Information Quality, Adoption in Hindsight, and An Optimal Portfolio of Skills
Five Things I Learned From Five Different Sources
Happy Monday from Las Vegas, Nevada 🌞
I hope you are having a nice Labor Day.
This week I share five short ideas ranging from cultivating your media consumption to picking the right skills to develop.
Enjoy!
Photo Of The Week — Angels Game
Photo of the week on top? Why not mix it up!
I just finished a great 5 day trip in Southern California. I relaxed on some beautiful beaches, went to watch Angels baseball, visited friends and family, met some podcast guests for the first time off zoom, and ate fish tacos. Solid weekend.
What I Learned This Week
1) The Future of Remote Work (Mitko Karshovski x Louis & Kyle — coming soon)
Mitko built his Digital Nomad/Remote work brand long before COVID accelerated mainstream adoption of the lifestyle.
His podcast, That Remote Life, has profiled many impressive Digital Nomads and Location Independent Entrepreneurs.
To narrow down what he’s learned as the host of the show, I asked Mitko about lessons from a few specific guests. In particular, Phil Libin, the former CEO of Evernote, caught my interest.
What did Mitko learn?
Mitko asked Phil what the future of remote work will be. Phil replied (paraphrasing) “remote work will simply be called work.”
Let that sink in. In the next few years, remote work will simply be called work.
Link: Louis & Kyle Show (to be released soon)
2) A Portfolio of Seven Skills (Scott H Young Blog Post)
Specific career advice is often quite difficult to prescribe. But everyone seems to agree on a few things. If you have really useful skills, you’ll do better than if you don’t.
Scott Young shares his top seven recommended skills under the constraints of being underappreciated and non-profession-specific.
The list? If you want to explore the reasoning, I’ve linked the article below.
Be really good at Excel
Write really good emails/memos
Be decent at public speaking
Do what you say you are going to do
Be good at research
Make decent quantitative estimations with intuition
Learn new software tools quickly
Full Article:Learning as Investing: 7 Skills That Pay Off in Any Job
3) Adoption In Hindsight (Tim Ferriss x KΞvin R◎se)
Crypto adoption is kind of hard to believe in hindsight.
Imagine if I told you in 2017 that crypto companies would be visible sponsors in every major sport, that Bitcoin is a household name (even with Grandma), that publicly traded companies own bitcoin in their treasuries, that major institutional investors are publicly bullish, and that Sotheby’s sells crypto-related artwork?
Each incremental step that brings crypto into the mainstream doesn’t seem like much along the way. When I look back and actually tally these mainstream adoption indicators, however, it is mind-blowing how much has changed.
Link: Tim x Kevin
4) Quality Information (Grant McCarty x Louis & Kyle)
The quality of the information you consume has a profound impact on the quality of your thoughts. You are the average of the 5 people you spend the most time with, and you are also the average 5 things you spend time consuming.
This is my love-hate with Twitter. The nature of the platform leads to shallow thinking with very little consideration of details, nuance, or complexity. It’s just hard to express long-form ideas with short-form content. (Side note… this is probably why threads perform so well). Contrast Twitter to a book. Most tweets get fired off with hardly any forethought. Maybe anywhere from 5 seconds to 20 minutes.
A book is a full-year undertaking.
Do you want to spend all day chewing on 1,000 unrelated and undeveloped sentences, or do you want to spend your time wrestling with extremely well-organized, finely edited, content created with much more intention and effort?
The same is true on audio.
Most podcasts are impromptu discussions designed for entertainment.
Audiobooks/ lectures are thoughtfully prepared to convey a specific set of ideas.
TL;DR: The quality/depth/sophistication of the information you consume will dictate the quality/depth/sophistication of your thoughts.
I’ve also started noticing how the information I consume implicitly alters my value hierarchy.
Like it or not, I judge myself relative to what I’m reading. Consciously aware of how damaging comparing yourself to others can be, I still do it.
When I read Tucker Max and Arnold Schwarzenegger, I see success relative to bro-shenanigans and swollness.
When I read business books, I see success as relative to how much money, capital, employees, revenue, tech crunch press, and Twitter clout I have.
When I read philosophy, I consider my own spiritual development as the basis of comparison.
What I’m reading starts to dictate what I value, and that starts to dictate how I act.
Choose inputs carefully.
Link: Louis & Kyle Show (to be released this week)
5) What I’m Relearning (no specific source)
Better Mornings: The longer you go in the morning without checking any inboxes or feeds, the better day you’ll have. Try to get 1-4 hours of productive activity (exercise, eating, reading, writing, etc) before email, socials, discords, texts, missed calls.
Better Reading: Nassim Taleb’s view on reading is counterintuitive, but helps me read so many more books. If a book isn’t PULLING ME IN, I’ve been dropping it. It takes a while to find these books, but then I read them furiously.
Here’s Nassim explaining the idea better than I just did…
“The minute I was bored with a book or a subject I moved to another one, instead of giving up on reading altogether - when you are limited to the school material and you get bored, you have a tendency to give up and do nothing or play hooky out of discouragement.
The trick is to be bored with a specific book, rather than with the act of reading. So the number of the pages absorbed could grow faster than otherwise. And you find gold, so to speak, effortlessly, just as in rational but undirected trial-and-error-based research.” — Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thank You For Reading!
I’m still on the hunt for interesting opportunities in crypto-related positions. Let me know if anything jumps out at you that I should be applying for!
Until next time,
Louis
Quick Clicks
(1) Book 📚 : Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir
Great sci-fi novel from the author of The Martian. Read 482 pages in 4 days if that tells you anything.
(2) Movies 🎥: Reminiscence & Suicide Squad
I enjoyed both of these new movies, but I’m also extremely generous with movie reviews. Shoutout HBO Max for letting me watch new movies at home.
(3) Tool 🔨 : Make Twitter Way Better with Minimal Twitter
Chrome extension that removes annoying and distracting elements of the UI (browser, not mobile).
(4) Special Bonus 💰: 77 Books Recommended By Nassim Taleb
Each recommendation includes why he endorses the book.
Such a great edition Louis. Especially point about Twitter, as a recent adopter, I notice and feel the same. You are what you consume.