Friends of Dave #408: 🥊 fight to the death for fluff 🥊
Reminder: it does truly take a village.
And while we all do our best to try to take some time to look around so we don’t miss it, there is also another important thing to remember:
You can’t do it all alone.
Whether in business or our personal lives, we need to build villages with ecosystems around ourselves that support us so that we don’t miss the good stuff.
You can call them partnerships or alliances or networks or maybe friends, family, mentors, advisors and consiglieres.
Whatever they are, keep them close and regularly nurture them.
Engage with them. Trust them.
Show them appreciation — and not just when you need something.
When life is moving at a normal, manageable pace, this support system may not feel critical, but they do help you see and experience the details that make things better.
But when life is moving faster than usual, you’re going to need your village….and you WILL need them.
And if they are too far away, it’s going to be really hard for them to give the help and understanding you need.
You can’t do it all alone.
It’s okay. No one can.
Just a quick reminder this week, Friends.
XOXO
Dave
And now a few things to make you smarter…
This chart ranks countries by GDP per hour worked, or their labor productivity. Data is sourced from the International Labour Organization, as of 2023.
This helps evaluate GDP relative to labor input and offers insights into human capital efficiency and production quality.
The human mind is designed to predict, but uncertainty helps us thrive. In our brain’s pursuit to plan, survive, and achieve our goals, it has learned how to guess what the world is actually like based on incoming sensory data — a process called predictive processing. Interesting interview that dives into how predictive processing and uncertainty actually keeps us healthy.
Sibling relationships affect us more than we probably realize—and we can work on improving them at any age. By paying attention to the quality of our these relationships, we might make our own discoveries about ourselves and our families.
Late on the night of October 28, 2005, and early into the next morning, New York City’s 311 service hotline was flooded with calls reporting a strange odor wafting across Manhattan. Large swaths of the island smelled like maple syrup and nobody knew why. It took almost four years of sporadic aromatic events to finally solve the mystery.
“Just conceptually, the whole idea of an after-school snack came out of advertising cookbooks.”
Cool look at the origin stories for many common snacks — and it is clear that the recipes came from companies trying to get your mom or grandmother to buy more stuff.
“We think this is what it takes to take your library with you and not have to fret.”
Hard to imagine the world without smartphones. Onstage at Macworld 2004, Steve Jobs claimed the iPod had reached a 31 percent share of the MP3 player market. But the company was eager to carve out a much bigger portion of the pie, and doing so meant taking on significantly cheaper MP3 players. The answer was the iPod Mini — and you probably had one. Interesting, nostalgic look back at how we consumed digital music and how the iPod Mini crawled so your iPhone could walk.