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Personal reflections

October 2020: A revolution has begun

Hello there,

October 2020 was quite a month. It was the beginning of a revolution in Nigeria with the end SARS protests and other discoveries. I hope the fire doesn’t fizzle out.

@Visualizevalue 

Highlights of August: 

On Netflix:

The Journey of the African Colony tells the history of Nigeria beautifully. Even though I did some history in school, it didn’t tell the full picture like this.

A Beautiful mind, a true-life story that made me finally understand schizophrenia — a disorder that distorts reality.Ronnie Coleman: The King The story of a fitness king who took it far. As far as I’m concerned it wasn’t worth it and it’s humbling seeing someone addicted to gyming, even at his own detriment.

Marcella: My friend was recommended this, love the twists and turns.

I’m still on Fresh Prince of Bel-Air

Cloout: Used the opportunity of building End SARS Diary, to build a new site

auf Deutsch lernen: einhundertachtzig-Tage-Serie auf Duolingo

On learning German: 180 days streak on Duolingo

Books Read

Contagious: Why things catch on by Jonah Beger

I enjoyed reading this as it gave me a general framework to approach virality. This book is designed for people who want their products, ideas, and behaviours to spread. 

Nobody wants to read your sh*t by Steven Pressfield 

I loved reading this and consider this a go Sometimes young writers acquire the idea from their years in school that the world is waiting to read what they’ve written. They get this idea because their teachers had to read their essays or term papers or dissertations. In the real world, no one is waiting to read what you’ve written.

The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload

I read this book last year and only came back to read of a chapter — Organizing the business world: How we create value?

The Icarus Deception: How High Will You Fly?  by Seth Godin

A re-read, I first read this book in 2017 — arguably the best book I read that year.

Art isn’t pretty. Art isn’t painting. Art isn’t something you hang on the wall. Art is what we do when we’re truly alive.
If you’ve already decided that you’re not an artist, it’s worth considering why you made that decision and what it might take to unmake it.
If you’ve announced that you have no talent (in anything!), then you’re hiding.

From Me:

In Africa: A Conversation with Ajoke Amusat, an agricultural aggregator. It all started with a Tweet.

2 years ago, Ajoke, a graduate of performing arts, wasn’t sure about what she was going to do next. When I asked her what she hoped to do with her performing arts degree she replied, “I don’t know, I just knew there were companies like Banks that hire just graduates irrespective of what they studied.” 

In my conversation with Ajoke, she talks about how without any business background or prior desire to run a business she started and runs a thriving business which has served over 500 customers with about 70% returning customers.

From the Web

Obvious to you. Amazing to others

Any creator of anything knows this feeling:

You experience someone else’s innovative work. It’s beautiful, brilliant, breath-taking. You’re stunned. Their ideas are unexpected and surprising, but perfect.

You think, “I never would have thought of that. How do they even come up with that? It’s genius!”

Afterwards, you think, “My ideas are so obvious. I’ll never be as inventive as that.”

Obvious Things That Are Easy To Ignore

“The world is full of obvious things which nobody ever observes,” says Sherlock Holmes.

Signalling as a service

  1. Most of our everyday actions can be traced back to some form of signalling status-seeking. 
  2. Our brains deliberately hide this fact from us and others (self-deception).

So we think and say that we do something for a specific reason, but in reality, there’s a hidden, selfish motive: to show off and increase our social status.

Jude ‘MI’ Abaga sits #WithChude ?

I enjoyed listening to this conversation. So many deep things said. It’s worth a re-listen. 

Make me think

You should see me whining like a spoiled brat when a video call is not working as smoothly as expected — all those interruptions and the bad sound quality! An experience which would have appeared nothing short of a miracle to people just 50 years ago and which requires the operation of a colossal infrastructure has become an expected normality for me.

We fail to appreciate and to empathise because we don’t understand what is going on.

So does technology makes us dumb? This question isn’t really new. Famously Plato warned us about the detrimental effects of writing — which we know of because he wrote them down.

Amazon’s profits, AWS and advertising

Amazon is not one business – it’s many different businesses, at different stages of maturity and profitability. Some of those businesses are established and highly profitable and others are new and in a start-up loss-making phase, but you can’t really see from the outside, because all of the money gets both aggregated and reinvested.

Adobe Inc. – From Garage Startup to an Empire

Cold fusion does some of the best documentaries available on Youtube. This one on Adobe Inc, the makers of PDF, Photoshop and other great products was great. 

Blackbox Interview with Davido ?

I’m very familiar with Davido’s story but I enjoyed this interview. It shed light on other aspects of him that I hadn’t heard before.

Newsletters:

I also subscribe to a ton of great newsletters, here is one out of the many I love: 

Screenshot essays

Eric Stromberg’s approach is unique. He condenses essays on business and technology to the size of a single screenshot.

Thank you for reading!

See you on the last Saturday in November 2020 – so help me God!

Did you come across anything helpful or something that got to you? Please share with me. Also If you have any feedback please reply via email 🙂

Have a Splendid November!

Daniel ?

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