Info refinery #15: Are you lucky?
A small summary of the book Outliers and 6 links to the best I have been consuming.
🧠 What’s on my mind
"Success is not exceptional or mysterious. It is grounded in a web of advantages and inheritances, some deserved, some not, some earned, some just plain lucky. All critical to making them who they are."
Even outliers/extremely successful people are where they are due to a certain set of advantages ( could be the family environment, the time they were born in,…) that people do not think of usually. That doesn't mean they didn't work hard, to be an outlier you need to seize the opportunity and work very hard and put the hours, but without those advantages, you are likely to not have a chance to start with.
I revisited my notes on the book Outliers and it is fascinating. Explains the example of professional hockey players. Most of them were born in January/February. In countries where it is a big sport, kids start at an early age, and when they are very young, a handful of months’ difference in physical development can mark the difference. Since they are first selected they get the change to play against the best and be in the main teams. Since they are in the best teams, they get better trainers and more hours to practice, making them even better and giving them the change to be professionals.
This shows how a small difference to start with gets amplified over time. Success is the result of an "accumulative advantage".
"Those who are succesful are most likely to be given the kinds of special opportunities that lead to further success."
🤯 What have I learned this week
Make it happen: You need to put in the hours, steal them from comfort, fight the resistance. (link)
Regional air mobility, not "air taxis": Instead of acting as a means to travel within a city Lilium has a vision of creating a network between close by cities with a reasonable investment. With that, you could reduce time from 2h30min by car or train to just 30 minutes from Zurich to Lugano. (link)
Polarized competition: The transformation of the world is polarizing opportunities. For some fields, it is compared to a forklift, which is a force for income equality and eliminates your strength advantage over others. However we see more and more of fields where a single talented person serves a huge customer base and commands enormous earnings, the kind of power a microphone has, it gives voice and presence only to a few. (link)
😮 Interesting things
Summarize like a pro: Learn from the best on how to summarize a book. Tiago Forte is the person I follow online that has changed how I think and work the most. It is a mini-course of between 5-6 hours. (link)
Vegan/non-vegan is not enough: Advancements in food-tech might need to make us think over the vegan/non-vegan definitions. They have developed fats that originated from cell culture. Which are originally sampled from an animal. But no animals are used in production. “I would not consider it vegan. But not an animal product either. Might need new definitions.” - Lauri Reuter (link)
Nature wipers: Amazing how strong yet flexible palm trees are to survive such wind.
🍴 Food for thought
📊 Visualization of the week
Thanks for being here in the 15th issue of the newsletter! Remember that I am more than happy to receive recommendations on what to read, what you would like to see, or just if you want to say hi :)