• I sent out an email on Tuesday. I never do this out of respect for your inbox and your time. Just one email on Saturday. But I gave a guest lecture to a college class on 3 things I learned over the last decade, and I thought it might be a message people needed to hear this week and going into the new year.

• We are bombarded by EMF (electric and magnetic fields) - aka radiation. Our exposure has increased a quintillion fold (a billion billion) since the 1950s thanks to cell phones, Wi-Fi, and bluetooth technologies. It's one of those things where I just don't know if/how harmful it really is. How much oxidative stress damage is EMF responsible for? But I'm leery. So I do a few things to limit exposure like: keeping my router off my desk (using ethernet is even better), putting my phone in a different room when I sleep, using speaker phone instead of talking with the phone right next to my brain, never keeping my phone in my pocket, and turning it off when it isn't getting good service (emits up to 1000X the radiation).

• It's about that time. We are coming to the end of the year when we get to look back on all that happened in 2019. One annual review I enjoy is TIME's "100 Best Inventions" of the year. I think there are a lot of bad trends in food innovation but positive trends in education and other sectors. And while it's a look back, I think many of these innovations are a glimpse of the future like AR/VR and energy technology. Human ingenuity is inspiring.

⏱ What took 40 hours -

• My 2019 New Year's challenge is to learn how to draw by committing at least 5 minutes, 5 days/week. I average about 10 minutes 5/days week which means I've now spent roughly 40 hours practicing this year.  In these 40 hours, ~1 work week, I went from this to this.