Blink Points

Ok readers, today I’d like to share a brilliant design implementation I found. Go to the New York Public Library instagram page and look through their stories. They are publishing open domain books on their page as “Stories”, and it’s gorgeous. The stories contain beautiful illustrations to go along with them, and the implementation is smooth, fun and easy. Over 300,000 people have read entire books on their page already!

I support Hong Kong and their protest against the Chinese government’s infringements on on their freedom. Surprisingly, that honestly wasn’t that hard to write, but based on what’s happening in the US now you’d think I was a geopolitical analyst to have an opinion on what’s going on between the China and Hong Kong. Funnily enough, I was in both China and Hong Kong this year. The people I met in both places were extremely generous, helpful, and good to me and my wife. I loved my visit to both places. However, I don’t think that excuses the Chinese Government from clamping down on the economic and political freedom of Hong Kong. In America, I think what has most surprised me most is that American […]

There’s an internet rule of thumb about creation, and it says that 90% of the participants of a community only view content, 9% of the participants edit content, and 1% of the participants actively create new content. Power users and creators dominate across Reddit and Wikipedia, for example. But In the publishing space that rule no longer applies. WordPress, Blogger, Tumblr, Twitter, and Tik-Tok all level the publishing playing field. Stars come and go and going viral can happen to anyone. For the most part, that’s good. I think seeing a wider diversity of people’s creativity is healthy, no matter how much it makes me cringe sometimes. What is currently happening in the publishing space-the leveling of the speed bumps to publish your ideas- will […]

If you know me you know I love satire. And if you enjoy satire too then you’re in luck, because this week’s New Yorker released one of the best articles on big Tech which looks like satire, but is actually just good old fashioned fact-based journalism. Go read the piece by Andrew Marantz and thank me later.

Nevertheless, they were helpful for me, and what’s good for the goose is good for the reader. And at least no one has told me they used Ultralearning and it completely ruined their life….which actually might be a blog post in three months. Now, like a little child learning an instrument, I realize I might have been butchering some of these mental model posts. I’m going back to the drawing board on this, and after a couple weeks I’ll return with something better, or maybe not, tough luck I guess. Fact is Mental Models interest me, and I’d like to keep going through the learning experience. The difficulty has been the value of a weekly post. It sometimes felt I failed to internalize a model […]

I have several months to myself in Berlin before I actively start looking for work. It’s a sabbatical of sorts. After a hectic last few years I’m treating myself to some time to pursue my own interests. I’ve selected three things to try learn over the rest of the year, and how i do it will be challenging, but hopefully rewarding. The other day I blogged about the book Ultralearning and I’ve now finished it and it has clarified the approach over the next several months. To sum it up, the best learning is accomplished by just doing the thing you’re trying to learn. Do the equations, write the code, swing the club. Whatever it is, the fact is fluency is achieved by action, not […]

One thing I’ve noticed now that I have both Monzo and N26 is that Monzo has more features. It’s a better app and the user experience is better. Their budgeting tools are great, their focus on personalization wins, and the layout makes more sense. I like that and all that is great until you realize N26 is in 25 more countries than Monzo. Most startups will face the ‘go wide or go deep’ problem with their market. Do you find your niche and perfect it, then move onto bigger markets, or do you get product market fit and scale, scale, scale? Both of those views are generally accepted and it’s not easy to figure out what’s the right strategy . In the case of these […]

I went on a three week trip to China and Hong Kong this year. My wife and I try do one long trip a year, and since we’ve got several friends around China with contracts ending now was the right time. Needless to say, I was excited about the opportunity to try some of the cutting edge fintech products I’ve read so much about. Flying to Hong Kong today. Gonna check out all those Asian fintech products I’ve heard so much about. Also dumpling, loads and loads of dumplings.— Jon Charles Gore (@therealtwotubs) April 18, 2019 At that point, China and Hong Kong were synonymous in my mind. But that falsehood wasn’t surprising. A big part of why we picked China / Hong Kong was […]

I have five months in Berlin before the end of the year. I am currently unemployed but I am comfortable financially. This situation will last until the end of the year, uncomfortably. I don’t like inactivity, and I don’t like living without an income. There are easy ways to fix the later, and interesting ways to fix the former. I bought Ultralearning by Scott Young today. At first skim it’s an amalgamation of the verified learning techniques right now. His principles incorporate a lot of Tim Ferris, Naval, Benny the Irish Polygot and even Adam Grant. If you are familiar with their research you don’t need to buy the book. If you aren’t, it’s a great jump off for learning the best learning techniques out […]

Today I read that people come to Berlin to discover their passion and whether they can make a career out of it. I thought that had a nice blend of romanticism and capitalism to it. We all want to make money doing what we love, and that’s the dream lots of rich people tell us made them successful . We equate passion and wealth as two sides of a balanced equation and think that if we can only solve for what we want we will be fine. I think there’s a bit of survivorship bias to the wealth = passion equation, but more importantly I’m not confident it’s even important to be passionate about what earns you money. Cancelling out for work, there are so […]