Sometimes growth is achieved through the process of making your dreams reality. Other times, growth is achieved by letting go of dreams that are no longer serving you.

It’s ok to change along the way and adjust what you’re looking for.

Remote work. Async-first work. Four-day work weeks. Pay based on value, not location.

It’s awesome to see great experiments and culture shifts happening across the tech industry. These perks seem to center around employee trust and longevity rather than churn and burn.

Mac Studio – Day One

The Mac Studio I ordered the day after launch finally arrived, and it’s been so worth it. It’s been an incredibly fast and responsive desktop, and I love that there’s now an Apple desktop that makes sense if the iMac doesn’t suit your needs (like if you own a Pro Display XDR). I decided to set it up from scratch as a new machine and document all of the things I did on day one to get it configured for my daily workflows, and wanted to write it all down.

Here it all is, in list form.¹

• Installed Launchbar and replaced Spotlight as the default action for ⌘+Space
• Installed Bartender and hid as many of the system menu bar items as possible
• Changed the trackpad settings to my preferences (enabled tap-to click, enabled silent clicking, changed “Swipe Between Pages” to three fingers)
• Enabled full disk access for Terminal
• Enabled iCloud Syncing for iMessage
• Enabled iCloud Drive for Desktop and Documents folders
• Authorized the computer for iTunes Apple Music
• Installed iStat Menus (woah, so many CPU cores!), and fiddled around with the menu bar items some more
• Installed Xcodes, started downloading the latest version of Xcode
• Installed Sleeve and set it up the way I like it (album art pinned to the bottom right corner of the desktop, floating on top of all windows when a track changes)
• Installed Tweetbot and authorized my account
• Installed Reflect and signed in
• Installed Slack and signed in to the appropriate workspaces for this machine
• Installed Nova and configured the command line tool
• Installed Fish shell, set it to the default shell, copied over my fish config from my MacBook Pro and fiddled with Terminal settings
• Installed the Operator font and set it in Terminal and Nova
• Set up my global git author/email information
• Copied over my global git ignore file (be gone .DS_Store!)
• Set up some SSH keys for various things
• Installed Kaleidoscope
• Installed Pastebot
• Installed Things

By this point I felt like the machine was in a pretty good spot, and I’ve definitely needed to tweak and install things since then, but now I have a playbook for the next time I need to set up a new machine from scratch.

We live so much of our lives being afraid. Afraid to try. Afraid to speak. Afraid to be different.

But if we give into that fear, we’ll be left with something worse: regret.

So do that thing, write that email, and be yourself. Even if you fail, you’ll be grateful you tried. ❤️

“I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: “If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?” And whenever the answer has been “No” for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.”

– Steve Jobs