Never underestimate the power of consistency. I tend to be obsessive-compulsive, and when I look at the volume of my text messages or how far I ran, I often get self-conscious. 11 years ago this week, Google announced that it was shutting down Google Reader. I pulled my stats and saw that I had read 228,731 stories using Google Reader. My obsessive-compulsiveness ended up with me having lunch with the product team at Google that summer before they shut it down. I also was one of the top users of the social bookmarking tool Delicious back in the day, and I am happy to have been connected with Joshua now for 25 years.
Now, I look at my blog posts and I’ve organized 24,100 AI headlines by hand over the last 75 weeks. Am I a squirrel? Math teachers always like to talk about compound interest, but don’t underestimate the results of doing anything consistently. It’s amazing when you look back. I wish there was an alternate universe where Google had integrated a social graph into Google Reader. I think they really could’ve beaten Facebook. I’m not sure I’ll forgive them. My Facebook memories today are wonderful but bittersweet.
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