This Week I Learned #37
2019-02-11
Wise: Thoughts of gratitude. Having watched the "WW2 in Colour" documentary series on Netflix it makes me wonder how the future will look. Will there ever come a time when Koreans will be persecuted by Canada? Will there be an uprising in the province of BC to push out the reviled Asian community? With increasing influence of heretics/extremists in the world I do not doubt the possibility of fear and hatred leading to absolute discrimination, similar to that witnessed in WW2. Yet, I do think Canada will be the least likely place to experience this. When I hear Caucasians call me chink or say an Asian slur I'm still comfortable giving the benefit of the doubt its ignorance and not malice. For the 1 asshole I meet there are still 9 very open-minded and accepting individuals in this country and I'd rather be a minority here than some other Western country. For this I am forever grateful to my parents for allowing me to be a citizen here. Many are not so lucky.
2019-02-12
Wise: My learnings on the eSports community: On a Netflix documentary called "7 Days Out" I watched an episode on eSports on a game called League of Legends (LoL). It's a common game that most of my friends play but having never played it myself it's been an interesting documentary. Contrary to popular belief on my Korean heritage, I don't play games and don't consider myself to be good at them either. Yet, turns out Korean teams have been involved in 7 of the last 8 world championships. The competition had more viewers than the NBA and MLB finals combined and is now a medal event in the 2022 Asian Games. The documentary follows 4 US teams and it was surprising to see retired NBA players owning or being heavy investors of the teams. It's an undeniably growing industry and if pistol shooting or equestrian are Olympic sports while powerlifting is not, then I can foresee eSports being in the Olympics in my lifetime. What I think was very touching was a realization of how "against the grain" one must be to become an eSports athlete. You start off being unaccepted by society, you are considered "uncool", your parents think you're wasting your time and the world at large won't accept what you do as legitimate.Someone wanting to be a basketball player is unlikely to go through so much negative judgment in society. Yet, when we compare facts, its the difference of people throwing an orange ball into a hoop vs. people clicking keyboards. Evidently, by the viewership numbers, both activities give entertainment to a large audience yet one earns more money than the GDP of a small country and is revered as a social icon while the other has neither. Food for thought.
2019-02-13
Healthy: Learned about how one could bank stem cells on Tim Ferriss' interview with Dr. Rhonda Patrick. Bank your stemcells for $625 and $125 annually at Stem Save. You can do it with your wisdom teeth. A good way to get some use out of the “thought to be useless” wisdom teeth. Same can be applied to the teeth for your children as they grow. Link here
2019-02-14
Wise: It seems quite timely that after a long debate with friends on Canada's long-term economic growth potential that I would see an article reporting Sweden now has a law where employees can take 6 months of unpaid sabbatical to start a company. Link here
2019-02-15
Wealthy: Learned about some great questions I could ask on future podcasts from listening to Alex Blumberg, Founder of Gimlet Media, Planet Money and Producer of This American Life, on Creative Live. 1) "Tell me about a time when..."; question to get deeper, the "tell me" part is important as it leaves interpretation open to the interviewee. 2) “what were the steps to.....?”; learn the process through the interviewee's eyes. Through the details the interviewee thinks matters. 3)“How'd that make you feel?”; articulate emotions into words. 4) “Why is this story meaningful to you?”, “What does that mean to you?”; when you notice a spark in the interviewee try to go deeper into why a particular story or statement was so exciting for them to say. Allowing the interviewee to explain can lead to uncovering a nuance you had no idea about. Link here
2019-02-16
Wealthy: Airbnb founders took 6 months to hire their first employee because they wanted to focus on getting the right person. It's about making purposeful investments after amassing a high conviction, not spraying and praying like the company is some index fund.
2019-02-17
Wealthy: Experimented with marketing the podcast content on Reddit for 7 weeks. I learned how some content businesses found success on Reddit so I thought I'd try it out as well. So far it has resulted in very minimal positive results. The reality is that most subreddit forums do not allow for self-promotion and even answering forum questions with a self-promoting link resulted in the answer getting deleted by the moderators. Even subreddits that do not explicitly ban self-promotion had moderators take down any link-related posts I had. Realization is to continue focusing on the product and allow my 1000 true fans to highlight the content on Reddit instead of me doing it manually.
Did you enjoy this post?
Join the community by Subscribing to the Weekly Newsletter
Included in the Newsletter are:
Monday’s Weekly “This Week I Learned”
Tuesday’s Weekly Essay
Wednesday’s Weekly Accounted For Podcast
Thursday’s occasional Book Note of a book I read recently