Just keep skimming, just keep skimming. I thought to myself as I paced through my open plan living room and dining room while reading Attention Span by Gloria Mark. You need 1735 steps anyways, so you might as well get through this chapter…or at least to the next subheading of the book. God, I was bored.

Earlier this year, I came across a Tumblr post that I keep thinking about.

It’s the story of a man who is writing an article on people achieving high scores in classic video games. He finds out that the record for tetris is 327 lines. This man’s wife, regularly clears 500 - 600 lines on long car rides easily.

So, they go to a tournament, and she sets the record at 841. That wasn’t even her best score. She’s just a baller like that.

About 13 years ago, I took an advanced writing for television masters course with Kimberly Costello and she gave me some advice that felt unintuitive at the time: if you have a big reveal or twist you think belongs in a season finale, put it in the pilot. Don’t hold anything back, just put it out there.

If you have interacted with me at all sometime in these past eight weeks (specifically after I listened to this episode of At Work by The Ready), you will have heard me share this quote by Alvin Toffler:

“The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read or write. It will be those who cannot learn, unlearn and learn again.”

In my recent newsletter, I recommended looking at those three states and defining what you think you are doing to fulfill those three categories: what are you learning? What are you unlearning? What are you learning again?

Today, however, I am going to use these three states differently. I am going to apply it as a vertical to my relationship with control.

I am remarkably disciplined. Structure, control, gamified goals, delayed gratification paired with living a non-routine life and only committing to doing things that are important is a pretty good way to describe how I operate my life. It has helped me achieve some big fitness goals and maintain healthy lifestyle habits.

Now, I have a new habit I am trying to form, and I am stuck. Really stuck.

It took me almost two years, but I finally finished reading Poor Economics by Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo. In one of the last chapters, they discuss a concept that really resonated with me. It’s called the three I’s, which stand for Ideology, Ignorance and Inertia.

Here’s a terrifying article from the Washington Post. It’s titled: AI is more persuasive than a human in debate, study finds. Subheading: When provided basic demographic information on their opponents, AI chatbots adapted their arguments and became more persuasive than humans in online debates.

Here is my position on balance.

Balance is a worthy goal, but I don’t think we have a correct calibration of the scale on which it is measured.

This weekend I lost my community.

My weightlifting gym BASA (Baltimore Area Strength Athletes), run by Jason Morstein, permanently closed.

I feel dramatic saying this but it’s true.

Work chat channels are the worst. When left to occur organically, chat conversations are disorganized, nothing is tracked, and everything is forgotten in a day.

TLDR: Being Obedient = Bad, Being Reasonable = Good.

I love working with Founders. There is a special kind of compatibility I can achieve with someone who is over-indexed on Innovational and Relational thinking because they balance out my Procedural and Analytical affinity.

However, as I evolve my portfolio of startups I work with, I am becoming more keyed into the type of person I want to work with. Here are my 3 Green Flags and 2 Red Flags that I look out for when chatting with a potential collaborator.

This year has been hard. Really hard.

It’s like 2024 decided to be 5 years at once. Maybe it’s a tax thing.

So there I was, minding my own business, when the Digital Wellbeing app on my phone decides to inform me that I’m spending an average of 15 hours a week on Tiktok.

Sir, I think at the app, how could you say something so controversial, yet so brave?

This concept, introduced by this episode of Fixable, has brought together some of my favorite things: mathematics and working smarter.

I didn’t realize I would have actual applications for what I learned in my Automate the Boring Stuff course so quickly! If you have any tasks that require the same sequence of mouse clicks, keyboard taps or anything like that to occur, then I have a time-saver for you!

Determine a fixed amount of money to gamble (e.g. $1,000).

Pick which color to bet on (e.g. Black)

Start by betting the minimum bet (e.g. $5)

Every round, increase your bet by $5, but continue to bet on the same color.

Stop play when either of the two events occur:

• You’ve doubled your total cash.

• The amount of money you have is less than your next bet.

As I near the end of my Automate the Boring Stuff course, I’m learning some very useful tools - especially as a Windows user. In order to synthesize my learning, I decided to do a little project combining a few new python functionalities I learned.

While I was reviewing chapter 5 of Automate the Boring Stuff, I learned about using Dictionaries in Python. One of the fun exercises demonstrated by the book was using Python’s Dictionary functionality to create a database for a list of supplies for a picnic.

A few weeks ago, I was listening to a special episode of the Teacher’s Off Duty Podcast with Daymond John and they were talking about teaching kids financial literacy. One idea they mentioned was having an in-class economy, where students earn classroom currency and then have to budget their money accordingly.