marketing
SEO hasn’t ever really changed
Empathy without action is worthless
A lot of work for a little light
The Sunday Summary: Tiny sales, slow speed, and bad feedback
“Make it darker” is not an acceptable form of feedback
Creativity comes from connected thoughts
Sell the customer as little as possible
Your oncologist doesn’t need to be a cancer survivor
The Sunday Summary: Removing gates, avoiding AI, building trust, and folding phones
A solid business is built on trust
Higher standards can make things look worse
It’s about time to remove the gates
The Sunday Summary: Parades, amazing tools, lazy leadership, and a bunch of headphones
Dumb rules come from lazy leadership
You are advertising to a moving parade
Writing a summary is 100x more valuable than reading one
If it costs less, we care less
The Sunday Summary: Long to-do lists, clear speaking, deep notes, and automatic golfing
We tend to trust the skills of automatic people
Visit your notes more often, not less
The clarity of an idea is based on the person receiving it
Do you want to be seen as trustworthy? Be trustworthy.
If you finish your to-do list, that’s problematic
The Sunday Summary: Start now, lots of Anki, lots of content, and there’s no way you can be copied
Awareness of your shortcomings doesn’t excuse them
Produce more, because so much of it should be trashed
The Sunday Summary: Mysteries vs puzzles, outrage, and wonderful tailwinds
Too much thankfulness can backfire
The “truth” about that “great opportunity”
You could leave life right now
People are mysteries, not puzzles
The Sunday Summary: Scams, parents, your name, and 20 years of WordPress
They probably don’t remember your name
Do you know who my parents are?
Your opinions should not be predictable based on your other opinions
Let people quietly follow you online
I don’t skip a day (unless I can)
If it’s on the slide, it gets written down
Those other people will do lasting harm to our country
AI will lead to more synchronous communication
Location pages are no longer helpful for SEO
The lock icon in your browser is going away because people don’t understand what it means
Word of mouth dominates marketing
Transparency isn’t the same as honesty
The way it starts isn’t how it finishes, and that’s by design
When you shove away the hostile, you push away the curious
Wanting to remember something doesn’t help
People play differently when they’re keeping score
Honesty can lead to contradictions
When job hunting, communication is key
Don’t freak out about AI just yet
Why do they disagree with you?
My 486 wasn’t powerful enough, and neither is AI
Who you know really does matter more than what you know
As automation speeds up, relationships will reign
The people in this room aren’t all the same
First instincts are often wrong
Powerful systems that work come from simple systems that worked
Heavy news readers tend to have more distorted views
Generative AI is better for input than for output
The Waters of the United States, and why political leanings might not mean what you think
What did you have for breakfast?
It only takes five seconds to clone your voice
Lead with reputation and legacy, not business
The other side really is human
Organize your brain by sharing your thoughts
Everybody has a personal brand
What should confrontation lead to?
Don’t just do something, sit there
Responsiveness can be as important as price
Assigning fault versus solving problems
Significant learning comes from being wrong
Bing AI Chat versus Google Bard: A first look
The more you talk, the more you think you learn
According to the state of Florida, you are likely “woke”
You can learn more from people’s questions than their answers
The first bit of AI with my notes
Open sharing helps more in the long run
Use fleeting notes to avoid yak shaving
Humility can help you seem real
Do you want to garden your notes or not?
Hard to Easy, or Easy to Hard?
Your character is how you help people that can’t help you
When your filter bubble works too well
Cold outreach is the domain of spammers
A good plumbing decision with a bad outcome
Keyword-rich domain names can cause problems
More content leads to shorter sales cycles
Serve others by taking care of yourself
How much will AI change our world?
We all have accessibility needs
Omission is as bad as commission
Do you skip the hard questions?
Choose goals that help you grow along the way
That might be a great sermon idea
Love is greater than hurt feelings
Winners quit a lot, so learn to fold faster
Seeking social status gives others power over you
Clarity comes through articulation
The wonderful pain of being morbidly curious
More consumption doesn’t mean you’re better informed
Don’t let your content be vapor
Cause blindness can lead to bad things
It’ll be interesting to see how you guys figure this out
Make the charitable assumption
I find time in the week, not time in the day
The output of courage is curiosity
Don’t forget about the medium ties
Excellence doesn’t need to be perfect
Secondary motivation can be powerful
HBO Max is playing the finite game
Personal note-taking is going to change dramatically
Work on development, not performance
Personas are specific, but not precise
Everything is always working out for me
Google Reader hurt the internet the most
Set them free to do their thing