Hi friends,

Welcome back - finally - to another issue of Dan's Notes.

If you're new here, Dan's Notes is a weekly email series I started in 2022 for writing practice, where I shared interesting links I'd read that week with highlights and commentary.

While the links were a hit and sending a weekly email did get me writing more, it made my Sunday evenings pretty stressful and the pace made it difficult to be consistently good. After 11 straight weeks I took a break for Coachella and had zero interest in restarting the practice after I broke the streak. Maybe I should have hired the Duolingo owl on retainer.

Hi friends,

Dan's Notes will take a break next weekend; I'll be at Coachella and I'm very much looking forward to unplugging for a few days.

Big thanks to everyone who's been following along for these past 11 issues - I've enjoyed all of your replies and online + offline chats, and despite this project being a real love/hate relationship sometimes, having to write and send something once per week has been a good habit for me, and I thank you for coming along for the ride. ✌️

Last week I shared an AI art-making tool called Midjourney that produces art from text prompts. This week OpenAI announced a similar tool called DALL-E, and the results are even more incredible. Nick Cammarata has a long thread of DALL-E illustrations made from his friends' Twitter bios:

And here's another thread with DALL-E-generated images and their prompts:

These objects don't exist

I'm currently obsessed with this new AI art-making tool called Midjourney that's in closed beta right now. You feed it a prompt, say, "sony 2004 portable bioreactor" - and get this:

The AI art era is going to be wild.

Hi friends,

In issue #1 I shared a link about the science of waking up and declared an experiment of going for a walk every morning shortly after waking up. I had some fun conversations with friends after that email and many of you seemed interested in the concept, so here's a short update about that, 8 weeks later.

The morning walks only lasted for about two weeks. Eventually I returned to reading + writing with my usual cup of coffee shortly after waking up. Ultimately I didn't feel like going for a walk matched my usual headspace in the mornings. I'm more of a Morning Pages guy - what I need in the morning is not 30 minutes alone with my brain; I need a notes app and a computer keyboard.

What did stick was some changes prompted by a link I shared in issue #3 about rituals. Rituals are the key to doing things consistently. When motivation and discipline fall short, rituals help nudge you towards action.

Hi friends,

Only a few links today - my reading list was a bit empty this week.

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Hope for the Future

Hi friends,

Lately I've been thinking about the concept of playbooks.

A playbook is a collection of methods and tactics for how to take action in a given scenario. They're most commonly thought of as a sports thing, but it's an effective tool to deploy in life, too.

Here are some examples:

Hi friends - welcome to Issue 5. If you're new here (welcome!) you can read weeks 1-4 here.

This week I finished reading Fixer Upper: How to Repair America’s Broken Housing Systems by Jenny Schuetz, a Senior Fellow at Brookings Metro and an expert in urban economics and housing policy. There's a solid summary in Brookings by the author here and a brief Twitter thread here.

In short: we have a huge shortage of housing in America right now, primarily due to a handful of factors such as incredibly strict zoning laws and homeowners who are incentivized to oppose any new construction to keep their property values high:

Hi friends,

I'm hoping to get into a little more essay-writing in the coming weeks, and perhaps narrow the range of topics into something a little more focused. (Or maybe some of you love a weekly email that touches on personal development, sleep science, technology, US fiscal policy, and supply chains – I don't know. Tell me!) Truthfully these emails haven't quite lived up to my own expectations, but that's why I was very clear from the beginning that is writing practice :) Honestly I'm just pumped that I've made it to week 4. Maybe next week I'll send this thing before midnight. Small goals.

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Hi friends,

Chessa and I have begun down the long path of planning our wedding, which, lest we surrender our hopes, dreams, and bank accounts to the wedding-industrial complex, means it's time for some simple Google trickery to navigate around the marketing machines and find authentic recommendations.

Google search is dying

Hi! Welcome to Issue 2 of Dan's Notes. We don't have a better title yet but I'm officially out of "one and done" territory 🎉

For those of you who are new here (welcome!), I started this weekly email as writing practice. I'm sharing a few of my favorite links from the past week plus anything else that's on my mind.

Results of last week's "morning walks" experiment

Dan's Notes / Issue 1

Hi! 👋 Thanks for joining my new email list :)

I'm excited about this project. As I said on Instagram, this is a new exercise for me in writing in public. One of my favorite practices is saving all of the interesting links I find during the week and spending time over the weekend reading, writing, and connecting the dots between themes I'm interested in.

So, as writing practice, I'll be sharing my favorite links from the week along with some of my own commentary on them.