OMM: digital declutter, revamping newsletters

What's On My Mind

Hi,

I am completely redoing my newsletter and scrapping the old style. I enjoyed the "Mindpill" for the things it gave me: practice, repetition, and learning lessons. But I've outgrown my old style and want something more refreshing--a lot of my perspectives, ideas, and overall mindsets have changed.

I did some reflecting a while back and here are the points of revision I am applying to my new newsletter:

Graphics

Before I use to whip up a quick black-and-white graphic, initially they were cool, but over time they became a stressor that honestly didn't bring much to the table when finished.

This newsletter is much more minimal. No graphics, more neat ideas.

Topics

I felt like I was writing about the same things over and over again. This primarily came from Being "trapped" in the "mental matrix" of online productivity and self improvement content.

Content won't always be 100% original, but I'd like to spread my wings a bit more - talking about things I actually find interesting.

The name

A lot of my revisions come from a sense of inauthenticity I felt after publishing and reading out loud--will touch on this more in a second.

But same goes for the name. "Mind-Pill". Corny.

"On My Mind" - much more genuine. "What's on my mind?" That's a pretty typical phrase to describe things your thinking about. I prefer it much more.

My grammar/writing style

Again just felt inauthentic and honestly cringe to read back to myself. If the focus is more on the topics/ideas being written about, not much of the "grammatical gymnastics" is needed to convey the point.

Writing how I would speak in real life is much more authentic.

Authenticity

I've changed the content I consumed and the people I listen too entirely based off of how authentic they are. How transparent are they? Are they honest about their flaws? Do they showcase nuanced/specific parts of their life?

The more you create content of any form, writing/videos, the more the gaps in your inauthenticity start to show--lies, inconsistencies, contradictions. The "fakeness" feeling is what draws people away form your advice.

This also goes for grammar. Notice any misspells/mistypes/typos? Correct, I'm human.

Structure

Again, back to minimalism. More focus on the ideas in their "raw form". Each issue will have one main "What's On My Mind" section, and a latter "Back-Of-Mind" section. All ideas that I find interesting or made note of. Can't promise any hustle culture techniques or money-making methods.

Took a lot of inspiration from Chris Williamson's "3 Minute Monday" (he said he actually enjoys writing his weekly newsletter)

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These changes made me feel a lot better about writing future issues, and remove a lot more friction.

Enjoy

Back-Of-Mind

3 Things I've Learned

#1 minimalism is much more fulfilling than the pursuit.

At the end of the day, it's not the things that make you happy, it's what you can do with the things.

If your enjoyment comes from the behaviors you have, the habits you establish, and the lifestyle you create--you won't rely on extra "things" in order to maker you happy.

If you are happy with what you have right now, you will be more happy with upgrades of the material things in your life. If you aren't happy with what you have now, you will be less happy with the upgrades of the material things in your life.

#2 truth is objective.

If truth is subjective, is that truth claim objectively true? No? Well then that's an inherit contradiction. Yes? Well then you admit truth is objective.

#3 economic trends predict that elephants will go extinct.

Learned this while writing a research paper for college.

As elephants die, the rarity of the tusks increase. Proportionally, the price for elephant tusks also increase due to higher rarity. Since the prices increase, they offset the costs for illegal gangs to go and hunt elephants, hence the trend goes until elephant population = 0.

The only way to change this would be to remove human/economic desire for elephant tusks.

Happy holidays,
Nathan