Elezea — quotes

Stand out of our Light

Rian van der Merwe — Sat, 18 Apr 2026 01:07:15 GMT

It’s my firm conviction, now more than ever, that the degree to which we are able and willing to struggle for ownership of our attention is the degree to which we are free.

– James Williams, Stand out of our Light: Freedom and Resistance in the Attention Economy

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What to do about time goblins

Rian van der Merwe — Mon, 20 Jan 2025 15:39:00 GMT

Once we’ve got a plan and that plan is locked we’re in this rare and special place where the things that will pull us off-course haven’t happened yet.

— Raw Signal Group, What to do about time goblins

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Google is combining its Android and hardware teams — and it’s all about AI

Rian van der Merwe — Sat, 20 Apr 2024 14:56:32 GMT

Maybe it’s my age showing but I’m with Gruber on this one:

I would argue, strenuously, that the phone is the natural AI device. It already has: always-on networking, cameras, a screen, microphones, and speakers. Everyone owns one and almost everyone takes theirs with them almost everywhere they go.

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The media dies a little less

Rian van der Merwe — Sun, 31 Mar 2024 14:33:45 GMT

For anyone else following along on “The Death of Media”… There are plenty of dire stories about layoffs and newsrooms shutting down, so I like finding stories of innovation (or small steps) in the space that appear to be working. I think 404 Media is doing great work, and their latest addition of a full-text RSS feed for paid subscribers makes me very happy:

Creating this feed was logistically quite complicated. We are thankful to Maxime Valette of FeedPress, who helped us make the feed, and to Ryan Singel of Outpost, who helped us sync the paid feeds with our Ghost member list. We’re also thankful to our paid subscribers, who have made it possible for us to pay for the development work needed to offer this and have also been very patient with us as we’ve worked behind the scenes to develop this feature.

In other actually good news on the media, The Atlantic is (finally) profitable! Mostly because they went hard on subscriptions.

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Actually, the internet's always been this bad

Rian van der Merwe — Sat, 30 Mar 2024 17:20:26 GMT

Some really interesting (and surprising) takeaways in this research, and a very good analysis by Caitlin Dewey in Actually, the internet’s always been this bad:

A team of Italian researchers evaluated more than half a billion comments spanning 30 years, and concluded that online discourse is no more ‘toxic’ today than it was in the early 1990s. […] Overall, the study found that the prevalence of both toxic speech and highly toxic users were extremely low. But the longer any conversation goes on, on virtually any platform, the more toxic it becomes.

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Can You Tweet Your Way to Impact?

Rian van der Merwe — Sat, 30 Mar 2024 17:15:14 GMT

Cal Newport writes about some recent research on the impact of social media followers/traffic in Can You Tweet Your Way to Impact? The tl;dr is that audience != impact:

In this narrow look at social media and science a more general lesson about this technology emerges. Maintaining an aggressive presence in these online spaces can increase the number of people who temporarily encounter you or your work. But these encounters are often ephemeral, rarely leading to more serious engagement. It’s exciting to receive increased attention in the present, but it may have little effect on your impact in the future.

I would say that this is true for me as well. Tweeting never got me much, even in the “olden days”. But I’ve made lots of real connections (and even got hired) because of this slow, steady blog.

Speaking of Cal, I just started on his latest book Slow Productivity: The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout and I’m really liking it so far. From the intro:

I want to instead propose an entirely new way for you, your small business, or your large employer to think about what it means to get things done. I want to rescue knowledge work from its increasingly untenable freneticism and rebuild it into something more sustainable and humane, enabling you to create things you’re proud of without requiring you to grind yourself down along the way.

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Building Engineering

Rian van der Merwe — Tue, 26 Mar 2024 13:49:35 GMT

This is a really great post by Ben Werdmuller. On the surface it’s about Building Engineering, but it’s mostly about good leadership and how to build successful products. I very much agree with his conclusion:

The most interesting and successful organizations have an externally-focused human mission and an internal focus on treating their humans well. That’s the only way to build technology well: to empower the people who are doing it, with a focus on empathy and inclusion, and a mission that galvanizes its community to work together.

There’s some great advice throughout, so I recommend reading the whole thing!

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The meek inherit the earth

Rian van der Merwe — Mon, 25 Mar 2024 14:11:07 GMT

Austin Kleon has a really interesting post on the word “meek” in the Beatitudes. In short, “meek” doesn’t mean “weak”:

Meekness as a habit of calm attentiveness, stillness, freedom from the fretting worry of keeping control, a stillness that allows others to feel welcome around you, can appear as something very different from the shrinking back that the word so easily suggests. If anger is very much to do with the “pushing out and pushing away” element in our psyche, “meekness” in the sense of a welcoming stillness is the opposite of this.

That definition reminds me of my earlier post On kindness and decisiveness. I should’ve thrown a “meek” in there!

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The shame of LinkedIn

Rian van der Merwe — Mon, 25 Mar 2024 13:56:17 GMT

I found the article I Asked Experts for Tips to Navigate LinkedIn’s Cringe Factor surprisingly helpful, not just for its advice but also because it articulates well why LinkedIn can feel so weird sometimes:

LinkedIn users are trapped in a culture of professionalism and all that comes with it. The person you are with your boss or a client is probably not your truest self. This setting makes posting — or even just creating and maintaining a profile — feel extra high-stakes and, in turn, contrived. On LinkedIn, there is no dancing like no one’s watching.

Also:

The goal for most people on LinkedIn is not to be a creator, it’s just to live to fight another day in the working world.

In other interesting LinkedIn news I was going to link to earlier, also see Facebook and X gave up on news. LinkedIn wants to fill the void:

Finding a home for news publishers in 2024 isn’t about finding a perfect fit, but rather finding one that’s close enough. The traffic fire-hose days of the 2010s aren’t coming back. And LinkedIn is not the secret to infinite page views. But it might be fertile ground to build an audience with manageable issues.

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Building Brex 3.0, March 2024

Rian van der Merwe — Mon, 25 Mar 2024 13:44:25 GMT

I wouldn’t want to work in an environment like this because even though delivery is a fun part of building product, I find that for most PMs it’s so much more fulfilling (and you usually get better results!) when they are part of strategy and discovery as well. That said, I’m now long enough into this product journey to recognize that as long as you have a team of people who love execution and are excellent at it, this is a completely valid way to build a company:

We changed this model with Brex 3.0. We killed our planning process, and now have One Roadmap for the entire company. I [Brex CEO] am the ultimate editor of everything that ships. We release 4 times a year, and each release has no more than 3 big themes. This forces me to choose what truly matters, allowing us to make a large, company-affecting investment in the few things that are step-function changes to the customer experience, and drop everything else.

Basecamp works in a similar way, and it works for them. I do appreciate that both companies are honest about how they work, so PMs know what they’re in for and what’s expected of them. The frustration only sets in if PMs think they have some autonomy over their work, and then slowly find out about the “shadow roadmap” they weren’t aware of. Just bring it all into the light, I say.

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Can AI therapists do better than the real thing?

Rian van der Merwe — Sun, 17 Mar 2024 14:19:41 GMT

My wife is a therapist, so the story Can AI therapists do better than the real thing? (oh hello, Betteridge’s law of headlines) piqued my interest, since we’ve had lots of conversations about this kind of thing.

The story starts off with some really interesting anecdotes about people forming “relationships” with their therapy chatbots, but it then turns towards some of the concerns and drawbacks, and how one client (not a fan of the use of “patient” in the article) ultimately dealt with the bot they created.

One example of the things that AI therapy bots can’t replace:

Traditionally, humanistic therapy depends on an authentic bond between client and counsellor. “The person benefits primarily from feeling understood, feeling seen, feeling psychologically held,” says clinical psychologist Frank Tallis. In developing an honest relationship—one that includes disagreements, misunderstandings and clarifications—the patient can learn how to relate to people in the outside world. “The beingness of the therapist and the beingness of the patient matter to each other,” Grosz says.

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The Trap of Tying Your Identity to Your Job Title

Rian van der Merwe — Sat, 16 Mar 2024 15:42:00 GMT

Elena Verna makes some really great points in her post on The Trap of Tying Your Identity to Your Job Title. If you are struggling with questions around title and importance and what it all means, this one is for you. This point on external expectations particularly stood out for me:

Perhaps most concerning is the inclination to make career decisions based on perceived market expectations rather than personal happiness and well-being. This mindset propels individuals down a path not of their choosing, driven by the desire to conform to societal benchmarks of success rather than pursuing what genuinely brings joy and satisfaction.

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What is strategy—explained with a useful puzzle metaphor

Rian van der Merwe — Thu, 14 Mar 2024 23:31:24 GMT

This is about content marketing but Fio’s post What is strategy—explained with a useful puzzle metaphor is very relevant to product people as well:

At its core, that’s what strategy is: taking a problem, discovering what makes it hard, and finding the right way(s) to solve it. The concept is super obvious when applied to a puzzle: you intuitively know that picking random pieces from the pile and expecting them to slot right into place is not a sensible approach…

…and yet, that’s often how content folks expect marketing programmes to work: we bypass the diagnosis and guiding policy phases, jump straight into picking tactics, and expect that all the pieces will automagically fit together in the end.

Another reminder (which I think we need to hear almost every day) not to jump into implementation too quickly. Take time to understand the problem and the opportunity first.

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Figma’s CEO on life after the company’s failed sale to Adobe

Rian van der Merwe — Sun, 10 Mar 2024 16:11:58 GMT

Alex Heath has a really interesting interview with Figma’s CEO Dylan Field, covering life at Figma after regulators forced Adobe to abandon its $20 billion acquisition of his company. It covers a wide range of topics, but I wanted to highlight Field’s thoughts on generative AI, which largely matches my own viewpoint:

If I was to zoom out even further to knowledge work, we’re very much in a paradigm of AI as a tool and AI helping people get work done, but it’s not necessarily a replacement. I really think that there’s a human in the loop going forward in that AI might be a useful tool, but we all know its limits in terms of hallucinations, in terms of potential inaccuracies. Even if you apply it to rote tasks, it’s important to check the work. And you know better than anyone as a writer that the current models do not match your ability to write, let alone gain context in a conversation to ask the right questions or show the intelligence that you have as a journalist.

If you think about what it takes to create great design, there’s so much in that context window that’s emotional or thinking temporally about a brand experience or a user flow. I just don’t see how, in the near term, AI is able to have that as part of its context, which means that humans are providing that.

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In defense of defensiveness

Rian van der Merwe — Sat, 09 Mar 2024 00:55:06 GMT

Mandy Brown (once again!) cuts through with some tough love advice for all of us:

If you have feedback you want to share but you’re worried about how someone might respond, stop: back up and let go of whatever conclusions or interpretations you’re holding and think about what questions you have. You think someone was rude in a PR, or seemed unprepared in a meeting, or delivered research that was half baked? Set those judgments aside for the moment and practice asking about their own experience and perceptions. Questions like, what was your thought process when you worked on this? Or, what were you feeling when you added that note? Or even the evergreen, how are you doing right now? are much more likely to be generative than awkwardly lobbing feedback at someone and then ducking to avoid the retort.

Trust that just as you can be responsible for assessing the difference between when you’re in real danger and when you’re simply learning, they can too.

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No, but phrased in the form of a question

Rian van der Merwe — Sat, 09 Mar 2024 00:47:25 GMT

In No, but phrased in the form of a question the Raw Signal team gives some great advice about how to handle those seemingly out-of-nowhere senior exec requests as a leader:

The problem is that as you get more senior maintaining productivity and de-risking execution is no longer good enough. Your job is not stability for its own sake. Your job is to make your team an instrumental piece of the organization’s success. And yes, one piece of that is making sure they can focus on their work. […]

The more senior you get, the more your approach to change needs to evolve from concern and critique, to curiosity. Whether that’s the CEO and their team bringing forward a new strategy, or a colleague pulling you aside after a meeting with an idea. Just for a minute, park the questions about implementation, and look at the idea on its merits.

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Useful

Rian van der Merwe — Sat, 09 Mar 2024 00:44:18 GMT

I love Molly Graham’s career advice in Useful:

One of the most important lessons I have learned over and over again is that the greatest thing you can do for your career is to be the person that everyone in the room knows they can rely on to get things done. Be the person that makes everyone else look good. Be the person that everyone wants to work with again.

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Explorations On Leadership

Rian van der Merwe — Sun, 03 Mar 2024 15:25:07 GMT

Big +1 from me on James Whatley’s thoughts on leadership in the latest edition of his Five things on a Friday newsletter:

Demonstrating that you as a leader are imperfect, that you get things wrong; that you are fallible—and doing so in a way that shows that it’s safe to open up and be vulnerable—enables and creates the feeling of psychological safety. You’re saying “I, the person who is meant to be leading this team, can be vulnerable therefore this place, this team, that we all work in, is a place where you can feel safe to be vulnerable too.”

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The anatomy of a people-first job ad

Rian van der Merwe — Sun, 03 Mar 2024 14:30:20 GMT

I love all the advice Charlotte Carnehl gives in The anatomy of a people-first job ad. If you’re about to go into a hiring phase, definitely bookmark this one for when it’s time to write the job description. One example:

When looking for a new job, it’s not only the position and responsibilities that are part of the package, but also the people I’ll be working with. So please tell me in your job ad: Who will be my manager? Who will I work and interact with most? Once I know, I can learn more about my potential future colleagues, and look at their writing or social media posts—just like you will do your research about me.

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In IndieWeb interactions: what builds connection?

Rian van der Merwe — Sun, 03 Mar 2024 14:29:00 GMT

Tracy Durnell brings up a good point about the importance of “lightweight interactions” in our digital communication. I remember the blowback against these kinds of “reaction messages” when they first became a thing. But I think Tracy is right that in a lot of ways, they keep our relationships strong:

The idea that lightweight interactions like a thumbs up or a “love it” comment are not valuable has, I suspect, grown out of a distrust of corporate-owned social media platforms mediating, coopting, and commodifying our interactions and engagements with each other. But, start learning about relationships and community and you quickly realize that these little exchanges are the glue that bonds us together. That relationships are built on repeated interactions, and that they must be maintained through continued interactions.

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