Nathanael Yellis

Happy New Year!

As I mentioned the other day, while giant and immediately broken resolutions are fun, for my New Years, I'm thinking again about small habits. What we're up to moment-to-moment, or what we're actually thinking about during our frequent bursts of downtime, say a lot more about our character than any big giant choice. Who we are to the people around us when "no one is watching" is a lot more predictive of who we actually are than our annual review documents or our big essays about the forthcoming year. Among the small habits I like is this little practice of reading widely and finding some well-written essays on interesting topics to send to you. Thank you for reading!

When you ride the train to or from Boston's North Station, just over the bridge immediately after the train yard, there is a signal tower. There are actually two: the Boston & Maine Railroad Signal Tower A, built in 1931, and a small temporary signal tower on metal stilts. The latter is in use for trains, the former apparently still houses the drawbridge controls. Signal Tower A is a beautiful brick building outlined in copper. The facade overlooking the rail junctions and bridge is a hexagonal gable. It's not in great shape: big wooden poles hold up the sagging side closest to the tracks. The other building looks like an over-sized deer blind: it's a metal box on metal stilts. All ugly functionality. The new one is Lego Technic; the old one is brick-built.

What if the motivational speakers are right? What if your attitude does predict how the world will manifest itself for you?

There's a guy who makes a giant slide deck of social media trends every year. It's infotainment because, if you're not actually in marketing or not trying to become a thought leader, it's not all that useful. One slide from this year's deck has stuck in my memory:

Earlier this week, I caught this podcast from Arthur Brooks on how to quit being addicted to your phone. It brought me back to 2017, when I had to noodle up a fake business to run on HubSpot's software as part of my new hire training. I took a good idea, turning your phone off for a day a week, and made it into one of those vague personal coaching outfits: theoretically, you could've paid me to tell you to turn your phone off. Spoiler alert! A digital sabbath, like my old "one day disconnect" idea, is one Brooks's five tips to curing your phone addiction. His others include phone-free mornings, evenings, bedrooms, mealtimes, and a few weekends throughout the year. While he lards it up with neuroscience and social science "studies," the core insight is commonsensical: if you stop using your phone all the time, then you won't feel the need to use your phone all the time.

Between October and January, I'm working in a new way. Instead of architecting solutions for any HubSpot-related technical challenge, I'm working as a forward-deployed architect for our AI features. In practice, this means I am configuring a specific set of our software's tools for our customers to use them better. The work is more narrow, much more hands-on, and thus deeper than my usual work. I'm about six weeks in, and am just arriving at my first few practical lessons. Among which: it's way easier to make recommendations on how to configure the software than it is to actually configure the software in a way that's really useful. That may not be surprising, but for someone who has spent eight years (and counting!) in an advisory position, it's been a notable lesson to learn.

Maybe it was due to Halloween. A few Saturdays ago, on my way back from Lowe's, I drove through one of those "No Kings" protests. The people had a fair amount of the usual political protest stuff: overly-detailed signs, pins identifying all manner of political opinions, and megaphones. This particular assemblage had something less frequently seen at these sorts of things: inflatable costumes. And not the big rats you see at a typical labor union protest. These were the exact things some kids in the neighborhood used for trick-or-treating: dinosaurs, aliens, and the like. Judging from the media coverage, a hallmark of the protests across the nation was their silliness. I didn't think much of it until I read an overly earnest explanation, written with the specific flavor of confidence only possible with LLMs, of how silliness is exactly the thing this moment requires of protest politics.

I used to be a Halloween agnostic. I didn't like the macabre decorations; for kids trick-or-treating was fine, but I didn't enjoy following them around. It's since grown on me. Now, I'm a fan. Here's why.

In the Spring, I received a mailer from my summer camp. In it, they tell you about what's new and who will be the summer camp staff this summer. As a kid and a counselor, that list of names was catnip: a look-ahead to who I'd be hanging out with all summer. In the mailer, they print the guys' names, their colleges or high schools, and the number of years they've been at the camp. Reading this year's, I noticed a few absences on the list. Not of people, it's been a long while since I recognized the staff, but of colleges. It wasn't just that the camp hire people from different places, it turned out that a few of the mid-Atlantic's Christian and liberal arts schools have shuttered completely.