✏️ New Word Learned:
Pettifogging: placing undue emphasis on petty details
🗞️ From Dispatch #002 of Mercury’s Playbook:
Indeed—of all the marketplaces and industries in the world, luxury is perhaps the most intriguing when it comes to consumer psychology, simply because it proves that utility and functionality are not the end-all-be-all of product appeal. It provides a rich study into one of humanity’s most fundamental desires—the need to feel special, superior, and set apart. When it comes to crafting desirable products, no one does it better than the luxury industry because luxury is product charged with meaning to the utmost degree.
📓 A glimpse into my sketch notes for my Tech Product Management course, week 1. People generally seem to be intrigued when they see them in class, even when made very hastily and with poor handwriting.
💬 Brooklyn-based band Geese talking about their creative process. I relate heavily:
“Well, it kind of starts with someone else’s pre-existing song most of the time, honestly. We’re pretty referential in what we do. Even if we try not to be, we can’t help it. So we find something we want to filter through ourselves, and then we sort of have to work backwards to try and un-plagiarize it. And that’s the part that requires the creativity.
🎵 Been listening to:
- The Best of Benny Goodman by Benny Goodman
- David Lyons by Dominic Fike
- Tiny Desk Concert by Ne-yo
- Chicago by Michael Jackson
Dominic Fike’s latest album is not the most effortful, but he has so much talent that it is still a solid musical project. Just wish he rapped more!
📚 New book order finally arrived
💬 Prof Glenn Okun in my class tonight:
”All genius is just someone else’s undisclosed process.”
🗞️ The very first dispatch of my business strategy newsletter is out now: mercurysplaybook.com
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Just finished the first draft of the first newsletter for Mercury’s Playbook, which goes out on Monday. I am so thrilled to finally get it going—but crunching away on a computer til 9:00pm on a Saturday is reminding me exactly why writing is considered such a labor of love (emphasis on labor). 😩
I think here of how difficult it can be to make a decision, the agony in wanting to make the right choice, knowing all the while that “right” is impossible. There’s an oft-unspoken effort to avoid regret in that agonizing. But that effort represents a kind of paradox: the anguish exists because regret is inevitable. To live is to regret. More than that, to live well is to care for your regrets, to accept their role as teacher and guide.
✍️ I wrote some brief thoughts about the concept of ‘F**k You’ money & why I’m not surprised our billionaires persist in their moral malaise. I realize this is semi-political & therefore subject to polarization, but I hope the more pertinent theme I am trying to circumambulate comes through.
Absolutely diabolical work from Google’s AI overview when I was trying to find out if a certain Lebanese-American artist still made music… 💀
🎵 Been listening to:
- In My Room by Julia Wolfe
- The Romantic Spirituals album by KAMAUU
- 3 Legs by Paul McCartney
- KIARI album by Offset
KIARI has earned a purchase from me. Incredible rapping with some mature tracks from Offset. Love seeing an artist grow.
Being on a NYC rooftop never gets old.
💬 From my current read, How Big Things Get Done:
Only 8.5% of projects hit the mark on both cost and time. And a minuscule .5% nail cost, time, and benefits. Or to put another way, 91.5% of projects go over budget, over schedule, or both. And 99.5% of projects go over budget, over schedule, under benefits, or some combination of these.
Really intrigued to see where this goes and how he fixes these problems.
✍️ I wrote an open letter to the anonymous person who stole my shoes last night. 🥾🏃♂️
✍️ New post on the blog: Conversations With Dead People—Who’s On Your Mt. Rushmore?
Thinking alot about those special voices we internalize and the dead people we converse with.