👋 Hey Friends,

I hope the week was good to you.

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🗝️ Key Idea: Quality Driven By Service

This past week, I read Ryder Carroll’s 2023 Reflection. If you're not familiar with Ryder, he is the creator of the Bullet Journal. He said something that resonated with me deeply. I’ll quote it here:

This hit home for me because I often find myself running into this same scenario where, if I can’t create something that’s obviously great, I shouldn’t ship it. This has happened with building apps, and this happens regularly with creating videos. In my subconscious, if I can’t create an amazing video, then I shouldn’t create one at all. There have been videos that I’ve started on and never finished because I didn’t think they were quality enough to finish.

However, if I zoom out, all the things that I am now [subjectively] great at, I started out producing at what I would consider a poor quality. If I stop to reflect, I’ve had success when I show up regularly. This is a reminder for me, and perhaps a reminder for you, that showing up is way more important than being perfect. If you show up often enough, you’ll improve until one day you’ll look back and notice significant improvement. Improvement that isn’t always recognizable in real-time.

The aspect of this quote that I resonated with is: quality for service, instead of quality for fear. It feels like I often don’t ship something that many will enjoy because I’m subconsciously fearful of how some people might respond.

If I stop and take my ego out of the equation, that feedback is potentially helpful and will allow me to decide where to devote my resources most efficiently and at worst, many people will get value from.

A question for you: What project are you avoiding because you are fearful of how people might react? Reply to this email and let me know. I promise I won’t judge.

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📼 Video: Readwise Reader Just Got A Ton Better... (on e-Ink)​

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In this week’s video I give the new Readwise update a spin and show you what you can expect on a Boox Note Air 3C, Boox Palma, or if you’re willing to tinker a little bit, a SuperNote A6X2.

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🪄 Tool of the Week: Elgato Prompter​

This one isn’t an affiliate link, and I’m still getting my bearings with the Prompter (it just showed up yesterday), but the Elgato Prompter enables a different kind of engagement for those of us who work from home. I’ve always been a bit frustrated that when I’m on a Zoom call, I can’t look directly into the camera lens and also see the person I’m talking with. With the Elgato Prompter, I can put the person I’m chatting with on the prompter screen and make direct eye contact with them, just like I would with an in-person conversation. Obviously, the prompter does way more than that, I purchased it primarily for creating YouTube videos, but I think there’s a broader use case than just those creating videos on YouTube.

Have a great week!
Brandon Boswell

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