Hi All!
First some news!
I just switched to use Substack to send you these emails. The tool I was using up to now was built for marketing campaigns and its features distracted me from getting the posts out of the door. Hopefully, youāll like the new look!
Yesterday I published a small summary ofĀ āHow to be a friend: An Ancient Guide to True Friendshipā. As an experiment, I drew inspiration from Maria Popovaās Brainpickings and tried to write in aĀ style similar to hers.
Iād love your feedback and comments! You just reply to this email or comment on the Substack thread!
What I am reading š
Over the last few weeks Iāve been devouring books in a way I didnāt expect. At the beginning of the COVID-19 lockdown I thought that I would have much more time to read and that I would end up creating a solid reading routine (say, a couple of hours every day, morning, or evening). But since the days are all the same, Iāve ended up in a sort of sprint cycle: there are days in which I have a lot of work and do no reading and others in which I almost do no work and read a lot (4+ hours).Ā
Turns out this is a pretty good dynamic. It allows me to rest and absorb the information I consume in a much better way. Iāll see if this habit continues when things go back to normal.
āĀ
During one of my recent āreading sprintsā I finished reading āBlue Ocean Strategyā by Kim and Mauborgne. As I mentioned in last weekās email, the book is a bit dry. It ended up having some great tools and frameworks to think about product strategy and has a strong focus on āvalue innovationā but a lot of what is distilled seems to be only clear in hindsight. This is, once a company becomes successful we can explain its success by looking back through the lens of the blue ocean strategy. I wonder though if there are companies that started out applying the principles laid out in the book and became successful.Ā
Iāll be doing research to see what I find and report back.
My favorite quote of the book was:
Unless the technology makes buyersā lives dramatically simpler, more convenient, more productive, less risky, or more fun and fashionable, it will not attract the masses not matter how many awards it wins.
As a technologist and early adopter of everything new and techie (i.e. a nerd) this is a sobering and important point. Some tech companies get caught up in a race to create technology innovations, but unless your product offering fundamentally depends on new technologies (think of the iPhone, Tesla) you should focus on providing valueĀ to your customers with whatever means already exist and are known to work.
ā
I am now reading āSeeking Wisdom: From Darwin to Mungerā by Peter Bevelin. Iāve been wanting to read this book for a long time but for reasons that I canāt remember I always put off reading it. I regret it deeply. Iāve only read the appendices and the conclusion (yes, I always start reading from the end), and Iām already blown away. It surprised me to find in it one of the best introductions to probabilities Iāve read.Ā
More to come.
Nerd CornerĀ š¤
Last week I mentioned macOSās integrated Spotlight, essentially a search bar for everything on your computer. While it is one of my favorite Mac features, it canāt search for images and screenshots, at least out of the box.
Luckily, the Internet had a solution to this problem: a script that runs OCR through your screenshotsĀ and attaches metadata to them. After you run the script, the screenshots become searchable through SpotLight, almost like magic!
Cool Finds š¤Æ
Bill Gatesā latest post is worth reading.
Melinda and I grew up learning that World War II was the defining moment of our parentsā generation. In a similar way, the COVID-19 pandemicāthe first modern pandemicāwill define this era. No one who lives through Pandemic I will ever forget it. And it is impossible to overstate the pain that people are feeling now and will continue to feel for years to come.
Soviet Russia had an 11-year period of no weekends and holidays. The policy was meant to increase production and avoid having idle machines in factories. Whether you live for the weekend or not, part of enjoying life is to have idle time with your loved ones. I still canāt digest the stupidity of communist systems.Ā
In 2017 a British journalist managed to get a fake restaurant listed as the #1 restaurant in LondonĀ on TripAdvisor.Ā The Internet, my friends, is full of terrors and wonders.Ā Ā
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Alberto