21.09: Random Thoughts of the Week

• 🥱 If you’ve been procrastinating on the expansion of your social and intellectual range, this is the ultimate resource to get you started. A bold critique on modern society and how we are boring each other out by repeating the same stories over and over.

• ⏰ Speaking of procrastination… Time Billionaires surely will reset your mind for the best when it comes to thinking of finite resources, in particular, time and money.

A million seconds is like 11 days. A billion seconds is 31 years. […] There is a difference between a time billionaire and a dollar billionaire. One has financial resources and the other has life resources. Our society overvalues the former, but undervalues the latter.

Having a billion dollars is great, but having a billion seconds is priceless. There is no amount of money in the world that can purchase immortality. Remember — the time billionaire always dies with zero.

• 🎁 Usually, links don’t relate to each other, but again, the latter is somehow linked to this idea that most people say they “want” something, when in fact, they want “the consequences” of that something. Posterchild example: I want to be rich (hard work) vs. I want the consequences of being rich (the yacht). This excellent post beautifully captures the idea, playing around with the verbs “be” and “do”.

• 🔮 Now coming from the other end. If you had “infinite” resources and no need to think of money in the long run, how would you use your time? What would you do? I think startup studios would be my (current) answer to the question.

Think of the studio model as a powerful de-risking machine. The main way it de-risks is through diversification. Studios improve their chances of success by taking a bunch of shots on net rather than just one.

• 🪴 This comparison between products and gardening profoundly resonated with the way I understand products myself. This philosophy would set the tone across all the projects at a hypothetical startup studio.

• 🗜 What if all software companies in the future become either suppliers or marketing businesses? This is what Blake Robbins suggests in Modern Suppliers — a bold insight on the very Internet’s fabric and its consequences in the long run.