(Bi)Weekly Learning Journal 9 (23/11/2020)

Hi RIP readers, welcome to the RIP (Bi)Weekly Learning Journal Episode 9!

“Whaaaat?? Not two but THREE consecutive WLJ posts? Ok guys, goodbye, unsubscribe, unfollow, ciao RIP, this blog is gone!”

Wait! I know, I know I’ve been a bit absent lately, but I got some excu… ahem, some news.

“Good news or bad news?”

I hope it’s good news for you 🙂

I’m working on a very long “Blog redesign” / “RIP 2.0” / “Five years vision” plan.

I’ve spent the last two weeks designing my next FIRE Spectrum steps. I think I’m coming to the conclusion that regular employment is not for me. Especially in my “old” field. If there’s a thing I don’t want to do is working as a Software Engineer for someone. Anyone. It doesn’t matter how cool the mission is or how much autonomy I have. I don’t have a drive for the field anymore. Plus, I have enough financial security (and years of age) to perceive time as my scarcest resource now.

That means that few announcements will come, probably before the end of the year.

Spoiler: Soon(ish) I’ll go 100% all-in with my blogging activity, trying to make it at least partially financially sustainable. I’ll share my ideas and my plans with you before the end of the year.

Stay tu…

“… and what’s the good news for us?”

😐

Ok, anyway, as I just said I spent the last two weeks drawing a vision, a (overly optimistic) creativity & productivity plan, and a (overly pessimistic) business plan. It’s been an intense couple of weeks. Hard decisions have been made. Nobody told me middle age would have been so complicated.

Anyway, I’m uncomfortably excited, stay tuned 😉

As consequence, I slowed down a little bit on the learning side, that’s why this (B)WLJ is thinner than usual (LOL)

I hope you enjoy the content, I got great feedback about the series so far.

The central themes are Passion Economy, Full Stack Freelancing, Deep Work vs Just-in-Time Management, and more.

Before we jump in, I have a couple of announcements.

First one is for my Italian friends: I’m probably going to shut down my Ufficio Antisqualo (Italian “Fake Gurus exposed” page). Some of them are sending threatening legal emails, and honestly I don’t want to waste my time defending myself against them. I know, I’m “anonymous” and “telling the truth”, but it’s also part of the RIP 2.0 plan to go public and show my real name… and I don’t want to have to handle those criminal assholes that sell snake oil for prices that end with a 7, who promise unrealistic results, and who have an army of lawyers a click away. Sorry friends, it’s not my core business. And I got visibility and a lot of real money to lose, I’m not a random guy on the internet not worth suing. We live in an unfair world, where criminals have the best lawyers and naïve people like me could make an ingenuous wording mistake and lose a legal battle. Not worth it.

Second, let’s launch the RIP Book Club 🙂

today I will start reading the book “Designing Your Life” by Bill Burnett and Dave Evans

I’m doing this together with the awesome blogger Ream Me Money, with whom I’m having an amazing epistolary conversation about the meaning of life 🙂

We decided to start reading a book together, and I’d like to extend the invite to my readers as well.

Why not make it a regular thing, like a monthly routine? As a nice side effect I’d publicly commit to read a book a month, which is a good enough goal for 2021. Let’s not put pressure on me us for the first edition, and it’s also almost Christmas… yeah, let’s give us 40 days, until the end of 2020 for our first book 🙂

I don’t have a clear idea about “how” to read a book together, we’ll find it out along the way.

I’ll create a page for the Book Club (link), and a page for each book we’re going to read (link to Designing Your Life). If someone wants to join, feel free to send me an email or leave a comment here. This first book has been chosen under the regime of “benevolent dictatorship“, but next books will probably be chosen in a more democratic way. Well, not the next one, which will be for sure The Elephant in The Brain. Then Atomic Habits. Then Hackers and Painters. Then… what? Democracy? Here on my blog? 😀

I’ll also post Book Club updates on Twitter, so if you want to join the first edition of the RIP Book Club and receive updates on the project please follow me there 🙂

Anyway, the book we chose is about decision making, existential crisis, and radical life changes.

If you want to get an idea of what the book is about, take a look at Bill Burnett’s 2017 TEDx Talk that I linked in a post about my midlife crisis last year:

Btw, if anyone wants to set up a digital place where to “read together” the book (circle? discord? telegram? a forum?) feel free to take initiative and let me know 😉

Let’s move to the cool stuff now!

Next WLJ episode on Monday December 7th 🙂

Enjoy!

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German – Frugalisten post inspired by my FIRE is DEAD and FIRE Spectrum posts (RIP/10)

Link

Ok, top one is a self celebration one 😀

A couple of weeks ago Oli (Frugalisten) told me he was going to write an article inspired by Fire Spectrum… and he finally pushed it out last week!

Thanks Bro!!

Enjoy (if you understand German)

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Naval Ravikant on Tim Ferriss Show (9/10)

Link – Link with Transcript

The 2018 Tweetstorm “How to Get Rich without being Lucky” ended with “When you’re finally wealthy, you’ll realize that it wasn’t what you were seeking in the first place. But that’s for another day” (link).

We had to wait 2.5 years, but I think Naval’s appearance on the Tim Ferriss podcast can be officially classified with that “another day“.

It’s half about “Happiness” (more like “living a content life”), and I’d say half about Cryptocurrencies. Well, probably less than half about Cryptos, but the topic has been explored a lot in the podcast. I must admit I slightly moved my position from “Cryptos are overhyped useless speculative assets with no real use” to “Ok, maybe I should keep an eye on it, especially on Stablecoins”. Maybe it’s time for a “Part 2” of my Crypto Series.

My favorite passage of Naval and Tim podcast is this one:

Proper meditation, proper examination should ruin the life that you’re currently living. It should cause you to leave relationships. It should cause you to reestablish boundaries with family members and with colleagues. It should cause you to quit your job. It should cause you to change your eating patterns. It should cause you to spend more time with yourself. It should cause it to change the books you read. It should cause us to change what your friends are. If it doesn’t do that, it’s not real examination. If it doesn’t come attached with destruction of your current life, then you can’t create the new life in which you will not have the anxiety

I listened to the podcast in two walking-in-the-woods sessions, and I now need to set time apart to read the transcript and extract notes into my private Digital Garden.

It’s becoming a deeply satisfying daily routine 🙂

Enjoy!

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Tiago Forte on The Rise of the Full Stack Freelancer (8.5/10)

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Amazing 2017 article on the new wave of freelancers, connected to the Passion Economy trend, and a bit “against” Deep Work. In his “Building a Second Brain” Tiago advocates for Just-in-Time Management, i.e. the ability to “plan a wedding in 5 minutes intervals”. The metaphor is in this article as well.

As I said in the intro of this post, I’m looking into evolving my career into something blog centric. I’m thinking about producing products and offering services… and I stumbled upon this three years old post by Tiago Forte that gave a name to it: The Full Stack Freelancer!

I read and re-read the post, and extracted notes. It’s a bit too complex to share them in a Doc, they’re sincerely too Roam-centric 🙂 You need to wait for my public Digital Garden to see the light.

Anyway, the main concept is that until few years ago a “Freelancer” was a specialist who focused on a single highly monetizable skill. Very rigid work in exchange for a very flexible lifestyle.

Today, with the rise of the Passion Economy, a “Freelancer” (yes, I kind of question that freelancer is not the right word) can leverage SaaS and platforms to integrate a “full stack” of capabilities.

No more building a single skill very deeply, but switch to Portfolio Thinking.

I particularly loved the “Unbounded Learning” chapter (emphasis mine):

Formal schooling frames our career choices in stark terms: either hyperspecialize, putting all your eggs in one basket you hope and pray will be relevant for years to come; or take a gamble on self-employment, testing your resilience and risk tolerance under extreme conditions.

Full-Stack Freelancing offers a middle ground, with potentially the best of both worlds. It is pragmatic, recognizing that most people are generalists who want to pursue diverse interests. But it is also aspirational, recognizing that you need the flexibility to take advantage of unexpected opportunities.

A Full-Stack Freelancer does not see a black-and-white world of free agents vs. wage slaves. Full-time employment can be one item in their portfolio, temporarily or long-term, knowing that it neither defines them nor limits them.  (RIP: can you see how this approach fits perfectly with a FIRE Spectrum approach to life satisfaction?)

A portfolio approach to work is unbounded when it comes to personal growth, creativity, and learning. Changing direction is just a matter of adding or removing an item from your portfolio, not making a dramatic, wrenching career change. This offers the possibility of a deeper sustainability than even a well-paying job can provide.

Enjoy!

Also take a look at this – a bit outdated – follow up article on Tiago’s personal “Stack” for his Full Stack Freelancing (link). A list of apps and software he uses (in 2017).

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Li Jin (a16z) on Passion Economy (8.5/10)

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We’re getting out of the “Uber for X” era, and into “monetizing individuality”.

This article is the first one of a series on a16z website about the Passion Economy theme, I strongly recommend you to read them all, especially the one about 100 True Fans (instead of the famous 1000 True Fans article by Kevin Kelly):

Since a16z is a venture capital firm, the post series is targeted toward startup founders, and what platform/services provide to workers in the passion economy. It’s a different angle to the Full Stack Freelancing story we introduced above, but a very pragmatic one!

As a bonus, you can listen to their podcast episode about Passion Economy

And as another bonus, you can take a look at the Li Jin recent appearance in The Pomp Podcast. It’s about Passion Economy, of course, and i’s very good! She explains why the Passion Economy is not just “Entrepreneurship” and it’s not only the “Content Creator” economy.

Want more about Li’s Passion Economy material? Follow her on Substack: li.substack.com

Speaking of which…

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The AlphaGo Documentary (8.5/10)

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Amazing! 1h30 minutes movie about the 2016 Go match between Lee Sedol and AlphaGo, won 4-1 by the machine.

It’s incredible how engaged I felt while watching this documentary 🙂

And I remember closely that match…

Enjoy!

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Li Jin “Unbundling Work From Employment” (8/10)

Link

A picture is worth a thousand words:

Li explores the “vertical” approach to the Passion Economy, i.e. how we are moving from the “Uber for X” era (creating a widget economy platform) to a “Shopify for X” era (creating a passion economy vertical platform/service).

Vertical platforms help with community building, foster vertical-specific network effect, and remove frictions between the passion economy worker and their customers.

Two pictures are worth a million words:

What about the horizontal platforms? They help with scaling, discovery, diversification of income stream and more.

Three pictures are worth more than a Billion words:

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rBooks by Luca Dellanna (8/10)

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First two Roam Native eBooks! Or as the author bravely called it: first rBooks ever published.

Amazing idea with high likelihood of fading out and being forgotten in a few years, but kudos to Luca for pushing the boundaries of what’s possible in the world of Content Creation and Knowledge Work!

Luca, I’m going to contact you soon! I also want to write a rBook 🙂

Pretty high score for the idea, not for the books (that I didn’t purchase).

Bonus: Luca’s r/RoamResearch post explaining his project, and receiving the usual brutally honest and harsh reddit feedback.

Second Bonus: Luca’s Tweetstorm on why rBooks are the future of eBooks. I like it!

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IndieWeb Principles (8/10)

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Along the line of the fight between the Stream and the Garden, there’s a fight between the internet of monopolies and the indie web: the internet should not be owned by huge companies!

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Italian – Roberto Mercadini “Cari ladri, vi devo dei soldi! Contattatemi!” (8/10)

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I love Mercadini. He’s a former Software Engineer turned into a storyteller, theater actor.

A “me” in a parallel universe.

This video is about a burglary episode that happened to his family 2 years ago, and how he commiserates the burglars to the point that he thinks he owes them something. It’s an amazing video that my brain connects with Thoreau’s Walden (when Roberto says his house is always open), with Fabrizio De André (when he forgave his kidnappers), and more.

Enjoy!

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David Perell Tweetstorms on Writing (8/10)

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David Perell tried an interesting experiment of writing 50 short articles in 50 days, and they’re surprisingly high quality. So, not exactly “tweetstorms”, as in “Twitter Threads”, but we don’t care about definitions, right?

Most of them are about writing, while a good chunk are about Entrepreneurship.

I extracted a lot of notes here.

Many good ideas to foster creativity and improve writing quality. Thanks David!

P.S. it took me too much time to output a Google Doc out of my Roam notes. In a not so distant future you’ll be able to access them directly in my Digital Garden / Roam Database 🙂

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John Green on “How’s the Water” (7.5/10)

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John is of course quoting the famous This is Water speech by David Foster Wallace (link – 10/10)

It’s about not knowing what we’re all swimming in.

It’s about Uncertainty, Ignorance, Skepticism, and Wisdom.

I’m 40 now, and I don’t trust people who are extremely certain about things.

Enjoy

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Nat Eliason video on Antifragile by Nassim Taleb (7.5/10)

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Antifragile is one of the books I’m procrastinating on the most. But I’ve consumed so much “lateral content” like reviews, notes, deep dives that I think I grasped the main concepts. Of course I want to read the original book, but it’s moving down in the priority list.

If I analyze my actions, my desires, my decisions I can tell that my life has been driven by a desire for Freedom and Independence. The more my actions, decisions, and worries are detached from the events around me, the happier I feel. That’s also a kind of survival necessity since I tend to be 10x more anxious and future-oriented than you probably are. That’s genetic, that’s the hand I was given. I couldn’t literally survive if I were living paycheck to paycheck.

So one of my favorite keywords is Robustness, which is an upgraded version of Resilience in my opinion. Resilience is adapting to the new environment, while robustness is endurance: it means heading toward your goals despite all the curveballs life throws at you.

Resilience means that if you lose your job you can take a knife and a bow with arrows and go hunting for food, and you know you’d be ok.

Robustness means that if you lose your job you shrug, check your bank account and say “ok, I have food secured for the next 15 years. Barman, please another Mojito”.

I like my tactics to be resilient, of course, but I like my strategies to be robust.

Antifragility is a powerful mental model that takes this a step further: thriving in a (apparently) negative situation, and coming out in a better position at the end. It’s everywhere in nature, it’s actually an elegant alternative definition of “Natural Selection”.

Nat’s video begins with “if you woke up tomorrow and your job was gone, a tyrant had taken power, and a deadly plague was sweeping the world would you be terrified? Or would you be ready to see it as an opportunity?”

Well, I’d be indifferent 🙂

I’m too old for the “opportunity” thing, but I’m also extremely robust to shrug instead of become “terrified”. I booked my spot in the Zen monastery!

Antifragility is about seeing negative situations as an opportunity. Both antifragility and robustness demand you to focus on permissionless activities, and that’s my main take-away from the amazing book I haven’t read yet.

Nice video summary by Nat Eliason, enjoy!

Spoiler: he also mentioned Financial Independence!

Bonus: take a look at his Antifragile book notes (attached to a 1.5 hours long podcast about the book)

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Adam Davidson about the Passion Economy (7.5/10)

Link

It’s a very good video about the future of work. A bit less deep than the Li Jin articles I mentioned above, but they’re telling the same story.

What we perceive as the “standard” way to work (big companies, a job, a career, growing salary with age) is just a blip in human experience. It’s been like this for maybe 200 years. It’s not been around since forever, and it’s not guaranteed to last for long.

Adam also calls the current economy the widget economy, and he claims that we’re shifting away from it and toward a passion economy.

Widget economy exploded during the 20th century thanks to the mass production of the same thing. More efficiently, cheaper, yada yada yada… Amazing, but it’s about turning people into machines, variations of the same thing. You have a job title and your contribution is pretty much a commodity. You have to suppress who you are to satisfy the need of the job title.

Passion economy means creating special things that only some people want, but they want them badly!

First thing that comes in my mind is all the new amazing board games I can find on Kickstarter!

The Passion Economy is another revolution, which will coexist with the widget economy. Still a lot of big organizations, but also a lot of small companies. Chaotic but more satisfying career path. Not junior SWE, SWE, senior SWE, SWE manager, but while you’re finding your unique passion your career might bounce around. Not linear.

Do you see parallel with the Full Stack Freelancer model above? 😉

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More to That about The Omnipresence of Work (7.5/10)

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Working From Home is making us miserable and unable to create boundaries between work and life.

At least the Blackberry that brought our jobs into our pockets was a clearly ugly gadget.

Now the home is no longer an environmental cue to put work aside. It is a place that constantly reminds you that there is always more work to be done.

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Scott Young’s 2007 Twenty Ways to stay productive when WFH (7.5/10)

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It’s a 2007 article that’s still very relevant!

Enjoy!

…and don’t forget to give the article a del.icio.us tag 😀

I extracted notes but it’s too much work to put them in a google doc… you need to wait for my Digital Garden to go public 🙂

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Kurzgesagt on Life and Size (7.5/10)

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TL;DR: everything works via diffusion.

Enjoy!

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Derek Sivers’s 2018 post “Use the Internet, not just companies” (7/10)

Link

This article stuck with me when I first read it, a couple of years ago.

I love Derek, I love his First Principles Thinking attitude. He’s the first one who I heard saying “You should use a personal database” – before PKM was cool, before Roam.

This post is about not trusting companies for your own stuff. Code your website from scratch. Own your databases. Build your cloud. Use TXT files or open standards. Companies won’t be around in 10 years.

In the music world, everyone was on mp3.com, then on Myspace, and so on. Don’t trust companies, even Facebook and Google. They might not be around in 10 years. Use them but don’t depend on them.

I personally like this. I always back up my stuff, I don’t want to rely on companies like you said. I love robustness. But I don’t go as deep as building my website from scratch (even though it would be a good exercise to fight The Bullshit Web, and to create my own Digital Garden), or using only TXT files.

I’m a Gen X, and I think I’m between the blissfully ignorant trusting attitude of a millennial or a Zoomer, and a “canned food and guns” attitude of a boomer.

I have my local cloud, my backups, my “TXT Files” (Markdown), but I also use companies that might disappear tomorrow.

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Jacob Falkovich “How I Write” (7/10)

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It’s 5 years Put a Num on It blogversary, congrats Jacob!

The post I linked is about his writing process, and you should know by now how curious I am with other writers’ writing process 🙂

Jacob is a Deep Work enthusiast, with a rational awareness of the difference between what he “should” do and what he “wants to” do. What should work for him, and what actually works for him.

I love the following passage (emphasis mine):

One day in late February I spent the day in the office struggling to get any work done while my mind was churning COVID thoughts. I came home exhausted at 8 pm, took off my shoes, then inexplicably went straight to the computer to start a brand new post with no outline or draft. After four hours I hit submit on what became my most influential post ever.

If you had asked me at 7:55 pm whether I was going to write a post that day, I would have thought it unlikely. But I sat down anyway, and the magic happened. If you plan to write in long spells you can’t wait for the perfect day when you wake up full of energy with a clear schedule and a buzzing mind — that happens too rarely if at all.

I also like his use of Twitter as a collaborative thinking tool, and his dismissal of the Writer’s Block as a problem. It’s a common trend among writers to throw shit to on Writer’s Block these days. And I agree as well, I never suffered from it. I have way more words ready to be written than the total amount of characters I can type on a keyword if I’d spend the remainder of my life typing.

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Coffeezilla and Mike Winnet (7/10)

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Very long live recording DRIP Podcast with Coffeezilla and Mike Winnet.

I didn’t watch the full 4 hours (!!) video, but got hooked up by the presence of Mike Winnet (the fun part starts at minute 30).

He told his own story: he sold a business for 12 millions and didn’t know what to do (I didn’t know that!). HE started attending business events and discovered they all use the same pattern to milk money out of  people, and that’s how the Contrepreneur Formula was born.

They also talked about “hard pills to swallow”, like how giants like Tony Robbins and Gary Vee are moving giant steps into the Contrepreneur business. Very sad. The richer they are, the greedier they are.

P.S. to all the guys who ask me “are the courses from X legit?” or “What’s your opinion on Y?”, usually referred to my Ufficio Antisqualo work, please check out this 67 seconds short speech (that starts here) by Mike Winnet!

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Tomas Pueyo “Coronavirus: The Swiss Cheese Strategy” (7/10)

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Tomas Pueyo’s series on “how to face Covid” should be the political guideline for any sane nation.

I’ve linked The Hammer and the Dance several times in my previous posts, along with the one on Testing and contact Tracing and few more.

Take a look at his video on Europe and Covid from February and early November. He didn’t mince his words on how Europe handled both the first and the second pandemic wave.

This post is about a new strategy for the Dance step, split in 4 layers:

• Reduce infection inflow.
• Reduce contacts between infected and healthy people.
• Reduce Rt.
• Quickly identify new infections.

Like a “Swiss cheese” (because a cheese is Swiss if and only if it has holes, right?), every layer has its own weakness but combined they make it hard for the virus to pass through all the holes.

Anyway, this post doesn’t contain enough new insights (just a collection of things I already knew) to get a great score on RIP WLJ 🙂

Enjoy anyway!

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Morgan housel “I Have A Few Questions” (7/10)

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A set of hard questions that you can ask yourself to raise your Contrarian and Skeptical self.

My Favorites:

• Which of my current views would I disagree with if I were born in a different country or generation?
• What do I desperately want to be true, so much that I think it’s true when it’s clearly not?
• What looks unsustainable but is actually a new trend we haven’t accepted yet?
• What do I ignore because it’s too painful to accept?
• Which of my current views would change if my incentives were different?
• What are we ignoring today that will seem shockingly obvious in a year?
• How much have things outside of my control contributed to things I take credit for?
• How do I know if I’m being patient (a skill) or stubborn (a flaw)? They’re hard to tell apart without hindsight.

As long as you live, keep learning how to live

– Seneca

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r/coolguides what to say to your kids instead of “be careful” (6.5/10)

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Very timely. I tend to fall into the “be careful” fallacy often.

Do this instead 🙂

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Italian – Oro Spezie e Tulipani (6/10)

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An Italian blog (and a newborn YouTube channel) about finances, passive investing, a bit of active investing by an anonymous blogger, Bowman, who works “in the field”.

Recent discovery, a lot of useful information, an Anti-Shark attitude, and some fun.

Enjoy!

I haven’t dug deep enough, so the ranking is a “Sei Politico” (Italian way of saying “a barely sufficient rating given without having tested of your skills, a participation medal“) for now 🙂

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PHQ-9 Depression Test (4/10)

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The PHQ-9 Depression Test is a pretty popular preliminary 9 questions test to check what’s your mental health state.

I took it, and I scored 9/27 (mild depression).

I then played with the answers and detected what the score is made of. And I questioned the overall test quality: in my opinion it’s pure bullshit.

Each question scores between 0 and 3 points, and then scores are summed up. It assigns Suicidal Thoughts the same score as Eating Disorders. A pile of Bullshit.

Someone with eating disorders who never had a suicidal thought gets the same score as someone who has no eating disorder but thinks about taking their own life every day.

Oh come on, how come we are close to sending people on Mars and at the same time someone gets paid to come up with such bullshit?

Tweet Link

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Guillame Nery – Hold your Breath (O_O/10)

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I used to be into amatorial free diving during my childhood. My father dove a lot, and sometimes I joined him for some diving sessions. Free diving, apnea. Never used oxygen tanks.

I used to be able to hold my breath for almost 3 minutes, and to dive down to 25 meters with just fins and a mask. I loved it! I remember when Maiorca, Mayol and Pipin were surpassing one another as freediving world record holders!

Then I didn’t care for ~20 years. Until few years ago, when I watched a TED Talk by Guillame Nery (link), who has been a world record holder. I also watched some of his aesthetically amazing videos, like the M-40, Ocean Gravity, or Narcose (this last one is NSFW).

He recently published this new one in defense of Coral Reefs.

Enjoy!

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Malukah and Erutan (Awe/10)

Malukah is a Mexican indie composer and singer, with one of the best voices I’ve ever heard, and a passion for fantasy, videogames, and TV Series.

I discovered her back in 2013, thanks to The Rains of Castamere (do you remember GoT? Was it a century ago?), and since then I listen to whatever she throws out on YouTube. I particularly love the multi voice recording videos, like this!

Check out her channel 🙂

Here’s her latest video, a cover of The Sound of Silence. Enjoy

P.S. congrats Malukah for having become a mom two weeks ago!

Along the same line, but more into Fantasy, Celtic, and Videogame Music, check out Erutan.

She doesn’t produce much content anymore, she claimed she lost her voice growing up.

I fell in love with Itsumo Nando Demo (from Studio Ghibli’s Spirited Away soundtrack).

I spent 2 months memorizing the words and singing it to my not-born-yet daughter during last 3 months of my wife’s pregnancy in 2018.

Spoiler: if you think it has any influence on pre natal brain development… well, it doesn’t. My daughter doesn’t like or recognize the song 🙁

And no, it’s not because of my inability to sing! Well, I’m not able to sing, of course… but but but uff 🙁

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The Expert (LOL/10)

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Old but gold. I come to this video roughly once a year, and it makes me laugh every single time.

This year it made me also angry.

Maybe it’s because it hurts on my open scars. My “enemies” have never been those depicted in the video, like the users, the product manager, the boss… but more like technology itself as a whole. The field of Software Development as a whole.

I don’t know. Mixed feelings. Bitter laughter this year.

Still worth it though 🙂

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Others

Here follows a list of other resources I’ve consumed over the last two weeks that didn’t make into the main section 🙂

Kurzgesagt on Geoengineering. Link. Interesting video about potential solutions to Greenhouse effect. More of a mental experiment than a real effective solution, but we like to let our minds wander, right? 🙂

Mike Winnet‘s Contrepreneur Bingo with three fake gurus forex traders. Link. I love the series! Also check out his latest episode with Grant Cardone! Link

Early Retirement Now on Target Date Funds. Link. Big ERN mentioned the Bellman’s Optimality Equation, the root of Machine Learning 🙂 “An optimal policy has the property that whatever the initial state and initial decision are, the remaining decisions must constitute an optimal policy with regard to the state resulting from the first decision.” Bellman, R.E. (1957), Dynamic Programming, Dover.

Robert Haisfield Roam Tour with Historian Mark Robertson Part 1. Link. A lot of insights on how to use Roam for productivity and PKM. Sadly there’s no part 2 🙁

John Oliver on the US presidential election results. Link. And this other one on Donald Trump fighting the final results. Link. Thanks guys, you made America great again!

Ryan Holiday on reading, keeping a commonplace book (predecessor of PKM), Marginalia, and the concept of Antilibrary. Link. How do you find time to read so much? No one says: How do you have time to eat? How do you have time to sleep or have sex? You make time. It’s the stuff of life. “When I get a little money I buy books; and if any is left I buy food and clothes” (Desiderius Erasmus)

Raptitude on Deliberate Relaxation. Link. Very good post! We can learn how to relax on demand.

James Jani on Escaping the Rat Race. Link. Not bad, but a bit too simplistic.

The Plain Bagel video on the difference between the Stock Market and the Economy”. Link. Yes, we now know about it, right?

ITA – Svevo Moltrasio Video on the most recent Covid related decree in Italy, that introduced “colored” regions. Link. Funny but also “fuck all of you”, dear conspiracy theorists.

ITA – Astutillo Smeriglia on why he hates Donald Trump. Link. I couldn’t have said in better terms.

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That’s all for this week 🙂