MONTHLY MULLING💡
The Ladder of Wealth Creation, Estonia, and Going Small or Going Home.
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!
If you’re so rich, why aren’t you so smart? If you’re so smart, why aren’t you happy?
I have been mulling over these quotes by Nassim Taleb and Naval over the past couple of days.
Anyway, let’s get started.
💭MULLING
✌🏼Good enough is just fine (Article)
This one was an interesting read. I had realized this idea sometime back but this article just put my thoughts in writing!
When you work on a project for some time (article, newsletter, or anything else), you start building expectations. As you keep working. you try to perfect it even further. That’s human nature - you can always do better!
And then there comes a point when you have done some “good enough” work but it is not perfect. So you chase perfection.
In doing so, you end up delaying the project and keep working on it even further. As you keep working on it more, the point of perfection keeps rising and rising.
It results in a chase that never ends. As a creator, you will never think your work is complete. But it is important to let it go when you think it is “good enough”.
“Good Enough is when you know that the work isn’t perfect, but it still respects the intellect of your audience. It’s not exactly what you envisioned, but it’s still damn good enough to deserve their investment of attention.”
💰Mental Model for Wealth Creation (Article)
I consider Naval’s tweetstorm on wealth creation to be one of the greatest things I got out of the internet. Naval does an amazing job of explaining what wealth is. But, how do you actually create wealth?
In this newsletter, Visual Wisdom visualizes an article written by Nathan Barry explaining the "Ladder of Wealth Creation".
As you can see in the above visual, most average careers start at the bottom left, where we devote our time to earn. But as our career progresses, we gain new skills which we could leverage to start our own service business, productized services, and finally selling products!
Visual Wisdom gives his own example of selling digital products on Gumroad and making money. You can buy the above wealth creation ladder visual from Visual Wisdom for free here.
📚Mark Manson - Better, Faster, Stronger (Article)
In this article, Mark Manson of the Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck fame discusses three questions that have been asked to him multiple times. If you are not a subscriber to his newsletter, you will have difficulty in reading the article. So here is the summary.
1) How do you remember what you’ve read? You don’t. We are taught in school that we should be able to actively recall whatever we are taught. But human memory doesn’t work that way. Our memory works based on association. As you read more, you will form these associations. So when someone talks to you about something in particular that you have read, you will be like “yes I have read it somewhere” and will be able to recall. The stronger the association, the better you will be able to recall.
You don’t actually need to remember all the information in each book, you simply need to remember what information is in each book.
2) How do you read faster? You don’t have to read a book sequentially. Mark says, “I go into new books with the attitude that they need to earn my attention, either through the quality of writing or the quality of information. I have a personal rule, if I get 10% of the way into the book and am still not enjoying it, I put it down and move on. Life is too short and there are too many books in the world”.
Train yourself to learn how to skip and skim well. Once you got what you want out of a book, you can keep it down and move on.
3) How do you read more? You do it consistently and intelligently. Mark says, “it’s not some Herculean effort to become an insanely well-read person. It’s like anything else: do it intelligently, and consistently, week after week, year after year, and one day you’ll wake up having read a few hundred books and everyone will look at you like you’re some sort of freakish encyclopedia who knows and remembers everything—but really you remember nothing—it’s just that someone said triggered a memory about a book you read four years ago and a bunch of associated ideas came flooding back into your mind and now you sound super fucking smart.”
😎How to be correct about everything all the time (Video)
Exurb1a is one of my favorite YouTube channels.
He explains a lot of biases, heuristics, and mental models in this video. He covers a lot about human evolution as well.
All this just to answer one simple question— how to be correct about everything all the time? *Spoiler alert* The answer is compassion.
☁Connected - Episode 5 - Estonia (Netflix)
In my previous newsletter, I talked about watching Connected on Netflix. I finished the show and thought it was ehhh🤷♂️. But one episode stood out to me which was about the “Cloud”. The host covers Estonia in this episode.
I had no idea about this but I found out that Estonia is one of the world’s most advanced digital societies. All citizens are given a digital ID card. All the work is done digitally. Voting is online. Public internet is free. Government work is done online and doesn’t use any paper. You can sign legal documents online using your digital ID. Taxes are filed online. The entire country has gone digital!
They have really embraced the future. And recently, they started a Digital Nomad visa through which people who do remote work can come to Estonia and live there for a year! 🤯
📚TREAT YO’ SHELVES!
😴Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker
How do you get better sleep? I ordered the book to find an answer. And boy, I was surprised. 3/4th of the book is spent on explaining the science behind sleep and dreams. Only the final 1/4th of the book gives some actionable advice with a 2-page appendix summarizing the major takeaways from the book😂
If you’re interested in understanding the science behind sleep, read the entire book. If you just need actionable advice— find this book in Barnes & Noble or Crossword, find the appendix, and read the 2 pages. You’re done!
Here are a few things I took away -
Have a consistent sleep schedule, even over the weekends🛏
Avoid caffeine and nicotine; coffee has a half-life of 5-7 hours. The coffee you drink at 7 pm, still has an effect on your body at 12am!☕
Avoid alcohol before sleep, it affects your memory🍻
Don’t take naps after 3 pm💤
A warm shower before bed will help🚿
If you can’t sleep at night, don’t keep lying on your bed. Get up, read something (don’t touch your phone or iPad), take a walk, and try again 📖
🗺The Culture Map by Erin Meyer
This is an interesting read. It talks about how our respective cultures have an impact on the way we behave at work. It maps out countries against a scale of ideas that we use to communicate at work and in personal life. If you work with a multi-cultural team, lots of actionable advice. It is a good read!
I feel having worked in PwC with a multi-cultural team, I knew most of the ideas from the book.
A good example that I can personally attest to is communication. In India, communication is based on a lot of assumptions and it is in-between the sentences. When I worked in the US, the communication was a lot more explicit, usually confirmed 3-4 times. So someone from the US working in India will have a hard time understanding the status of a project if they don’t understand the context (or the unspoken words).
Now there are always outliers. But this book gives some solid actionable advice for the masses.
Note: If you have book recommendations, you can directly send them to me through my social accounts linked below. I also keep my GoodReads account up-to-date, if you want to take a look. Here is a list of my most recommended books of all time.
🆕CONTENT UPDATE
✍🏼BLOG
Here are the articles I released in the past couple of weeks.
How to create Network Effects and applying them in real-life - this is the last part of my 12,000 words Network Effects series. In this part, I discuss how to create a business with Network Effects.
Go Small or Go Home - discussing the idea of the smallest viable market. I explain why do niches work and how can you find your own niche to start a business.
🎙PODCASTS
WHAT THE HAT!?
We released our season finale discussing how and why did we start the podcast! And we show our faces! I know, never thought I will be plastering my ugly-ass face on the internet but here we are. SPOTIFY | ANCHOR | YOUTUBE
We have already started working on season 2 of the podcast and we got some really great feedback (you can give your feedback here). We are working on
a shorter episode format
more diverse guests
better audio quality
better quality of questions
We also started WTH Media which will help podcasters to start their own shows. Are you interested? You can get the podcast cheat sheet from our website!
COLD BREW MONEY
Our weekly podcast discussing money because your friends and family won’t.
💲Are you interested in having a passive income source? (all streaming platforms) We discuss what is passive income, why is it important to create wealth, and some ideas on how to get started
🏡We also talked with a home-owner in the US on buying a new house (all streaming platforms). There are a lot of parameters that are required to be understood before you consider buying a new house, we discuss some of them.
I also release daily content on my Instagram account - show some love!🥰
Okay. Bye.
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