22 Jul 2025 #writing
I’ve decided to start a new writing adventure: writing a book.
I’ve had to debunk lots of limiting beliefs.
- “I need a publisher”
- “I need 100% new material”
- “Writing a book is hard.”
Wrong!
After going down the rabbit-hole of searching how to write and self-publish a book, here’s what I’ve learned:
1. A hit book creates demand for more books.
After Atomic Habits, there was an audience interested in habit creation. Then, more books about the same topic came out.
A hit book isn’t necessarily competence. It’s signal of market interest.
2. You can plagiarize yourself.
We can remix our own ideas. Credits to James Altucher’s podcast.
A good post can become part of a book chapter. A series of posts can become a short book. A personal story can become an intro.
That’s the strategy Yuval Noah Harari used to write 21 Lessons for the 21st Century. He compiled lots of disperse ideas into a book.
More examples? The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck was a blog post. The Psychology of Money, a series of posts.
You see? We can repurpose our posts into books.
3. A book’s job is to tell stories.
(Another lesson from James Altucher’s podcast.)
Always be storytelling. Stories are the best way to make a message memorable.
Our job is to tell stories, not to present facts - unless we’re writing a textbook or something.
4. A book lives forever.
Your book doesn’t need to be a best-seller at launch. It can succeed anytime. And there’s plenty of time for that.
21 Jul 2025 #misc
Yesterday, I revisited an Asian restaurant I hadn’t been to in years.
It’s a family business in a neighborhood I used to live in. It’s still run by the same Chinese couple. And interestingly, their level of conversational Spanish is rather intermediate. Still the same as when I met them. Probably an A2, if you’re familiar with language proficiency levels.
But they know enough Spanish to explain what’s in every dish, take your order, and take your payment. And that’s all they need.
Their Spanish may be basic, but it’s enough to meet their daily needs. Do they speak Spanish? Absolutely. Maybe not about politics, philosophy, or the meaning of life.
Too often we think fluency is about attending a language institute and getting straight As on an exam. But fluency isn’t about perfection.
Fluency is about connection and communication. It’s about knowing the right words for the right moment. And the Chinese couple running the restaurant are completely fluent.
Maybe you’re not opening a restaurant, but here’s how I’d learn a language for work from scratch and 10 hacks I’ve used to learn foreign languages faster.
20 Jul 2025 #writing
You can smell AI-generated content from miles away.
You can feel it. It’s the opening lines, the weird word choice.
- “Delve”
- “Ever-evolving”
- “In our fast-paced world…”
You can’t fight against it.
Recently, I learned how to stand out from AI while listening to James Altucher’s podcast. I forgot to take notes, but he said something like this,
To stand out from AI, we have to live an interesting life.
AI only remixes content it was trained on. AI can’t beat an authentic voice with impactful stories. We have to live our stories and pour them into our writing.
My writing resonated more once I started sharing personal stories. They turned my writing from crickets to likes. So tell stories only you can tell. That’s how you truly stand out from the noise.
19 Jul 2025 #productivity
We think of guns, car chases, and James Bond when talking about spies.
Productivity rarely comes to mind. But real espionage, as shown in TV shows like The Agency or Lioness, is full of chaos, multitasking, and shifting priorities.
Thanks to Mr. YouTube algorithm, I stumbled upon an interview with a former American spy:
He answers a ton of questions about espionage and psychology. But here are three battle-tested lessons about productivity I learned:
#1. We all have to balance the same three resources. Energy, money, and time. Two of them are limited. The other one, not so much. That’s why we should optimize for energy and time.
#2. Task saturation is when you have more tasks than you can comfortably handle. When that happens, you become so overwhelmed, you stop thinking rationally. Think of how many tasks you can handle at the same time and subtract two. That’s your sweet spot.
#3. When you’re task saturated, always tackle the task you can finish the fastest. And then, the next fastest one and so on. That gives you a sense of progress and momentum.
With those three lessons, you’re ready to get things done like a real spy. Don’t forget the cool gadgets and masks from Mission Impossible.
18 Jul 2025 #mondaylinks
Hey, there.
Here are 4 links I thought were worth sharing this week:
#1. Here’s how to sell yourself (3min). It distills the tactics from the guy who landed and balanced multiple startup jobs at the same time. He must have done something right to land those jobs in the first place, right?
#2. Want to build software quickly? Here’s a guide on how to do it (12min).
#3. When I hear “ergonomic,” I think of chairs or keyboards. But what about repositories? Here’s how to make repos ergonomic too (14min). It starts with the README file.
#4. Like human languages, programming languages grow, evolve, and die. They borrow features from one another. Here are some of the already dead but influential programming languages (20min). I used one of those in high school.
And in case you missed it, I wrote on my blog about two tiny fixes to improve your communication at work (2min) and 10 pieces of tech we use before breakfast without noticing them (3min).
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See you next time,
Cesar
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