This is the Monday Medley, a newsletter that goes out, you guessed it, every Monday. I republish it here for sharing and referencing, but if you'd like to sign up you can do so right here:
Happy Monday!
I added five new videos to my Roam course this week. One video about filtering to expand on the basic functions, and then four videos related to Personal Knowledge Management in Roam. Sorry to anyone who had trouble with the checkout link last week, it's fixed now!
I also uploaded my notes on "High Output Management" by Andy Grove to the Brain. It's one of the best books on management and corporate leadership I've read, I wish I had pulled out my notes sooner.
And on the Growth Machine blog, we published a guest post by Danavir Sarria on how he helped double Cup & Leaf's email revenue in 30 days.
This Medley is brought to you again by Clearscope! One great thing about it I haven't mentioned is the Google Docs integration. If you write your articles in Google Docs like 99% of content creators I know, you can optimize it for SEO right in the doc without ever having to leave. It's perfect for optimizing as you go, and not getting your formatting messed up by constantly copy & pasting.
🏦 I read this piece from Josh Kaufman about the "Permanent Portfolio Investing Guide." The permanent portfolio idea is really interesting to me since it's such a simple, and seemingly effective, mix. Two questions I had reading it: if you're long-bitcoin, how does that factor into the mix. And why doesn't Wealthfront, which is what I use now, allow for custom allocations like this?
🦍 Here's a great example of Taleb's "Fooled by Randomness" ideas in action: most investors in the Netherlands were unable to get better results than Jacko the gorilla.
📏 Clayton Christensen passed away just over a week ago, so now might be a good time to read his speech on "How Will You Measure Your Life?" if you haven't already.
📦 More from Josh Kaufman, this is a good piece on how "Guiding Structure" can affect your productivity and work quality. I particularly like the example of the "Sterile Cockpit Rule" from the FAA:
"Most airline accidents happen below 10,000 feet, where distractions can be deadly. Above 10,000 feet, pilots can talk about anything they want, but below 10,000 feet, the only discussion permitted is about information directly related to the flight in progress. By eliminating distractions, the Sterile Cockpit reduces errors and accidents."
💡 Some good related books to this idea: Simple Rules and Work Clean.
🤯 How sure are you that your organic food is really organic? This man Randy Constant sold over $120,000,000 worth of grain falsely advertised as organic over 7 years.
🙅♂️ Oat milk like the popular Oatly has been taking the coffee and smoothie world by storm, but unfortunately, it's horrible for you. Here's a good highlight from Jeff's article:
Oatly has about the same blood sugar impact as a Coke and about the same amount of oil per serving as french fries. Oatly's primary sugar (maltose) has a higher glycemic index than pure glucose.
I pushed back on at least one of the claims in the article, and Jeff and I ended up having a good conversation about it on Twitter.
🥛 What is a good milk alternative then? The only one I regularly drink is Malk, since the only ingredients are organic almonds, salt, and water. Unfortunately, that means it tastes a lot less good than other pseudo milks, but at least you're not drinking french fries. Note that many of these issues are similar to the problem with Soylent and other fake foods.
⚡️ This is a great article on how Nuclear Power Can Save the World. I knew the fears about Nuclear were overblown, but I didn't realize just how overblown they are. Here's a passage from the article:
in 60 years of nuclear power, only three accidents have raised public alarm: Three Mile Island in 1979, which killed no one; Fukushima in 2011, which killed no one (many deaths resulted from the tsunami and some from a panicked evacuation near the plant); and Chernobyl in 1986, the result of extraordinary Soviet bungling, which killed 31 in the accident and perhaps several thousand from cancer, around the same number killed by coal emissions every day.
😱 I had to fact check that, and I found this study that puts the number at around 5,000 deaths since Nuclear's inception. That's insanely low!
🥵 Based on another study, Solar kills 10x as many people per Terawatt hour (people falling off roofs and such). Wind kills ~3x as many. And Coal (based on world average) kills 402.5x as many people. that's nuts. More people die in a day from coal alone than die from Nuclear in over a year.
😠 This is a perfect example of how "small cuts" can kill us. We get scared of Nuclear because of a few big events, when it's really the safest option. We get scared of Coronavirus because it's flashy in the headlines, but still drive cars and eat McDonalds. Getting scared by sensation is fun, but rarely helpful.
📰 Ryan Reynolds is quickly becoming one of the most impressive unconventional-PR marketers out there. First the Peloton ad, now this.
🤒 The Coronavirus still feels kind of overblown (compared to, say, the flu) but it's a little uncanny how spot-on this prediction from Bill Gates from a few years ago feels.
🙄 PETA keeps digging their hole deeper on Twitter. I don't know how they thought that publicizing their rejected super bowl ad was going to go over well.
🛠 In a past Medley I shared my coffee setup that the owner of Levercraft in Austin helped us put together in the cafe. Here's an incredible photo-lapse of him building his cafe from scratch, out of an abandoned Spartan trailer.
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Have a great week,
Nat