The Leader's Paradox

16 Mar 2018

Paying attention to everyone else’s self-interest is in fact a precondition for one’s own ultimate well-being.

but…

There is something about the seductions of power that makes one lose sight of ethics and other people’s interests.

So much more to unpack here, but at very least, one should be able to appreciate the unceasing tension between the experience of wielding power and being an effective leader.

Just start writing and the rest will follow

14 Mar 2018

https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2018/03/13/write/

How uncanny. I'm glad I'm not alone in this journey of ramping up in writing.

Old School Blogs

13 Mar 2018

I chanced upon an old-school blog. The sort that was organised by months and years along the sidebar. It brought back memories of how I used to have a set of blogs that would be mass-loaded into tabs, and I would consume them one at a time.

It wasn't so much about the content as much as it was about checking if the person had actually written anything new. It was a little daring, a little unsanctioned. There was no curation, no algorithm prioritising what you should read next. It was about the person. It had to be about the person, because there was nothing else to fall back on.

Also, so much more thought would've been put into crafting those posts, which made them worthwhile.

Blogging vs Wiki-ing

13 Mar 2018

I tried blogging from Standard Notes earlier this evening. It was a nice and satisfying experience to be able to whip up an entry just like any other note and simply hit Publish to Blog for it to be magically published to listed.standardnotes.org.

I ran into a little snag when my note disappeared from Standard Notes (might've accidentally deleted) and now there was no way to unpublish the note other than asking the admin to help unpublish.

What was so different about blogging from Standard Notes compared to writing here?

It occured to me upon arriving here that in on typical blog platform, I get to start with a clean writing slate that then later gets automatically integrated back into a stream of posts.

Notes works more like a wiki, so I'm having to contend with a bunch of unfinished writings. It's just more mentally burdensome.

Defining my network

4 Mar 2018

The Internet of 2018 is now actually an amalgamation of tens (hundreds?) thousands of internets each larger and more prolific than the one Internet that we had in 2006. This means the concept of an all-reaching big B blog is

  1. a myth, and
  2. a race to the lowest common denominator

This brings me to my attempt to define who I might be addressing in my writings.

Update 13 Mar: I'm putting this off in favour of simply focusing on writing for now