Pedro Silva's Blog

I used to think minimalism was about owning fewer things, the white walls and bare shelves that fill every minimalist photograph. Over time I started to doubt that. What gets removed in those photographs is visible. What is actually being reduced, I think, is something else: the number of decisions a life demands.

Every possession asks for something. It has to be stored and maintained, and eventually repaired or replaced. Every commitment keeps a piece of your attention long after you agreed to it, and information behaves the same way: an article saved for later, a podcast still in the queue, a browser tab that insists you revisit it. None of this feels heavy by itself. Together it adds up to a day full of small obligations nobody decided on purpose.

For 603 weeks I have kept my thinking in the same place. Workflowy holds 11000 bullets now. Ideas, half-formed arguments, todos, plans, the shape of projects I have not started. When I want to know what I think, I open it and look.

It has been there the whole time. While everything around it changed, the place stayed the same. This is the tool that keeps my life in order.

A job posting I came across last week was for a fractional executive assistant. Not a fractional executive, an assistant to one, split across however many people needed a slice of her calendar. I found myself wondering how much of any of those calendars she actually holds in her head.

Fractional work has spread well past the C-suite by now. Executives sell their time in slices. Owners hold stakes instead of companies. Even the people who support those executives get sliced the same way. Friendships get described this way too, half present, already checking the time on the way out.

Success: The predictable result of hard work, patience, sacrifice, and learning put into practice every day.

One bag, two jobs done well. And an observation about why I like it so much.

I recently bought the Knack Pack Small 2 and I’ve been using it consistently for commuting (when I have to commute, that is, because I work a lot from home). And as it expands for short one or two day trips, it’s a perfect bag doing two jobs. That is the practical reason I bought it, and the practical reason holds. It is genuinely good at both.

“You get rewarded for unique knowledge, not for effort. Effort is required to create unique knowledge.” — Naval Ravikant.

You get rewarded for unique knowledge, not for effort.

Effort is required to create unique knowledge.

— Naval (@naval) November 8, 2020

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It’s actually the person who listens carefully to the smart people in the room.

“I wasn’t the fastest guy in the world. I wouldn’t have done well in an Olympiad or a math contest. But I like to ponder. And pondering things, just sort of thinking about it and thinking about it, turns out to be a pretty good approach.” — Jim Simons, Mathematician and Quantitative Investor

Most people just react to life. Writing forces you to stop, look at your thoughts, and actually figure out what you mean.

I think writing will change your life more than motivation ever will. I do not mean this in some motivational sense. I mean it in a highly practical way. Most of us never stop long enough to understand what is happening inside our own heads. We simply react. Writing forces a pause. It makes you look at your thoughts instead of running away from them. You usually do not even realize what you truly think until you start writing it down.

I spent late April in Barcelona at Reuters Pharma Europe, and one sentence from a roundtable on AI and the agency model has stayed with me since. Someone said that AI is compressing content production from weeks to hours, and that the bottleneck has moved. It is no longer making content. It is making it matter.

I take a lot of notes at these events, pages of them, some of which I never reopen. This sentence is the one I kept turning over on the flight home, and I think it is because it reframes almost everything else I heard that week, including a thread I have been pulling on for a while now about what AI does to how we reach doctors.