MONTHLY MULLING 💡
How Writing Online Made Me a Millionaire, Where The Wild Things Are, and the GameStop Saga
Hi👋,
Tapan here.
Monthly Mulling is a newsletter sending the best ideas from the web to your inbox for free. High signal. Low noise.
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Happy Sunday y’all!
My office project is somewhat over after an excruciating 2 months of long working days. Finally some rest!
Since the last issue of Monthly Mulling, GameStop went from $65 to $347 and now back to $63. Pretty crazy, eh? We did an episode on Cold Brew Money on the GameStop saga. Check it out!
If you have read my article on skills that we are not taught in school, you will resonate with this.
Onwards🚀
💭MULLING
✍🏼 How Writing Online Made Me a Millionaire by Ali Abdaal (Video- 16 mins)
Everything Ali says in this video resonated with me (except for becoming a millionaire). If you are planning to put content out and are worried, watch this video! Ali talks about -
How writing will help you - to keep a log for yourself, make notes, understand and learn new things. You can go back to these notes and ideas after 3-4 years and learn something new!
Butterfly Effect - once you publish online, you don’t know where your thoughts and ideas will travel to. A flap of wings in Africa can lead to a tornado in the US.
It will help someone - if you think you don’t have any new ideas to share, you’re wrong. If you have put 100 hours reading about something, it’s still 100 hours more compared to someone who has just started.
💡 Where The Wild Things Are by David Perell (Article - 7 mins)
If you’re active on Twitter, you know who Dave Perell is. I am currently devouring his blog and found an article that resonated with me.
Dave says, “Creativity always starts at the edge”. Essentially, ideas begin on outskirts and as they become mass-media, it loses its creativity. Originality.
There are three broad categories of information producers/consumers
The Diggers - they are surrounded by creative people. They are present when trends begin. They hold the key to Pandora’s Box.
The Tourists - they borrow fringe ideas, clean them up, and present them to the mainstream consciousness. They are curious but feel responsible to share brilliant ideas from the web.
The Masses - they find most of their ideas from the tourists and stay far away from the Diggers. They operate within clearly-defined, well-mapped territories.
Informational advantages are found in obscure, hard-to-digest sources. As information moves from the boards of 4chan to the forums of Reddit to Twitter and Instagram and to the front page of the New York Times or Facebook, the signal to noise ratio increases and informational advantages disappear.
As ideas trickle from the fringe to the mainstream, their tone, tenor, and shape transform. If you want creativity, stay at the edge. Follow the Diggers — they know where the wild things are.
📈 Step Changes vs Incremental Change from Dhaval Shroff (Podcast - 50 mins)
This comes from Cold Brew Money. We recently had Dhaval Shroff as our guest who works at Tesla.
We were discussing Elon Musk and how Tesla was a gamechanger when it launched and he brought up an interesting topic - Step Change vs Incremental Change.
Incremental Change - as the name would suggest, they are small changes taken to slowly improve a product. iPhone currently.
Step Change - this is a complete overhaul of how the product works. iPhone when Steve Jobs launched it in 2007.
The incremental change model is followed by a lot of companies. They have the base setup and they slowly improve the initial base.
Step change needs a completely different mindset. These are the people, the innovators, who take huge risks and try to disrupt the market. It requires stripping down an existing product and the way it works into pieces, understanding what is necessary, and building it up but way better.
First Principles is a great mental model for a step change. And that’s what Elon did with Tesla and SpaceX. Steve Jobs did with iPod and iPhone.
📚TREAT YO’ SHELVES
Check out my 2021 Reading Challenge page (read 30-pages per day). You can join us on Goodreads, we have a group for the challenge!
READING CHALLENGE 2021
Again lagging behind because of work. I haven’t been keeping up with the 30-page per day yet somehow managed to finish 4 books in the past month.
I haven’t been able to connect with philosophical books recently so moving away from them for a bit.
STEAL LIKE AN ARTIST BY AUSTIN KLEON
Book summary in one line: None of the ideas are original, everything has been said before; great artists know how to make these ideas into their own.
Important Lessons:
Be consistent in your creative pursuit. If you wait for creativity, creativity will wait for you. Create something. Every day.
Don't copy, try to imitate. Learn from your heroes and see how can you add your own authentic spin to their work. In doing so, you will find your own style.
Have a lot of side-projects and keep switching between them but at the same time keep some time for yourself. To sit still. Your best ideas will come when you’re bored.
Favorite Quotes:
When people give you advice, they’re really just talking to themselves in the past - Austin Kleon
The work you do while you procrastinate is probably the work you should be doing for the rest of your life - Jessica Hische
Complain about the way other people make software by making software - Andre Torres
I am currently reading
The Heart of Buddha’s Teaching by Thich Nhat Hanh
Algorithms to Live By by Brian Christian and Tom Griffiths
Show Your Work by Austin Kleon
🎙PODCASTS
😎 WHAT THE HAT!?
🏏 Yash Khandor on Software Management, Pivoting Careers and Creating Niche Content
🎨 Tanisha Wagh talks about UX Design, Psychology in Design, and On Taking Risks
🎧 APPLE | SPOTIFY | YOUTUBE | GOOGLE PODCAST | ANCHOR | CASTBOX | STITCHER | JIOSAAVN | WEBSITE
💰COLD BREW MONEY
🚗 Electric Vehicles with Dhaval Shroff ($TSLA, $NIO, and more)
🤷🏼♂️ GameStonks $GME
🎧 APPLE | SPOTIFY | GOOGLE PODCAST | ANCHOR | CASTBOX | JIOSAAVN
Ciao.
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