FS | BRAIN FOOD

Mar 3, 2024 | #566 | read on fs.blog | Free Version

Welcome to Brain Food, a weekly newsletter full of timeless ideas and insights you can use in life and work.

FS

“Entropy applies to every part of our lives. It is inescapable, and even if we try to ignore it, the result is a collapse of some sort. Understanding entropy leads to a radical change in the way we see the world. Ignorance of it is responsible for many of our biggest mistakes and failures. We cannot expect anything to stay the way we leave it. To maintain our health, relationships, careers, skills, knowledge, societies, and possessions requires never-ending effort and vigilance. Disorder is not a mistake; it is our default. Order is always artificial and temporary.”

— Entropy

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Insight(s)

"There's nothing better than being the underdog. The more people count me out, the more I count myself in. I don’t like to show all my cards too early, and that gives me two distinct advantages: my opponents often get the wrong read on me, and I push myself longer and harder. When it looks like you should pack it in but you still dig in anyway, you also pick up a lot of support."

— T. Boone Pickens

“We are trying to prove ourselves wrong as quickly as possible, because only in that way can we find progress."

— Richard Feynman

***

“When I first started getting successful at skating, my style was ridiculed — so I had already been through all this flak. I was scrawny, I was skinny, I didn’t look cool. I didn’t flow the way the old-school guys did. I wasn’t a Dogtown guy. So they were like, “Who’s this little robot kid doing circus tricks with a skateboard?” I’d finally found in skateboarding the one thing that speaks to me — which already set me apart from my peers, because it’s an outcast activity — and then I was an outcast in that. It was so crushing. But skateboarding gave me much more happiness, so I was prepared to deal with that disappointment. So, yeah, the years of becoming the king sellout, according to the hard-core skaters — I didn’t care. I learned to be resilient early in life.”

Tiny Thought(s)

"Two questions to ask yourself:

What's working for you that you'd be crazy to change?

What's not working for you, and you'd be crazy not to change?"

"The most powerful productivity tool ever invented is simply the word no."

***

"The person who carefully designs their daily routine goes further than the person who negotiates with themselves every day."

—
(Share Tiny Thought 1, 2, or 3, on X).

Positioning

April Dunford on how positioning shapes our relationship with something:

“I was on my way to work, and I went to Tim Hortons coffee shop in Canada. I’m standing in line and the guy in front of me is ordering breakfast. It’s 8:00 AM, and he orders this thing which is a double chocolate salted caramel muffin. And I was like, “That is some genius marketing stuff right there.” I’ve got a piece of cake, it is double chocolate caramel cake, but if I put it in the muffin format and I call it a muffin, everything about that is different. The whole context around it is different. It is socially acceptable to order double chocolate caramel whatever if you say it’s a muffin, because I’m now comparing it differently. If I said it was cake, what’s cake? Cake competes with other things that are like dessert. It competes with ice cream and tiramisu and other things you would order for dessert. What does cake cost? Well, if you’re in a restaurant, it’s $10, $15. Where do I get it? I might go to a bakery, but I get it at a restaurant, too. When I’m talking about a muffin, well, [a] muffin’s totally different. A muffin’s breakfast. It competes with a bagel and a donut. What do I charge for a muffin? I charge $1, $2 for a muffin. The whole context around it is different. The product, however, is the same. That thing that you’re eating is a piece of cake, whether it’s in cake form or muffin form. I can choose to position it as a muffin. It’s the same product, but the assumptions about that... The competitors are different; your value is different; the assumptions that customers have about that product are different because I’ve placed it in a different context."

The entire conversation is worth a listen or listen to the start of the excerpt above.

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