This Week I Learned #90
“Go to bed smarter than when you woke up”
2020-02-17
Tim Ferriss' podcast with Ryan Holiday. I replayed this episode multiple times and this is what I came away with:
Focus is on being different. Constantly. Competition is for suckers. This parallels with the mental model for investing: “What is your edge?"
A natural ‘edge’ could be built from focusing on being you.
Just because you are great at it, doesn’t mean you should be doing it. It’s a challenge.. and I think it’s the ephemeral ball and chain in one’s life… but there is only one you and keeping that in mind is always a struggle.
2020-02-18
Continued from above:
Tactic for how long you should give a book before quitting it: 100 pages less your age. The idea being: the longer you’ve lived the less you’d need to see to determine what’s good or not. Great filter I’ll start incorporating.
Buying a book is merely paying for the author’s time to compile everything. To give the author more of your time and attention by reading it is a separate equation all together. Disassociate the need to read and finish what you bought.
2020-02-19
Chase Jarvis’ interview with Chelsea Yamase, Instagram influencer @chelseakauai. She was 27 when she started her journey. She was a top 4.0 student who went to study architecture but she realized that she did not enjoy being in a studio until 4am every day planning outlines of buildings. She took a year off to rethink what she would do. It’s an insanely difficult journey for students who’ve always been academic overachievers to make. Her early journey hit me hard because I had planned my entire high school to be an architect as well and hearing how she took the leap into her Instagram career when she was 27… it was a story that gave me perspective as having made a similar jump at a similar age. During her year-off she studied graphic design, then did jobs in journalism and went back to school to get a degree in journalism. She kept on doing things that interested her. Then, as she started posting about her life on social media and started getting traction when she shared things she loved doing… she made the jump to make it full time. Quite a fascinating story of someone who made numerous difficult choices to live a life doing things she was genuinely interested, could be great at and unknown at the time.
https://www.chasejarvis.com/blog/finding-true-north-with-chelsea-yamase/
2020-02-20
Brene Brown’s interview with Tim Ferriss. I’ve listened to her podcast interviews numerous times but this one particularly spoke to me. I found her tactics of 80/20 in her relationship insightful (a view that relationships are never 50/50 partnerships but rather a constantly shifting dynamic where one person has to cover a majority). It also made me think more about building my career of investing in people as she categorized herself as a researcher and not a therapist. The distinction between the two and what that means for my own career. It’s also a general view on someone that is doing work that I’m interested in and is one more data point for a model I can take examples out of.
2020-02-21
A 2 part series on the world of child sex abuse on the web by NYT's The Daily podcast.. With the wide access of information, many child sex abusers have built communities to share videos/images of their crimes on social media sites like Facebook. Many of these images are widely searchable on all major search engines other than Google. This 2 part series shows a look into this criminal world that seems so blatantly out in the open. With many tech companies choosing to make communication private though, it will be ever more difficult for law enforcement to track the sharing of these images and that shows one downside to the increased privacy movement for web communication tools.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/19/podcasts/the-daily/child-sex-abuse.html