August 26, 2025

⚡️ Not a bolt, but a whisper

Epiphanies are rarer than we think.

Hello! I'm Gina Trapani and once a month I round up the 10 best posts from my blog Note to Self in this newsletter. When the last issue arrived in my inbox, the first thing I saw was a big honkin' typo. Here's to practice over perfection.

1. I summited a personal mental mountain at my first 10-day silent meditation course. It was hard!
2. I didn't have any sort of revelation. Epiphanies are rarer than we think. When you ask a big question, the answer arrives not as a lightning bolt, but as a whisper.
3. A perfect phrase for the moment serves as both an indictment and a rallying call: Dan Sinker calls this the Who Cares Era. The most radical thing we can do is care.
4. When you wonder how someone achieved their success: the answer is always that they worked hard and got lucky.
5. Just like "life hack," "vibe code" became too broad an umbrella term to be useful. When someone says they vibe-coded an app, my first question is: How much of it do you understand?
6. All our ideas are downstream from the the ideas we take in. Garbage in, garbage out. That's why I'm setting up a new-old system for intentional inputs.
7. Jenn Schiffer left her tech job and turned her pixel art into handmade candles that were a hit in my house.
8. It’s common to look back at intense, adrenaline-driven times in one's career and feel nostalgia for the clarity of focus, but don't confuse intensity and passion.
9. PSA: You don't have to use generative AI "art" in your blog or other projects.
10. When dealing with feedback on my work, I still reference Ann Friedman's Disapproval Matrix. Lovers and critics, bring it on.

Thanks for reading. Reply to this email to let me know what you think.

– Gina