What’s Nextby Jordan Gonen | 1.8.2018
by Jordan Gonen | 1.8.2018
Hi there 👋 How was your first week of 2018?
Tomorrow, I leave for my semester abroad. I will be spending a week in New York (9–16), a week in Barcelona (16–24), four days in Singapore (25–29) and start February in Hong Kong. Let me know if you have any travel recommendations / tips / thoughts.
Enjoy the content below and I hope you learn a thing or two 👇Articles to Read.
Making History by Doing Nothing:
To do nothing is often the best course of action. But history was not made by those who did nothing. So I suppose it’s only natural that ambitious and driven men want to go down in history.
Most of history is made by those who mastered the art of doing nothing when nothing needed to be done. This is especially true for business leaders and investors. Their do-nothingness can be more important than their inclination to do something. We just pay more attention to the somethings because they’re more obvious and exciting. My basic idea is 99% of investing is doing nothing, 1% will change your life, and that 1% is the only visible part so it’s all we talk about.
When exactly are we the most productive? Thinking back on your last year, you probably have no idea. Days blend together. Months fly by. And another year turns over without any real understanding of how we actually spent our time.
But our mission at RescueTime has always been to help you do more meaningful work. And this starts with understanding how you spend your days, when you’re most productive, and what’s getting in your way.
In 2017, we logged over 225 million hours of digital time from hundreds of thousands of RescueTime users around the world.
Simply put, our data shows that people were the most productive on November 14th. In fact, that entire week ranked as the most productive of the year. On the other side of the spectrum, we didn’t get a good start to the year. January 6th — the first Friday of the year — was the least productive day of 2017.
1) 2017–2019 will be THE big crypto bubble. Things could get nuttier from here…far nuttier than in the dotcom era. The retail investor base is 10x larger, with 24/7 access to the FOMO and get rich quickism. And we’ve got CNBC to help with the pump!
17) Forks with airdrops will become the preferred alternative to ICOs. You give away free money in order to get people excited about the new and improved project. The only thing they pay is attention. The people who truly buy in become your collaborators.
18) Stablecoins will work until they don’t. Sure, the Basecoin and MakerDAO teams seem strong, but these things will always break under (not so) black swan market conditions. And like the fiat currencies they aim to replace, once they break, they’ll be broken for good.
If Your Work Dominated Your Every Moment Would Life Be Worth Living:
Imagine that work had taken over the world. It would be the centre around which the rest of life turned. Then all else would come to be subservient to work. Then slowly, almost imperceptibly, anything else — the games once played, the songs hitherto sung, the loves fulfilled, the festivals celebrated — would come to resemble, and ultimately become, work. And then there would come a time, itself largely unobserved, when the many worlds that had once existed before work took over the world would vanish completely from the cultural record, having fallen into oblivion.
And how, in this world of total work, would people think and sound and act? Everywhere they looked, they would see the pre-employed, employed, post-employed, underemployed and unemployed, and there would be no one uncounted in this census.
“Man exists as a unit of society. Of himself, he is isolated, meaningless; only as he collaborates with others does he become worthwhile, for by sublimating himself in the group, he helps produce a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts.”
AI: Scary for the Right Reasons:
Artificial intelligence, AI, has grabbed headlines, hype, and even consternation at the beast we are unleashing. Every powerful technology can be used for good and bad, be it nuclear or biotechnology, and the same is true for AI. While much of the public discourse from the likes of Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking reflects on sci-fi like dystopian visions of overlord AI’s gone wrong (a scenario certainly worth discussing), there is a much more immediate threat when it comes to AI. Long before AI goes uncontrollable or takes over jobs, there lurks a much larger danger: AI in the hands of governments and/or bad actors used to push self-interested agendas against the greater good.
What Self-Awareness Really is and How to Cultivate It:
As an organizational psychologist and executive coach, I’ve had a ringside seat to the power of leadership self-awareness for nearly 15 years. I’ve also seen how attainable this skill is. Yet, when I first began to delve into the research on self-awareness, I was surprised by the striking gap between the science and the practice of self-awareness. All things considered, we knew surprisingly little about improving this critical skill.
Students are mining cryptocurrencies from their dorm rooms:
In November 2016, he stumbled on NiceHash, an online marketplace for individuals to mine cryptocurrency for willing buyers. His desktop computer, boosted with a graphics card, was enough to get started. Thinking he might make some money, Mark, who asked not to use his last name, downloaded the platform’s mining software and began mining for random buyers in exchange for payments in bitcoin. Within a few weeks, he had earned back the $120 cost of his graphics card, as well as enough to buy another for $200.
More to Check Out:
– How Youtube Became the World’s Best Film School
– Keith Rabois on OFF RCRD (podcast)
– Pinterest’s Third Way
– The Gold Rush of 1849
– RIP IPO
– A Beginner’s Guide to Longevity ResearchSee My Full Reading List
My Update:
– In case you missed it, last week I published my comprehensive year in review for 2017. I shared a bunch of my learnings and experiences.
– Excited to travel around the world in the coming months. The journey starts tomorrow and I will be in New York for a week. Let me know if you would like to get together!
– Still not completely happy with the newsletter design. Let me know what you think I should improve 🙂
– Got a few projects in the works.
By jordangonen on January 8, 2018.
Exported from Medium on February 17, 2018.