Postcard 5: Play
Hi Friends,
Hello from New York; I hope you had a great week.
This week is a reminder about doing the things that feel like play. I am always amazed watching my kids play and how much fun they have doing it. I put some thought into some of my earlier years of software development, where what I was doing actually felt like play rather than work, it all felt like toys. Somewhere along the way, writing code became work and wasn’t play anymore.
This newsletter feels like play, the articles I’ve been writing feel like play. The meetings I’ve had with my writing group feel like play. I vowed this week to make writing code play again. I started building some things just for fun again.
Some of my favorite Naval quotes on Play to ponder on:
What feels like play to you, but looks like work to others?
— Naval (@naval) December 10, 2020
Working with who you want to work with, on what you want to work on, is actually just play.
— Naval (@naval) July 31, 2020
"Pick an industry where you can play long term games with long term people." - @naval
— Naval Ravikant Bot (@NavalBot) January 10, 2021
The top 3 tweets from this week:
"The thing I have noticed is when the anecdotes and the data disagree, the anecdotes are usually right. There's something wrong with the way you are measuring it."
-- Bezos. A quote I love and hate in equal parts.— Morgan Housel (@morganhousel) April 20, 2021
I thought about this a bit and when anecdotes and data collide it usually does not bode well for the data.
Volkswagon, Ford, GM, Toyota, and BMW collectively spend $25B+ on advertising each year.
Tesla $0.
The result?
The most Googled car company in the US.
The "Most Valuable American Automaker."
Here are 8 takeaways from inside their marketing playbook 🧵— Alex Garcia 🔍 (@alexgarcia_atx) April 22, 2021
A great tweet thread on how Tesla's competitors spend 25 Billion in advertising and Tesla spends nothing.
I've signed up for 28 courses that I haven't finished. Who else has this problem?
Those of us who struggle to complete self-paced courses need a way to get the benefits of Cohort Based Courses(CBCs) - accountability and community
Enter Course Clubs
What are Course Clubs?/1
👇— Chris Wong (@chr_iswong) April 23, 2021
We have all signed up for online classes and never finished them. A great thread on a new concept my friend Chris is coining, called Course Clubs, and a great way to group together and power through those classes.
Top 2 Articles:
Surely you're joking, Mr. Feynman - by Dr. Feynman
Dr. Feynman was a Nobel Prize-winning physicist who, among other things, worked on the first atomic bomb at Los Alamos.
In this post Dr. Feynman reminds us of the importance of Play.
With 15 Words, Warren Buffett Explained a Brutal Truth Most People Never Accept by Bill Murphy Jr.
From the Article:
""The interesting thing about business, it's not like the Olympics. You don't get any extra points for the fact that something's very hard to do. So you might as well just step over one-foot bars, instead of trying to jump over seven-foot bars."
Now, Buffett is talking about business, but this realization also applies to many other parts of life, too: academics, ambitions, even relationships."
My Most Recent Article
I genuinely enjoy my work leading teams of engineers, and this week's article felt like play to write. This article is about how to build a great engineering team from the ground up.
Thank you again for allowing me in your inbox! Please reach out if you want to discuss any of these articles, ideas, or any of my other writings. My inbox is open; feel free to reply.
Sincerely,
Louie