Welcome to Morfternight, your weekly digital postcard.

Share Morfternight

👇 tl;dr

Today, we take a moment to reflect on the meaning of a new year, share some photos, think about the future of Morfternight, and look at its past.

🥳 Happy New Year!

We certainly love our calendar years. We have invented many ways of counting days, weeks, and months that compose a year. We have figured out solutions to address the small differences introduced each year (2024 is a leap year, by the way, in case you forgot). In the end, though, there is a power to a repeating cycle punctuating our existences.

We are learning, although unfortunately through climate change, that the cycle does not have to be immutable. While the dance of seasons persists (your mileage may vary based on your location on the planet), they keep following each other while not always resembling the ones from previous years.

Here’s a more optimistic approach to the point I am making. In a solar-centric model, we can consider that each year we get back to the same point we were one year before, and start a new orbit. We can zoom out, though, and consider the movement of our Sun around the center of the Milky Way, or the movement of our galaxy in relation to other ones around us. Or, as it gets further and further away, the movement of our local cluster in relation to the rest of the universe.

In this broader context, as Ethan Siegel explains in “Our Motion Through Space Isn't A Vortex, But Something Far More Interesting,” we can estimate that our planet moves at the blazing speed of 368km/s (± 30km/s) on a path that will never bring it back to the same position.

I find it very comforting to find at this cosmic scale the same structures that enable us, year after year, to become better at anything we do through the establishment of a cyclical pattern. This is where we evaluate a situation, figure out a path for improvement, move forward on that path, measure the impact of our actions, evaluate the situation again, and repeat.

It is the essence of the iterative approach to move forward through the repetition of a consistent cycle: think, act, evaluate, think, act, evaluate, think, etc.

So, as this year comes to an end, and another one begins, I’d like to wish you all the best for the future, and remind you of these two simple ideas that may help you improve it:

• Dream in decades, but iterate weekly. Years are nice to tell history, not to write the future.

• We’ll never be in the same location again, so there’s no reason to wait for next year. Next year begins today, each day.

The only day when “I’ll start next year” makes sense is today! Enjoy the celebrations, I wish you all the best, and see y’all next year!

📷 A Postcard from Vienna and one from Madrid

In the last issue of Morfternight, a few weeks ago, I explained how I was having trouble with the M11 and focusing. I ended up acting on it, I sold the M11, and have, for the moment, replaced it with two options.

A Ricoh GRIIIx, the smallest camera with a large sensor (APS-C). I have read a lot about this little one over the past few years, met several enthusiastic owners, so I ended up diving in. It is truly a pocket camera, it literally fits in my pocket, yet it is packed with all the manual settings to give you full control of the results. The only caveat so far is that it doesn’t come with a viewfinder, optical or electronic.

By default, framing is done on the back LCD screen, which would be ok if I hadn’t reached that stage in life where to see at arm’s length one needs glasses…

Ricoh sells an optical viewfinder accessory, but I doubt that will work for me. For once, it costs almost half the price of the camera, which makes little sense. In addition, it adds a bulk to the flash hot-shoe that goes against the primary quality, the small size of the GRIIIx.

The photo above was taken in Vienna with the GRIIIx, this other one was taken in Madrid with the same camera.

The second replacement is a Fuji X-H2 with the Fujinon XF56mm f/1.2 WR and a vertical grip with extra batteries. This is a very familiar setup, I used the X-H1 for quite a while from 2018 to 2020, and the 56mm on APS-C is the equivalent of a 84mm in full frame, extremely close to my darling 85mm, the focal length I prefer above all.

I barely started playing with it, I literally only went out once for one hour, but I was already rewarded with one image I truly enjoy. Here it is.

I hope you’ll like it too. Please let me know in the comments, or simply by replying to this email.

🗞️ What’s next for Morfternight?

As you may have noticed, I have been sending it out irregularly in the recent past.

I have tried to understand, and explain, in the past this dynamic where on the one hand, I don’t want this to become a forced exercise. If I don’t take pleasure in writing Morfternight, the odds of you enjoying reading it will crumble. On the other hand, I genuinely understand and appreciate the feedback I have received from readers about the importance for you to receive it regularly. So you don’t start wondering if it ended up in the spam folder, or whether I stopped sending it, or if something happened to me.

So, how do we solve this conundrum?

Investigating a bit closer to what stops me from reaching your inbox regularly, I identified the tension between the time available to write Morfternight, and the expectation I set for myself to provide every week each section of content. From the photos, to a curated selection of articles, personal thoughts on AI, leadership, or product, a full Morfternight takes a few hours. A time I gladly spend writing it when I have it, but that at times I simply can’t find every week.

As 2023 ends and 2024 begins, I decided to try something new for the third season of this digital postcard. Instead of prioritizing the volume of content, at the risk of not sending it often, I’ll prioritize sending it, even if at times it’ll be just a photo and a short note.

After all, I’ve been calling this a “digital postcard,” so maybe it is time it honors its name!

📚 Three past issues of Morfternight

As we close the second season, here are three links to past issues that mattered particularly to me.

The most shared:

Morfternight #37: I am back!

Paolo Belcastro · June 9, 2022

Ride - More Photos 👋 Hello Friend, and welcome to Morfternight. I am back in beautiful Vienna after being on the road for two weeks. While I was in Portugal, driving on a beautiful Sunday between Porto and Lisbon, something incredible happened: we passed 300 morfternighters!

Read full story

The most commented:

Morfternight #64: Product Longevity

Paolo Belcastro · December 18, 2022

🤩 Welcome to the nine new Morfternighters who joined us last week. We love to have you here, and I hope you’ll enjoy reading Morfternight. If you do, remember to share with a friend by clicking on this button.

Read full story

The most liked:

Morfternight #92: The Power of One-On-One Meetings

Jul 24

👇 tl;dr Today I resume sending Morfternight after a three weeks hiatus. I normally link to content I have published on the blog, but as I wrote something I believe is really important for all managers and anyone who has a manager (that’s a lot of people), I am going to do something different and include the full article here.

Read full story

🤖 Custom GPT step by step next week!

In the last issue of Morfternight I asked if you’d be interested in a step by step breakdown of how to create Custom GPTs. I apologize for the delay, but I am currently on vacation, and suddenly creating screencasts, taking screenshots, and publishing a proper tutorial started feeling a bit too much like work, and requiring too much computer time.

Instead, I’ll promise it for next week. We’ll open the third season with a focus on Custom GPTs and how-to create different sorts, from simple instructions to leveraging third-party APIs.

If you have a specific task you’d like to see a Custom GPT for, don’t hesitate to comment, or reply to this email. Who knows, maybe we’ll build just that one! :)