Weekly Mix #199 - Harder Than It Looks, Life-Changing Ideas & Agency

Weekly Mix #199 - Harder Than It Looks, Life-Changing Ideas & Agency

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Happy Monday!

I hope you had a great long weekend, wherever you are.

As usual, I hoped to get more done than I did, despite the wet weather ruining my plans to bike and golf as much as possible.

I'm always surprised at the difference between the days where you truly have nothing scheduled, and ones where you have one or two things.

Unless they're first thing in the morning, they seem to take up time and mental space through the whole day. This seems to apply whether on a day off or a work day.

I often try to get around this by having days where I truly schedule nothing, and other days where I schedule everything possible, filling my entire day with whatever obligations I want to fulfill.

Either way, it's nice to have some rainy days to encourage the days with nothing at all.

Have a wonderful week!

Graham

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Links

📖 Harder Than It Looks, Not As Fun as It Seems - Morgan Housel - Something I find to be more and more true the more experience I get. Nothing is ever as good or as brilliant or as beautiful as it seems from the outside. In other words, the grass is always greener. Reminded me of this piece on effort I shared earlier this year.

📖 50 Ideas That Changed My Life - David Perell - I'm sure I've shared this one before, but it's worth sharing again. A succinct list of 50 great principles, and a great starting point for building your own list.

📖 The Most Precious Resource is Agency - Simon Sarris - An exploration of how we remove agency in the modern world, and the evidence that perhaps we should be giving more, earlier. "The act of creation causes imagination, not the other way around...Learning is naturally the consequence of doing." I wonder a lot about this in the realm of education.

📖 How do you ask good questions? - Tyler Cowen - A quick piece about how to ask better questions—something I've been thinking about more as we get back to more in-person interactions. Some quick takeaways:

Be more specific

Preface your question with a confession

Learn to show you're listening intently

10 Tweets​​

​Why Amazon writes memos instead of using slide decks​

​​​Where Elon Musk lives now​

​Sheep herding as seen from a drone​

​A beautiful video of a Tissot watch being restored​

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