Notes

Personal thoughts and reflections. This is a living body of ideas that I refine and tinker with over time (many of these notes are much older than their publish date suggests). They are primarily notes to myself, but you may find them interesting too.

There is no newsletter for this website, but you can find an RSS feed of my latest notes here. For my writing and research on SEO and marketing, see the Ahrefs blog.

BLUF (bottom line up front) — 2026-02-19

Wide for inspiration, narrow for execution — 2026-02-18

MECE (mutually exclusive, collectively exhaustive) — 2026-02-18

Think in bullets — 2026-02-16

Just write it down — 2026-02-14

Predictions are just information asymmetry — 2026-02-12

Choose compounds over isolates — 2026-02-11

Finish things — 2026-02-06

Reader's draft versus writer's draft — 2026-01-30

List of personal websites — 2026-01-30

How this website was built — 2026-01-30

The enshittification of non-fiction — 2026-01-29

My favourite books of 2025 — 2026-01-23

Marketing is repetition — 2025-08-10

Never outsource understanding — 2025-07-26

Marketing is a continued exercise in novelty — 2025-07-07

Get great with bad gear — 2025-07-01

Be your own harshest critic — 2025-06-10

When education goes to zero — 2025-06-06

Could < should < did — 2025-05-09

Creativity is a muscle — 2025-04-04

Collect failure — 2025-02-18

Buy books liberally — 2024-12-06

How I read books — 2024-11-13

The final ten percent — 2024-05-30

Weasel words — 2024-05-24

On ghostwriting — 2024-05-24

The risk-reward asymmetry of difficult things — 2024-04-12

The primacy of good ideas — 2023-02-14

Convincing case studies — 2022-08-19

The power of the pre-mortem — 2022-08-16