#93: Beyond the boredom of repetition

What crab noodles taught me

Hello friends,

I'm really sorry for skipping last week's newsletter. There was a lot going on with my life for the past three weeks and I was so burned out that my brain and body didn't listen to my command at all.

How are you doing? I hope you're still safe, sane, and healthy.

Now, on to this week's newsletter!

Beyond the boredom of repetition

I have a weird tendency: I always make it a point to try crab noodles wherever I go.

Aside from the fact that I'm an unequivocally huge crab-noodle head, there is more.

I enjoy learning about what’s behind the difference in crab noodles of different regions. It says a lot about the whole regional culinary taste, or at the very least, the personality of the cook.

For instance, in southern Vietnam, crab noodles are sweeter and fatter compared to those in the north because the southerners generally prefer sweeter food due to the abundance of tropical fruits in the region.

Image source: Danhgiatot

It's difficult, on the other hand, to guess the local taste by trying the unique cuisine of each region.

Let's say in southern Vietnam, they have a lot of other noodles that the northerners don't have, and yes, they are sweeter and fatter too. But, they can be sweeter and fatter because that's the requirement for the food (to be good), not because the locals enjoy such taste more.

When we have a constant of the concept (crab noodle) and variables of ingredients (sweet, sour, spicy, salty), it's much easier to notice the difference.

That's also how I look at habits in my life.

I am a fairly disciplined person. Not to the point of waking up at 4 am and taking a cold shower every day, but I have habits that I almost never skip: morning stretches and journaling, weekend badminton, and writing.

Technically, it's the same thing ("concept") I do during a specific point of time in the day. But it's different depending on my health, my mood, and all the things happening in my life before that specific point.

I journal daily. But this morning I wrote it with much more enthusiasm and gratefulness because I just finished teaching a 1-month intensive writing class. Still journaling, but yesterday it felt like a chore because the prompt in my journal book asked me to think about a painful memory.

This mindset is particularly useful in habits that I want to improve. Instead of looking at morning stretches as "ah shiet not again" (constant), I look at all the involved variables like my breathing and my flexibility and try to notice the difference from yesterday.

The more frequently I do it, the more vivid the sameness of doing stretches becomes, and the more I'm accustomed to noticing even the smallest bit of growth in the variables.

I can see my elbows slowly reaching the floor when doing the seated forward bend, closer and closer every day.

Image source: Yogateket

Don't get me wrong. I hate waking up early to exercise. Who wouldn't want to sleep in for an extra 45 minutes? But at the same time, every day after I stretch, I always look forward to the next day. It's not what I will do the next day, but how much better, despite how tiny little beetle, I can do.

If I were the spokesman for Murakami, I would say a huge attribute to his success in maintaining his habit of running is his frequent travels. From clumsily running in the Nihon University track in Japan to sprinting through New York square, to mindlessly withering with cramps and fatigue under the scorching heat of Athens. Each place brings new feelings, observations, and contemplation into life. Again, the same concept, different variables of ingredients.

Haruki Murakami in Marathon in 1983 after having run the route "backwards" from Athens, in an image from the Japanese edition of his book "What I Talk About When I Talk About Running"

I don't know how this mindset can be of use to you. If any, I hope it provides a new perspective to look at what you deem as your daily repeated chores, and lighten your head a little beetle bit.

Beyond the boredom of repetition, lies the surprising increments of progress.

Weekly discovery: Padlet

Are you:

• Needing a public survey for your class?

• Writing a farewell e-card for your soon-to-leave colleague?

• Making an introductory board for your team members?

• Creating an online portfolio for your best creative work?

Then Padlet might be the app that you're looking for!

Padlet is a digital board where you can create and organize beautiful, rich-media cards effortlessly.

I first came across Padlet during my Induction day at my new company, where all the new hires were asked to share their thoughts after the day ended. The organizer, later on, showed the screen where everyone could view, vote or comment on each other's cards.

Other than board mode, Padlet also offers Timeline, Map, Grid, and more!

Timeline

Map

I was personally using Padlet to collect my students' pain points in my latest writing class. Then I will tackle the top-voted question at the beginning of each class.

(Interested? Here's the waitlist for the next cohort in June - Vietnamese only)

Around the Internet

1. This is, hands down, the drama of the week (spoiler alert: Elon Musk lost the battle!) Click on the tweet to read on!

Halli @iamharaldur

Dear @elonmusk 👋 9 days ago the access to my work computer was cut, along with about 200 other Twitter employees. However your head of HR is not able to confirm if I am an employee or not. You've not answered my emails. Maybe if enough people retweet you'll answer me here?

2. 3 days ago, Spotify unveiled a ton of new, disruptive features in 2023, in their Stream On event (Full event here)

Here are some highlights:

• A newly designed home screen that's "Part Tiktok, part Instagram, and part Youtube", aiming to bombard users with the catchiest part of a song to help with new song discovery | LINK

Stuart Dredge @stuartdredge

So anyway this new Spotify vertical discovery feed that’s being announced tomorrow has… already appeared on my phone 👀

• Smart shuffle: Adding same-vibe songs into your current playlist to help you discover new songs. It will replace the "Enhance" feature which was rolled out in 2021 but I only discovered it recently lol | LINK
  But it seems like the community isn't happy about it.

• Podcast updates:

  • Spotify will autoplay podcasts that (it thinks) will match the user's preference when the current one ends

  • As a creator, you can also add clickable chapters to your podcast by adding texts into the description (same as how you do it on Youtube)

    

• Countdown page for Pre-save: Pre-save is similar to Youtube's Premiere feature, with which you can save one song or an entire album to your queue before it’s released. The new countdown page is complimentary to pre-save, adding up the hype!

3. Messaging apps are crazily racing to add AI to their platform.

• Last week, Discord was announced to be testing the ChatGPT-powered Clyde chatbot with alpha users. One of the most prominent features of Clyde is to summarize conversations for users who might have missed them.

• Slack seems to be a step ahead, as its new ChatGPT app has been released for beta users in the past weeks, and offers a wider range of features from convo summaries to finding resources buried in Slack channels, to drafting clear-cut messages within seconds. And omg I don't know that Slack has been acquired by Salesforce 2 years ago!!

4. If that's not enough for you, next week GPT-4 will be released.

Rowan Cheung @rowancheung

🚨BREAKING: GPT-4 is coming next week, as per Andreas Braun, CTO of Microsoft Germany. The model will be multimodal and include video features. 🤯

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Thanks for reading this week’s newsletter. If anything in this newsletter has provoked your thoughts, I‘d love to hear them - it’s the best reward for my writing journey.

As always, I wish you a relaxing Sunday and a productive week ahead.

Yours,
Tuan Mon

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Many One Percents newsletter is my weekly curation of Internet gems, mostly about technology, productivity and product management. If you want to support me, you can either subscribe to this newsletter, or donate via these channels: Momo | Paypal | Vietcombank