Reading & Thoughts from April

Apr 29, 2019

erik's newsletter

Issue #7 // April 29, 2019
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"Life is 10% what happens to you and 90% how you react to it." -- Charles Swindoll

#READING

22 Lessons From Jeff Bezos’ Annual Letters To Shareholders (20 minute read)
//cbinsights
Bezos’ annual letters are so fascinating, not only to understand the Amazon strategy, but also what is going on in the economy. The annual 2018 letter was broken into 5 distinct parts
1. Third Party sellers — how “Third-party sellers are kicking our first party butt. Badly.”
2. Intuition, curiosity, and the power of wandering — specifically found in AWS, which is most of Amazon’s operating income
3. Imagining the impossible — long shots such as Amazon Go Stores
4. Failure needs to scale too — failures such as the Fire Phone, but leading to successes such as Alexa
5. Hiring and Employees — raising minimum wages to $15 for all employees
And as always, Bezos attaches his 1997 letter, which is Day 1.

This letter is interesting to see where Amazon is positioning itself for the future.

Part One
> Third-party sellers are kicking our first party butt. Badly.

This shows two contradictory things
1. Amazon is not a monopoly, and it actually supports SMBs
2. Amazon could become a monopoly, expanding into the 3rd party seller product domains
On the first point, Amazon supports 3rd party sellers, handling all the hard parts of the logistics (referrals, customer support, storage, shipping), taking a nice cut of their sales.

And on the second point, Amazon has been known to launch their own private label brands, wiping out all 3rd party seller competition.

Part Two
> No one asked for AWS.
Part two appears to prep the rest of the letter, showing that Amazon is always focusing on the customer and run with what is best for the customer in the long-term

Part Three
> With Amazon Go, we had a clear vision. Get rid of the worst thing about physical retail: checkout lines. No one likes to wait in line. Instead, we imagined a store where you could walk in, pick up what you wanted, and leave.
Getting there was hard. Technically hard.
Amazon can make things happen, there is no limit to the creativity, and they are going to be working on some of the hardest problems, no matter the cost

Part Four
> As a company grows, everything needs to scale, including the size of your failed experiments.
Amazon is preparing for moonshots. Part Four ties together Parts Two and Three, showing that they will be working on technically challenging problems that solve for the customers problems. However, no matter what happens, there will be multi-billion dollar failures along the way. Some will become the Fire Phone, a failure. Others will become Alexa, or even AWS, reaping the rewards, trumping the failures in terms of long-term dollar amounts.

Part Five
> Today I challenge our top retail competitors (you know who you are!) to match our employee benefits and our $15 minimum wage.
This part appears to tie back in Part One, showing that Amazon is giving back to its employees, and challenging others to do the same.

If you want to see the shareholder letter directly on the Amazon site (and other interesting articles) see it here.

Productivity Isn’t About Time Management. It’s About Attention Management (10 min read)
//nytimes
> The stumbling block is that productivity and creativity demand opposite attention management strategies. Productivity is fueled by raising attentional filters to keep unrelated or distracting thoughts out. But creativity is fueled by lowering attentional filters to let those thoughts in.
Time and timing is so important. I recently read another article that shows humans now have a shorter attention span than a golfish (which is 9 seconds) We have endless ways to be distracted, and now more than ever, we have to be cognizant about it.
Along with this article, I found Slack Is Not Where 'Deep Work' Happens (7 min read) to be a nice extension.

Shallow Work: Non-cognitively demanding, logistical-style tasks, often performed while distracted. These efforts tend to not create much new value in the world and are easy to replicate.

Deep Work: Professional activities performed in a state of distraction-free concentration that push your cognitive capabilities to their limit. These efforts create new value, improve your skill, and are hard to replicate.

— Cal Newport

I don't completely agree with Cal above, however, it breaks the work into a binary type. Determining the type of work is half of the battle, with both shallow and deep work being needed throughout the day.

Want to learn a new skill? Take some short breaks (5 min read)
//ninds
> In a study of healthy volunteers, National Institutes of Health researchers found that our brains may solidify the memories of new skills we just practiced a few seconds earlier by taking a short rest. The results highlight the critically important role rest may play in learning.
I've been talking about this forever, finally this research is starting to show that I may not be completely crazy. When I used to study in college, I would fall asleep mentally running through problems I've already completed, while I might have gone further than a "short rest," it definitely helped me during the test.

If you ever see me in a deep focus, I will latch onto a thought, turn away from the computer, look out of the window and focus deeply on that thought. For me it is a sort of daydream, but I find that I get a lot more deep focus and thoughts while "spacing out" rather than actively doing work on a computer.

This appears to be the same as any skill learned according to this brief study. Rather than repeatedly practicing a skill actively, you should passively practice the skill with breaks as well. As long as you are still focused on the skill, then the learning may be greater than if you were actively doing it.

#PODCASTS

Eric Schmidt -- Lessons from a Trillion Dollar Coach (2 hours)
//thetimferrissshow
Interview with the previous CEO of Google. The interview goes into Bill Campbell, coach of many CEOs of successful Silicon Valley companies. Some of my notes & commentary below:

Train in the executive arts
Surround yourself with people who will argue with you
70/20/10 — 70 core business, 20 adjacent businesses, 10 emerging business/longshots
Systematize innovation
The job of the CEO is to make communication faster — respond to emails immediately and delegate
The job of a CEO is no a sprint, but an ultramarathon, hold the spin rate just like in a bike race
Make decision quickly, the quicker, the less inefficiencies
Everyone needs a coach, for everything
Humanize the manager<>report relationship, it’s not a management relationship, but rather a coaching relationship
What are your moral frameworks, how will other people perceive this?
Monday through Friday should be focused on work, Saturday is your time to think, how did the week go? What can you do better? Is this the best use of my time? How can I make this more effective?
Follow up book: Trillion Dollar Coach: The Leadership Playbook of Silicon Valley's Bill Campbell

#RANDOM

Your cotton tote is pretty much the worst replacement for a plastic bag
//qz

1,060-hour image of the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) captured by Amateur Astronomers
//astrospace-page

These Adidas running shoes are 100% recyclable
//fastcompany

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