🧑🏼🚀Five Link Friday #4
People Driven Learning, Hijacking your social feeds, are your friends really your friends, a documentary for your weekend and a peek behind the workings of a multi-million dollar Amazon Seller.
Hi Friends 👋🏼
Happy Friday! And yes, for my fellow Singaporeans, I'm “cheating” but technically, its still Friday somewhere in the world. The week got a little bit busy (yes, I have a full time job) and couldn’t squeeze out this post in time for Friday.
But I hope everyone’s still on track keeping up with their 2021 resolutions.
As always I’m always grateful to all of you for reading and subscribing. And for everyone else, if you wanna join a bunch of smart, curious folks and get both my Long Form Deep Dives and Five Link Friday’s regularly, do subscribe👇🏼
Let’s get into it!
Five Link Friday #4
(I’ve decided to also add “Link” buttons just in case it wasn’t too intuitive previously that the titles were the links to be clicked)
📚 People Driven Learning
David Perell talks about how learning today is more influencer, not professor and serendipity of the Internet, not the rigidity of a classroom curriculum. He also explores the concept of ‘personal monopolies’. This post really resonated with me. Maybe because i’m also here, curating content for you to enjoy and learn from. But also, the volume and quality of learning I have gained from my Twitter follows, Youtube tutorials and from the good folks on Reddit absolutely drawfs (by multiple orders of magnitude) what I learned in college.
📱 Hijack your Feed
Ever plan to take a short break during the workday and end up spending half an hour doom-scolling Twitter or TikTok? These designers have come up with a new solution to the problem of the bottomless social feeds. Imagine if the bottomless social feed and a to-do list had a baby. Put simply, the browser extension they’ve created will “hijack your feed” and replace the ads that you usually see in your Twitter feed, with beautiful designed CTAs (call to actions) from your to-do lists. And the graphics are superb! Check it out! Personally I find the concept super intriguing.
👯♂️ Poor Perception of Friendship Ties Limits the Ability to Promote Behavioural Change
I guess the thought hasn’t crossed most of our minds but, do the people we think are our “friends” also see us as their “friends”? When we consider another individual as “friend”, the common expectation is that this other individual also thinks of us as friends. Does this hold true? Check out the paper.
These researchers also looked to investigate and prove the important role that reciprocity and directionality of friendship ties play in inducing effective social persuasion. You want to mentor a “friend”? Or be a buddy to help a “friend” stop smoking? Your effectiveness will be affected by the factors discussed in this research.
🎥 The Third Industrial Revolution: A Radical New Sharing Economy
If you were looking for a documentary (or lecture) to watch over the weekend, you might wanna check this one out. While it’s basically a dude talking to an audience in a warehouse, the way he speaks is strangely compelling. He talks about the convergence of the three “internets”, efficiency, the sharing economy and so much more. All of which will or have already affected our lives in significant ways.
🌄 Being an Amazon Seller in 2020
If you’re planning to start an ecommerce business (and even if you’re not), this was an insightful read. The author is the Founder and CEO of Viahart, an educational toy company that had $7.4M in sales in 2020. He talks transparently about how much he’s paying for advertising, how much of his sales come via various channels and also how 2020 has affected his business.
An interesting quote to tease you:
$4.6 million dollars worth of product were added to carts on our (direct to consumer) website in 2020. We finished the year with $97,000 in sales.
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Hope you found those links as mentally stimulating as I did. As always, if you're finding this newsletter interesting, give me your feedback; you can respond to this email or tweet at me!