Ryan Holiday’s Takeaways, On Facebook, and On Tea
Three takeaways from last week’s reading:
Ryan Holiday just came out with a piece on ‘Things I Stole From People Smarter Than Me’. At first glance it looks like a laundry list of suggestions, which in a way it is. But if you browse through it, some are practical gems. I took quite a few with me from this list including a question from Tim Ferris on these lines ‘“What do you do with your money?” The answer was “Nothing, really.” Ok, so why try so hard to earn lots more of it?’ And here’s another one: ‘Best and most polite excuse is just to say you have a rule. “I have a rule that I don’t decide on the phone.” “I have a rule that I don’t accept gifts.” “I have a rule that I don’t speak for free anymore.” “I have a rule that I am home for bath time with the kids every night.” People respect rules, and they accept that it’s not you rejecting the [offer, request, demand, opportunity] but that the rule allows you no choice.’
Cal Newport wrote this essay about Facebook, and how pivoting its business model in the early stages might have led to a flaw that Facebook could suffer for in coming years. The pivot was when Facebook scaled beyond closed communities to an open-for-all platform. In order to generate revenues, the business model tweaked from establishing and nurturing connections to entertainment and mindless scrolling. The revenue stream of course was advertisement. “Facebook shifted from connection to distraction; an entertainment giant built on content its users produced for free. This shift was massively profitable because it significantly increased the time Facebook’s gigantic user base spent on the platform each day,” Newport writes. Though Facebook’s revenues grew, it’ll now need to compete in the world of targeted entertainment. Amidst this, the core idea of Facebook — that of establishing connections — has somewhere disappeared. Newport concludes that in the backlash against engineered distraction techniques and data-ripping, the future of Facebook will be different from what we see today.
I stumbled across this piece about tea last week. Written by Vir Sanghvi, the essay focuses on Indian tea and why it has not scaled to global ambition despite having competitive quality and good produce. What I found interesting was the history of tea that this piece captures, especially the part about the kind of tea favoured in India (concoction of milk, sugar and tea called chai and marketed as Chai Latte in the West) which is a relatively new invention of the 1950s. The original intention was to find a market for cheaper parts of the tea plant, and little would have anyone guessed that this supposedly niche market would explode. Towards the end of the article, Sanghvi talks at length about the findings on excessive amount of fluoride in tea. That part is stretched but overall, the piece is interesting if you want to learn more about Indian tea.
A quote that I came across:
Men desire novelty to such an extent that those who are doing well wish for a change as much as those who are doing badly
— Machiavelli
