Postcard 8: Useful
Hi Friends,
I hope it has been an eventful week for you. For sure, it has been for me as I joined the Ship 30 for 30 May cohort, where we ship 30 essays in 30 days. I managed to ship my first two; you can read essay one and essay two if interested.
Also, my brother Anton launched an app this week that lets us annotate the screen record our computers. The app sort of took off because it's useful and because it's most useful right now with everyone at home trying to do video onboarding, explainer videos, make courses. Now the tool is free, so he won't get rich anytime soon, but we have struggled to get people to use even free things.
This week, there was a lesson from all this that if you make something even remotely close to what people want, the internet is an amazing place, and it doesn't take very long for things to start moving. It's incredible because people started writing articles about the tool in German, sharing it in Chinese. It's a lesson for the things we do; we should strive to be useful and make useful things.
Let's get into the postcard.
Top Tweets from others this week:
9 years ago today, I founded Coinbase. One of the most important lessons I come back after all this time is long-term focus.
— Brian Armstrong (@brian_armstrong) May 14, 2021
Brian Armstrong wrote a powerful tweet thread about the importance of long-term focus. His company and crypto, in general, have gone through a lot of ups and downs and there are great lessons to gleam from his thread.
One mode of failure is continually overlooking simple ideas while searching for a better way.
One mode of success is continually practicing simple ideas while searching for a better way.— James Clear (@JamesClear) May 11, 2021
This tweet from James Clear is a powerful reminder to stick to the basics and get good at those.
THREAD: The top 0.1% of marketing mental models.
Compressing a 6-year career into the best 8 ideas:— George Mack (@george__mack) May 10, 2021
This is a long thread about the very best growth and marketing mental models: even if you aren't a marketer, this is insightful.
A bonus tweet from Ev Chapman, one of the Ship 30 for 30 participants, who wrote an amazing piece on how great constraints can be on our life.
Top Articles I've read this week:
Mortgage Mayhem by Marc Rubenstein
A great article about the boom and bust cycle that's going on in the mortgage industry right now. Marc goes deep and gives us insights into what will happen next with mortgages and the companies that issue them.
Play Your Own Game by Morgan Housel
Morgan Housel reminds us that everyone is investing for different reasons, different outcomes. Yet, we all shout over each other about which investment is right or wrong and which strategy is right or wrong.
Work from Home & Productivity by Michael Gibbs, Friederike Mengel, Christoph Siemroth
One of the first major studies I have run into about the efficacy of work from home since the pandemic started. It confirms a lot of what our intuition already told us. Working hours went up significantly, people end up working way more from home, but there is also a lot of inefficiency in our style since many are so new to it.
My Most Recent Article is titled Life or Death
I dove into some of the reasoning people seem to make better decisions when under Life-or-Death circumstances. They make better decisions faster and even use less information. I am most interested in how we might tap into that ability without necessarily always putting ourselves in life-or-death circumstances.
Thank you again. Don't forget to 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