Hello Friends,
I hope 2023 is everything you’ve hoped for (and more)!
Here’s some quick updates:
📔 Profile With Day One
I’m excited to share that I’ve been profiled by none other than Day One (a.k.a. the #1 journaling app in the world, with millions of downloads and the winner of several Apple awards)! 🔎
As it turns out, they have a blog series where they highlight Day One users that have accomplished some pretty sweet “streaks” of journaling using the app, and they loved the fact that I not only had a streak of over a thousand consecutive days — but also (naturally) that I created an online course sharing with the world how I use Day One to journal everyday. As you might recall, the course I’m referring to is “Micah’s Guide to Journaling With Mindfulness”, and if you’d like some additional context about my motivation for journaling and how I use Day One for this process — you can read my interview here (which also includes a discount coupon code for the course):
https://dayoneapp.com/blog/streak-story-micah-moss
🏃♀️ The Tortoise & The Hare
I’m sure you’ve heard this old chestnut before:
It’s a marathon, not a sprint.
As I was doing some light reading, I came across the story of Cliff Young.
In 1983, a weeklong ultramarathon spanning from Sydney, Australia to Melbourne was kicked off, and a sixty-one-year-old potato farmer named Cliff Young joined in the race—clad in overalls and work boots. He started off with a slow gait (and he soon found himself miles behind the pack). As the other runners slept at night, however, Cliff grabbed a quick cat nap … and kept on going. Some five days and nights later, Mr. Cliff Young came in first, and ended up setting a new course record.
I guess the reason I’m bringing this up is because A) this is quite possibly the most Australian story I’ve ever heard, and B) sometimes I need to hear these reminders myself — so I’m just going to call out a few things:
Consistency isn’t glamorous, but it is powerful.
Also:
If you think you’re “late” to something — “late” is merely a figment of your own imagination.
… and not to put too fine a point on it:
It’s never too late (or you’re never too old) to start.
🖼️ Make Something Wonderful
If you haven’t heard, the Steve Jobs Archive has released an official first-hand biographical book titled Make Something Wonderful: Steve Jobs in his own words, comprised of never-seen-before interviews and artifacts. This book has a special place in my heart …
One — I used to work for Apple, and I can certainly say (at least this was my experience a decade or so ago) that the ethos of Steve Jobs definitely did permeate every facet of the company — from the training, to the design, to the empathy, curiosity and wonder we were encouraged to share with each and every person that walked through those doors.
Two — I used to walk around Reed College when I lived in Portland (it’s a lovely campus), and Jobs was a (famous) attendee and (later) dropout of the eccentric student body. I ❤️ Reed College (how can you not)?
This book is chock-full of first hand accounts of pivotal moments in Apple’s history, like when Steve was interviewed during the launch of the iPhone — and he looked back twenty-three years when they launched the pivotal Macintosh in 1984:
I remember the week before we launched the Mac, we all got together, and we said, ‘Every computer is going to work this way’. You can’t argue about that anymore. You can argue about how long it will take, but you can’t argue about it anymore.
The rest, as they say, is history … More about the Macintosh:
In another age, Steve believed, the people on the Macintosh team would have been writers, musicians, or artists. “The feelings and the passion that people put into it were completely indistinguishable from a poet or a painter,” he said. He called their work a form of love and their product “a computer for the rest of us,” with a mouse as well as arrow keys, desktop icons instead of programming commands, and, at startup, instead of a blinking cursor: a smile.
It’s easy to forget how revolutionary the Mac really was at the time, in an age of giant / unfriendly cantankerous devices that you had to access via complex computing commands, etc.
The book’s also worth perusing just to check out cool ephemera from Jobs’ life, like this artifact:
If you have any interest in Mr. Jobs, the discipline of product design, the history of modern computing, of if you’re a fan of the (criminally underrated) show Halt And Catch Fire (which was loosely inspired by Jobs and other early computing visionaries) — do yourself a favor and pick up this (free) ebook (or browse the beautifully-designed website version of this book).
R.I.P. Steve. 💾
🖋 Parting Words
I want to be around people that do things. I don’t want to be around people anymore that judge or talk about what people do. I want to be around people who dream, and support, and do things. — Amy Poehler