Hello!

This is edition #58 of

The Connection

, the weekly email I send family, friends, and future friends (hello!) Glad you're here.

It’s the start of June, which means if you haven’t booked your summer holiday yet… time to get on it.

(In the past, I’ve been terrible about this. I’d forget to book

anything

and suddenly it’s August and I just let the summer slide by without any R&R.)

Now that I’m a parent, I’m trying to be more proactive about creating memorable holidays, like my parents did for me. Speaking of, I remember it used to take weeks for my mom to research vacation options -- pictures weren’t high quality, there was a lot of email back and forth, and then you sent the check in the mail and prayed it got there.

This week, I literally booked two holidays in a couple hours, thanks to Airbnb and VRBO. Technology is so cray.

Published book notes this week:

Linchpin: Are You Indispensable?

 by Seth Godin.  I think it’s important to read this early on in one’s career, to kill any ideas of entitlement one may have in their minds. With that said, the book probably could have been cut by 100 pages or so, or even be the same length as

The Dip

.

I also published my notes from 

Rework

 by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson. Classic as well, and a  fast read to change your paradigm on what kind of work you should be doing.

Onto this week’s articles:

Make sure to hit "Display Images" above to see puppy pics. 

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Profiles

• The Most Toxic Name in Philanthropy How responsible are we for our family name? If we’ve benefited from it, are we also expected to apologize for it?You have a lot of money, or a piece of artwork, or a patch of earth. The source of this money/artwork/earth is from a generation older than you, or it’s your generation but you married into it—you’re a beneficiary—and there’s a problem with the source. They were Nazis, for example. Or slaveowners. Or, in this case, made highly addictive opioids, and allegedly marketed them as safe. You weren’t a part of this, but now, like it or not, it seems you are. What, exactly, are you supposed to do? How are you supposed to act? How much of your life must you devote to apologizing, justifying, defending?

• Inside the Epic Fall of Michael Avenatti This profile reminded me of the adage: “Money doesn’t create monsters, it reveals them.” Substitute “money” for “fame” here and it accurately describes Avenatti’s scenario.There was a point, he said, when he was living out of a hotel in New York, where he would wake up every day and want to pinch himself because he couldn’t believe what was happening. The publicity he got for Daniels’s case kept the campaign-finance violations in the news, which did significant damage to Trump and people in his orbit. “I couldn’t believe how unbelievably great everything was,” he got out before his voice started to catch again. “Now, there are days when I can’t believe what a nightmare this is.”

• Read Before Binge Watching That Ted Bundy Documentary Ultimately, the murder victim is treated as little more than a plot device. And that’s not okay.I don’t begrudge true crime fans their shows. I’m not here to tell you you’re a bad person if you enjoy these stories. But I wish that the audiences and creators of these shows would give a little extra thought to how the dead woman (because it’s almost always a woman) at the heart of the story is treated in the telling. Is she treated like a human being who had more life left to live, with people who loved her, who will never be the same because of her loss? Or is she reduced to a gory crime scene photo and a plot point in a story about a man who doesn’t deserve anyone’s fascination?

• Listening to My Neighbors FightThis, perhaps more than anything else, is what listening to my neighbors fight has taught me: that even in a city as dense and filled with humans as New York, you can be totally invisible. Sometimes that invisibility is privacy, the only way it’s possible to live on top of one another, as we do. But at other times it is dangerous, even mortally so. Seeing one other, paying attention to one another, might be our only grace.

Business

• Super applicable leadership strategies and tactics Major takeaways: (1) You have to care about people. (2) Treat top and gradual performers differently - but serve both. (3) Use both structured and casual check-ins. They’re different tools.“The simplest tactic around giving a damn is to push your managers to have career conversations with their people,” she says. “This isn’t about mapping out their path to promotion, it’s about really getting to know them as human beings.”

• How Sofar Sounds Works The gist of the article is that Sofar Sounds is taking advantage of artists on its platforms by not paying them enough (or at all). What I’m confused about: Sofar Sounds does not have the monopoly on live musical performances. If the musician does not like the value proposition… they’re not forced to take it. It reminds me of Julia Alexander’s piece, The Golden Age of YouTube is Over (covered in a previous edition of The Connection) where creators making a living creating videos felt indignant when the rules of the platform evolved. The platform was free. The attention was free. You don’t get to complain when they change the algorithm.  With streaming replacing higher-priced CDs, musicians depend on live performances to earn a living. Sofar is now institutionalizing that they should be paid less than what gas and dinner costs a band. And if Sofar sucks in attendees that might otherwise attend normal venues or independently organized house shows, it could make it tougher for artists to get paid enough there too. That doesn’t seem fair, given how small Sofar’s overhead is.

• Sports Illustrated SOLD The brand is sold for $110 million to Authentic Brands Group - which means they get the IP, but don’t take on the overhead of the website, the journalists, or the magazine.What Authentic Brands immediately bought was not the magazine itself but rather Sports Illustrated’s valuable intellectual property. The purchase covers the magazine’s trove of more than two million images, its swimsuit and Sportsperson of the Year brands, the instantly recognizable name itself and other assets.

• How Brands Get Their Names Cool look at the art and science behind naming, from a naming consultant.

Money

• Realistic Personal Finance Hacks Shortcuts really exist. These hacks are hard. That’s what makes them valuable. My three favorite: (1) Suppress your ego to below your income. When you define savings as the gap between your ego and your income you realize why many people with decent incomes save so little. (2) Choose the right partner. Corollary: Don’t get divorced. (3) Avoid trouble to start. No one gets out of debt faster than the person who avoided it to begin with.

• Michael Milken and the Creation of the Junk BondThe greatest innovation in the recent history of finance was not the ATM, whatever the benefits of skipping the teller’s line. It was the junk bond. To this day, high-yield bonds, as they are now more genteelly known, remain a brilliant innovation because they elegantly solve a simple yet ubiquitous problem: They give companies with less than stellar credit ratings access to capital. These bonds created and grew entire industries, such as wireless communications and cable television, just as they created and grew immense pools of wealth.

• “Adulting Classes” Are Just Personal Finance Classes in Disguise I’d recommend saving your time and money and pick up Ramit Sethi’s new edition of I Will Teach You to be Rich. Or read my notes on it.

Miscellaneous

• Rutgers University students deny funding to its 150-year-old independent campus newspaper.

• I binge listened to To Live And Die In LA podcast on a 3-hour drive. Produced and hosted by Neil Strauss. Strong recommend. Slightly related - I didn’t find the ads too annoying, for some reason.

• Velocity is killing baseball. League-wide attendance in 2018 declined for the sixth straight season, to 28,659 per game, down 13 percent from its 2007 peak, alarming MLB officials.

• Why New York City stopped building subways

• The photo of the eagle that broke the internet

Quote of the week

: In 1912, after he became the first explorer to reach the South Pole, Roald Amundsen wrote: “Victory awaits him who has everything in order—luck, people call it.” (from Peter Thiel’s

Zero to One

)

Thanks for reading!

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 If there's any way I can help out, please let me know. Or if we just haven't chatted in a while, I'd love to hear from you. Just reply directly to this email. 

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