Five Things — December 2016
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Dear friends,
I hope this letter finds you well and you had a great Christmas. This will be a quick newsletter, did not have much time to ramble on — it may be more effective.
If you want to read past newsletters, click here. I kindly request you to provide feedback to improve the next newsletters.
Thank you for your time. See you in 2017,
Alex
#1 What is the right price?
With currency being a very recent concept in the history of Humanity and the complexity of the products/services provided today, it is almost impossible for an individual person to understand what is the fair price to pay.
On top of these, we also have a set of cognitive bias which are used to set prices. This article details a few “pricing experiments you might not know, but can learn from” to prevent these bias.
Link (Article, 20 min)
#2 Favourite Notebooks
During the last years I have experienced with several notebooks to take notes and for ideation/planning of new projects. These are my favourite ones:
- Best notebook to take notes: Moleskine Professional — this looks like a traditional Moleskine notebook but has several unique characteristics: pages are organised based on the Cornwell method, pages are numbered and includes a to do list section;
- Best notebook for ideation: Maruman Mnemosyne N180A — for ideation you should have at least A4 size to allow space for your imagination to roam. Beside this, Maruman’s notebook has the best quality paper I have ever experienced, allows for horizontal and vertical use, you can number/name each project/idea and it has rings so you can easily remove pages.
Moleskine Professional (FNAC, 20.50€)
Maruman Mnemosyne N180A (Amazon UK, 16.36€)
#3 Trump, the Master Persuader
I continue to be fascinated by Trump. Scott Adams, Dilbert creator, predicted Trump’s win more than 12 months ago and in his blog has been translating all the craziness coming from Trump, who he calls the Master Persuader. Scott is trained in hypnosis/persuasion and is able to explain the techniques used by Trump to communicate.
Trump linguistic kill shots (Youtube, 8 min)
Scott Adams interview just before Trump’s win (Youtube, 26 min)
#4 Are we living in a simulation?
Are we living in a simulation — a very advanced video game where each of us are just algorithms running on a machine sitting on the “real” reality? Elon Musk believes there is a very high chance we are.
This video quickly explains this hypothesis, aka The Simulation Argument. I’ve also included a longer video with Nick Bostrom (who wrote the first paper on this topic) where he goes into more detail.
Video (YouTube, 3 min)
Longer explanation by Nick Bostrom (YouTube, 23 min)
#5 When to say No
My father always told me: “Strategy is about saying no”. I didn’t listen much — as sons sometimes don’t — and still say Yes too many times.
In 2017 I will continue to say Yes, but I will say a lot more No’s that can lead to bigger YES’s.
When to say No (credits to Seth Godin and Kevin Rose):
- If you’re not proud of it, don’t serve it.
- If you can’t do a good job, don’t take it on.
- If it’s going to distract you from the work that truly matters, pass.
- If you don’t know why they want you to do this, ask.
- If you need to hide it from your mom, reconsider.
- If it benefits you but not the people you care about, decline.
- If you’re going along with the crowd, that’s not enough.
- If it creates a habit that costs you in the long run, don’t start.
- If it doesn’t move you forward, hesitate then walk away.
- If you’re going to say no, do it now. “Maybe” is not fair to the asker.
- If you’re saying yes out of fear of offending the asker, say no, you’ll grow stronger.
- If you’re unsure, sleep on it, then say no in the morning.
