Dima reads #5

Links

I believe in numbers more than anything else and therefore try to track as many metrics as possible. That's why Buster Benson's post was particularly interesting to me - it's like an asynchronous brainstorm on the topic. A quote for inspiration and getting attention:

You get one death bed point whenever you do something that you believe will still be valuable and meaningful to you when you’re on your death bed. He/she who dies with the most death bed points wins.

Continuing to click on the linked links I got to ‘Quantified Self’ - there are more of these date freaks measuring themselves from all angles. Example, a show-n-tell deck on the impact of HRV on stress during (work) conversations.

I was hooked by the “insights per minute” concept - because it's true, there is content that generates a lot of reflection and a desire to leave highlights - a great demonstration of value. It's a good list of podcasts, and if you dig further there are other interesting lists along these lines as well

Hidden monopolies are everywhere, but what's even more interesting is how the dominant players set the rules for the rest of us, changing the industry. This is something that Bill Gurley has talked about before. And here's another example involving Walmart - their effect on the economies of the cities where they opened. And “adjacent” story with another effect - “food deserts“ in US.

Books

Interesting list of top scifi books by Tiago Forte. On his tip, I read Octavia Butler’s “Lilith’s Brood: Dawn“ - good. And suddenly I've connected the dots. Already in the second book (the first - “Children of Time” by Adrian Tchaikovsky) the idea of one race winning over another by substituting chemical stimuli is touched upon. In Tchaikovsky’s book, the spiders tweaked the humans so that they were not frightened of them, but saw them as partners. And similarly in “Dawn” the aliens in a similar way build a ‘partnership’ with earthlings. And we can believe in such a future. Already now social networks and media are getting people hooked by hacking dopamine loops, in fact it's almost the same thing.