What I highlighted in June 2023
Articles
Max Read's profile of Mr. Beast in the New York Times Magazine
Even within this context, Donaldson stands out for his dedication to understanding how YouTube works. For most of his teenage years, “I woke up, I studied YouTube, I studied videos, I studied filmmaking, I went to bed and that was my life,” Donaldson once told Bloomberg. “I hardly had any friends because I was so obsessed with YouTube,” he said on “The Joe Rogan Experience” last year. After high school, he hooked up with a gang of similarly obsessed “lunatics” and planned out a program of study. He and his friends “did nothing but just hyperstudy what makes a good video, what makes a good thumbnail, what’s good pacing, how to go viral,” he told Rogan. “We’d do things like take a thousand thumbnails and see if there’s correlation to the brightness of the thumbnail to how many views it got. Videos that got over 10 million views, how often do they cut the camera angles? Things like that.”
I thought of the somewhat famous Jeff Hammerbacher quote, "The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads. That sucks.". Not that Jimmy Donaldson is the best mind Gen Z has to offer but it sucks to imagine that many of the most talented millennial and Gen Z will spend so much of our brainpower understanding and use algorithms or AI technology. And maybe end up missing the forest for the trees, in terms of social impact.
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Defector’s co-owners anticipate single-digit revenue growth from subscriptions this year. Meanwhile, one of their old enemies, Barstool Sports, was recently acquired by Penn Entertainment, a gambling conglomerate, for three hundred and eighty-eight million dollars. When I asked Ley about that, he didn’t express envy. Instead, he compared Defector to a neighborhood bar, no pun intended. “This is our little business—we just need to have these margins, pay our employees, and that’s it,” he said. “No one who owns a bar is thinking, ‘I can’t wait for NBCUniversal to come offer to buy my bar for a hundred million dollars.’ If you think of it as a business that you’re running with your friends, it becomes a lot easier to just be like, ‘Yeah, we’re having success, and that’s all we need.’”
We need more public coverage of businesses like this. Those who are doing good work, at a reasonable scale, paying and treating people well. And not hyper focusing on growth quarter over quarter because of board, investor, market, whatever pressure.
Adam Bryant in HBR on leadership
In this article I’ll explore the mental shifts needed to become a leader and to handle the challenges you’ll encounter in your new role. The process involves identifying and communicating your core values and learning how to approach tough decisions. It requires setting the bar for your team’s performance and learning to compartmentalize so that you can find the right pace for yourself. And it requires expanding your self-awareness and paying attention to the stories you tell yourself about your experiences—your successes and failures, your bad times and good ones—when you contemplate the arc of your career and life.
Profile of Daniel Bard and his struggles with the Yips
When treating athletes with the yips, sports psychiatrists try both to alleviate their anxiety—with breathing exercises, therapy, and the like—and to fool their brains into accessing deep working memory rather than the misfiring part of the brain. A golfer might try putting with the opposite hand or distracting himself by counting backward from three before swinging. A tennis player struggling with her toss might do little math puzzles just before serving. Debbie Crews, a sports psychologist who has published several studies about the yips, told me that the goal often is not to eradicate the yips but to outsmart them. This turns out to be very hard to do.
Even with how professionalized and developed the discipline of psychology is, I find it is under-theorized and under-utilized in the world of work. This profile was a nice way to get into it via the professional sports angle. But, generally, especially as the economy moves more into services and knowledge work, a stronger command of and defter use of psychology will separate good from great leaders and professionals.
Movies
New movies I enjoyed over the last few weeks:The Civil Dead, Polite Society, You Hurt My Feelings, Rye Lane
Old movies that were either rewatches or first time around and I loved: Four Lions, Opening Night,The Parallax View,
TV Shows
- We started a rewatch of "High Maintenance" and it's just such a good show
- "Beef" was very good, especially the first third or half
- "Jury Duty" is hilarious and felt truly novel
- "Smartless" was a nice guilty pleasure binge
- "Daisy Jones and the Six", "Platonic" and "White House Plumbers" were fine
Podcasts
- I recently started listening to A Typical Disgusting Display, featuring comedy writers from the world of Family Guy. It's fine, pretty funny. But it has made me wonder, what it is about white guy comedy podcasts that are so comforting to have in my life. Maybe its that we were all brought up on sitcoms, The Simpsons and 90s comedies that were primarily written by men like this. So there's some sort of comfort blanket effect of just having the voices of guys like Mike Birbiglia and Conan in our heads that feels soothing.
