DeveloPassion's Newsletter - Metronomes and momentum

By Sébastien Dubois • Issue #75 • View online

Hello everyone! I’m Sébastien Dubois, your host. You’re receiving this email because you signed up for DeveloPassion’s Newsletter. Thank you for being here with me ✨

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Welcome to the 75th edition

Another week, another newsletter! I hope that you all had a great one 🤩

This week I’ve started finding my new marks. New routines, new habits, new decoration. New life basically. It’s not all glorious yet, but I’m working on it.

Life is ever-changing. Change is the norm, so we better be flexible!

I’ve decided to treat myself and bought an Amazon Echo Dot as well as some Phillips Hue lights. Setting it all up was a breeze, and I’m super happy about the results. I can finally give orders and be listened to. It never worked with my kids 😂

I need your help (seriously!). If you get value out of this newsletter, please consider becoming a supporter.

The Lab 🧪

The lab is undergoing minor turbulences. The rolling average of my products has gone under $800 in the last 30 days. There’s a similar trend on Medium, where I went down from 30K views a month to 12K. Also on Twitter where numbers stagnate.

In reality, the root cause is clear: very little activity on social networks, no new articles, etc. The good news is that the solution is obvious: get back to work!

This week, I’ve released version 1.3.1 of the Obsidian Starter Kit. In this version, I’ve added a number of new templates, automation rules a new plugin, and a new tip for the user guide.

I’m not done with that project yet, but I’ve been thinking about launching a new product. Its code name is “Personal Information Management Starter Kit” (PIM Starter Kit). The idea I have is to create something similar to the obsidian Starter Kit but focused on Personal Information Management. That is, focused on how to store, structure, and organize personal information. That includes:

Digital documents
Paper documents
Pictures
Videos
E-mail
Bookmarks
Contact information
Music
Books
Podcasts
Search/location history
Chat history
…

I have quite a bit of experience with that, so I can certainly create something useful. And I feel like many people in the world need help. Whenever a friend or relative lets me get a glimpse at their files, I scream inside :)

For now, it’s just an idea, but I could get started with that sometime in September.

Metronomes and momentum

Metronome

Galileo Galilei studied and discovered concepts that ultimately led to the creation of the metronome around the beginning of the 17th century. The first mechanical one was created in 1696 by Etienne Loulié.

Metronomes produce sound at a regular interval. Musicians rely on those to learn how to play with regularity and consistency. The regularity of metronomes is their core feature. They’re stable and predictable. They never skip a beat, never slow down, never lose the pace, and never go off track.

Regularity and consistency are two incredibly powerful qualities to develop and leverage, independently of what you do. They imply predictability and reliability, which increases confidence and trust. Both trust and confidence are core social constructs. They facilitate decision-making. Once you gain their confidence and trust, people get more inclined to help you, buy from you, rely on you, come back, etc.

Regularity and consistency also help create momentum. As more and more gets “done” (or delivered, or shipped, or published, etc.), results add up and add weight to everything you do afterward. If you have written one essay, then only that essay vouches for your writing skills. If you have written a hundred in a hundred days, it tells a very different story. Beyond that, people who discover one of your creations might want to explore other ones. That’s where momentum comes from. The longer you remain regular and consistent, the more momentum you will gain.

The great thing about momentum is that even if you stop for a while, it will remain and will only slow down progressively, just like an object in motion. If there isn’t too much friction, the object will keep its momentum.

If you want to achieve great results, then go build yourself some momentum!

Ideas I've explored this week

A few of the ideas I've explored this week

Among those, here are a few cool ideas I’ve explored:

Really smart thinkers are clear thinkers
The modern mind is overstimulated. Boredom is a key to creativity and planning
Difficulties strengthen the mind like exercise does the body
Calm is a superpower
A busy mind accelerates the perceived passage of time. Peace of mind can help buy more time
Sacrificing leisure for efficiency is sliding to burnout
Learning requires stimulating imagination, not mindless memorization
Generalists have the edge when it comes to exploring knowledge and ideas
Variety in work is required, but it cannot come at the cost of depth
The success formula
Considering the complexity and wholeness of situations
The stress master switch
The autonomic nervous system
Dark triad
The Ouroboros effect
Allopathic overload
Affective agnosia
Patience is a powerful life skill
Writing styles
Knowledge categories
And oh so much more!!

If you want to read more about those, then support me by becoming a paid subscriber. I’ll be forever grateful ❤️

Recent articles

No new articles this week (I know, I know 😂)

Quotes of the week

“If it hurts to hear it, look for the truth in it. If it comforts to hear it, look for the lie in it” — Naval Ravikant
“Worry is a misuse of imagination. Learn to use your imagination wisely. Focus your energy on what you want to see in your life”

Book of the week

A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose (Eckhart Tolle)

Tolle describes in detail how our current ego-based state of consciousness operates. Then gently, and in very practical terms, he leads us into this new consciousness

amzn.to • Share

Tips of the week

RootMyTV - Stage 1

RootMy.TV - Slide to root your LG webOS TV and install the webOS Homebrew Channel

Time to get YouTube without the Ads :)

rootmy.tv • Share

How to Get Your Brain to Focus | Chris Bailey | TEDxManchester

The latest research is clear: the state of our attention determines the state of our lives. So how do we harness our attention to focus deeper, get distracte…

www.youtube.com • Share

How cool is that?!

Thinking and learning links of the week

Refind – Get smarter every day

Every day we pick 7 links from around the web for you, tailored to your interests. Loved by 50k+ curious minds.

refind.com • Share

A systems model of anxiety-driven procrastination - Axle

Examining my procrastination problem through a systems lens—with some ways to make progress!

axle.design • Share

🔮 Reinventing Organizations: Hierarchy vs Holacracy

What you need to know about how organizations will look like in the future

thechase.substack.com • Share

The Story of the Night I Met Albert Einstein | Reader's Digest

This Reader’s Digest Classic of “My Most Unforgettable Character” offers a lesson in life—and music—from the most brilliant mind in the world.

www.rd.com • Share

PKM Weekly July 17 2022 – Issue 027 – Curtis McHale

curtismchale.ca • Share

PKM Weekly July 24 2022 – Issue 028 – Curtis McHale

curtismchale.ca • Share

‘Mathematics is an unknown land’: meet Fields Medal winner Maryna Viazovska

most famous for solving the problem of how to pack spheres in the most efficient way in a space with eight dimensions.

www.nature.com • Share

Call for Model Examples of Zettelkasten Output Processes : antinet

Perhaps too much of the resurgence of the zettelkasten idea and the online space about it is focused on what a zettelkasten is or how it should be…

www.reddit.com • Share

Tech links of the week

JSON Creator Douglas Crockford Interview by Evrone

We had a nice chat with Douglas Crockford, a well-known American computer programmer who was involved in the development of the JavaScript language. Douglas is the author of How JavaScript Works. He also discovered the JSON Data Interchange Format, the world’s most loved data format. Enjoy full interview!

evrone.com • Share

The new wave of React state management

Understand the core problems state management libraries need to solve. And how the proliferation of modern libraries address them in new ways.

frontendmastery.com • Share

The Slow March of Progress in Programming Language Tooling - Earthly Blog

The 2022 Stack Overflow developer survey is out!And what’s fascinating to me is which popular programming languages are either loved or dreaded.1Th…

earthly.dev • Share

Vitest | A blazing fast unit test framework powered by Vite

A blazing fast unit test framework powered by Vite

vitest.dev • Share

Michael Hladky - Performance at Scale - Non Trivial Performance Optimisation in Angular - Google Slides

docs.google.com • Share

Indie Hacking and bootstrapping

How to use a personal website to enhance your ability to think and create?

Working note on creating a website to enhance my ability to think and create

michaelnotebook.com • Share

Remote Work: is it a generational divide? 👶⚡️🧑‍🦳

There’s a lot of talk about divergence of opinions. But where do they come from?

thechase.substack.com • Share

How Much Money Do Indie Hackers Products Make? | Scraping Fish

Indie Hackers is a wonderful community for founders, a vast ocean of shared knowledge and a place to showcase your product journey. A lot of people are sharing their products there along with the revenue, often verified by Stripe. We analyzed the available data to check how much revenue are those products making and what are the most money making categories!

scrapingfish.com • Share

Tell HN: Today I made my first “bucks” on the web | Hacker News

Your description for this link…

news.ycombinator.com • Share

The Chase | Matteo Cellini | Substack

Practical guides to navigate the world of hiring, re-skilling, and growth leadership in tech. Click to read The Chase, by Matteo Cellini, a Substack publication with thousands of readers.

thechase.substack.com • Share

37 subreddits to market your startup

I’m not able to link to any of these, but I hope this helps you add more marketing channels to test. Marketing / Sales - /r/Marketing - /r/AskMarketing…

www.indiehackers.com • Share

That’s all folks!

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