Welcome to Flex It Fridays.
Here you’ll find a space for the beautiful, the strange, the delightful and weird. Fridays mean rest, party, or escape from the routine, but especially for attending to far-off whispers we might otherwise miss. Enjoy!
Today’s Flex is a love letter to Sublime.
Sometime in the last year, I read an article by Tara McMullin, who mentioned her writing/creating process as comprised of haphazard, messy piles. McMullin described her love of different software tools, observing that most of them are made to increase productivity. But writing and thinking well defy our contemporary obsession with efficiency, speed, and optimization. Writing, pondering, dreaming - these all take time, and effort, and false start after false start. They resist linearity and goal-achievement.
My close friends and family know my years-long love affair with Notion. Discovering that tool was truly life-changing for me. I still use Notion on the daily, but I have never made it work as a container for creating, especially as a writer. I built and jerry-rigged multiple set-ups in the attempt to design an environment that felt natural, enjoyable, and unpremeditated.
Part of the joy of writing, for me, lies in the discovery of ideas that could never have come together otherwise, because to discover those ideas requires a garden, a web, a spill of marbles on the floor. No matter how I set up Notion, it required me to know exactly what I needed, in order to call it up from the database. But the whole point of writing lies in discovering what I don’t know!
Writing reveals knowing: it’s a slow arrival, a gradual shift, a long growth into a new thing.
So when McMullin mentioned this new app I’d never heard of before, I immediately hopped over to check it out.1 Sublime looked intriguing at first glance. I loved the simplicity of its UX, the Zen-ness of its space. I tried it, wasn’t fully convinced. Then earlier this year, after testing cobbled-together tools and processes, I gave up.
I went back to Sublime, poked around a bit more, and thought,
Hmmm. This might have it—the muchness, the thingness, the environment I’ve been trying to design. This could be a return to keeping a common-place book, but in digital form. This feels serendipitous.
So I signed up for a subscription, and got to talk with Sari Azout, the founder, dreamer, designer of Sublime. We had a fantastic conversation about her vision for Sublime, and for building a company focused on resonance, not scale. I loved hearing from Sari about her desire to build a product and service for the end user, not for investors, and especially about building a company and ethos that lasts for longer than an internet minute.
This post isn’t sponsored. It’s just my support of a cool company doing a neat thing that I’m glad to be part of. You can check out Sari and Sublime here on Substack, and her moodboard for building a business.
Let’s be hopeful, creative, and wise—together.
Shalom,
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(My digital life is littered with tested and left-behind accounts.)
