🐍 Killer pythons, salaries, hockey and Home Alone
This week is a longer one, as it should be after 2 weeks, but the topics are widely varied–everything from Teslas to killer snakes.
As always, if you're enjoying the newsletter, please forward to friends! Forwarding a great story to people is a good excuse to connect, and I really appreciate you sharing.
Have a great end of week and weekend!
Blog Post I Wrote:Inversion - How to Succeed by Avoiding Mistakes
A powerful mental model that I apply regularly, inversion is flipping a problem or question on its head to find an alternative way of reaching the answer. It's closely related to first principles thinking.
Articles I'm Reading:
- Stalking Killer Pythons with Florida's Bounty Snake Hunters - Mel Magazine - This is a crazy story. Basically, 1000+ Burmese pythons escaped during Hurricane Andrew in Florida, and they are breeding like crazy...to the point that Florida has 50 contractors hunting these things now. They grow to 20+ feet!
- Know Your Worth - This Twitter movement had people posting their salaries, jobs and locations (mostly software-related), and this site aggregated all those tweets. The takeaways: some engineers get paid a lot, and others don't (ie. there's wide variance). Interesting read nonetheless.
- Tesla teardown finds electronics 6 years ahead of Toyota and VW - Nikkei Asian Review - Interesting to note some of the reasons for the finding (supply chain restrictions). Another example of some of the underrated advantages startups have over incumbents. (Yeah, I know, we can debate if Tesla is a "startup", but they definitely are in the car world)
- Model Hacking ADAS to Pave Safer Roads for Autonomous Vehicles - McAfee - ...but despite that, some Teslas can be hacked by stickers. Low-tech sometimes beats high-tech.
- Opioids, Car Crashes and Falling: The Odds of Dying in the U.S. - NYT - I started looking up some of these stats again, because of a conversation at work about the dangers of white-water rafting. The reality is, driving in your car on the way there is about as risky. Are "extreme" sports like this insurance's high-margin products?
- The power of Paul Bissonnette: How a former tough guy became the most influential person in hockey - The Globe and Mail - For the hockey fans out there, this is a great profile and story about a former NHLer hustling to build his business career.
- Macaulay Culkin Is Not Like You - Esquire - I'm not a huge Home Alone fan, but this is a good profile on a child star finding some semblance of happiness and peace in his life.
Book Notes I Added:Never Split the Difference - Chris Voss
An actionable, entertaining read. I chose this book as the first of several with the aim of improving my negotiation skills, and it didn't disappoint. I'm already applying many of the skills, and plan to continue practicing. Stories of FBI hostage negotiation make it entertaining throughout.
Have a great week!
Graham
