Week #11

I helped a man climb a mountain and found that I too had reached the top

Welcome back, my dear readers!

1. Get a sock 🧦.
2. Put the thermometer inside the sock with the point looking down.
3. Whirl the sock around quickly. 3 or 4 full rotations should be enough.
4. You’ve effortlessly reset your mercury thermometer. 😎 How cool is that?

Anyway, since I had to quarantine, I’ve spent more time studying, reading, thinking, and writing! So, this post will hopefully be richer than usual. Grab a cup of coffee and enjoy.

🎧 Songs I had on repeat this week

(and their beautiful music videos)

• High Enough
• Euphoria
• Space Oddity

🏗 Startups

• How to Fail - 25 Lessons Learned through Failure (~15 minutes 📖)

  Interesting snippets:

  • How a bad idea starts: “That looks easy… I could do that.” How a good idea starts: “That looks fun… I should do that.”
  • Solve buyers’ problems instead of sellers’ problems.
  • “New, New, New!” Fuck new. What’s different? What’s better?
  • Over-promise, over-sell, over-deliver.
  • Hire people smarter than you.
  • Don’t hire resumes. Hire people: curiosity, passion, interpersonal skills, and drive.
  • Create incentives to guide decisions. Rules do not create loyalty. Instead of telling people what to do, outline goals and let them lead you to the destination.
  • Recognize the difference between “penny-wise” and “pound-foolish.”
  • Click on the link up there to read the full article and all my highlights.

🪐 Various cool stuff

• The Art Market is a Scam (And Rich People Run It) (<25 minutes 📽)
• Scorsese producer to make first Hollywood movie funded by NFTs (~1 minute 📖)

🎞 Movies I watched this week

• Hot Summer Nights

  ⭐️ 4 /5

  The story was pretty trivial, but the photography kept me watching. Nothing special, but probably the best of the “nothing special” movies of this kind I’ve watched so far.

  

  

  

• Romeo + Juliet

  ⭐️ 4 /5

  They kept the key points of the story while changing some details to fit a more modern world. I liked most decisions! The dialogues are as heavy as they should but they don't feel so. The editing of the prologue and the gang fight scenes is absolutely crazy, I loved it.

  

  

  

💻 Tech

(and 🧑‍💻 Coding)

I’ve gone through a lot of tutorials and courses. Some of them are incomplete or unclear, but others are very well done!

If you have a programming background and you’re interested in touching with your hands the technology behind this crypto stuff everyone is talking about, I suggest starting by learning Solidity here (~90 minutes 📽).

If you’ll dive deeper, at some point you’ll probably have to learn some framework for making your blockchain development life easier, and I suggest you bookmark this very well done Truffle Tutorial (<30 minutes 📽).

There are a lot of problems to be solved before these technologies can be adopted at scale. At the moment, the crypto world is full of shit, but, behind the shit, there are a lot of great revolutionary ideas.

If you have no idea what we’re talking about, check out Jhonny Harris’ videos on Crypto I shared in Week #2 and teachyourselfcrypto.com.

🧘 Life

• Fear-Setting: The Most Valuable Exercise I Do Every Month (~20 minutes 📽📖)

  Interesting snippets:

  • Risks aren’t that scary once you take them.
  • Most people will choose unhappiness over uncertainty.
  • Four years ago, I had more money than I knew what to do with and I was completely miserable, worse than ever. I had no time and was working myself to death. I had started my own company, only to realize it would be nearly impossible to sell. The question then became, How do I escape this self-made prison? A trip, I decided. So I took the trip, right? Well, I’ll get to that. First, I felt it prudent to dance around with my shame, embarrassment, and anger for six months. But as soon as I cut through the vague unease and ambiguous anxiety by defining my nightmare, the worst-case scenario, I wasn’t as worried about taking a trip. I realized it wouldn’t be that hard to get back to where I was, let alone survive.
  • Fear comes in many forms, and we usually don’t call it by its four-letter name.
  • Click on the link up there to read the full article and all my highlights.
• The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck - Summarized by the Author (<45 minutes 📽)

  Interesting ideas:

  • The real important question is not "how to accomplish every single goal?", it's more like "what sorts of goals should we have in the first place?"
  • If you're always worried about what people think about you, the problem is not what people think about you, the problem is you don't have anything better to worry about.
  • Negative emotions have an inherent purpose. They help us. They are signals that we need to do something.
  • Happiness comes from solving problems. If you pretend you have no problems in your life to solve, then you'll be happy. And if you also find problems in your life that you want and can solve, then you'll be happy. The secret sauce is finding problems that you "want to have", that you "enjoy having".
  • In today’s world, everything’s designed to make you feel like you’re the most special person on the planet. The ticket to emotional health, like that to physical health, comes from eating your veggies-that is, accepting the bland and mundane truths of life: truths such as "Your actions actually don't matter that much in the grand scheme of things" and "The vast majority of your life will be boring and not noteworthy, and that's okay." This vegetable course will taste bad at first. Very bad. But once ingested, your body will wake up feeling more potent and more alive.
  • There were a number of Japanese soldiers in World War II, they got stranded on random islands in the Pacific and nobody told them the war was over. So, they continued to fight the war into the 1950s, 60s and even 70s, shooting at people, killing people, and hiding in the jungle for 27 years. It doesn't matter how disciplined you are, it doesn't matter how motivated you are, it doesn't matter how strong you are, how intelligent you are, how much support you have, if you have the wrong goal, you're fucked. If you have the wrong value, then all of that other stuff, it's just gonna hurt you.
  • Click on the link up there to watch the whole video and read all my highlights.

🦉 Quotes of the week

You have comfort. You don't have luxury. And don't tell me that money plays a part. The luxury I advocate has nothing to do with money. It cannot be bought. It is the reward of those who have no fear of discomfort.— Jean Cocteau

When I saw you I fell in love, and you smiled because you knew.— William Shakespeare

I helped a man climb a mountain and found that I too had reached the top.— unknown