Weekly Mix #178 - Getting Lucky, Top Job Skills, Time, "Yet" & Tim Urban

Weekly Mix #178 - Getting Lucky, Top Job Skills, Time, "Yet" & Tim Urban

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Happy Monday!

I hope you enjoyed Super Bowl weekend and had a good first week of February (!!).

This week I read How to Get Rich, which despite its terrible title, is one of the most entertaining books I've read in some time. I'll post notes soon.

Two of my favourite short essays from last week were Adaptability and Macro Productivity.​

I tuned into my first Clubhouse chat this week. It's basically an audio-only, real-time fireside chat. Not sure what I think yet, but there's an interesting negative take here.

In this week’s newsletter:

Article: How to be lucky​

Article: The top 10 job skills of tomorrow​

Article: The Tail End​

Article: A simple missing word​

Podcast: Tim Urban of Wait but Why on the Creator Lab Podcast​

Have a wonderful week!

Graham

Article: How to be lucky - Christian Busch​

This article pairs well with David Perell's How to Maximize Serendipity.​

Both are about the same thing: maximizing our ability to recognize opportunities and "luck."

I put "luck" in quotation marks because a lot of the trick is recognizing opportunities and "creating luck" yourself.

Article: The top 10 job skills of tomorrow​

I wouldn't normally include a fluffy article like this one, but the top 10 skills are almost all things we focus on in this newsletter.

Meta-skills like analytical thinking, active learning and learning strategies, critical thinking and analysis.

My takeaway is that while specific knowledge is valuable, especially if it's in a growing field, the most valuable long-term skills are those that can be applied to new skills and subjects.

Article: The Tail End​

I try to re-read this article at least every couple months. The magic of this article is showing our time visually, using things that are very easy for us to understand.

How many pizzas are left in our lifetime, for example, or how many swims in the ocean.

When people ask what it's like being back home during the pandemic, I often quote this article, specifically this part: "It turns out that when I graduated from high school, I had already used up 93% of my in-person parent time. I’m now enjoying the last 5% of that time. We’re in the tail end."

The pandemic has brought lots of bad. But one of the good things for some of us has been the extra time with family that we wouldn't have had otherwise.

Article: A simple missing word​

"Yet."

I enjoyed this piece of Seth Godin's on reframing things we haven't quite finished.

My takeaway: be patient, trust the process, and "can't" turns into "haven't yet."

Podcast: Tim Urban of Wait but Why on the Creator Lab Podcast​

Tim Urban, author of the blog Wait but Why, doesn't appear on many podcasts, which is part of why this one was so enjoyable.

If you want the quick recap, I put together my takeaways in this Twitter thread.​

Ten Tweets

​Austin Schlessinger and I on the top creator economy tweets, threads, and people to follow​

​25 resources to improve your writing from Jamie Russo​

​Sahil Bloom on the Feynman technique for learning​

​Motivation for creators from Ira Glass, via David Perell​

​Greg Isenberg's guide to startups​

​6 mental models from Tobi Lutke, CEO of Shopify, via George Mack​

​Andrew Wilkinson's book recommendations​

​A moving-bin business idea from Shaan Puri​

Photo: Sunset views

One of the best parts about photography, in my opinion, is learning to have a better eye for good lighting and beautiful scenes. This was one such opportunity during a post-storm sunset last week.

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Thank you for being part of the newsletter every week.

It means so much that you let me be part of your inbox, and I love building a community of like-minded people with you.

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