It’s a new year and a great time to start a new project. If you are a reader of GSP Updates, you will remember that I used to include a section called “The Bigger Picture”. This monthly email is a more extensive version of that section. These are the best things I have read, watched or listened to recently; along with material I’ve written.
Let’s get started…
The Top None Percent
An excerpt from the best blog post I read last year:
When I talk to my kids, they are never going to hear about anything being harder, just different. Rather than seeing good or bad, I want their lens to find problems to solve. There are not many one-dimensional puzzles anymore, and that’s GREAT! Trying harder and harder to jam one passion into place may be the wrong move. Experimenting on a few different dimensions might end up fitting together better than anybody else has imagined, because it may not even exist yet. Some combinations have never even been attempted, so they might lead smack dab to the middle of the top none percent.
Ryan Krueger
The full article by Ryan Krueger is a must read for every parent raising a child.
Learning
A new generation has grown up teaching themselves using YouTube.
I’m inspired by Jayson Tatum, the Boston Celtics star. He was 7 years old when YouTube was invented. Throughout his childhood, he watched Kobe Bryant videos on the internet. But he didn’t just watch the highlights. He studied Kobe’s footwork, the subtleties of his shot fakes, and the rhythm of his jab steps. Even though he’s now 21 years old, students of the game say he plays like somebody whose seen decades of basketball. That’s because he has.
David Perell via Monday Musings (10/7/19)
YouTube has even been credited with helping Olympic athletes.
Yego’s rise to fame is a bit more unconventional than the standard javelin medalist. In 2013, a year after qualifying for the 2012 London Olympics for the first time, Yego told CNN that he is self-taught and relied on YouTube videos to perfect his technique.
Business Insider
Small Changes in Habits
The impact created by a change in your habits is similar to the effect of shifting the route of an airplane by just a few degrees. Imagine you are flying from Los Angeles to New York City. If a pilot leaving from LAX adjusts the heading just 3.5 degrees south, you will land in Washington, D.C., instead of New York. Such a small change is barely noticeable at takeoff—the nose of the airplane moves just a few feet—but when magnified across the entire United States, you end up hundreds of miles apart.
Atomic Habits by James Clear
Super Powers
Some blind people can understand speech that is almost three times faster than the fastest speech sighted people can understand. They can use speech synthesisers set at at 800 words per minute (conversational speech is 120–150 wpm). Research suggests that a section of the brain that normally responds to light is re-mapped in blind people to process sound.
[Austin Hicks & R Douglas Fields via 52 things I learned in 2019 by Tom Whitwell.
Eisenhower
Eisenhower was promoted to lieutenant colonel in 1918, in advance of his coming deployment. He would not be promoted again for twenty years, until 1938. The army had a glut of officers who’d been elevated during the war, and there were not many openings for advancement in an army that by the 1920s was shrinking and assuming a marginal role in American life. His career stagnated, while the careers of his civilian brothers zoomed ahead. By the time he was in his forties, he was easily the least accomplished of the boys in the Eisenhower family. He was in middle age. He did not receive his first star until he was fifty-one. Nobody expected great things of him.
The Road to Character by David Brooks
Top Posts from 2019
These were the most popular posts from my website, based on page views.
But What If You Didn’t Pay Cash