Hey, happy Monday!
This is one of my favorite newsletters in a while. Take 10 minutes and read the whole thing…hope you have an amazing week.
Articles to Read.
To do something well you have to like it. That idea is not exactly novel. We've got it down to four words: "Do what you love." But it's not enough just to tell people that. Doing what you love is complicated.
The very idea is foreign to what most of us learn as kids. When I was a kid, it seemed as if work and fun were opposites by definition. Life had two states: some of the time adults were making you do things, and that was called work; the rest of the time you could do what you wanted, and that was called playing. Occasionally the things adults made you do were fun, just as, occasionally, playing wasn't—for example, if you fell and hurt yourself. But except for these few anomalous cases, work was pretty much defined as not-fun.
The world then was divided into two groups, grownups and kids. Grownups, like some kind of cursed race, had to work. Kids didn't, but they did have to go to school, which was a dilute version of work meant to prepare us for the real thing. Much as we disliked school, the grownups all agreed that grownup work was worse, and that we had it easy.
By high school, the prospect of an actual job was on the horizon. Adults would sometimes come to speak to us about their work, or we would go to see them at work. It was always understood that they enjoyed what they did. In retrospect I think one may have: the private jet pilot. But I don't think the bank manager really did.
The main reason they all acted as if they enjoyed their work was presumably the upper-middle class convention that you're supposed to. It would not merely be bad for your career to say that you despised your job, but a social faux-pas.
Why is it conventional to pretend to like what you do? The first sentence of this essay explains that. If you have to like something to do it well, then the most successful people will all like what they do. That's where the upper-middle class tradition comes from. Just as houses all over America are full of chairs that are, without the owners even knowing it, nth-degree imitations of chairs designed 250 years ago for French kings, conventional attitudes about work are, without the owners even knowing it, nth-degree imitations of the attitudes of people who've done great things.
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There are no adults in the room
One of the most shocking things I learned when I started working in a professional capacity is that there are no adults in the room.
Rather, it is to say that no one knows everything and everyone is doing the best they can. (Well, most people, and it’s good to assume positive intent.)
If you go into a company expecting to be handed work on a platter and to have someone know exactly what is going on, the way that, say, a college professor knows how to teach physics 101, you are going to be disappointed.
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The term “technology” is an old one, far older than Silicon Valley. It means anything that helps us produce things more efficiently, and it is what drives human progress. In that respect, all successful companies, at least in a free market, are tech companies: they do something more efficiently than anyone else, on whatever product vector matters to their customers.
Sustaining technologies make existing firms better, but it doesn’t change the competitive landscape.
Disruptive technologies, though, make something possible that wasn’t previously, or at a price point that wasn’t viable. This is where Peloton earns the “tech company” label from me: compared to spin classes at a dedicated gym, Peloton is cheap, and it scales far better. Sure, looking at a screen isn’t as good as being in the same room with an instructor and other cyclists, but it is massively more convenient and opens the market to a completely new customer base. Moreover, it scales in a way a gym never could: classes are held once and available forever on-demand; the company has not only digitized space but also time, thanks to technology. This is a tech company.
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How U.S. Banks Took Over the World
A decade after fueling a crisis that nearly brought down the global financial system, America’s banks are ruling it. They earned 62% of global investment-banking fees last year, up from 53% in 2011, according to Coalition, an industry data provider. Europe’s banks are smaller, less profitable and beating a hasty retreat from Wall Street.
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How Do Influencers Make Money?
In 2018, the industry of “influencing” was valued at $1 billion, and it’s projected to balloon to $10 billion in 2020. But who are these people and how exactly do they make money?
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Almost Everything About Goodreads Is Broken
Goodreads, the largest literary social media network, should be a good gathering place for readers. It is one of the only online communities for people who like to read books, but the service’s apparent monopoly seems to have stopped it from innovating, based on complaints from users and, well, basic observation. As a result, readers don’t have a good, central online community where they can discuss favorite novels or dish about exciting new releases; authors and publishers don’t have a reliable, trustworthy way to promote their books and interact with fans; book clubs and literary publications don’t have a good way to use the site to gain members and foster discussions.
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The Surprising History of American College Dorms
Hotels have received plenty of architectural attention, but unless you’re Howard Hughes or Coco Chanel you probably haven’t spent four years living in them.
The dormitory is an interesting space, intrinsically transient but often designed to serve as a social aggregator, edifying home environment and cocoon from baleful influences, once loose morals and religious nonconformists, lately Halloween costumes and Republicans.
The first unusual thing about American dormitories is simply how widespread they are. You don’t actually need to house students on-site: this happens for a very small minority of students in secondary and boarding schools, and a minority in graduate education. Living on campus is not remotely as common in a number of other societies, and wasn’t the standard even in some European societies that provided inspiration to American universities. A prime task is to explain “why Americans have believed for so long that college students should live in purpose-built structures that we now take for granted: dormitories. This was never inevitable, nor was it even necessary.”
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More to Check Out:
- The Mysterious Vaping Illness That’s ‘Becoming an Epidemic’
- A town for people with chronic-fatigue syndrome
- Kids and their toys from around the world
- Marc Andreessen’s plan to win the future.
- The 2020s Will Begin With The Lowest Interest Rates In 5000 Years
My Update.
More working and learning and focusing. So much ahead.
I’ll double down on my note from last week…I know that many of you absolutely hate your job…you dislike the content or find no value or are not learning very fast. I want to help. I really believe in you! Email me jordangonen1@gmail.com.