Dozen Worthy Reads đź“° (No. 177)
Hi All,
I hope you all are doing well and welcome (if you aren’t new then again) to Dozen Worthy Reads. A newsletter where I talk about the most interesting things about tech that I read the past couple of weeks or write about tech happenings. You can sign up here or just read on …
Programming Note Reminder: This article is part of a series for my writing class. The writing class, Write of Passage is intense and enjoyable and sadly the class finishes next week. So many lessons learned and from the feedback I have received over the past five weeks from you all, the class is working as intended. Thank you for supporting my journey to become a better writer which I hope will, in turn, add value back to YOU.
Today’s weekly curated format is one that you are familiar with but I will be changing the format slightly going forward. I have always written these as a curated list of links that I pull from my saved articles on Matter. I hope you enjoy this new format!
What's on top of my mind?
My website has been up for the past few weeks and I am thinking about ways to make it better and more useful. If you have any ideas, definitely reach out. I’d love to hear from you. I am also thinking a lot about the distribution problem (i.e. growing my audience across platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, etc), and as we know distribution is the thorniest problem to solve.
On a personal note, this week has been very upsetting. I messed up very badly on a personal relationship and the person is no longer in my life. If you read my article on maximizing wired relationships and minimizing wi-fi relationships, I lost a wired relationship. As humans, we make dumb but hurtful mistakes, and I made one of those. As Ray Dalio wrote in Life Principles “At such times, you will be in pain and might think that you don’t have the strength to go on. You almost always do, however; your ultimate success will depend on you realizing that fact, even though it may not seem that way at the moment”. I know that he is right, I just don’t feel that way right now.
The idea of the week: The Third Door
I stole this idea from this week’s Write of Passage class. The idea is quite simple. There exists a third door and it's important to tap into that for success. Alex Banayan has a book about this which I haven’t read but plan to
Life, business, success… it’s just like a nightclub.
There are always three ways in.
There’s the First Door: the main entrance, where 99 percent of people wait in line, hoping to get in.
The Second Door: the VIP entrance, where the billionaires and celebrities slip through.
But what no one tells you is that there is always, always… the Third Door. It’s the entrance where you have to jump out of line, run down the alley, bang on the door a hundred times, crack open the window, sneak through the kitchen—there’s always a way.
Whether it’s how Bill Gates sold his first piece of software or how Steven Spielberg became the youngest studio director in Hollywood history, they all took the Third Door.
As I think about this, I am trying to figure out how to use this in life and work. Are there any situations in which you could have used the third door? The obvious one is finding a new job.
Quotes of the week
I have two new sections on the website: Quotes I love and Quotes on writing which I plan to keep updated but here are this week’s quotes.
“No one can make you feel inferior without your consent." - Eleanor Roosevelt
“You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take.” - Wayne Gretzky
The cool thing of the week: Sleep patterns in the middle age
With so much talk about sleep and getting 8 hours, which I try my best to do, I thought How did people sleep in the Middle Ages? was pretty cool. Humans apparently slept in two phases! Here is an excerpt from the article:
Both phases of sleep lasted roughly the same length of time, with individuals waking sometime after midnight before returning to rest. Not everyone, of course, slept according to the same timetable. The later at night that persons went to bed, the later they stirred after their initial sleep; or, if they retired past midnight, they might not awaken at all until dawn. Thus, it 'The Squire's Tale' in The Canterbury Tales, Canacee slept "soon after evening fell" and subsequently awakened in the early morning following "her first sleep"; in turn, her companions, staying up much later, "lay asleep till it was fully prime" (daylight).
Interesting things I read this week:
How People Think by Morgan Housel: How People Think
Morgan’s writing is absolutely fabulous and he has so many wonderful anecdotes on how people think in his post:
One day, I realized with all these people I was jealous of, I couldn’t just choose little aspects of their life. I couldn’t say I want his body, I want her money, I want his personality. You have to be that person. Do you want to actually be that person with all of their reactions, their desires, their family, their happiness level, their outlook on life, their self-image? If you’re not willing to do a wholesale, 24/7, 100 percent swap with who that person is, then there is no point in being jealous.
Life is Short
Paul Graham on Life. Relentlessly prune bullshit!
Relentlessly prune bullshit, don't wait to do things that matter, and savor the time you have. That's what you do when life is short.
Tech happenings of the week:
Lots of chatter on the landmark Digital Markets Act, that would reshape the ways in which tech giants compete with their rivals. The interoperability aspect has a huge impact on encryption. This is pretty dumb legislation without having standards and is haphazard in its implementation of “gatekeepers” defined as any platform that has a market capitalization of €75 billion, or more than €7.5 billion in European revenue
Casey Newton has the entire scoop here: Three ways the European Union might ruin WhatsApp
D2C brands try retail again
What's old is new once again and given the impact of things such as ATT, the end of COVID, online brands are trying to bridge the gap from online to offline. This is very interesting and as more and more D2C brands saturate online channels with less clear indicators of how campaigns are performing this might be a trend that will last for a while. Who said retail is dead? : Online Brands Try a Traditional Marketing Strategy: Physical Stores - The New York Times
Why do we use LOL so much
A fun look at the word “lol” and why we use it so much
No longer simply an internet acronym that’s entered the mainstream, lol is an example of how language evolves over time, adheres to new grammatical rules, and creates a community around the people that use it. : Why We Use “lol” So Much
TikTok's Golden Opportunity
Aleks Kantrowitz on TikTok’s golden opportunity to capture the ad market from Facebook
TikTok today has a golden opportunity to take market share from Facebook, the kind that doesn’t come around too often. After Apple effectively broke Facebook’s ad system by cutting off crucial tracking capabilities — the social network’s measurement can now be off by as much as 60%, per some marketers — people like Maher are looking for alternatives. TikTok, with its massive, engaged user base, can sometimes be all they can talk about
Gokul Rajaram on titles at companies : Titles. Most CEOs are an urgent breed
Whether or not you realize it, people at your company will use titles to signal and assert their power and bypass or even sabotage the normal decision-making and execution processes of the company. For example, some companies have fortnightly or monthly “Director” meetings attended by people with Director-or-higher titles.
