026 • Six months of writing newsletters

Happy Friday all, and welcome to quite a special issue of Fundamentalised,

This issue is the 26th I've released, meaning that I've now been publishing a newsletter for half a year. It's gone quickly, but when I look back I can see how much progress has been made.

Let me tell you the story...

I started publishing on Medium at the start of 2023 sharing insights about anything that I thought might be of interest or use to other people. Quickly, I realised that everyone had newsletters, and thought it might be a good thing if I had my own. After all, audiences on other platforms were rented, as everyone preaches.

I first chose Substack for my newsletter. But what was I going to write about?

The answer I thought I had was found in my lifestyle. For a long time, I've been very into looking after my health, and I've only eaten predominantly single-ingredient foods for a long time.

The newsletter was going to draw on this idea, looking into the fundamentals of not only fitness but of productivity, personal knowledge management and more.

The first issue was about recency bias. I'm pretty sure that nobody read it except me. Demotivated, I returned to posting on Medium, until I heard of beehiiv.

Everyone on Twitter was hyping up this new newsletter tool, and I still held the desire in my heart to begin growing my one.

I signed up, plugged the form at the bottom of a couple of Medium articles and got some family and close mates to sign up.

Now I had an audience, I couldn't let them down. I had a name now too - Fundamentalised. The imaginary past participle of a verb describing the breaking down of something into fundamentals. I wanted to fundamentalise topics I understood in depth for other people to learn about.

Towards the end of May, I sent my first issue for real. This time it was about a principle that I feel very strongly is important - digital minimalism (you can read it here).

Every week from this point, I've sent an email on Friday to the Fundamentalised newsletter list, covering something that I think might be of value to the readers. Throughout time this has evolved to what you see today, taking on and then abandoning midweek content recommendation emails in favour of creating a roundup on Friday.

The advancement of the newsletter led me to develop a website for my work too. I used to post the newsletter issues on Medium but now you can only get the newsletter through being part of the email list or by going to Fundamentalised.com.

I always love writing to you every Friday.

This list is somewhere I can get away from the confinements of my area of expertise - Obsidian and PKM. Here I'm more free to tell stories and explore ideas that I'm not as knowledgeable or certain about.

Thank you all for trusting me to add value to your inbox weekly! I hope that Fundamentalised can continue to grow and improve for many more issues to come.

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What I’ve written this week…

I have nothing to show at the moment but I’ve submitted a comprehensive piece on Obsidian and everything I’ve written about the app to the Obsidian Observer on Medium. Keep an eye out there because it’ll be accepted and published very soon.

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Thanks again for reading Fundamentalised! I’ll see you next week.