Think Week #8
Hidden Gems, Analysis Paralysis, Coding is Thinking, A Model for Luck, Mantras
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Let’s dig in.
— DKH
Hidden Gems
On December 11th, 1985, David Letterman interviewed Quincy Jones a week before his film The Color Purple was set to hit theaters.
They talked about how Oprah Winfrey unexpectedly joined the cast of the film.
Quincy was watching AM Chicago one morning and saw "this lady."
He said to himself "there's Sophia," the character Winfrey went on to play in the film. He didn't know who Oprah was or if she could act.
Quincy got her name, an audition tape, and the rest was history.
The Color Purple went on to garner 11 Academy Award Nominations and AM Chicago would later become The Oprah Winfrey Show.
Quincy Jones is someone I've admired for decades and I never knew this story. I was randomly stumbling through YouTube and found the Letterman interview.
Old interviews are full of great stories.
They always produce an overflow of ideas for you to think about it.
Quincy had a gift. He was able to see something in people that they often didn’t see in themselves. He was a master at discovering hidden gems.
Analysis Paralysis
You can be the most outwardly confident, yet lost, person on earth.
I've been there. Not sure what to write about. What to invest your time in. Who to engage with, or what to pay for.
Analysis paralysis is real.
It’s mentally debilitating.
How does one reset?
Getting away from the screen, burying my face in a book, catching up with a friend.
These are the cheat codes I use for getting unstuck. There are so many different types of freedom. Clarity is one of them.
It's difficult to gain on your own.
Phone a friend every now and then.
Creating a New Luck Surface Area Model
Written by Josh Cadorette
We cannot control all of the things that influence our lives. Millions of variables affect what happens to us and when it happens. These variables make the concept of controlling our own luck elusive. Yet, just because something cannot be controlled does not mean that it cannot be facilitated. Doing and telling are two variables that allow us to create our own luck, not control it, in order to increase our chances of success.
— Source
I love that last line…
Luck is not something you can control but it is something you can create.
Josh helps us understand this by showing us what creating luck looks like from an economic perspective.
You need equal amounts of “Doing” and “Telling” to have the most efficient path to creating your own luck.
The “Telling” piece for writers involves marketing, distribution, and as we just learned from Alex Llull, formatting!
Josh is also working on adding a few new variables to the equation:
Passion (P) - do you care about what you work on? If so, it'll yield higher levels of luck.
Consistency (C) - a routine cadence with which you do (D) and tell (T) leads to higher levels of luck.
Empathy (E) - the ability to relate to people. This results in higher levels of trust amongst team members/supporters, leading to higher levels of luck.
Coding is Thinking
AI tools like cursor can generate an incredible amount of useful code and I feel like I have superhuman strength leveraging them, but my brain is already wired to think like a programmer. It only enhances what was already there. The connections between the neurons in my brain didn’t form by having AI write code for me.
It’s true, natural language is now a legitimate programming language.
Everyone is a now a programmer.
But the rich get richer.
Midjourney helps designers significantly more than someone without any design experience. Claude helps experienced writers more than writers who lack discipline.
The value being captured from these tools is not evenly distributed amongst society.
Should you still learn how to code?
Absolutely.
Coding is not just a means to an end.
It's a tool for thought.
If writing is thinking, coding is thinking.
Atomic Notes
Fab Five
Emily Sundberg: “Creating content with the goal of making money off of it is different than creating content with the goal of getting likes, is different than creating content with the goal of being creative and connecting with other people.” — Source
Anna Mackenzie: “The Portfolio Career Layering Method is, as it sounds, an approach to building lots of disparate or interconnected channels of work. It involves starting with one focus, and then as you achieve critical mass, expanding to another.” — Source
Polina Pompliano: “One of the biggest things I've learned is that nothing in this life is guaranteed. Not trust. Not respect. Not luck. But the one thing you can control is staying the course with a level head over a long period of time. If you focus on delivering a consistent, high-quality product, that’s when miracles happen.” — SourceStephen Moore: “It has been a death by a thousand cuts as the platform (Twitter) continues to descend into irrelevance (or relevance, but for all the wrong reasons?) And this week, things got taken to a whole new level.” — Source
Annika: “Not only did many influencers abandon their community building in favor of paid promotions. They also lost the plot of fashion and beauty altogether. Because trends are no longer trends (plural), it feels like there is one trend (singular) and it is promoted like this universal rule everyone needs to follow.” — Source
Fin
My mantra for the past 10 years.
Three words.
Live, Love, Serve.
Live your life, not someone else's.
Love beyond the limits of your prejudices.
Serve those who are less fortunate than you.
— DKH
P.S. A collection of newsletters worth reading.
Thanks Marco! Glad it resonated.
Thank you for the mention. What a great round up of content!