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August 3 · Issue #38 · View online
A short monthly newsletter packed with awesome new discoveries and personal recommendations!
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Happy August, and welcome to the 38th issue of ‘How Curious!’ ✌️ I was lucky last month and hit a hot-streak of great books and podcasts. If you check out those listed below you’re in for a treat! 💯 The world may be in some form of lockdown until a) A vaccine is ready, or b) A very effective treatment is available. I’ve started to examine how I would shape my life if this is the case, albeit with the luxury of knowing I have antibodies and can work from anywhere. 🏖️👨💻 What would you do differently if you were told the current state of play will continue for the next 12 months?
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My first trip in a hot air balloon 🎈
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Nothing is a waste of time if you use the experience wisely - Auguste Rodin Happiness is the acceptance of the journey as it is now, not the promise of the other shore. - Mike Carter We’re all basically building castles in the sand. Whether the surf comes in tomorrow, next year or next decade, don’t kid yourself of its permanence.
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Derek Sivers is amongst the quirkiest authors I read. I love all his content. It’s digestible, humorous, and immediately actionable. Derek’s short books don’t contain needless filler material and can be completed in 2 hours. I highly recommend you check out his two new books!
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Hell Yeah or No: Derek Sivers (9/10)
We shouldn’t preserve our first opinions as if they reflect our pure, untarnished, true nature. They’re often just the result of inexperience or a temporary phase. Old opinions shouldn’t define who we are in the future. The adding mindset is deeply ingrained. It’s easy to think I need something else. It’s hard to look instead at what to remove.
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Your Music and People: Derek Sivers (9/10)
Most of us don’t know what to do next. We know where we want to be, but we don’t know how to get there. The solution is incredibly simple and effective: Work backwards. Just contact someone who’s there, and ask how to get there. Call the destination, and ask for directions. You’ll get there much faster than walking without a map, hoping you arrive someday.
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The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger: Levinson, Marc (8/10)
The shipping container transformed global transportation, drastically reducing the time and cost to send goods around the world. Putting goods in a large box may seem obvious now, but it’s introduction faced many challenges, including regulation and global alignment on standardisation. Malcom McLean’s fundamental insight, commonplace today but quite radical in the 1950s, was that the shipping industry’s business was moving cargo, not sailing ships. The container itself served as a mobile warehouse, so the traditional costs of storage in transit warehouses fell away. Cargo theft dropped sharply, and claims of damage to goods in transit fell by up to 95 percent.
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View my digital bookshelf here and my 11,500+ book highlights here.
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#88 Derek Sivers: Innovation Versus Imitation - The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish
Musician, speaker, writer and entrepreneur, Derek Sivers chats about creating and running CD Baby, reading, mental models, living a meaningful life and the biggest mistake he’s ever made.
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What Dan Romero Thinks About Basically Everything - Village Global's Venture Stories
Dan Romero, formerly of Coinbase, joins Erik on this episode. Their discussion includes the lessons he learned from scaling Coinbase, some of the best books he’s read and what people don’t appreciate about the history of technology.
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#67 Systemic Racism In The UK with Adam Pugh & Africa Daley-Clarke - Adulting
This episode with Adam Pugh and Africa Daley-Clarke discusses systemic racism in the UK. A challenging but very important topic.
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No Code List - Comprehensive List of No Code Tools
This site contains a comprehensive list of no-tool cools with great categorisation to help you quickly find relevant tools.
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WindowSwap
Open a new window somewhere in the world
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How Long-Haul Trucking Works - Wendover Productions Youtube channel
Whilst doing a deep-dive on the freight industry I stumbled across the ‘Wendover Productions’ Youtube channel. It focuses on explaining how our world works, covering travel, economics, geography and more. I really liked this video on long-haul trucking and look forward to binging on more from this channel!
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What's Docker, and what are containers? - Technically
The ‘Technically’ newsletter sends out engaging and simple explanations of technical concepts that are useful for your day to day job if you work with software. I particularly like this article on Docker and containers as it’s quite neat to see concepts from a 1950s innovation in shipping applied to modern software!
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Percentage calculation hack 🔢
- If you ever have to calculate a difficult percentage on the spot you can use a simple shortcut - flip the numbers around.
- For example, if you wanted to work out 4% of 75 in your head, just flip it and do 75% of 4, which is far easier!
- Rule: x% of y = y% of x
The world of postage before stamps 📬
- Before stamps were introduced in 1840 you didn’t pay to send a letter, you paid to receive one!
- If the postman knocked on your door with a letter for you, he’d let you read it only if you coughed up a few shillings.
The Fresno Drop - Introducing Credit Cards 💳
- When credit cards were first introduced they had to overcome a chicken-and-egg problem: retailers didn’t want to go to the trouble of accepting them unless lots of customers demanded it, while customers couldn’t be bothered signing up for the cards unless plenty of retailers would accept them.
- To overcome the inertia, in 1958 Bank of America simply mailed a plastic credit card to every single Bank of America customer in Fresno, California – 60,000 of them. Each card had a credit limit of $500, no questions asked – closer to $5000 in today’s terms. The audacious move was known as the Fresno Drop
- The banks swallowed the losses from delinquent loans, and by the end of 1960, Bank of America alone had a million credit cards in circulation!
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View all previous newsletters here and all previous newsletter links here.
If you enjoyed this newsletter, feel free to forward this email to a friend or reach out with feedback and suggestions for the next edition! ✌️ - Peter Duffy
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