(in my opinion, anyway)
I should have done this last week, shouldn’t I? I know, it’s 2025 now, but — my boy’s still off school, I have a new puppy to look after, my life is chaos, and so I thought this would be a good chance to fire out some stuff that you might have missed over the last year. Hope you find something useful, and I’ll see you next week.
Joel x
🎥 Video – 6 life-changing skills anyone can learn (in 6-12 months)
Pretty self-explanatory: I think stuff like talking to people, writing, drawing and learning to learn are so fundamental to quality of life that everyone should learn them. Here are the best resources I’ve found for doing that.
📝 Newsletter – Put something funny on the post-it
If there’s a summary of what I think makes work really good rather than just fine, I think it might be this.
📝 Newsletter – Occam’s Razor vs Arnold’s Shotgun
Riffing off the above article, I decided to invent my own mental model. I’ve come up with two more gif-based ones since (Candy’s Medal and Goldblum’s Razor).
📰 Article – Productivity tips for lazy people
Me for the Guardian, condensing everything I know about productive into a bit less than 2,000 words.
📰 Article – How Rebel Ridge reinvented action movies
I don’t do a tonne for the Guardian on movies and TV, but Jeremy Saulnier’s Rebel Ridge was too good to ignore.
🎥 Video – How I stay in shape in my 40s
This one underperformed — my viewers want to know about reading and learning, not weights — but it’s a video I spent a tonne of time thinking about, and it really does have my best advice for staying in shape as you age (or before the ageing really hits you).
📝 Newsletter – In defence of being quite cool
This was a long newsletter, based mostly on a chat I went to with author David Mitchell. Not my usual style, but I hope it’s interesting.
🎥 Video – How To Manage All Your Interests (and get real results)
I do a lot of stuff, but I mostly manage to fit it all in. Here’s how!
📰 Article – I have finally mastered meditation – with the help of my tiny new puppy
Fun fact: I wanted to call this “I’ve mastered meditation…by watching my puppy poop.” The Guardian wouldn’t let me.
Credit to the Original Article | Explore More of Their Work If You Found This Article Enjoyable.
https://joelsnape.substack.com/p/just-start-special-the-best-stuff
