Happy Saturday all!
I hope you’re having a great start to your weekend. It’s the first day of October, and Fall is in the air!
What I’ve been up to:
I've spent the past few days exploring small towns in Northern Spain - 14th-century castles, quiet cobblestone streets, and cozy, medieval taverns.
Last week, I spent a few hours setting up a GoodReads profile! If you want to see what books I've read, am currently reading, and want to read, feel free to check it out. Always happy to chat books.
Here's a recap of the coolest things I've explored this week.
✍️ Quote I’m pondering:
Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon, on being bold and taking big risks:
“Outsized returns often come from betting against conventional wisdom, and conventional wisdom is usually right. Given a 10 percent chance of a 100 times payoff, you should take that bet every time. But you're still going to be wrong nine times out of ten . . . We all know that if you swing for the fences, you're going to strike out a lot, but you're also going to hit some home runs.
The difference between baseball and business, however, is that baseball has a truncated outcome distribution. When you swing, no matter how well you connect with the ball, the most runs you can get is four. In business, every once in a while, when you step up to the plate, you can score 1,000 runs. This long-tailed distribution of returns is why it's important to be bold.
Big winners pay for so many experiments.”
📚 Book passage I loved:
Don’t aim at success — the more you aim at it and make it to target, the more you were going to miss it.
For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side effect of one’s dedication to a cause greater than oneself or as the byproduct of one surrender to a person other than oneself. Happiness must happen, and the same holds for success: you have to let it happen by not caring about it.
I want you to listen to what your conscience commands you to do and go on to carry it out to the best of your knowledge. Then you will live to see that in the long run — in the long run I say! — success will follow you precisely because you had forgotten to think of it.
― Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl
💡 Idea from me: The Marketing of Ideas
“Advertising is a racket, like the movies and the brokerage business. You cannot be honest without admitting that its constructive contribution to humanity is exactly minus zero.”
― F Scott Fitzgerald in a letter to his daughter, August 24, 1940
In the 20th century, as capitalism swept across North America, the marketing industry emerged.
Marketers learned how to convince people to buy new products. They became better and better at convincing people they needed what they were selling. The more they could sell, the more money they would make.
Today, in the information economy, people have become marketers of content. They've developed cunning strategies and tactics to get us to click - give them our time and attention.
But, just as falling for the marketing of products leads to a house full of junk, falling for the marketing of content leads to a brain filled with junk.
In both, we must be conscious consumers. Choose what we consume selectively and intentionally.
It will remove clutters both in our homes and our minds.
❓ Question for You:
A question from James Clear on the long-term impact of our daily habits:
If you keep doing what you are about to do today for the next five years, will you end up with more of what you want or less of what you want?
📸 Photo of the week:
Pics from the Royal Palace of Olite in Navarre, Spain!
If you have any feedback or just want to be friends, feel free to reach out.
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Have a fantastic weekend.
Much love to you and yours,
Tommy