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The Life Dinner, Stonecutter Story, & More

Sahil Bloom

Welcome to the 242 new members of the curiosity tribe who have joined us since Wednesday. Join the 57,887 others who are receiving high-signal, curiosity-inducing content every single week.

What’s a Rich Text element?

The rich text element allows you to create and format headings, paragraphs, blockquotes, images, and video all in one place instead of having to add and format them individually. Just double-click and easily create content.

Static and dynamic content editing

A rich text element can be used with static or dynamic content. For static content,

just drop it into any page and begin editing. For dynamic content, add a rich text field to any collection and then connect a rich text element to that field in the settings panel. Voila!

  • mldsa
  • ,l;cd
  • mkclds

How to customize formatting for each rich text

Headings, paragraphs, blockquotes, figures, images, and figure captions can all be styled after a class is added to the rich text element using the "When inside of"

nested selector

system.

Question I find illuminating:

What are the core elements of your ideal day?

I don't know about you, but I personally find the idea of creating a 5 or 10-year plan intimidating and rather useless.

I used to do it, but my predictions that far into the future quickly turned out hilariously wrong. Spending much time planning the detail around this time horizon has never struck me as a valuable exercise.

Instead, I sat down and made a list of the core elements of my ideal day.

The questions I asked myself to establish my list:

  • When I get into bed at the end of the day with a feeling of satisfaction and pride, what happened during the day that created that feeling?
  • What actions did I take?
  • What traps did I avoid?

My bet is if I solve for nailing these core elements daily, the long-term will work out fine. No need for a 5 or 10-year plan—I can refocus on stacking ideal days and trust that my compass is pointing me in the "right" direction.

So what are the core elements of my ideal day?

  • Short, focused sprints on my most important projects. Usually this means two 2-hour blocks of deep work. One in the early morning before my son wakes up, one in the afternoon. The morning sprint is the most important—if I don't do anything else other than that, the day still feels like a win.
  • 60 minutes of physical activity. When my body is engaged, my mind works well.
  • 60 minutes of time outside. Being in nature is how I unlock creativity for my deep work sessions. I walk my son for about ~3 hours a day. It is great dad-son time, and it opens up my mind.
  • Present husband and dad time. The most important thing in the world. I really try to unplug and put down the phone during this time (even if it's hard to do).

Go through the exercise and determine the core elements of your ideal day. Stop worrying about your lack of a clear 5-year plan. Focus on nailing these elements daily and let the rest take care of itself.

(Share this on Twitter!)​

Quote I think about constantly:

"Most great people have attained their greatest success just one step beyond their greatest failure." - Napoleon Hill

Don't fear failure, just learn to fail smart and fast.

Without failure, there can be no success.

(Share this on Twitter!)​

Framework for relationship growth:

The Life Dinner

Entrepreneur and investor Brad Feld created a concept he calls the Life Dinner. It's a powerful framework to fostering relationship health and growth over time.

The Life Dinner is simple: It's a fixed date blocked to sit down for a meal with your partner to reflect on personal, professional, and relationship progress, challenges, and goals.

Over time, your life becomes increasingly crowded and hectic—this makes it easy to allow your relationship with your partner sit on the back-burner while you deal with the more pressing fires of day-to-day life. While this may seem ok in the short-term, this can easily lead to big problems in the long-term.

The Life Dinner is a thoughtful approach to keep your relationship thriving despite the time constraints and stresses of daily life.

A few specifics for conducting a Life Dinner:

  • Set a recurring monthly date for the event to occur. Brad and his wife did theirs on the first night of every month.
  • Pick a place, explore a new place, or cook a meal at home. It doesn't need to be a full meal or night out, but carving out the physical time and space may be beneficial.
  • Three areas to cover: Personal, Professional, and Relationship. Within each area, each person should have the floor to reflect on the prior month's progress and challenges, as well as forward-looking goals. After each person has their time, you can discuss key items as a team. The goal is to give each person time to speak freely before opening it up for a joint discussion.

My wife and I love the Life Dinner because it creates a structure through which we can grow together. Since we had our first child in May 2022, it's been a critical part of our "system" for ensuring we continue to grow together despite the chaos of having a newborn in the house.

If you're in a relationship, I'd encourage you to give it a shot. At worst, you get a nice meal together—but I'm guessing you'll get much more out of it than that!

Tweet that made me laugh:

It's probably revealing of my inner nerd, but I love math humor.

153 is the most narcissistic number I've ever seen, followed closely by 370 and 371, which also love themselves a bit too much...

Article I keep coming back to:

Spurs’ Title Is a Testament to Persistence

I'm not a huge basketball fan, but this article is mostly about a mentality for life:

"When nothing seems to help, I go back and look at the stonecutter hammering away at his rock perhaps a hundred times without as much as a crack showing in it. Yet at the hundred and first blow it will split in two, and I know it was not that blow that did it—but all that had gone before." - Jacob Riis

I've always loved the stonecutter metaphor. It's often hard to see the progress you're making, but you have to trust in the process and continue to chip away.

Remember: It may take 10 years to become an overnight success...

The Life Dinner, Stonecutter Story, & More

Sahil Bloom

Welcome to the 242 new members of the curiosity tribe who have joined us since Wednesday. Join the 57,887 others who are receiving high-signal, curiosity-inducing content every single week.

What’s a Rich Text element?

The rich text element allows you to create and format headings, paragraphs, blockquotes, images, and video all in one place instead of having to add and format them individually. Just double-click and easily create content.

Static and dynamic content editing

A rich text element can be used with static or dynamic content. For static content,

just drop it into any page and begin editing. For dynamic content, add a rich text field to any collection and then connect a rich text element to that field in the settings panel. Voila!

  • mldsa
  • ,l;cd
  • mkclds

How to customize formatting for each rich text

Headings, paragraphs, blockquotes, figures, images, and figure captions can all be styled after a class is added to the rich text element using the "When inside of"

nested selector

system.

Question I find illuminating:

What are the core elements of your ideal day?

I don't know about you, but I personally find the idea of creating a 5 or 10-year plan intimidating and rather useless.

I used to do it, but my predictions that far into the future quickly turned out hilariously wrong. Spending much time planning the detail around this time horizon has never struck me as a valuable exercise.

Instead, I sat down and made a list of the core elements of my ideal day.

The questions I asked myself to establish my list:

  • When I get into bed at the end of the day with a feeling of satisfaction and pride, what happened during the day that created that feeling?
  • What actions did I take?
  • What traps did I avoid?

My bet is if I solve for nailing these core elements daily, the long-term will work out fine. No need for a 5 or 10-year plan—I can refocus on stacking ideal days and trust that my compass is pointing me in the "right" direction.

So what are the core elements of my ideal day?

  • Short, focused sprints on my most important projects. Usually this means two 2-hour blocks of deep work. One in the early morning before my son wakes up, one in the afternoon. The morning sprint is the most important—if I don't do anything else other than that, the day still feels like a win.
  • 60 minutes of physical activity. When my body is engaged, my mind works well.
  • 60 minutes of time outside. Being in nature is how I unlock creativity for my deep work sessions. I walk my son for about ~3 hours a day. It is great dad-son time, and it opens up my mind.
  • Present husband and dad time. The most important thing in the world. I really try to unplug and put down the phone during this time (even if it's hard to do).

Go through the exercise and determine the core elements of your ideal day. Stop worrying about your lack of a clear 5-year plan. Focus on nailing these elements daily and let the rest take care of itself.

(Share this on Twitter!)​

Quote I think about constantly:

"Most great people have attained their greatest success just one step beyond their greatest failure." - Napoleon Hill

Don't fear failure, just learn to fail smart and fast.

Without failure, there can be no success.

(Share this on Twitter!)​

Framework for relationship growth:

The Life Dinner

Entrepreneur and investor Brad Feld created a concept he calls the Life Dinner. It's a powerful framework to fostering relationship health and growth over time.

The Life Dinner is simple: It's a fixed date blocked to sit down for a meal with your partner to reflect on personal, professional, and relationship progress, challenges, and goals.

Over time, your life becomes increasingly crowded and hectic—this makes it easy to allow your relationship with your partner sit on the back-burner while you deal with the more pressing fires of day-to-day life. While this may seem ok in the short-term, this can easily lead to big problems in the long-term.

The Life Dinner is a thoughtful approach to keep your relationship thriving despite the time constraints and stresses of daily life.

A few specifics for conducting a Life Dinner:

  • Set a recurring monthly date for the event to occur. Brad and his wife did theirs on the first night of every month.
  • Pick a place, explore a new place, or cook a meal at home. It doesn't need to be a full meal or night out, but carving out the physical time and space may be beneficial.
  • Three areas to cover: Personal, Professional, and Relationship. Within each area, each person should have the floor to reflect on the prior month's progress and challenges, as well as forward-looking goals. After each person has their time, you can discuss key items as a team. The goal is to give each person time to speak freely before opening it up for a joint discussion.

My wife and I love the Life Dinner because it creates a structure through which we can grow together. Since we had our first child in May 2022, it's been a critical part of our "system" for ensuring we continue to grow together despite the chaos of having a newborn in the house.

If you're in a relationship, I'd encourage you to give it a shot. At worst, you get a nice meal together—but I'm guessing you'll get much more out of it than that!

Tweet that made me laugh:

It's probably revealing of my inner nerd, but I love math humor.

153 is the most narcissistic number I've ever seen, followed closely by 370 and 371, which also love themselves a bit too much...

Article I keep coming back to:

Spurs’ Title Is a Testament to Persistence

I'm not a huge basketball fan, but this article is mostly about a mentality for life:

"When nothing seems to help, I go back and look at the stonecutter hammering away at his rock perhaps a hundred times without as much as a crack showing in it. Yet at the hundred and first blow it will split in two, and I know it was not that blow that did it—but all that had gone before." - Jacob Riis

I've always loved the stonecutter metaphor. It's often hard to see the progress you're making, but you have to trust in the process and continue to chip away.

Remember: It may take 10 years to become an overnight success...