The Connection Newsletter 59 - Airport people

The Connection Newsletter 59 - Airport people

June 10, 2019

Hello!

This is edition #59 of

The Connection

, the weekly email I send family, friends, and future friends (hi!) Thanks so much for reading.

Last weekend I spent sick and curled up in the fetal position on the couch. The silver lining is this is my golden window of opportunity to squeeze in television binge-watching, so I made the most of it. Some quick thoughts on what I watched:

  Always Be My Maybe

Ali Wong said she wanted this to be her and Randall Parks’s

When Harry Met Sally

. All in all I think they came pretty close. Neither is a perfect movie, but I enjoyed how they explored the idea of the man playing “supporting role” in a relationship, poking fun at San Francisco’s elitism, and the fun cameo from Keanu Reeves.

Interestingly enough, on YouTube this movie was billed as a Keanu Reeves rom-com. Whatever gets the click 🤷 (more on clickbait below).

  The Perfection

This new addition to the Netflix library was excellent. Reminded me of Park Chan-wook’s

(which if you haven’t seen, definitely check out as well).

  Silicon Valley Season 5

Finally catching up, funny as always. However, the lack of TJ Miller’s presence left a greater void than I would have anticipated. 

  Three Guys and Three Letters: The Story of the Fertitta Brothers & Dana White 

Interesting story (terrible name). It’s easy to forget that 15 years before WME-IMG bought the UFC for $4.2 billion dollars, the UFC was a money-losing machine that operated out of cities without athletic commissions and couldn’t be broadcast on cable. The work put into crafting the company (and the sport of MMA) into what it is today is incredible.

In other things besides watching TV… I’ve been carving out an hour each morning to learn SQL. I’ve been using Udacity’s free

course and finding the experience very pleasant. I learn slow and need lots of reps, so the interactive quizzes give me a ton of practice. It’s been really helpful as I think about our own program development at Reforge.

Finally, published my book notes to Peter Thiel’s

. Full of counterintuitive ideas around business and start-ups, I think this is an important read to help you rethink your approach to building a technology-enabled big business.

Okay, that’s it! Onto this week’s articles:

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

  On Careers 

  • 11 Unproductive Habits To Quit. This is a good list in general, but for me, it was most directly related to my career. I ignore my health when I’m working. I check things (email, social, etc.) too much when I’m working.

  • How to Create a Career. Four principles to think about when building your career. I agree with most of them, although personally I think the dialogue around “focusing on your strengths” is getting lopsided. I think you choose a path that plays to your strengths (e.g. if you have off the charts EQ and love people, your best work probably isn’t done buried beneath spreadsheets) but to continue to grow, you have to work on your weaknesses. It depends on where you want your career to grow, and having the foresight to realize the path to get there evolves, and so you have to evolve, too.

  • Should You Use Clickbait? It’s an interesting debate, and I can see both sides of the issue. However, I like how Margo sums it up here:To quote the master himself, Eugene Schwartz, on page 15 of his seminal book Breakthrough Advertising, “It’s the copywriter’s job to force the prospect to read his client’s full story – not just a skimmed version of it.”

Clickbait does the opposite as evidenced by all of you routinely emailing me about how no one reads anymore. And your persistent (unfounded) arguments for short form copy.

  On Restaurants 

  • Fascinating look at the World of DC’s VIP Diners. Highly recommend. The secret codes, policies, and favors reserved for the DC elite… and the efforts restaurant staff will go to offer white glove treatment.Restaurant staff make it their business to remember details about the demeanor and preferences of their celeb VIPs, particularly when the preferences skew from the ordinary. Bartender Zac Hoffman, who has worked at other favorites of the Playbook set—Mirabelle, by the White House, and the Riggsby, tucked into the Carlyle Hotel in Dupont—recalls how 2020 hopeful Kamala Harris asked for a cup of ice so she could drop cubes into her white wine. At Kith and Kin in the Wharf’s InterContinental hotel, he says, former presidential candidate Herman Cain dropped by the bar several times over the course of his stay, ordering rounds of Crown Royal doubles. “It got to be impressive. We actually started to have a betting pool of how much he could drink,” Hoffman recalls. “He wasn’t belligerent. He wasn’t an asshole. He wasn’t making a fool of himself. He just really likes Crown Royal, and he handles it like a champion.”

  • A restaurant manager mistakenly served a $5,000 bottle of wine. Most managers/owners would not have been so chill.  “When they told me about it I thought, ‘Oooh that is an expensive mistake,’” Beckett said. “At the same time, I thought it’s the same kind of I’m-not-concentrating thing I would do. It’s just an unfortunate human error.”“The restaurant industry is a place where you can get hammered for making mistakes, and we don’t want to be that place.” He said the manager who grabbed the wrong bottle for the server is mortified, but that hasn’t stopped Beckett from “the most gentle teasing” of her. He called her an otherwise “brilliant” employee.

On Other Things

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