Mr Money Moustache, Marissa Mayer, and a Quiz
Last two weeks were heavy digging on some old profiles, and here are a few interesting ones that I came across:
This New Yorker profile of Peter Adeney (aka Mr. Money Moustache) makes for a useful read if you want to challenge some of your beliefs about money and luxury. I found my way to it via Ferris’ podcast interview with Adeney. Note that both, the profile and the podcast, are old (from 2016/17) and I discovered them only recently. Adeney is extremely popular for his thoughts on frugality, and investing life savings wisely. I wanted to learn more about him and the profile is a good primer on the man and his thinking. One of the ideas that stayed with me after I had heard the interview and read the profile was that happiness can be optimised, i.e. over-consumption doesn’t necessarily lead to more happiness, as it plateaus out after a point. The key is to find that optimal point. Doing so would reduce unnecessary consumption, thereby reducing expenses and at the same time contribute to sustainable living.
Sticking with the profiles, yet another old gem that I stumbled across is this one on Marissa Mayer from 2014. While it does describe the tumultuous time Mayer had while running Yahoo, the profile also documents the history of Yahoo and how it’s bet on Alibaba (when it was still a start-up) kept it afloat for longer than it should have. This profile is a good primer on the strategy of the technology sector as well. For instance, talking about strategy, it notes that ‘turning around a technology company has been historically rare. Tech companies invent new ways of doing things, but as they expand, often metastatically, they tend to shift their focus toward protecting their booming business rather than investing in new disruptive ones’. Coming back to Mayer, when she started in her job, she had razor-sharp focus on reducing the portfolio from 100 to a few with focus on managing users’ ‘daily habits’, such as news-reading, checking weather, reading email and photo-sharing. Then she got to work to refine them with countless iterations. While she was micromanaging the profile states, she lost touch with her most important stakeholders, implemented some bad policies, and took some seriously wrong hiring decisions. We all know how it ended. However, I couldn’t stop wondering if this critical commentary on Mayer would have found its place in NY Times had she managed to do a turnaround.
Though I am taking a sabbatical from all political news, this is one fun quiz I enjoyed. It’s about whether you can correctly guess whether the voter is a Trump or a Biden supporter by looking at the contents in the fridge. As it turns out, it’s hard to do so (when I last checked, the results show a 52% accuracy on guesses). However, there are some tell tale signs, which makes this piece a fun-read but also insightful on how signs of political leanings can be found in not-so obvious places.
A quote that I came across:
Be radically proactive about any behaviour that pays off in 10 years
