In a world where technology is increasingly conspiring to steal our focus and attention, my goal is to teach you how to be more productive with Apple technology. I want to help you achieve what is most important to you and enjoy your life at the same time using technology instead of becoming another one of its victims. Pretty much everything I make points at that North Star. I believe in this message so much that I’ve staked my livelihood on it.
Sparky‘s Happiness Formula
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Hi Friend, Over the past several years, I’ve spent a lot of time reading classic Hellenistic philosophy. I find those thinkers’ willingness to take on the big questions interesting. Because when it comes to thinking about philosophy, I’m practical. I couldn't care less whether or not I’m living in a simulation. I am very interested, however, in finding and sharing happiness. And the Greeks thought about that question a lot. Maybe Aristotle said it best: Happiness is an activity of the soul in accordance with virtue. From Nicomachean Ethics, Book I, Chapter 7 That’s really the aim of my Productivity Field Guide. To get people to figure out what roles are important and how to become their best version for those. Having lived this system and now taught it to many people, I’m increasingly convinced that the payoff is more significant than being your best self. I believe I’ve found a formula for happiness. Put simply: Pursuing your best self (Arete) + Ethical Living = Happy Life That makes a lot of sense! Many of the ancients argued that living ethically and in accordance with virtue is key to achieving eudaimonia, often translated as happiness or flourishing. Arete can easily substitute in for virtue. It is very similar. Fulfilling one’s potential and living in line with one's true nature along with ethical living gets you there. Or, at least, it gets me there and several others I’ve talked to going through the Productivity Field Guide. Does this mean this formula makes you immune from suffering and disease? Of course not. It does, however, give you a mechanism to cope. True happiness can come from living a life of virtue and striving for personal excellence. The more I pursue these goals, the more I see it in myself and others. I’ll cover this more in-depth in a new edition of the Productivity Field Guide, which will be released later this month. Stay tuned. Your pal, Upgrade Photos with PowerPhotos (Sponsor)The Photos app is great until it’s not. If you want to add power-user features to Photos, check out this week’s sponsor, PowerPhotos. It’s the ultimate toolbox for managing your photo libraries on Mac. There are some true power features here that really improve the Photos app:
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David Sparks (MacSparky)
In a world where technology is increasingly conspiring to steal our focus and attention, my goal is to teach you how to be more productive with Apple technology. I want to help you achieve what is most important to you and enjoy your life at the same time using technology instead of becoming another one of its victims. Pretty much everything I make points at that North Star. I believe in this message so much that I’ve staked my livelihood on it.
MPU 855: Shortcuts with Viticci Federico Viticci, founder of MacStories and the resident Shortcuts master, joins David and Stephen for Shortcuts with Viticci. The three get into everything iOS 27 brings to Shortcuts, starting with Describe a Shortcut and how far natural-language automation can really go. They cover the smaller wins too, including Else If support, new automation triggers, and built-in data storage that finally gives Shortcuts global variables. Viticci also talks about his...
THE MACSPARKY DISPATCH Hi Friend, Right now, the frontier AI models are, at best, getting $200/month from AI consumers. And Sam Altman has said publicly that OpenAI loses money on every one of those subscriptions. The compute bills are just that large. Apple is doing something entirely different. At WWDC this year, they started making the case for local AI. Not with a frontier model of their own. They don't have one, and they're not trying to win that race. What they did instead was double...
THE MACSPARKY DISPATCH Hi Friend, I spent the last month setting up a new community for the MacSparky audience. I'm not going to walk you through the build today. That's a piece for another week. What I want to tell you about is where the actual decisions came from. I worked through option after option. Names, structures, pricing, rooms, access tiers, onboarding flow. By the end I had a draft set labeled A through H. Yes, eight versions. I went in deep. Claude was useful for a lot of that....