Enjoy this week’s newsletter! 😃
🥑 Premium Mediocre Life of Maya Millennial [*Highly Recommend*]
This article is a bit wild. It’s fairly long, hilarious, and has some crazy illustrations. I suspect many of you (non millennials) who read this will be a bit confused.
But - if you get through it, you’ll be rewarded with a new awareness of all the things around you that are premium mediocre. Game of thrones, starbucks lattes, avocado toast…the list goes on.
We even delve into the avocado toast paradox: How can avocado toast be both good, and premium mediocre?
🎵 A stats based look at the itunes app charts
This was my 2nd favorite article of the week. It breaks down what we can learn about the world by looking at the itunes app charts:
March madness apps have a HUGE spike every year in the beginning of March
The average Top 30 app has been on the App Store for 1,853 days (> 5 years)
We have solved a lot of major technological problems for consumers over the past 10 years. There’s an app for pretty much everything.
Daniel Gross: Dreams and Determination
This was the first time I had ever listened to a podcast with Daniel Gross, and I was super impressed overall.
He:
- Grew up in Israel during a time when you suicide bombers were an everyday concern
- Was accepted into YCombinator @ 19, had to abandon his business the day before demo day, and then started a company which was acquired by Apple when he was 22.
- Now runs Pioneer and works at YC
🚀Sci Fi Companies Getting Built Now
This article makes me optimistic. It can feel like everyone is just working on the next food delivery startup, or some premium mediocre gadget they can pawn off to Maya Millennial.
There is certainly some of this - but this has always been the case. The business world will always have some noise.
In many ways, it’s actually amazing we haven’t had more cases of Theranos. There’s a lot of reasons to be optimistic. One of the things that I think makes America unique is that there are still so many irrational people that fully believe they can solve some of these crazy hard problems.
To quote newsletter favorite Dov Charney:
You have to bullshit yourself a little bit, because when everybody believes — when everybody believes your bullshit and you start believing your bullshit too. It can actually, like, just manifest itself that it just — it happens. Because you believe it’s going to happen. And everybody’s so convinced it’s going to happen that shit starts to happen that never would have happened had you been more realistic about life!
Here’s the amazing companies getting built right now.
🎮 What if the SAT was a Video Game?
I’m pretty skeptical of both the critiques and solution discussed in this article. That said, Imbellus is a super creative idea and I’m excited to see where it goes.
😍 Watch a few min of this video and I promise it will make your day better 👇👇👇
Personal
I made handmade pasta for the first time this week! The photos don’t do it justice, but the end product was pretty gorgeous. The pic below showcases rich pappardelle with asparagus, mint, feta, and walnuts. I had an absolute blast at the class and learned a few things (homemade pasta is hard!)
I also attended a meetup with Haseeb Qureshi this week. I’ve interacted a decent amount with him online over the past few years, so it was fun to finally interact with him in person. He’s the one that got me interested in Earning to Give and has the best article on negotiation on the internet.
I wrote a tweetstorm with a few quotes / snippets from the event. He retweeted it 😃- twitter is crazy.
Reading
I’m working my way through Understanding Media. The idea density is unlike anything I’ve ever read.
I honestly don’t understand how I’d never heard of this book before picking it up. I’m blown away about how well the author understood the world we live in today - in 1964.
“Language does for intelligence what the wheel does for the feet and the body. It enables them to move from thing to thing with greater ease and speed and ever less involvement.”
As always, thanks for reading. Have a beauteous week!
- Taylor