Hi Friends!
As mentioned in last week's edition, I'm going to experiment with this space over the coming weeks.
The rationale for this is that while I've had a lot of fun writing these emails, it hasn't always been easy to find the best content to share with you. My ultimate goal is to create a space where I can provide as much value to you as possible.
So now I want to ask you for feedback. It'll only take you a couple of minutes to answer this survey! And it will help me to understand what you've enjoyed and what you have not. Thank you!
Twitter Threads 🧵
If you're not on Twitter, consider signing up. Of all the big social media sites, Twitter is perhaps the most customizable and provides the most value if you can sift through the noise.
I was off Twitter for a long time but last year started using it again, and most of what I learned throughout the year, I discovered through Twitter.
My strategy to avoid the trap of endless scrolling is to only access Twitter on my desktop, not on my phone, and use TweetDeck instead of the normal Twitter feed. TweetDeck makes for a customized experience so you can create lists with your favorite accounts:
Here are my favorite tweets of the week:
Nassim Taleb discusses social media and Trump. He discusses the issue of banning Trump from Twitter. Since it is a private company, it can ban whoever they want, but to be just, they should also ban extremists on the other side who also threaten the democratic process. This is a complex matter with no right answer. Expect endless discussions on this topic. But be warned that in this particular instance, agreeing with Trump's ban and disagreeing with the Capitol invasion is a false dichotomy. It's totally fine to be against both.
While everybody is talking about Elon Musk and Tesla, let's remember that Amazon is still the most interesting company on Earth. In this thread, Dan Rose (former Amazon exec) explains how Amazon first started to build their own data centers and how Bezos arrived at the idea of renting compute power. This was a crazy idea at the time, but now AWS is so powerful that they can pretty much shut down entire businesses.
WhatsApp's latest update to their privacy policy triggered many alarms in those of us more privacy-conscious. The company, part of Facebook, will start sharing your data with other Facebook services. No surprises then that both Telegram and Signal got a spike of new users in recent days. Telegram has been WhatsApp’s defacto alternative for a while, but Signal is becoming more popular. Their code is 100% open source, and they don't store any personal data, as claimed by their recent tweet:
Building Habits 🚀
Last Sunday, we hosted the first session of TinyRockets Habits Bootcamp, and I can only say that I was completely blown away. We had a total of 70 boot campers and had a blast for almost two hours. We talked about the importance of starting small but steady and how the psychology of habits works. After participants complete their first mission this week, we'll be diving deep into how our identities and environments shape the habits we form. We've already opened registration for our second cohort starting in February! Here's a 50% discount link if you want to check it out (feel free to share it with your friends!)
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Have an awesome week!
Alberto