My notes on 'Start Small, Stay Small' 💎 Issue #84
Plus: reasons to be thankful, funky heuristics, and life's plans.
Happy Friday👋
What’s up? 📖
This week I published my notes on Rob Walling’s ‘Start Small, Stay Small’.
If you always wanted to build an online business you’ve heard about this book already, probably even read it, but if not, I think you owe it to yourself to give it a go. Here is a very short summary:
Probably the most recommended blueprint to (micro)entrepreneurship. It's all about finding the smallest niche that supports the smallest solution you can build. Step-by-step, iterating and finding profitability without illusions of grandiose. It's not about making millions, but supporting the lifestyle you chose.
The last sentence is my favorite part of the overall philosophy of the book. It’s not about focusing on a big payoff, but on small, almost sure, bets. The process is all about focusing on the smallest difference that you can make and how to exploit it, and although there are no magic recipes, this seems like the best next thing.
And now, the best things I found on the Internet this week.
New to me 💡
Underrated reasons to be thankful | 7 min read
🦃 I saved this article last Thanksgiving, as you might infer by its title, and I’m thankful I did. These are non-obvious pieces of trivia, some of them easier to start conversations with than others, that can easily put a smile on your face. You know that smile when you win at board games without having the faintest idea of how you did it.
That the Earth hasn’t recently been hit by a solar flare as powerful as the 1859 Carrington event, which is good because that would set electrical lines around the world on fire, meaning months of power outages and simultaneous failures of food, transport, and medical systems.
But life had other plans | 3 min read
🧬 This one is best experienced without any kind of teasing quotes.
Heuristics That Almost Always Work | 10 min read
🌪 You will never look at useless rocks the same way again.
He works in a very boring building. It basically never gets robbed. He sits in his security guard booth doing the crossword. Every so often, there’s a noise, and he checks to see if it’s robbers, or just the wind.
It’s the wind. It is always the wind. It’s never robbers. Nobody wants to rob the Pillow Mart in Topeka, Ohio. If a building on average gets robbed once every decade or two, he might go his entire career without ever encountering a real robber.
At some point, he develops a useful heuristic: it he hears a noise, he might as well ignore it and keep on crossing words: it’s just the wind, bro.
This heuristic is right 99.9% of the time, which is pretty good as heuristics go. It saves him a lot of trouble.
The only problem is: he now provides literally no value.
How To Achieve Ultimate Blog Success In One Easy Step | 3 min read
📅 I wish the one step was even easier.
When people ask me for advice on blogging, I always respond with yet another form of the same advice: pick a schedule you can live with, and stick to it. Until you do that, none of the other advice I could give you will matter.
Please help me grow this newsletter! I’d love if you shared it with your more curious friends.
A most counted tweet 🎲
This week in a gif 🧹
High note ⚡
Last issue most clicked link was You Can Only Pick Two.
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 leave a review here ⭐. 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