Monday Musings (6/17/19)
Summer of Learning Bundle
Hey everybody,
I’m psyched to announce the Summer of Learning.
The Summer of Learning is a bundle of two online courses: Building a Second Brain and Write of Passage. I’ll be co-teaching both courses with Tiago Forte, the founder of Forte Labs. Together, they are an end-to-end curriculum for dedicated professionals, executives, creators, and writers.
Building a Second Brain will help you store, organize, and manage all your information. Write of Passage applies that knowledge. In it, you’ll learn to incubate interesting ideas, develop written content, and build an online audience. You’ll receive a $100 discount if you purchase both courses.
Who is the Summer of Learning For?
You’re drowning in information overload. You’re scrambling to keep up with your emails, messages, meetings, travel itineraries, research materials, favorite podcasts, and reading lists. The madness is making you stressed, anxious, and unproductive. You want to be a leader in your organization. You have colleagues who rely on you. You want to know more, read more, write more, and achieve more. But right now, all that information is hogging your time.
I get it. I’ve felt your stress. I have a solution for you. And I’ve done most of the hard work for you.
You need a system for managing your ideas. An organized system for storing everything you read, hear, and experience in a central place, so you can access information on demand. A system for managing, interpreting, and combining information in productive ways. A system for developing interesting ideas, writing them down, and sharing your insights with the world. Ultimately, the Summer of Learning will give you a breakthrough system for taking information abundance from a source of crippling anxiety to a competitive superpower.
That way, you tap into the world’s collective intelligence.
What Will You Learn?
First, you’ll learn to save and organize all the information that’s important to you. That way, no matter where in the world you are, you’ll be able to retrieve information when you need it the most. Then, you’ll build your online presence and learn a repeatable system for quality writing. You’ll learn to create opportunities for yourself, connect with anybody, and use the internet to gain a promotion, increase your income, and meet the people you want to meet.
By the end of the summer, you’ll be able to write consistently and instantly retrieve your valuable information when you need it most. Writers block will be a thing of the past. You’ll have a personal website and a reliable way to distribute your ideas to the people who matter most. You’ll create a series of published articles on your website and have the confidence and capacity to share your ideas with the world.
Every moment spent trying to remember an idea is a moment spent not creating one. You have access to the best thinking of the world’s best thinkers right at your fingertips. But right now, you’re not taking advantage of it. It’s time to gather it, distill it, and share it.
This is your chance to take control.
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If you’re interested, check out these links:
Fresh Ideas
I published last week’s comments about the “Go For It Window” on my website.
In it, I explained why technology advances faster than social norms. Large gaps between accelerating technologies and stagnating social norms create lucrative opportunities. But these opportunities are only available for a limited time. In that moment, people can capitalize on the difference between the real and perceived state of the world.
I call this sliver of opportunity the “Go-For-It-Window.”
You can read the full article here.
Coolest Things I Learned This Week
Predicting the Future is Hard
The Wall Street Journal recently shared a graphic showing predictions from 50 economists on the direction of interest rates. The average forecast for the end of June was 3.39% on the ten-year.
As you can see in the chart below, not one of the predictions came close to where rates currently are.
The Incredible Story of Radar
From an excellent article by Michael Batnick:
“The snippet below took place in 1922. The two engineers repeated the experiment successfully several more times, and a few days later, on September 27, they sent a letter to their superiors describing a new way to detect enemy ships. A line of US ships carrying receivers and transmitters could immediately detect “the passage of an enemy vessel…irrespective of fog, darkness or smoke screen.
This was the earliest known proposal for the use of radar in battle. One military historian would later write that the technology changed the face of warfare ‘more than any single development since the airplane.
The navy ignored it.”
Geographic Clustering Increases Productivity
A recent study in the Journal of Urban Economics tracked writers who were living in the Ireland and the United Kingdom between 1700 and 1925. It found that writers who moved to London increased their productivity by about 12 percent. Furthermore, members of the London writers cluster were 24 percent more likely to have their work published.
The study compared writers’ productivity before and after they moved to London. The productivity gains didn’t just come because the most prolific writers moved to London. Writers’ productivity improved significantly in the first five years living in London.
As the study shows:
"Due to the geographic concentration of creative industries, authors in London likely had access to stronger and more advantageous social networks, in terms of increased connections with their peers (other authors), individuals with influence within the publishing industry (agents, publishers, critics), and those who are a part of the intellectual and cultural elite (artists, musicians, wealthy patrons). Authors in London also could have taken advantage of the related economic infrastructure and gained from the resulting economies of scale, allowing for a more efficient transformation of ideas into physical book-form.”
Birth Rates in Europe
Even Europe’s highest birth rates are barely at replacement level and most of Europe is far below.
Photo of the Week
Greetings from California!
I’m in Los Angeles for meetings and podcasts. The summer vibes are in full swing. Yesterday, I recorded a podcast episode with Jeff Morris Jr., the Chief Product Officer at Tinder. Right after the episode, I said to him: “That might have been the best podcast I’ve ever recorded.”
Can’t wait to share it with you.
Until next week,
David Perell
P.S. No matter what you want to do with your career, it pays to write online, share your ideas, and build a targeted audience. And the Summer of Learning is the best way to take control of your online presence.