Self talk, driverless vaporware & getting rich – Sunday Sesh 19/09/21

Hello, welcome to another Sunday Sesh, where I share tidbits of things I’ve found interesting over the past week.

 

🎧 Podcasts

“The Stories That Hold Us Back with Jon Acuff” from The Chase Jarvis LIVE Show

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We all have little stories we tell ourselves. Often, they can be a tad unproductive. Jon Acuff calls these little stories “soundtracks” and tells us that many of us have broken soundtracks. Soundtracks like we’re not smart enough. We’re not good enough to get that promotion. These are the soundtracks that hold us back in life, where we let fear stop us from starting a business, asking for more pay or asking that person out.

Everyone overthinks. But contrary to most other self-development advice I see, Jon actually argues that you shouldn’t fight it. Instead, you can harness it for good.

“The Climate Workhorse: Extremely Cheap, Clean Electricity” from The Interchange

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A very deep and technical discussion about all the money currently going into renewables and what it could mean over the next 20, 30 years for the industry.

For the first time in almost a century, there’s a growth story in infrastructure. In the 20th century, there was a huge buzz with the construction of the electricity grid. Now we’re seeing parallels to that period with solar, wind, other renewables and energy storage entering the mix.

 

 

📚 Books

Ready Player One by Ernest Cline

I really enjoyed this book and stayed up a few nights reading it. I haven’t watched the movie yet. The story is set in 2047, where most of the human population spends their time in a virtual reality video game called the OASIS because the real world is pretty crappy in comparison.

There are loads and loads of references to 80’s pop culture and early videogames in the book. Most of the references and descriptions were lost on me, but I still enjoyed the imagination that went into describing the virtual worlds.

 

 

📃Articles

Why self-driving cars could be going the way of the jetpack | New Scientist

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With all of the hype in the tech world around autonomous vehicles, it often feels like we could be saying goodbye to driving cars by ourselves any day now. This article is a refreshing dive into why we’re not there yet. Unsurprisingly, it all boils down to safety. It was interesting to learn that autonomous cars only work on roads that are properly marked, with signs and lane markers. So that leaves out a lot of country roads. The article posits that we may never reach full autonomy and might have to recalibrate our expectations.

How to Get Rich (without getting lucky) – Tweet Thread by Naval Ravikant

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“Seek wealth, not money or status. Wealth is having assets that earn while you sleep”.

“When you’re finally wealthy, you’ll realise that it wasn’t what you were seeking in the first place”

Very concise and relevant advice in this thread. Those first and last sentences are so powerful and consistent with what I believe.

Learning as Investing: 7 Skills That Pay Off in Any Job

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Pretty cool article about bunch of really relevant, yet not-so-sexy skills that anyone should know as a knowledge worker in 2021. They apply across almost every industry. If you’re looking for a high-reward, low-risk-of-obsolescence set of skills to work on to further your career, try starting with these:

  1. Being great at Microsoft Excel
  2. Writing good emails
  3. Being a decent public speaker
  4. Getting everything done that you should you would
  5. Researching effectively
  6. Ballparking numbers
  7. Learning new software quickly

 

Overcoming Web3 Bias

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New paradigms in technology come around all the time. The internet, smartphones and social media to name a few. The impact of these is obvious to us today, but their potential was only obvious to very few people in the early days. Right now, in the crypto space we have things like NFTs, DEFI and DAOs, which are similarly early stage, high potential paradigms.

How do you balance this potential for something to be world-changing with the chance of it simply becoming vaporware? If you lived on the year 2000 and knew what the internet would look like on 2020, you could’ve gone all in on Amazon, Google and Apple. But without that foresight, every potential paradigm-changer carries a big risk. Not every technology ends up taking off. Even successful tech has false starts, like the dotcom bubble in 2001. It’s difficult to stay invested in something like that long enough to see it take off.

The answer is to hold both ideas simultaneously. The idea that it will take off, but also the idea that it will fail. Go all in and don’t worry about judgment. But focus on building, and don’t worry about what others think. Only invest what you’d be ok losing. And if it doesn’t work out in the end, at least you’ve built something, gained skills and connected with people.