Hi all,
1.Morgan Housel is an excellent writer. He wrote ‘The Psychology of Money’ which is a very readable guide on personal finance and everything around it, but his book ‘Same as Ever’ is his masterpiece for me. The subtitle is ‘Timeless lessons on risk, opportunity and living a good life’. I highlighted 68 quotes from this book in Readwise which is a record for me, and therefore difficult to choose just one as an example but I think this will give you a flavour of his writing and philosophy:
“Today’s economy is good at generating three things: wealth, the ability to show off wealth, and great envy for other people’s wealth. It’s become so much easier in recent decades to look around and say, “I may have more than I used to. But relative to that person over there, I don’t feel like I’m doing that great.” Part of that envy is useful, because saying “I want what they have” is such a powerful motivator of progress. Yet the point stands: We might have higher incomes, more wealth, and bigger homes—but it’s all so quickly smothered by inflated expectations.”
By all means listen to the audio, but I found actually reading it to be much more rewarding precisely because I could re-read and think about the things he says. An excellent read.
2.Oliver Burkeman used to be a writer on all things productivity, finding new and interesting ways to make more of time and then he discovered that the average lifespan is four thousand weeks, and that stopped him in his tracks. As a result he wrote ‘Four Thousand Weeks’ which is his manifesto for a life which focuses more on the moment and the quality of a balanced life rather than trying to cram more and more tasks into the same amount of time. Given the premise you might think this would be a melancholy book contemplating the short time we have here, but not at all. Oliver has an inspirational style which has driven me to see my life, but more importantly, my days, very differently:
”As long as you believe that the real meaning of life lies somewhere off in the future – that one day all your efforts will pay off in a golden era of happiness, free of all problems – you get to avoid facing the unpalatable reality that your life isn’t leading towards some moment of truth that hasn’t yet arrived. Our obsession with extracting the greatest future value out of our time blinds us to the reality that, in fact, the moment of truth is always now – that life is nothing but a succession of present moments, culminating in death, and that you’ll probably never get to a point where you feel you have things in perfect working order. And that therefore you had better stop postponing the ‘real meaning’ of your existence into the future, and throw yourself into life now.”
Beautiful.
3.My work these days is all about the application of generative AI to business and small businesses in particular, working with local governments to spread the word of this magical technology. I could write a newsletter on just this honestly ( and I do here) but for today I’ll restrict myself to telling you about an AI search app called Perplexity. You can download Perplexity as a mobile app or use it on your desktop. You can subscribe but it’s free version is perfectly fine. It’s advantage over Google is that you enter your question (not a series of search terms) and it gives you a straight answer rather than a list of websites and ads that might contain the answer if you read them. Perplexity gives a short summary of what it’s found and provides footnote numbers which you can click through to see it’s sources. It’s so good that I now use it for helping with software when I can’t work out how to do something rather than use the software’s help function. I saw a study recently that said that three out of four people who use Perplexity stop using Google. Bad news for Google but great news for users.
That’s it for today. A number of you have joined the ‘Future of American Democracy’ Whatsapp group for all things on the US Presidential election. We very much enjoyed the debate as we chowed down on a cat. You can join here.
Look after yourselves,
Ben