Tag: blog

Books

It’s time for book snippets ✄

patmcg2 Comments

I’ve been doing super summaries on this blog for a while now. The idea is to condense a great book into a super distilled version that covers the core concepts as quickly as possible. Hopefully the super summary is useful, and if your curiosity is teased enough, then you can read the actual book.

I think it’s a win-win, and these continue to be some of my most popular posts.

But some books simply can’t be super-summarized.

The book Show Your Work has has been sitting on my coffee table taunting me for months. I pick it up and read a bit, absorb whatever nuggets of inspiration I get out of it, and then put it away for a while.

I keep thinking I’ll write up a super-summary on this little 184-page book. I mean, how hard could that be?

Ironically enough, this tiny, square, innocent-looking book is so densely packed with good material that a super summary is nearly impossible. I think I could but the book in half, maybe? But who wants a 92-page summary of a book? 🤔

So I’m starting a new thing here: a book snippet. I’ll take one little concept at a time from a book and post it. And then post a series of excerpts over time for any give book.

This approach fits (so to speak) with my goal of keeping things short. So with that, stay tuned for the first snippet.

👉 First snippet: “You’re only as good as your record collection.” 🎧

This little book defies the super summary.
creativity · Quotes

A good blog is like this item of clothing 👗

patmcg3 Comments

The best quotes are both funny and true, and therefore memorable. At the end of this talk good on conversations, Celeste Headlee credits her sister with this quote.

A good conversation is like a miniskirt; short enough to retain interest, but long enough to cover the subject.

The sister might have borrowed the idea from Winston Churchill. 🤷🏻‍♂️

I think the idea generalizes to writing too, so I’m going to adapt the spirit of this quote for my own purposes.

A good conversation blog is like a miniskirt; short enough to retain interest, but long enough to cover the subject.

And it’s working. I already deleted three sentences from this post – and added this one. 🤔

Before I forget, here’s a salacious photo – as required – to catch your attention.

Via Pinterest (I don’t think miniskirts even existed in Winston Churchill’s time 😆)

See also

Don’t Be Like Uncle Colm

“I didn’t have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.”

Me · Practical

In case you notice a change in case

patmcg1 Comment

It struck me recently that I didn’t have a strategy for capitalizing my blog posts. So I’m making a change.

As the sole proprietor of this blog, I hereby decree that henceforth and regressively back to 1 June, year 2021, all blog posts shall follow the Sentence case standard.

Title Case was starting to bug me. It was overly formal and hard to read, as in Who Do You Want to Be On The Other Side Of This Crisis? And it was confusing. Which words do you capitalize, again? I took my best guess on 5 Things You Don’t Need to be Happy, Fulfilled, and Successful.

Plus Capital Case was constantly being dissed up by quotation-titles such as “The only real escape from hell is to conquer it.”

Capital Case also made it hard distinguish Proper Nouns from normal words, as in Favorite Austin Hotel Pools. Was that post about hotel pools in Austin? Or was it about pools at the Austin Hotel?

I’m pretty happy with this change, so much so that I am tempted to go back and fix all the old posts, such as “Favorite Austin Hotel Pools” to “Favorite Austin hotel pools”. But there are 742 of them, and sometimes it’s better to live with your imperfect past anyways.

With that, enjoy all the easier-to-read blog titles, future reader. I’m going to figure out punctuation for quotations next. 🤷🏻‍♂️