Dustings #138
/Did you make any New Year's Resolutions? It's not too late. Don't get hung up on the idea that you "missed" midnight on January first. "Oh well, there's always 2027."
New Year's Resolutions can be made until January 15th. Where do I get that idea from? I made it up. But considering most resolutions are abandoned by that point anyway, I'm giving you permission to keep making them until then.
Don't know what resolution to make?
Here's one everyone can use. I call it…
Count Your Blessings
Create a note or a Google doc on your phone where you record every good thing that happens to you throughout the day.
It doesn't have to be big stuff. It doesn't have to be like, "Great news! In an 'Indecent Proposal'-style scenario, Sydney Sweeney offered me a million dollars to have sex with her."
It can just be little things. Good conversations. Good meals. A nice walk. A movie, book, or show that you really enjoyed. Some nagging pain that goes away. A blog post that inspired you.
You get a point for every blessing you note. Your goal is simply to get as many points as you can. Let this game always be running in the back of your life, reorienting your thoughts to search for the good moments happening around you all the time.
The magic isn't just in remembering—it's in training yourself to notice these moments while they're happening. Your brain will literally start scanning for things to add to your list. You're gamifying optimism and appreciation.
At the end of the year, you can look back and see hundreds of little moments that brought joy to your life.
I've been getting a lot of "Will you review my product?" emails in recent weeks.
That usually means it's been too long since I mentioned this:
I don't review products on this site.
In my newsletter, I do write about products I like and have been using in the previous month. Technically, I don't even know if you'd call those reviews. I'm just writing about the stuff I'm using and how I'm using it.
If you want, you can send me stuff—either to my email address or the mailing address in the contact link above. I'm always happy to receive something interesting you've been working on. And if you definitely want me to mention your product on the site, you can see the options for that in this post.
Otherwise, I'll just end up writing about it if I like it.
For reference, last year I received 46 free tricks, ebooks, downloads, or magic apps. I ended up writing about 12 of them. If you don't like those odds, or you don't think what you're offering is likely to cut through the noise with me, no need to send it my way.
In the most recent newsletter I wrote about a trick called Pathfinder.
I had forgotten (or perhaps never really fully understood) that you can do more or less the same trick with the spectator looking at any page on their phone using Marc Kerstein’s Xeno Anywhere and Momentum.
As Eli B. wrote to inform me:
Loving Keepers 1. Just a quick note for those who love the pathfinder “go to any website and think of any word” idea but wish it was on a spectators phone, the answer is Xeno Anywhere combined with Inertia Pro (momentum) by Marc Kerstein.
They can go to any website, pick any large word, and it generates a progressive anagram as well as giving you a screenshot and an AI summary if you like that. Not to mention xeno comes with an apple watch app and direct connection to the peeksmith 3 which makes it much easier to move “secretly” through the PA. But you could also do it with a bluetooth remote in your pocket, an earpiece, or even smart glasses (my favorite).
There’s going to be different trade-offs here, but if using the spectator’s phone is a priority for you, then this is a great option.
If you’re not using any secret devices to cue you, you can still use the presentation I wrote up in the newsletter which justifies why you’re looking at your phone throughout the process.
Tomorrow, and several other dates throughout this year, has this very powerful numerical property.
What does this mean exactly? I have no clue. But these dates make great "Calendar Imps." They're special days where you can reach out to someone and tell them you want to try something you recently read about, something that has a better chance of working on one of these particular dates (for whatever reason you come up with).
You can say to someone, "Are you free next Wednesday? There's this thing I read about recently… it sounds like bullshit, but it's from a source I kind of trust, so I'm intrigued. It only works on a few days of the year, days that reduce down to 1s in numerology. No, I don't really know what that means either, but I want to give it a try."
With the right person, someone who enjoys the sort of things you do, you get to build anticipation days in advance and tie your performance to something that exists in the real world. (The real world of numerology, at least.)