Hey friends,
Welcome to the 14 new subscribers this week, it’s great to have some new faces in the crowd. I’m pretty sure it’s not just my family that I’m writing to anymore…
Thanks for being here!
Let’s get to class…
Homeroom
My Essay: The Best Way to Learn Online
This week I’m sharing a tiny piece I put together outlining the best way to learn online. The age of abundance we’re living in has given us immense opportunity to self-educate as long as we’re using technology the right way. This article shares in detail how you can get going with that. The simple steps are:
Read essays, not articles
Click on all the links
Get really into notes
Share what you’ve learned
Click the link to check it out and read in more detail about each step.
Elementary Education: Conviction & Knowledge
One of the best online writers is Tim Urban. He’s the absolute best at using imagery in his essays. He creates his own characters and terms to provide vision and context in illustrating his points. His website is an amazing place to kill some time reading great ideas.
One of Tim’s models that I love is the common path to knowledge. Check out this illustration:
There are several steps along the way, but the three landmarks he’s created on the graph are:
Child’s Hill - When you think you know everything, but really know nothing.
Insecure Canyon - You’ve come to terms with the fact that you don’t know everything. It’s the low-point of conviction. It’s also the starting point toward real knowledge.
Grown Up Mountain - The climb on the path the real knowledge with strong conviction.
I love everything about this model, but I really love Child’s Hill. We can all relate to thinking we know more than our parents and believing we have all the answers, only to find that we were sorely mistaken.
Faux-Zoology
One of my favorite concepts is called Yak Shaving. You can read one of the origins of this idea here on Seth Godin’s blog, but I’ll explain it in full.
First, the definition.
Yak Shaving: Going down a path that is unrelated to the task you need to do. It’s starting down a rabbit hole of tasks further and further away from the original task at hand.
It could be called something else, but Yak Shaving is catchy and memorable. The idea is this, quoting Godin:
I want to wax the car today.
“Oops, the hose is still broken from the winter. I’ll need to buy a new one at Home Depot.”
“But Home Depot is on the other side of the Tappan Zee bridge and getting there without my EZPass is miserable because of the tolls.”
“But, wait! I could borrow my neighbor’s EZPass…”
“Bob won’t lend me his EZPass until I return the mooshi pillow my son borrowed, though.”
“And we haven’t returned it because some of the stuffing fell out and we need to get some yak hair to restuff it.”
And the next thing you know, you’re at the zoo, shaving a yak, all so you can wax your car.
How often does this happen to all of us during the course of a workday or a project? It’s so easy to meander down a line of unrelated tasks if we’re only focused on the next task at hand.
It’s important to always stop and ask yourself why it is you started a task in the first place every now and then to make sure you haven’t wandered blindly down a path away from your original purpose.
Don’t go shave a yak.
Intro to Geographical Desirability
This map of the United States has a bunch of dots. 80% of Americans live within these dots on the map. This equates to 3.6% of the land mass of the lower 48 states.
It’s not totally surprising, but it is visually fascinating.
It’s going to be interesting to see how the work-from-home economy begins to cause small shifts in where people are living. Many companies have already announced that they won’t be shifting back to office life after opening back up from COVID lockdowns, so there won’t be any reason for people to have to live in expensive areas like Silicon Valley anymore. Some of these companies are Twitter, Square and Facebook and Slack.
Will we see shifts to 2nd/3rd tier cities, or even rural areas? Can’t wait to find out! Watching those real estate prices like:
Quote of the Week
“Formal education will make you a living; self-education will make you a fortune.”
- Jim Rohn
Photo of the Week
My parents came out to LA for the week, so I took my dad surfing. This is my wife and I heading out for some waves.
That’s it for this week!
Talk to you all next Sunday.
-Ryan