Morfternight #65: It's a marathon, not a sprint
The one that wraps up the year.
🤩 Welcome to the three new Morfternighters who joined us last week.
We love to have you here, and I hope you’ll enjoy reading Morfternight.
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📷 Photo of the week
Almost There - More Photos
👋 Happy Holidays
I wish you the best, whatever you celebrate or if you don’t celebrate anything.
To be very candid, I am not a massive fan of the end of the year. I generally feel it adds non-negligible amounts of extra pressure and stress when in fact, January is just the month after December.
The end of the month, quarter, and year are all arbitrary checkpoints, almost irrelevant to making real change.
Real work happens at scales, simultaneously shorter and longer.
Improvement and iteration are daily and weekly disciplines. Improving a little bit every day and shipping an improvement every week or two allow for tight feedback loops, maximize learning and help spin the flywheel faster and faster.
On the other hand, it takes decades to change the world.
“I am in a marathon, not a sprint,” says the Automattic Creed, which has guided my professional life for the past 12 years.
🗺️ Three places to visit today
Morgan Housel shares a few of the Ideas That Changed [His] Life, and the one that resonates stronger with me is the last on his list: “Your personal experiences make up maybe 0.00000001% of what’s happened in the world but maybe 80% of how you think the world works.”
I found it quite interesting to read The BBC’s 15 Web Principles - 15 years later. What’s intriguing is how most of these principles still ring as valid in 2022 and are also consistently ignored by most of the web.
I mentioned ChatGPT and other tools based on large language models a few times, to the point that I am tempted to add “Machine Learning” in the description of Morfternight. One of the upcoming challenges will be figuring out How to spot AI-generated text, at least while these tools are still highly unreliable and experimental.
✈️ 2022 was the year we traveled again
Since March, it has become possible to fly again more easily after a two-year hiatus. I had the great privilege to meet many of my colleagues this year, from Costa Rica to Mexico, Sweden to Portugal, and London to the USA, where I traveled to San Francisco, Las Vegas, Austin, Denver, and New York City.
A back-of-envelope calculation tells me I met about 350 colleagues at meetups and a similarly large number of people at conferences.
Each of these encounters gave me joy and made me grow and progress.
Here’s to hoping that we never get locked down again!