A year's worth 💎 Issue #50
Plus: A top-10.
Happy Friday 👋
What’s up? 🎂
A year ago I was sending my first-ever newsletter issue to a handful of people. After sending 50 emails I still haven’t learned my lesson and I see only reasons to continue. It’s was not that easy though.
Sometimes I think if I should spend this type of energy on other projects, a different kind of newsletter even. On other occasions I recognize that I’ve achieved all milestones I had for This Week’s Worth and if I stop doing it I would rate it a success.
Today, we crossed even more milestones: 50 issues, a year of this newsletter!
This makes me reflect on what I want for the future of this endeavor and, right now, it’s more probable for things to change than staying as they are.
I would love to hear your thought on all of this. What do you miss? What do you want to see more? What do you want to see less of? You can always comment below or send me an email.
This week I want to look back and share the 10 links that I most enjoyed curating for you in this past year. Who doesn’t love top 10’s, am I right? It’s the next best thing I can send you after a birthday cake slice (emails can’t yet include that type of attachment).
My favorite links of the past year 🔟
(by order of appearance)
68 Bits of Unsolicited Advice | 8 min read
💎 Ok, if you hated the last article, my friend, do I have bad news for you. This is the 68y old version! Kevin Kelly, the founder of Wired magazine, wrote something special here. It made almost every newsletter that I subscribe to in the past weeks and mine is no different. I had to share it here or otherwise, he wouldn’t leave me alone. If you prefer the video format, here’s the author himself reciting the same advice for your viewing pleasure.
A Mile an Hour - Running a different kind of marathon| 17 min watch
🏃♂️ A guy running a mile per hour is just slow. A guy running a mile per hour while baking bread, playing scrabble, planting trees, and building tables probably gets your attention. Beautifully shot, inspiring, and a big kick in the teeth for those moments when we say that we don’t have time for something. We can literally run a marathon and do everything in 24 hours.
Give yourself permission to be creative | 9 min watch
🧔 Remember that first TED talk you watched? How fascinating it was. There are some viral ones that got famous for a reason or another, but with the advent of TEDx, it seemed like what we gained with range and opportunity we might have lost in pure quality of ideas. This one with Ethan Hawke might not be about the most groundbreaking of the ideas (which is not to say it isn’t powerful), but I’ll be damned if being delivered by one of the great actors of this generation doesn’t make it the most captivating thing you’ll see this week. The set, the colors, the lighting, the whole thing is charming as hell.
What My Sled Dogs Taught Me About Planning for the Unknown | 4 min read
🛷 What a beautiful story this is. Sled dogs love to run, and they love to go full throttle while they are it. “That’s fine if we’re going 10 miles, or 30, distances they can cover easily in a few hours. We can leave after dinner and be home by midnight, silver snow on a full-moon night. But what if we’re going a hundred miles, or a thousand? Asking sled dogs to pace themselves, to slow it down, is like asking a retriever to only fetch one ball out of three: It goes against their every instinct.” The lessons this musher shares next on how he handles this ‘instinct are for everyone.
UNNUR | 19 min watch
🏄♀️ This one is mandatory for surfers, parents, photographers, or people who are still doubting if they should book that trip to Iceland.
100 Tips for a Better Life| 12 min read
🎢 This is soooo good! These go from cooking to rationality, passing through compassion, and like a game of Civilization, you always want to go for one more (turn). Here’s a couple, from the many, I loved: “Don’t buy CDs for people. They have Spotify. Buy them merch from a band they like instead. It’s more personal and the band gets more money.” and “Procrastination comes naturally, so apply it to bad things. “I want to hurt myself right now. I’ll do it in an hour.” “I want a smoke now, so in half an hour I’ll go have a smoke.” Then repeat. Much like our good plans fall apart while we delay them, so can our bad plans.”
How I Approach the Toughest Decisions | 8 min read
⚖️ I like when people distill wisdom on the Internet, but I absolutely love it when they manage to give you an insider’s view of how the machine works at the same time. That’s Barack Obama here, and so you have the track record of someone with the experience to know what he’s talking about, plus the colors of doing it from pool table of the White House. “The best we can do is find a framework that helps us consider our choices, knowing that there may not be one perfect answer. That way, we can rest a little easier knowing that did the best we could in the circumstances, come what may.”
Leadership Lessons from Steve Kerr| 9 min read
🧭 Everything about Steve Kerr just clicks with me and that’s a challenge. What are the benefits of seeking messages that you consider gospel? How are those going to make you think or reconsider established principles? I think Steve ends up providing the answer to that in this article when it mentioned how he encourages leaders to seek and define their core values before leading. The way I see it, there’s a big overlap in our core values and it’s totally OK to have him as my mentor without his permission.
The Revised Psychology of Human Misjudgment| 110 (not a typo) min read
🧠 Things you need to know:
This is the revised transcription of a talk Charlie Munger gave in 1995 at Harvard.
It has the least clickbait title ever.
It probably has the highest ratio of wisdom per number of words used on anything on the internet.
I still don’t know what’s best about it. If it’s the content or how well it’s written (said?).
The talk presents 25 tendencies where we behave a certain way when the right conditions are met. You can’t avoid really escape them, but perhaps knowing about them you might be able to eliminate some bad outcomes or at least reduce their impact.
The talk is full of examples of what happens when you are affected by these tendencies and some of them are hilarious, even if only adjacent to the topic at hand: “And then there is the case of Mark Twain’s cat that, after a bad experience with a hot stove, never again sat on a hot stove, or a cold stove either.”
You can just randomly scroll and pick a random paragraph and it will reveal something interesting. I just did it and I got this: “The proper antidote to creating Persian Messenger Syndrome and its bad effects, like those at CBS, is to develop, through exercise of will, a habit of welcoming bad news. At Berkshire, there is a common injunction: “Always tell us the bad news promptly. It is only the good news that can wait.” It also helps to be so wise and informed that people fear not telling you bad news because you are so likely to get it elsewhere.”This is why you keep going and when you notice the 110 mins are up.
You can watch a 14 min animated version of it here.
On the Usefulness of Photography| 4 min read
📷 This was inspiring. It’s rare when a utilitarian approach to something can stir so much emotion, but this checks the mark. What’s useful about photography is, for most of us, very emotional at its core. We take pictures with our cameras and phones, because we want to, someday, look back and feel something for what we see. And it works! If only we took even more pictures. As a father trying to teach my daughter how to brush her teeth, this part broke me: “What you should be recording are not the destination events of life so much as the much more mundane things: rainy mornings, making cookies, the process of building a shed or starting a garden, or your child trying to learn to brush his teeth.” I’m not taking photos and I know, one day, I’ll wish I was.
Please help me grow this newsletter! I’d love if you shared it with your more curious friends.
A most ventilated tweet 👃
This week in a gif 🎲
High note ⚡
This issue cover picture comes from here.
Last issue most clicked link was The Financial Turing Test.
I hope you enjoyed these last minutes as much as me putting this together.
You can also show some love by clicking that tiny ❤️ at the top of the email. It would help spread the word. Or you can provide candy bars 🍫.
If you are one of those friends and someone shared this with you, you are in luck, buy them a beer next time you are together, and meanwhile, you can subscribe to This Week’s Worth here:
Until next week,
Filipe