June 2019 : A newsletter

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Status: 🌊☀️📚

  1. Summer is here 😎. First, a flashback + update: It’s now one week post-Ski to Sea 2019 and I’m emerging from the hurt locker character-reinforcing-experience that was the ‘downhill ski’ segment of the race. Race organizers, let’s be honest: 97% of the ‘downhill ski’ is an uphill climb (in ski/snowboard boots, while carrying one’s planks/board). For most participants it’s also a catch-22: If training doesn’t throttle your calves, the event will. 📷<- click for uphill to finish line data. Onward.     

  2. I like this video and you might, too: BOOKSTORES: How to Read More Books in the Golden Age of Content. The premise: solid, footage: excellent, editing: exceptional - and sylistically, it’s a 10/10. Watch, learn, share.

  3. Then check out Wait But Why, one of the blogs reco’d in the vid. Two suggestions: How to Pick a Career (That Actually Fits You) and 100 Blocks a Day. Either (or both) might change the advice you give and how you fill your time, adventure races notwithstanding.

  4. Then check out Barking Up the Wrong Tree, ibid, and one of Eric Barker’s recent installments: New Neuroscience Reveals 5 Rituals That Will Make You Happy. Am fully in favor of #2: Do More Stuff.

  5. Some of my favorite stuff is creative work and because creative work requires inputs and risks and insights, check out The Creative Future Report. Among other takeaways: Adaptability is the key skill of the future. 👍 Also: Debbie Millman’s presentation ‘Anything Worthwhile Takes Time. Plus: the Design Matters podcast, also featuring D. Millman.

  6. I subscribe to a handful of newsletters. Some for work, others as points of comparison (re: style, format, content), and still others to stay connected to current and cultural events. One is The Hustle, a daily email that covers tech and business news. Another is from Austin Kleon, who recently jotted a heads-up on Operational Transparency referring to a longer HBR piece titled Operational Transparency. 🖱-> 🖱 Kleon is also the author of Keep Going: How to stay creative in good times and bad. Embrace the process.

  7. This just in from the world of academia: New study finds simple way to inoculate teens against junk food marketing (source: The University of Chicago). Spoiler: Tell teens they’re being manipulated and they’ll rebel - in a good way.  Also: 10 Principles of Modern Marketing (source: MIT). ☑️+ ☑️

  8. Elsewhere on the internet: The Moving Correspondence of Albert Camus and Boris Pasternak via Brain Pickings. From one of Camus’s letters to Pasternak: “It is false to say that frontiers do not exist. They do exist, temporarily. But at the same time there exists a force of creativity and truth uniting us all, in humility and pride at the same time.” Also check out Camus’s beautiful letter to his childhood teacher after winning the Nobel Prize.

  9. More brain food, this from Jason Silva, the former host of Brain Games and the personality/thinker/talent behind the video series, Shots of Awe. Recent clip: The Fear of Being Fully Alive. At a 4:31 runtime it’ll require an investment of 1/3 of 1/100th of your daily blocks; 2/3 after you’ve watched a second time. You get the math.      

  10. And finally, as in every update, a quote: “Forget everything else. Keep hold of this alone and remember it: Each of us lives only now, this brief instant. The rest has been lived already, or is impossible to see.” - Marcus Aurelius (H/T: Daily Stoic)

Own it.

-John