📸 The view from this last weekend 🗽🌃
No, really, the biggest lie Disney ever sold was making the cockroach in Wall•E an adorable creature. Romantic fiction at its finest. 🪳❤️
If God don’t like ugly, then why did he make the cockroach? 🪳
✏️ New Word Learned:
Badinage: humorous or witty conversation
✏️ New Word Learned:
Parturition: the action of giving birth to young; childbirth
💬 From Down and Out in Paris and London:
I believe that this instinct to perpetuate useless work is, at bottom, simply fear of the mob. The mob are such low animals that they would be dangerous if they had leisure; it is safer to keep them too busy to think. [This fear] is a superstitious fear. It is based on the idea that there is some mysterious, fundamental difference between rich and poor, as though they were two different races, like negroes and white men. But in reality there is no such difference. The mass of the rich and poor are differentiated by their income and nothing else, and the average millionaire is only the average dishwasher dressed in a new suit. Everyone who has mixed on equal terms with the poor know this quite well.
✏️ New Word Learned:
Etiolated: having lost vigor or substance; feeble
History doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme.
📓 Sketch note page for my “Managing A Growing Company” course — probably incoherent out of context, but helps me capture what’s not on the slides and printed notes.
✏️ 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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