The 'How-tos' of great performances 💎 Issue #45
Plus: If a cat does sit-ups why can't I do a giveaway?
Hey there 👋
What’s up? 🔝
Am I doing a giveaway? Maybe I am.
And…here’s the best stuff I found on the Internet this week.
New to me 💡
What complexity science says about what makes a winning team | 17 min read
🧩 We all have heard before the saying “the group is better than the sum of its parts”, but few have tried to explain where is the difference between those two values. This article is the best attempt I remember. “Part of the reason why recruiters and others resort to going after the best players rather than building the best team is that it remains unclear what other factors contribute to team greatness, and how to quantify them.”
🏀 The all article is great if you are into what makes teams tick (I even wrote about that here), but I have to mention the example of Lego players: if you look at their individual contribution all you see is average, but if you look at the team with them you see everyone getting better and the opponents getting worse: “by helping them out in all sorts of subtle ways. ‘I call him Lego,’ Morey says. ‘When he’s on the court, all the pieces start to fit together”.
The 10 Foundational Practices for a Good Life | 13 min read
😎 Who doesn’t love a little bit of short-term discomfort in return for a promise of 10x returns in the long-term? In all seriousness, reading 30 minutes per day is no discomfort, exercising daily is, and having a conversation with someone smarter than me once a week would be a pleasure. You will have a different discomfort scale, but will probably agree that these are 8, or 9 of these 10 things would be awesome to include in our lives. Also, unlike most of these articles, this one offers a plan that makes sense for adopting the 10 practices in 6 months.
Practice Analytically, Perform Intuitively | 8 min read
💯 In an ideal world, you give your best display of skill without thinking about how you should do it. Just the act of doing it would realize the best play for what a given activity is asking from you. This is more or less consensual. What’s not as consensual is how to get there.
⛳ We all agree that you have to practice deliberately, but not so much in how that looks like, what should be included and left out, or how to best use computers and the data they spew out for our benefit. Then there’s Bryson DeChambeau (This Week’s Worth #20). He cares little for how an entire sport thinks about how to best play it.
Please help me grow this newsletter! I’d love if you shared it with your more curious friends.
A most rewritten tweet ✒
This week in a gif 🐱👤
The gif (in case you are reading this in your email).
High note ⚡
This issue cover picture comes from here.
Last issue most clicked link was The Revised Psychology of Human Misjudgment.
I hope you enjoyed these last minutes as much as me putting this together.
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Until next week,
Filipe