Writing

Winter holidaying in Cwmystwyth

I needed some time off. As part of an effort to spend less and explore more of what’s around me, I booked a week away near a village called Cwmystwyth in Ceredigion, Wales.

It’s easily drivable from Bristol and I also have friends a little further North, near Machynlleth. I picked it as I wanted to be somewhere remote, near mountains and running water. Check.

Cwmystwyth is a small village nestled alongside the river Ystwyth, which flows all the way west to Aberystwyth. Cwmystwyth literally means “valley of the river Ystwyth.” It sits in the middle of the Cambrian mountains. It is the exact centre point of Wales, according to Wikipedia. This is also West Wales, so it’s pretty wet.

I’m back

It’s been nearly 2 years, but I’m back writing again.

What happened? Well, I cofounded Almanac with some very smart people, and then this year we raised $9m in seed funding. Which was great news, but of course, also the reason I stopped writing.

Things are no less busy now, but I would like to share more thoughts, spurred on by so much of what is happening in the world at the moment: racial violence, global pandemic, political polarisation and an increasing intolerance of open discussion.

Learn more and blog better with Readwise

My Kindle is one of my favourite gifts from my wife. I resisted the idea of an electronic reader for a long time, but after seeing Gina use hers on holiday and at home, my curiosity grew.

Besides the convenience, a big selling point for me was highlighting—being able to select and save passages from what I was reading. I rarely read without taking notes, so being able to save and review notes digitally was an irresistible proposition.

Write your worries down

Too much of our time is lost struggling with painful feelings that we cannot express.

We try to move forward, try to put up a good fight, but there is something malign and pervasive colouring our mood. It drains our energy, saps our motivation, but remains out of sight. It’s uncomfortable, but even more important than that, it’s unclear.

Whether fear, worry, sadness or doubt—it is this lack of clarity that keeps us feeling stuck.

Hit the button

When you start writing its natural to obsess over the quality of what you share. You’ve read good writing—and this is not it. Your words look feeble and forced. Better to postpone your noble endeavour until you are worthy.

Here’s the underlying belief: these words aren’t good enough to publish, yet. I’ll keep going until they are. Procrastination, recalibration.

Here’s the truth:

It’s not about the right words; it’s about using your voice.

Why you should be writing in Markdown

It’s time to break the tyranny of note-taking apps and blogging platforms: write your online content in a universal language that encourages flow and keeps you focused on the content.

When you’re writing for the Internet, you want to be able to save and move your writings around as easily as possible. You don’t want each new app loosing bits of your formatting. After you’ve published your words, you don’t want them locked into that one particular presentation forever, right?

Organising your blogging with Trello and Sublime Text

Organising anything with Trello is a joy:

• Web and mobile versions of Trello mean you can easily edit your projects from anywhere. A lot of writing apps aren’t so portable.
• Simple to use: intuitive, visual and very low barrier to entry
• All backed up to The Cloud ☁️
• Really easy to drag and drop images into cards, as well as adding checklists
• It’s freeeeeee

You might use Trello to manage projects, weddings, holidays… but a blog?

Why to choose Ghost for your blog

2021 update: I no longer use Ghost to power this blog! But I still think it’s an outstanding project and that the company are pioneering many practices that should be more widespread. I still frequently recommend it to others. Alas, the nerd in me got hooked on blogging via writing offline and committing changes through git. This blog is now powered by Hugo.

Up until now, every time I wanted to start writing I’d expend 97% of my energy thinking about how I could build a blog, which features I want, testing fonts, browsing themes and saving colour schemes. The remaining 3% went towards some writing. It’s the curse of being a developer.

6 unfounded fears about writing & publishing online

It’s been five months since I launched this blog. I’ve written 14 articles, generated a whopping £2.68 in Amazon referral fees, and built a staggering 19-strong subscriber list.

But I wasn’t an overnight success. It’s taken me a long time to get to the point of publishing these posts. For years, I amassed notes and shared nothing. I was held back by a multitude of fears that pin most people down when they consider sharing their creative work.

What do I write about?

My writings tend to revolve around a few reocurring themes:

• Investing in perennial practises over short-term lifehacks. This means cultivating the slow habits that really make a difference to our minds and bodies. This is achieved through prioritising consistency and cultivating a skepticism towards the immediate solution.
• Protecting ourselves against the misdirection of attention from things that appear to provide fulfilment and instead focusing on those timeless sources of fulfilment under our noses. This involves: 1) discovering those practises that are worth investing in and 2) embedding them in our lives via ritual.
• Prioritising basic fitness as your primary health insurance and mental health aid. This comes with the happy consequence of looking good naked.
• Indulging in regular solitude and finding ways to carve silence into your life. Each of us— especially if we wish to be creative and productive—has to balance consumption with enough reflection to metabolise incoming information into insight.
• A reconnection with the body—the ancient emotions, intuitions and cues that are so often left behind. Questioning the tendency to live life exclusively through the medium of thought.
• Finding the sacred in the everyday. Discovering not just the practical but the profound. Giving ourselves to the friction of flourishing as a wellspring of meaning and wisdom instead of the one-dimensional struggle to maintain a state of happiness.
• Regularly reconnecting with your values and virtues, and building them into your daily life through ritual. To be fulfilled and productive you have to know what you’re shooting for, point yourself in that direction, and find ways of regularly course-correcting. Being the weird you want to see in the world
• Practising minimalism as a means of removing the bloat that prevents your values shining through more clearly. Minimalism is a noise reduction system.
• Understanding that every path has some pain. Pick the one you know will make you a better person by the end. Be vulernable and honest.
• A reckoning with suffering. Suffering is what is often most real to us and orchestrates a large part of our lives, yet we rarely discuss it. A conscious relationship with the simple and all-pervasive nature of suffering can remake our lives in ways we can barely imagine. By default we push suffering away but this distance creates a host of other problems for us and separates us from one of the most important source of wisdom and growth.
  • We’re surrounded by wildly different surroundings compared to our ancestors of 10,000 years ago, but our internal struggles with fear, craving, jealousy, love, bliss and deceit have remained remarkably constant.
• Practising forgiveness—towards others but most importantly for ourselves. Each of us is fallible and liable to err. Avoiding political ideologies that place the blame with certain groups or economic policies.
• The joy of reading great books—their ability to help us to correct errors in thinking and open up new vistas and possibilities in us. Reading classics allows us to participate in the great conversation we as a species have been having with ourselves for over 5,000 years.
• The therapeutic gift of writing and journalling in making what is cloudy and chaotic within us visible and meaningful.
• The prevalence and challenge of anxiety. Why it matters, how it happens to the best of us, and how to standup to it and grow into someone better because of it.
• How to use technology with intention and care, instead of following the multi-tasking path of least resistance.