What a beautiful morning! (Taken with instagram)
tetw:
A Tetw reading list
The Best of Freakonomics by Stephen J. Dubner and Steven D. Levitt - How to make it, why we steal it , how to bet with it, and how it motivates us. A selection of the best articles from NYT column that became an international sensation.
To Have is To Owe by David Graeber - A lot of people have little understanding of what money really is - if you want to find out, this classic article is the place to start.
Three great articles about the financial crisis by Michael Lewis - The world’s top financial reporter heads to Greece, Iceland and Ireland to find out how the credit crisis changed the world.
Jonathan Lebed’s Extracurricular Activities by Michael Lewis - Another classic Lewis piece about how a 15-year-old became the first ever minor to face prosecution for stock market fraud.
The Great American Bubble Machine by Matt Taibbi - “The world’s most powerful investment bank is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.”
The $20 Theory of the Universe by Tom Chiarella - A beginner’s guide to bribery. Find out just how far greasing people’s palms with a $20 bill can get you.
Why the Poor Pay More by DeNeen L. Brown - “The poorer you are, the more things cost. More in money, time, hassle, exhaustion, menace. A primer on the economics of poverty.”
Inconspicuous Consumption by Virgina Postrel - What do the things you spend your money on say about you?
Is Free the Future by Malcolm Gladwell - The author asks whether the internet will make paying money for stuff a thing of the past.
High-Tech Nostalgia
“It might sound paradoxical, but the ‘nostalgia industry’ will be the latest spinoff of the high-tech industry.”
I read this in the China Post and hot on it’s heels was the announcement by Facebook that it was purchasing Instagram for $1 Billion dollars. They might be onto something.
Vintage magic happens when you capture people with Instagram. In a world of high-def video and high resolution pictures Instagram’s soft focus and saturated colors create a charm that makes everyone look good. Instagrams are more than images, they are feelings.
We welcome the warm fuzzies that well up when we think about the good ‘ol days. Our memories tend to focus more on the good and not so much on the bad. Instagram and the 80’s channel on Pandora are just a couple of the ways we can bring those feelings into our daily lives.
High-tech nostalgia is here and if it brings charm and warm fuzzies with it then I say let’s bring back the good ‘ol days in whatever way we can. I’m buyin’!
Tomorrow’s cover today: the digitisation of manufacturing will transform the way goods are made—and change the politics of jobs too.
Fantastic piece!
This is a fascinating perspective on what makes up an economy.
EXCLUSIVE: Police across the country are puzzled by a crime wave targeting an unlikely new black market currency — Tide laundry detergent.
Theft of Tide detergent has become so rampant that authorities from New York to Oregon are keeping tabs on the soap spree, and some cities are setting up special task forces to stop it. And retailers like CVS are taking special security precautions to lock down the liquid…
“There’s no serial numbers and it’s impossible to track,” said Detective Larry Patterson of the Somerset, Ky., Police Department, where authorities have seen a huge spike in Tide theft. “It’s the item to steal.”
This was a special creation by Don the Idea Guy. Check out his new project and get a cartoon and creativity tip every day! What could be better than that? I love it! Thanks, Don!
Lin-Sanity
Before this morning I had never heard of Jeremy Lin.
My teenage boys flipped on Sports Center, a pre-school ritual born of Brett’s sports marketing class last semester, and this tweet was bold on the screen:
@Shaq
Linderrella story of the year jeremy lin has lingle handedly played lensational lincredible I’m linpressed all he does is Lin Lin Lin
For my fellow non-Lin knowers, Jeremy Lin is a basketball player who is igniting a fire under the New York Knicks and quickly becoming the Tim Tebow of the NBA. He played in relative obscurity at Harvard, his safety school, since there were no scholarship offers (What??? Who’s safety school is HARVARD?). He went undrafted in 2010. He finally got picked up by the Dallas Mavericks summer league and then the Golden State Warriors. He was placed on waivers, signed by the Houston Rockets, placed back on waivers and finally signed by the New York Knicks, essentially as a 3rd or 4th string guard.
Jeremy Lin’s opportunity came, as an awful lot of them do, at a moment of desperation for the Knicks. They were playing terribly, squandering leads in the fourth quarter, and Coach Mike D’Antoni must have figured; “Why not? What’s the worst that could happen?”
Since that moment it’s been Jeremy Lin’s court. His got his first career start in the NBA, has scored career high stats, has broken league record, and engendered a fan frenzy that has the Associated Press declaring him “the most surprising story in the NBA.” Someone out there must already writing the script for the movie. Anyone up for a re-make of The Natural?
Kobe Bryant sums it up, “Players playing that well don’t usually come out of nowhere. It seems like they come out of nowhere, but if you can go back and take a look, his skill level was probably there from the beginning. It probably just went unnoticed.”
What made the difference? How did Jeremy Lin rocket from languishing on the bench to blazing superstar?
I believe it’s all in the fit. Lin’s skills fit into the Knick’s talent gap, Lin’s personality fit into the locker room, Lin’s playing style fit the coaches game plan, and Lin’s attitude fit into the culture of the whole organization.
One or more of these were missing at every other place Lin played. While every stop along the yellow brick court helped hone him into the player he is today, and he did well at each one of those stops, there was always an element missing, the elusive IT factor, the thing that is the catalyst for the magic.
Not one person in New York knew they had the magic combination when Jeremy Lin showed up that first day. They knew they had a good solid player, but the Knicks actually considered putting him back on waivers just a couple of weeks ago, before his contract became guaranteed, so they could sign someone else. (Yikes!)
February 4, 2012.
No one saw it coming.
The perfect fit became apparent on that day in a 99-92 victory over the New Jersey Nets. The spectators may not have known they were witnessing magic in the making, but Carmelo Anthony and the rest of the Knicks knew something was gelling at half-time, and Coach D’Antoni knew he would be making some changes by the time the game was over.
Now everyone knows it.
The perfect fit. It’s not just a principle of sports, it’s a principle of life.
We all have the potential for our own Jeremy Lin moment. Finding our own perfect fit requires trying on a lot of different things and putting them to the test on the court. It takes courage, trial and error, and maybe even some crashing and burning, before our own Linderella story is born.
This week, my boss Jeffrey Gitomer told me to “be less professional.”
Wow, I thought. This is coming from one of the most successful businessmen of all time that made is own name a brand recognized around the world. A sales trainer to Fortune 10 Companies, best selling author, THE King…
‘New York architect John Locke recently launched a project to repurpose phone booths into pop-up communal libraries. The project, DUB 00, turns antiquated phone booths into bookshelves that allow visitors to take, borrow, or exchange books. Using a single piece of plywood, the bookshelf hangs securely to the interior of the booth without altering the original positions of the pay phone and signs. The phone booth libraries, as part of Locke’s “Urban Betterment Project,” have been installed in Manhattan Valley and Morningside Heights’
(via Run-Down NYC Phone Booths Transformed Into Communal Libraries @PSFK)
The fascinating thing about Facebook is not how we use it — it wouldn’t be so successful if it hadn’t built on well-established and valued behavior — but how we have given a 27-year-old and a few of his friends certain proprietorial rights to our lives. As a friend noted, he no longer owns the images of his newborn daughter — or the notes of congratulations on her birth from his friends.
“
| — | Opinion columnist Trevor Butterworth on Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, and the creation of a new kind of ownership and power. (via thedailyfeed) |
You Have To Read Your Email!
Here’s a notion: Email requires processing. Figuring out what it is and what to do with it takes time, sometimes a lot of time. Reading the first sentence and leaving it in your inbox with 2500 other half read emails doesn’t cut it.
We all get mass amounts of email every day, it can be annoying, but in reality we voluntarily jumped on board the crazy train to inbox overload. Not reading your emails, because you get too many of them, does not make it ok for you to waste other’s time by asking for information you’d already have if you had actually read your email.
Over the last year I have had to completely overhaul my email writing style. Out with verbose paragraphs, in with 8-10 word sentences and bullet points. I now write emails that are could stunt double for flashcards, and yet, I am amazed at how much time I spend responding to people with hair-trigger reply fingers.
Here’s my platform: Return to reading. Pay it forward by taking a few extra minutes and decision incoming emails, rather than skim them. I use Merlin Mann’s Inbox Zero as my north star. Find one you can steer by.
Via Scoop.it - Knowmads, Infocology of the future
Growing up with the Internet gives today’s children a very unique view on the way the world works — one that is vastly different from that of older generations. These kids, the ‘digital natives,” are raised with modern technology deeply…
