Techniques, challenges, and reasons to live as if you were retired. Chapters 0:00 · Intro 0:28 · Marc's question 1:12 · What are mini-retirements? 3:56 · Challenges 7:04 · Vacation slack 8:38 · How much money do you need? 10:17 · Financial independence 11:42 · Creating your own products 12:54 · Passive income, freelance, and full-time 14:02 · Money is time 16:08 · Safety 17:39 · Enjoy every day 19:09 · Pause 20:30 · Living as if you were retired 21:31 · Do you need a mini-retirement? 22:13 · I'd...
Mar 13, 2021•23 min•Ep. 44
James Melouney & Selene Urban on how to get started with meditation, self-discovery, building trust and connection with your audience through a humane and authentic message, and key learnings from their entrepreneurial journey. James Melouney is an eclectic mix of mathematics, finance, strategy, marketing, meditation and self-discovery. He graduated with a University Medal in Mathematics & Finance before becoming a management consultant. Though since then, James chose to follow his calli...
Feb 28, 2021•1 hr 43 min•Ep. 43
Strategist, investor, community builder, and NGO founder Mike Gabour on mindfulness and attention, meditation and dark showers, the multiplier effect, minimizing time in front of the screen, the contents of his backpack, and falling in love with the ocean. Mike Gabour is a first generation immigrant, born on the Mediterranean ocean in Alexandria, Egypt. He is Co-founder and Managing Director for Koinonia , a micro-lending organization which empowers marginalized entrepreneurs in Egypt. Leadershi...
Jan 31, 2021•1 hr 12 min•Ep. 42
Harvard's Jose Luis García del Castillo and host Nono Martínez Alonso on teaching, live streaming, the guilt of postponing things, the difficulties of delegating tasks and micro-management, the fear of shipping creative work, and lessons learned after forty podcast episodes. This episode opens the ALGO series—conversations between Jose Luis García del Castillo y López and myself on teaching, machine learning, coding, and creativity. It's been three years since I last interviewed Jose Luis, and I...
Dec 24, 2020•58 min•Ep. 41
During your commute, do you listen to music or podcasts? Books Deep Work (and productive meditation) by Cal Newport Links My Podcasts Not Music blog post (2014) Oak meditation and breathing app Hurry Slowly podcast by Jocelyn K. Glei Deep Questions podcast by Cal Newport People mentioned Adam Menges Cal Newport Chapters 00:00 · Intro 03:38 · Why not music, by default? 04:20 · Focus and meditation 04:53 · Why listen to podcasts? 05:46 · Solitude 06:24 · Meditative walks 07:16 · Once-in-a-lifetime...
Dec 10, 2020•14 min•Ep. 40
Modelical's Roberto Molinos on the benefits of being patient and embracing uncertainty, a series of techniques, theories, and books that can help you rethink your company and market your products, and his 4-day workweek. Roberto Molinos is an architect and holds a Master of Advanced Studies in Structural Design from Madrid Tech - Madrid (ES). He has developed undergraduate and graduate research with Rafael Escolá Foundation and POLE Europe program, completing essays on the use of information tec...
Nov 18, 2020•1 hr 27 min•Ep. 39
Celebrating a year of weekly sketches and stories. Today, I bring you an episode that celebrates a year and a half of weekly sketches and stories. At the time I published this essay on my blog, I was at fifty-three publications. But as I write these lines, I'm at seventy-one posts. Happy Newsletter-versary! Repetition, repetition, repetition. It works, it works, it works. —John Maeda Links The Laws of Simplicity by John Maeda (book) My published sketches (blog) My British Museum basalt stone sta...
Nov 06, 2020•3 min•Ep. 38
Microsoft's Adam Menges—founder at Lobe.ai and a former Apple employee—on helping people build intelligence into their apps by making it simple and understandable, his unconventional education, having death present, regret avoidance, grit, and his daily routine for note-taking, file management, meditation, and much more. Adam is a product designer, entrepreneur, and engineer located in San Francisco who specializes in Artificial Intelligence and visual programming languages. He spent time workin...
Oct 26, 2020•59 min•Ep. 37
Director Daniel Natoli on the making of Sisyphus, Getting Simple's first short film. A man is condemned to repeat a useless task day after day. It's easy to fall into the trap of mindlessly repeating the same routine over and over again. Every once in a while, we need to be reminded to stop and reflect; To meditate on whether what you’re doing makes sense; To find out how to get out of the loop and do what gives you joy. There’s no need to measure how productive each of your actions is—some of i...
Sep 16, 2020•8 min•Ep. 36
How to create good habits and break bad ones. This episode is part of the Habits series. In this excerpt from my interview with Scott Mitchell (episode 29), Scott and I discuss what atomic habits are, how to use them to create good habits and break bad ones, how I started implementing them in my daily routine more than a year ago, the difference between flow and deliberate practice, and why you should schedule your leisure time. Links Habit tracker sheets template Flow Deliberate practice How To...
Aug 26, 2020•13 min•Ep. 35
Generating lots of ideas might help you achieve originality. Notes Skill and expertise let you judge your own ideas to better identify the good ones and discard the bad ones. "Many people fail to achieve originality because they generate a few ideas and then obsess about refining them to perfection." —Adam Grant, Originals I'd love to hear from you. Submit a question about this or any previous episodes. Join the Discord community . Meet other curious minds. If you enjoy the show, would you pleas...
Aug 12, 2020•5 min•Ep. 34
Portfolio careerist Carmen Chamorro on the benefits of working in different fields, managing multiple interests, and how recognizing a potential Renaissance-like profile might positively influence your career. Carmen loves change and disagrees that we must define ourselves in only one single and exclusive way. She is a natural learner and can draw on a wide range of commercial, educational and voluntary experiences that allow her to connect with different clients in personalized ways. Carmen is ...
Jul 20, 2020•56 min•Ep. 33
Insisting Simplicity's author, JR, on crafting your own routine from scratch, writing, blogging, frugal practices to achieve financial independence, permaculture design, the struggles of making a living as an artist, and more. Insisting Simplicity is a blog about simple living, minimalism, and adventure travel that JR writes to celebrate life, our planet, and the richness of simple living. "I'm obviously attracted to the concept of simple living and to a stoic aesthetic and something that is boi...
Jun 26, 2020•1 hr 28 min•Ep. 32
Autodesk's Kean Walmsley (@keanw) on prioritizing fun, freedom, and flexibility, traveling and working around the world with family, blogging, teaching, remote work, and the post-COVID world. Kean Walmsley works at Autodesk Research, based in Neuchâtel, Switzerland. Kean joined Autodesk in 1995 and has worked in a number of Autodesk offices around the world – in the UK, the US, India and Switzerland – and in a number of roles, both technical and management-focused. He spent several years working...
May 28, 2020•1 hr 41 min•Ep. 31
Here's an episode in memory of Patrick Winston which opens the new Sketches series with a short piece on story understanding with artificial intelligence and my experience attending Winston's 6.034 lectures at MIT. "Don't just tell me it's a school bus. Tell me why you think it's a school bus." I've sketched for the last 365 days. A year ago I decided not only to sketch daily but to write short stories and publish them online every Tuesday. The first story went out on July 2, 2019. And today is ...
Apr 30, 2020•11 min•Ep. 30
Scott Mitchell jumps in time to dissect his own experimentation life philosophy, his efforts to remove creative friction, and his worldview. An experimental episode on Scott's metaphor of the arena, experiments he's carried out over the past years, and his current solo adventure. Scott Mitchell is a designer and software engineer currently working out of Boston, Massachusetts. Scott is the founder of stud.io ( stud-io.org ), a construction technology company focused on automating fabrication pro...
Mar 31, 2020•1 hr 50 min•Ep. 29
What I've learned and what's changed over the past year, and new habits that seem to be here to stick with me for years to come. We're more virtually connected than ever before. Yet, we seem to be more disconnected from one another than any former civilization. We've created shallow ways of communication (say, email or instant messages) which generate a false sense of connection. It's harder to connect in deep ways with our closest friends—where a brief walk, talking on the phone, or a video con...
Feb 06, 2020•16 min•Ep. 28
Technology whisperer Tatjana Dzambazova on asking the right questions to avoid the waste of talent, connecting and inspiring others, becoming vegetarian, and the myth of a better life. Tatjana is Director of product management, software solutions, at Bright Machines, a software-driven-manufacturing start-up based in San Francisco. Tatjana's career started as an architect—she practiced over 12 years in Vienna and London. In 2000 she started her 18-year design technology journey with Autodesk , ma...
Jan 15, 2020•1 hr 17 min•Ep. 27
Nono's daily writing process, tools, and techniques. I believe the ultimate goal of writing is to touch others; to make our words resonate with our readers. Today my spoken words are for you. This episode is part of an experimental series titled Habits in which I share how myself (and others) do certain things and why, hopefully unveiling workflows, techniques, habits, and routines that you can make use of right away. Specifically, this episode focuses on writing and what's helping me write more...
Dec 18, 2019•25 min•Ep. 26
Nono Martínez Alonso on his story, his worldview, how and why he started Getting Simple, and the struggles and joys of making a podcast about simple living, doing less better, and crafting your own lifestyle. Nono Martínez Alonso hosts The Getting Simple Podcast—a show about how you can live a productive, creative, and simple life, in the form of friendly, long-form conversations with creative from eclectic areas—sketches things that call his attention, and writes about enjoying a slower life. N...
Nov 30, 2019•1 hr 28 min•Ep. 25
Nate Peters on democratizing design tools and using his design skills for good, dealing with internet junk, potential misuses of machine learning, and more. Nate Peters is a computational designer and software developer with experience in design optimization, digital fabrication, and machine learning. Nate received his Master of Design Studies in Technology from the Harvard Graduate School of Design, and his Bachelor of Architecture from Iowa State University. Currently he works in Boston as a s...
Oct 28, 2019•1 hr 18 min•Ep. 24
Harvard University's Andrew Witt on the power of ruminating ideas, understanding complex problems, curating signals, geometric simplicity, introspective automation, and finding time for reflection. Andrew Witt is co-founder, with Tobias Nolte, of Certain Measures, a Boston/Berlin-based office for design futures and an Associate Professor in Practice of Architecture at Harvard University. Trained as both an architect and mathematician, he has a particular interest in a technically synthetic and l...
Sep 27, 2019•1 hr 4 min•Ep. 23
Scott H. Young on quickly mastering hard skills, acquiring knowledge, and becoming good at things that seem impossible to you right now. Scott H. Young is an author, entrepreneur, and ultralearner . After learning MIT's 4-year computer science curriculum in less than twelve months, Scott taught himself four new languages in a year. In his book Ultralearning , Scott shares the principles and methods that he and other ultralearners employ to quickly master new skills, acquire knowledge, and become...
Aug 06, 2019•2 hr 2 min•Ep. 22
Technologist and artist Cristóbal Valenzuela on powering your creative work with artificial intelligence, co-founding RunwayML to put machine learning in the hands of creators, and his take on simple living and creativity. Cristóbal Valenzuela is a technologist, artist and software developer interested in the intersection between artificial intelligence and creative tools. He is co-founder of Runway and researcher at New York University ITP. Previously, he co-founded Latent Studio, a creative st...
Jul 18, 2019•1 hr 8 min•Ep. 21
Artist and illustrator Pier Gustafson on living a simple life with what makes him smile, the messy creative process behind projects, clients, and deadlines, and being an artist in the twenty-first century. Pier is an artist who presently designs maps, monograms, logos, invitations and other illustrations usually for print. His passion is drawing. Though he explores various media from simple pencil to the iPad he tends to favor vintage fountain pens, which he collects and repairs and sells to oth...
Jun 26, 2019•1 hr 12 min•Ep. 20
Panagiotis Michalatos on the luxury of choosing to be simple and the emerging trend of simplicity, the power of intuition, questioning our creative interfaces and workflows, and his love for screens. Pan Michalatos is an architect, lecturer in architecture technology at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, and a Principal Research Engineer at Autodesk. Between 2006 and 2010 he worked as a computational design researcher for the London-based structural engineering firm AKT. Along with colleague...
May 30, 2019•1 hr 31 min•Ep. 19
Nono Martínez Alonso on forgetting who you were trying to help, the main point behind creating tools, and the case of Machina, with Jose Luis García del Castillo y López. Computer programs help us do things we couldn't do before. Often, programs provide new ways of doing what we were already able to do — faster, easier, more precisely — fostering experimentation and unleashing our creative potential. At times, though, we get lost along the way. We focus on small details and forget about the whol...
Apr 30, 2019•17 min•Ep. 18
CEO of NuVu, Saba Ghole, on creating an innovation school & reinventing high school education; growth mindset; art and design as expressive mediums; changing places; simple life habits; technology; and more. Opportunities to talk to people like Saba Ghole and learn about how they understand life and what drives them to do what they do every day, is what moves me to continue with the Getting Simple project. "I had a chance to reminisce with Nono about what it means to get simple and embody a ...
Mar 31, 2019•1 hr 37 min•Ep. 17
Tesla's Matt Jezyk on his rituals to slow down and stay afloat amongst all the things competing for your attention; embracing change and automation; techniques to be more creative; the rationale behind his ten-year life cycles; why he just transitioned from Autodesk to Tesla; and a lot more. Matt works as the Sr. Staff Software Engineer at Tesla in the group that designs and builds the "Gigafactories." He develops software to smooth out the design, fabrication, and construction process. Matt’s g...
Feb 28, 2019•1 hr 39 min•Ep. 16
Antonio García Guerra, PhD from the University of Oxford, on the importance of physical activity, social time, and information to be more creative and perform at your maximum cognitive capacity. Antonio Garcia Guerra is a recently graduated PhD student from the University of Oxford. He was born in Badajoz (Spain), but grew up by the sea in Málaga. In his own words, "The sun didn't wash the nerd away." Antonio studied Biotechnology as an Undergraduate at the Universitat Autónoma de Barcelona. Bef...
Jan 29, 2019•1 hr 1 min•Ep. 15
