Archive

Hey!

Nick here. Long time.

I wanted to let know a few life updates that will change my posting schedule. But more importantly, I wanted to share my excitement with you about what’s to come.

1. starting a new job in Feb

Hey all,

The last few days have been amazing - I’ve received several heartfelt email replies to my last newsletter:

Hey,

I think I’m having an existential crisis at the moment with this newsletter, and more broadly, with my blog. And I’d like your help.

You see, I started writing on my blog for fun while vaguely trying to be helpful. It was about capturing learnings and observations and putting them out on the internet for friends or acquaintances to read. (For a taste of what I used to write before nickang.com, see my old WordPress blog. Very few know about it - enjoy!)

Hey,

I wanted to drop you an email to let you know that I’ve finally made the effort to organise my blog a little. There are now topical pages and a main topics page that organises quite many of the 400+ articles I’ve written over the last 5 years into emergent topics, such as:

Good Monday!

I’ve finally straightened out through weeks of writing and clarification the types of notes that I have in my personal knowledge management (PKM) system. I feel a load off my chest!

The thing is, this PKM thing can easily spin out of control. I know because I’ve been spun around before (more than once) when trying to set up my PKM. Structuring information is hard. Structuring information in a way that creates a holistic web of knowledge that doesn’t collapse under its own weight? That’s almost impossible. Without some ideas, that is. Complexity tends to build up on the structure level over time instead of the content and knowledge.

This second part (there are only two parts) can help.

Good Monday!

I’ve just published a new post about PKM (personal knowledge management) that took the last couple of weeks to finish writing. I think you might like it.

This is part I of II, in which I explore the types of notes in a PKM. I even made a sketch to illustrate the gardening analogy —

I’m in quarantine. I wish it was properly boring, but alas, with the slew of new regulations in Singapore that has hit me since we arrived, it has been anything but.

Hello fellow humans.

This week I was arrested by a simple thought: are skin-tone emojis unnecessarily divisive?

Hey there. Happy Saturday.

We had Seth Godin keynote at the Sofa Summit 2021 this week at work. In his presentation, he said something that reminded me of something I had once heard: marketers change people. That’s their job.

I had heard someone less known frame the purpose of marketing this way before, but it did not have a strong imprint on me. I had already forgotten to see it that way. Perhaps I never did adopt it to replace my old perspective of marketing, which was that it was mostly to get people to buy shit that they didn’t want in the first place.

Hello! This week is an exciting one because I received a 1-year subscription to Masterclass. Masterclass, for those who haven’t been targeted by their ads, is a learning portal with a very high bar for who qualifies to teach. Think bestselling authors like Neil Gaiman and Dan Brown, world-renown scientists like Neil deGrasse Tyson, or famous celebrity chefs like Gordon Ramsey!

I received the subscription as a holiday gift from the company I’m working at. We were given 3 options to choose from: subscription a fitness and health app, a book summary app, or Masterclass.

It was an easy choice for me…

I chose Masterclass, but I can’t help thinking that a monkey could do that. The harder part is, of course, doing something meaningful with it.

Hello! This week I want to talk about a change I noticed in my internet behaviour - I have started to use the “heart” reaction instead of the typical (traditional) “like” reaction.

This came mostly subconsciously, as part of a wider change in my perspective about what kinds of messages exist on social media, the wider web, and also at my company’s Slack workspace.

If I were to try and trace the origin of this wider change in my perspective, I would probably arrive at one person: Milan. He’s a colleague working in the same team as me at Smartly.io and he is one of the most empathetic people I know.

In our workplace Slack, Milan is known for doling out more hearts than the rest of the company combined. It can feel weird, for sure. Why is this person reacting with a heart? But it didn’t long for me to adjust to it, and more importantly, I’ve learned to embrace it myself.

Hello! Welcome to my new newsletter. I thought a nice way to inaugurate it would be to tell you about how I almost didn’t send this out.

I struggled for years to start a newsletter. To me, publishing blog articles is easier than sending an email because articles just sit there waiting to be discovered, or you might perhaps send the article to someone when you already know that they would be interested in it. That’s why I have been blogging for 4 years, publishing 400 articles, but have never kept a regular newsletter.

I find newsletters scary because I keep asking myself, how can I keep the quality high? That then leads me to more questions: quality- what? Quality anecdotes? Quality articles from the web that I enjoyed? Original ideas? And quality to who? Who are these people reading an email from me?!

I think part of the confusion comes from me being unsure of what want out of a newsletter. I know, conventional marketing wisdom says that a newsletter should be about , the person reading these words. I should focus on bringing value to you. But I’m not going to lie, because that would be a poor start to a relationship. I am also thinking about what I want and what I can get out of this work. I know I’m not the only one who thinks about this.