The Connection Newsletter 47 - Real Life

The Connection Newsletter 47 - Real Life

March 18, 2019

Hello!

This is edition #47 of

The Connection

, the weekly email I send family, friends, and future friends (hello!) Thank you, as always for taking the time to read this newsletter.  

I was in the mall last weekend, where I saw these ads:

Followed by the hashtag, #LifesBetterIRL.

It felt like advertising’s equivalent of the old man growling about the whippersnappers cutting across his lawn while chewing on a Werther’s Original.

If the point is to try and get people physically back into the mall, they’re missing the punchline: what happens online -- for good or for bad -- is real life. And clever hashtags won’t bring people back.

So what will bring people in?

1) Building unique experiences

2) Bridging the online world with the offline

I’m not suggesting this is easy because it’s not. It’s very hard.

But if it works, then the fact that it’s hard makes it defensible against the Amazons and Jet.coms and Instagrams of the world.  

Hope you have a terrific week. Onto this week’s articles:

Make sure to hit "Display Images" above to see all the images in this newsletter.

Tanja Hester’s article challenges the typical “retire-early narrative”. It’s more philosophy than a how-to, which I enjoyed. What really resonated was her personal inflection point, when she decided to make early retirement a goal:

“Isn’t the idea that you’re supposed to achieve more to get a better lifestyle, not a worse one? It was like my work advancement came at the expense of the rest of my life.”

It challenged how I thought about this in my own life: how to balance the drive to impact the world versus the desire to attain a better lifestyle. Dare I say... it’s delicate.

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. The productivity systems of Stephen Wolfram are next level.

I don’t think the entire system will be relevant to any one person. However, there are amazing nuggets throughout, and if even one tip improves your life by 1%, it’ll be worth the read. The takeaways that really stuck out to me:

  • He spent years optimizing his work station for both typing, recording video, and taking calls

  • He listens to music through noise-canceling headphones to avoid car sickness while working in the car

  • He built his own software to work around his work habits (versus adapting his habits to the software)

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I’ve stepped into a Product Manager role at Reforge. The role is new, but the act of learning the job while doing the job isn’t.

Anytime I’ve done so (as an assistant, working in literary management, working in production) I loved reading about the history of the profession and industry. There was something soothing about understanding the context and its place in history.

This piece by Ellen Chisa about the history of product management was an excellent primer.

“it did not start as an engineering role. Its earliest form was brand management, a term coined by a young advertising manager named Neil McElroy, who in 1931 wrote a memo to the executive team at Procter & Gamble proposing the idea of a "brand man"—an employee who would be responsible for a product, rather than a business function.”

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“

.” Hundreds of leaked text messages between Kevin Tsujihara, actress Charlotte Kirk and partners Brett Ratner and James Packer show how the powerful executive, under pressure, said repeatedly he would push for auditions as accusations of "extortion" and a proposed settlement agreement followed.

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. A great reminder of how much art we can create on our phones.

Thanks for reading!

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