Sunday Snapshots (1st December, 2019)
Sunday Snapshots (1st December, 2019)
Monks, Laws of Physics, Black Friday, Jony Ive, and Sunda
Hey everyone,
Happy Thanksgiving to everyone in the US and Canada. For everyone else, I hope you had a great week!
I just published my article Starbucks: The Art of Timing. It’s all about understanding how to align your business and marketing efforts around customer behavior. Ultimately, I want people to look at businesses as systems to identify critical bottlenecks and remove inefficiencies at those bottlenecks. This article is the first in a series that will help me achieve that vision.
If you have any feedback or thoughts on the article, please just reply to this email to let me know or reply to this thread on Twitter.
In this issue of Snapshots, I want to talk about:
Living with the Monks by Jesse Itzler
Discovering the laws of physics through videos
The Blackest Friday by Web Smith
Jony Ive’s gesture
And more!
Book of the week
Jesse Itzler is the co-founder of Marquis Jet, a private jet card company, which was acquired by Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway. He is also the creator of the 100 Mile Group, which has incubated brands like Zico Coconut Water. He is also the author of the bestseller Living with a SEAL. He is also part owner of the Atlanta Hawks. And he’s married to the founder of Spanx leggings, Sara Blakely.
It’s safe to say that he has a busy life.
So when he decided to live with monks in upstate New York, it was not going to be an easy transition.
Here were three of his takeaways:
Experiences to bond:
Everyone is so concerned with connecting on social media, adding followers, collecting business cards, and shaking as many hands as they can at a cocktail party. But how strong is that network when you really don’t know the people? Sure, coffee is great, but I still think you need to go deeper. That’s why experiences are so important, especially experiences you do with others. Right now I can call and count on people who I have deep connections with, not because I bought them a bagel and followed up with a thank-you email. It’s because I have true connections, moments if you will, and experiences that will last a lifetime. If you ever climb Mount Washington with someone, they’ll be your friend for life. An experience is like making a deposit in the bank. We can draw on it at any time.
Effort as edge:
Because of their EFFORT, the monks have EDGE. Edge is an internal advantage. It’s the right hook that your brain can use to knock out fear or that internal bully when it creeps into your thoughts. When you gain edge it’s like stamping a permanent “I get shit done” tattoo on your brain. You can always access it when needed. And you get edge by stepping into the unknown and by consistently doing things that are hard.
Focus on one task:
Monotasking has become second nature. I enjoy washing dishes and cleaning floors. It’s amazing how much better my production is when I focus solely on one task. There’s no race anymore. I finish when I finish. I finish when the job is done. That’s one thing I’m picking up here at the monastery. The monks have eliminated most of the self-imposed deadlines that we all put on ourselves daily. Rather, they have shifted their focus to emphasize the quality of their work. They finish when the job is thoroughly done, and then and only then are they finished. That attitude favors a “no cutting corners style,” and the end result is always much better.
The book is a short read and you can work through it on a long afternoon. As a primer for New Year Resolutions, it’s probably one of the best books you can read.
Long read of the week
Visual Physics: Discovering Physical Laws from Videos
What if we could show a video to a computer and it would push out equations that the objects in the video were governed by? That sounds like science fiction.
But researchers at UC Berkeley have developed an algorithm that can do exactly that.
There are certain assumptions (more like limitations) – only the dynamics of single objects can be found, the object for which the equations have to found is known and can be identified, and that input videos are in sequence. All three are fairly reasonable.
The algorithm architecture is simple – they use a position detection module which goes into a latent physics module (this turns position data into parameters) which combine through the equation discovery module.
Future applications of this includes “high-energy astrophysics, optical scattering, and medical imaging where the governing equations are unknown.”
Business move of the week
The Blackest Friday by Web Smith
Black Friday is over, according to Web Smith. Brands need to be differentiated and have their own day when they can curate the attention of their audiences without the mad frenzy of Black Friday/Cyber Monday. A good example is Amazon’s Prime Day.
In the age where brands are competing for wallet share and attention, being one of the thousands of brands offering discounts will only work if your discounts are the deepest – cutting into your margins. For smaller retailers, it’s a losing gamble.
Web consistently puts out the best content when it comes to retail and e-commerce. I highly recommend you check his work out.
Gesture of the week
There is something about getting a reply back from someone you admire that’s simply magical. Jony Ive – who announced that he’ll be leaving Apple earlier in the year – sent one of these letters to 13-year fan. These never fail to bring a smile to my face.
Quote of the week
And once the storm is over, you won’t remember how you made it through, how you managed to survive. You won’t even be sure, in fact, whether the storm is really over. But one thing is certain. When you come out of the storm you won’t be the same person who walked in.
– Haruki Murakami
Our experiences constantly change us. So in order to become the people we want to become, we should choose our experiences to the extent we can. If I think about the experiences that have changed me, almost none of them were chosen by me. That’s something I want to change. More on this in the future.
Meal of the week
Last week, I went to Sunda in River North. The Brussels sprouts are absolutely amazing. Everything else doesn’t matter. Just eat the Brussels sprouts.
That wraps up this week’s Sunday Snapshots. If you want to discuss any of the ideas mentioned above or have any books/papers/links you think would be interesting to share on a future edition of Sunday Snapshots, please reach out to me by replying to this email or sending me a direct message on Twitter at @sidharthajha.
Until next Sunday,
Sid