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Hi Friends! It’s day, <checks watch> 5 of NaNoWriMo and I have written exactly ZERO WORDS. Yeah, no. I don’t have time to write a novel this month, which should come to the great relief of my clients, to whom I own many things. BUT, just because I’m not doing it doesn’t mean I can’t give y’all some information that might help you do it, or help those of you who might want to write a longer thing, fiction or non-fiction, down the line.

One of the biggest questions I’ve gotten this past year is what in the **** is a Bilt card? It’s a justified question: their ads are everywhere from airports to subways, and they’ve quickly become one of the hottest credit cards on the market. In my opinion they very much deserve the hype. I was a skeptic when I first heard of the card, but their team continues to deliver tremendous value.

A few weeks ago, I read an excellent interview in The New York Times Magazine with Georgetown professor of computer science Cal Newport. Many of you may know Newport from books like Deep Work, which elaborate his ideas about doing meaningful work in the face of endless distractions. At one point in the interview, Newport says this:  “The critical mind-set shift is understanding that even minor context shifts [that is, switching focus from the task at hand to a different task] are productivity poison.

Second in size only to Sicily, Sardinia (Sardegna in Italian) is located off the western coast of Italy, just south of Corsica. With over 1,000 miles of coastline and a mountainous interior, Sardinia has some of the most beautiful beaches in Italy as well as its own unique culture, cuisine, and dialect. It’s also home to the first identified Blue Zone, one of a handful of places around the world where people live the longest.

If you’re new to this Substack, one of the things I’m offering subscribers in 2023 is A Year with Jane. We’re reading through Austen’s six novels this year and Mansfield Park is our read for May and June. This is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. If you joined us for our read of Austen’s Emma, Mansfield Park might be a surprise.

Everyone wants to build a super-app. Yet, almost every super-app will fail. You don’t get to be a super-app just because you have a lot of users on your core app and you now decide to bundle multiple services into the same interface. You gain the right to be a super-app by (1) gaining the primary right to customer relationship in a certain category (or in very rare cases, across categories), and (2) gaining the right to mediate all other services (in that category) through your interface.

Happy Friday, Searchers!  Last week, we published an episode called “Why’d I take speed for twenty years?”  For months, I had been feeling trepidation about putting that first episode out. It felt vulnerable to talk about something so personal in public, and more so when the personal thing intersects with a topic people feel strongly about. I have to say though, the listener feedback last week was so impressive. It just made me feel grateful for the audience we’re finding here.

Note: This newsletter is supported by Rohrbach Brewing Co., a pioneering craft brewery in the city of Rochester. For many the pandemic pause was damaging and detrimental. But for others, it was a time to reevaluate, pivot, and emerge re-energized. Faced with uncertainty and rapidly changing business conditions, breweries were forced to be nimble. It was the only way to survive. But Brooklyn-based Wild East Brewing, which opened just months before the pandemic started, utilized a different strategy to remain relevant.