This is the newsletter counterpart to Apple Nocom's blog missmansanas.com. I wish I could tell you what it's for and what it's about long-term, but I myself do not yet know. For now, it means receiving a random pensive email from me once in the blue moon, and nothing more.

I wanted to write to you, but I didn't have anything that felt meaningful to say. At least none that was writeable — complete, polished, final. I am, however, working on a publishable version of my second brain / digital garden. So I'm fishing out three interesting things from the vault:

In 1978, neurologist Dr. James Austin wrote in his book that there are four types of luck:

1. Blind luck: luck that is completely out of your control. Where you're born, who you're born to, base circumstances, "acts of God" and other truly random occurrences of the world.

2. Luck from motion: your luck that "increases" as you move (more intentionally than not), opening you up to more "lucky events." Think: the people you meet because you were putting yourself out there. I suppose this is what they call making your own luck.

3. Luck from awareness: luck as a result of your awareness and depth of knowledge at something. Your familiarity and "expertise," if you may, allow you to position yourself for lucky breaks. Entrepreneur Naval Ravikant also called this "spotting luck."

4. Luck from uniqueness: specific luck that gets pulled toward you, seeks you out, because of your unique set of attributes.

The author of the newsletter The Autodidacts posed "troubleshooting" as the skill that will never go obsolete.

I’ll define troubleshooting as systematically determining the cause of unwanted behaviour in a system, and fixing it.

Troubleshooting is often learned tacitly, in the process of explicitly learning “the skill”. Troubleshooting is rarely discussed as a skill unto itself. But many features of an effective approach to troubleshooting are domain-agnostic.

This was a super interesting idea to digest between debates about AI-replaceable skills and roles. In the developers community, coding via generative AI has been dubbed "vibe coding." And it's a bit of a laughingstock because whatever time you saved with gen AI, you can then use it debugging and troubleshooting the code instead. 

This one's one of my favorites, and my relationship with it predates the birth of my knowledge vault. Paul Graham distinguishes between the way a maker's schedule looks (or should look) and the way a manager's schedule looks. 

The manager's schedule is familiar for the modern worker: the day is cut into one-hour* intervals. Activities are blocked off that way, and you can switch activities every hour.

The maker's schedule, however, is cut into half-day intervals. Developers and creatives need at least 4 hours of continuous work on a "single" task which defines their role: making things.

An underdiscussed flaw of the modern workplace is that everyone is expected to function on a manager's schedule.

* Paul Graham wrote the linked article in 2009. In 2025, I think our day is now cut in 15-minute intervals instead of 60. Which is worse, somehow.

If you're curious, my current set-up for article-surfing is Meco for newsletters, Feedly + Pocket for web posts, and Obsidian for taking notes. I'm not a researcher and I don't have any other power uses for my tools -- I just cling to information like it might save my life one day. So I thought I'd put these atomic ideas somewhere.

I am currently reading Suzanne Collins' The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes because I've accepted I need long, restful breaks between chapters of Some People Need Killing by Patricia Evangelista. Still, I think it might be one of the most important things I'll ever read as a Filipino, so I will persist.

What's caught your interest lately, {name}? Knowledge shared is never halved.

With all the grace I can muster,
Apple