Try something new 💎 Issue #5
Plus: movie posters as old books and the voice of god.
Happy Friday!
What’s up? 😉
When was the last time you did something for the first time? And I don’t mean eat something for the first time, or visiting a new place. I mean an activity, like a sport, driving or painting a wall.
Last Friday I played golf for the first time.
Maybe calling it “golf” is a bit of a stretch. Just because we have a driver’s license it doesn’t make us F1 pilots. I had a club in my hand and I tried to hit the ball. That’s it and that’s the easy part. Having the ball “fly” in a respectable manner is what will get you.
Lucky for me I had a great coach. And what a difference it makes. When you know nothing one simple feedback can take you from “this is impossible” to “that was easy”.
As a football coach, this lesson paid more dividends besides those related to golf. We can coach as much as we want, but I have a feeling that we have much to gain with struggling while being coached, and see how that feels. Especially after we started coaching.
How should we react to instructions that we don’t understand? Or to the feedback, we try to apply but we don’t seem able to? How motivated are we by the goals established in each task? What do reaching those goals tell us about our skill level?
If you always wanted to try golf I say you should definitely take a class like this and see how it feels. I’m still considering what my next step should be.
New to me 💡
Designer Imagines What His Favorite Movies Would Look Like If They Were Old Books | 2 min read
It’s not like I’m 75 and know what all books looked like back in the day, but what Matt Stevens accomplishes here is designing these book covers in a way that they are believable even if you don’t know what vintage books would look like.
3 Must-Have Qualities for Effective Leadership | 19 min read
There’s plenty of books and articles about leadership. This one by Steph Smith is different. I like how it stems from the experience of someone who took a position of leadership inside a team where everyone was more experienced. I’ll let you explore the article on your own, but if you are in a hurry, I would say that you need to “acknowledge how much I have to learn” as one of the most important meta-skills for any kind of growth.
Operating Principles: The Tool High Performers Use to Make Hard Choices | 10 min read
Decision making is one of my favorite topics. Here Taylor Pearson gives the example of one of the frameworks we can use to facilitate those most agonizing decisions. “Operating Principles are a set of principles, heuristics, and rules of thumb to enable more effective judgements for modifying existing systems or creating new ones". Not only you’ll be entering a decision space with some extra “tricks” by your side, but you will also avoid the same walls every time you face the same problems.
From the archive 🗂️
Salieri describing one of Mozart's compositions | 1 min watch
This is probably the most famous scene of the movie Amadeus. And it’s also part of my playlist World Experts Talking About Their Craft Is the Most Hypnotic Thing on YouTube that I’m sending to every new This Week’s Worth subscriber. I started the playlist because I came to the realization that it was pretty hard to look away when world experts are talking about their stuff. They expose secrets, they let you in on the jokes, and they give you a taste of what a life’s dedication to a single topic feels like.
A most guiding tweet ✍️
These apps I discovered 🔎
SwipeBox | Takes any URL you feed into it and transforms the corresponding site into a PDF.
Unified Remote (Android) | Turn your smartphone into a remote control for your computer.
Anyline Keyboard | Scan text with your phone and paste it wherever you want.
This week in a gif 🤯
High note ⚡
Last week’s most clicked link was 68 Bits of Unsolicited Advice by Kevin Kelly.
I hope you enjoyed these last minutes as much as me putting this together. If so, I’d love if you shared it with some friends.
You can also show some love by clicking that tiny ❤️ at the top of the email. It would help spread the word.
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