Good news is in short supply, but I think this is the right answer to the Q: What's the best news in America right now?
This seems to be the first period on record when every major cause of premature death—overdose, auto accident, homicide, obesity—is falling *at the same time*
A super detailed comparison of Perplexity iOS Assistant vs Siri by @stephenrobles. Stephen does a thorough comparison across a wide array of use cases:
1. Apple Music (both direct songs with their names and indirect ones where you don’t quite know the song but you know some properties of it - ��Play the song Jack Black sings to his dog in the Minecraft movie”): Siri can do the first, Perplexity can do both.
2. Podcasts: Perpelxity can’t start playing the Podcast (needs the user to tap the play button) unlike the native Siri but can help find podcasts hard to find.
3. Maps and Reservations: Perplexity can not only give you local results with Apple Maps but take you to the opentable page to complete your reservation that Siri cannot.
4. Uber: Siri can’t get you to the uber ride page, Perplexity can.
5. Emails: Perplexity can nail an email draft with all details on Apple Mail unlike Siri
6. Multi Step Actions, YouTube, and General Reliability: Perplexity clearly the winner
Stephen ends with the conclusion that Perplexity is the better general knowledge smarter AI assistant and recommends updating your action button to the Perplexity Voice Mode. https://t.co/sxCcqt6vTH
It was a marvelous night, the sort of night one only experiences when one is young.
The sky was so bright, and there were so many stars that, gazing upward, one couldn't help wondering how so many whimsical, wicked people could live under such a sky.
This is Kevin Kelly.
The close friend Tim Ferriss goes to for advice.
He taught him a philosophy for life that made Tim stop giving a f*ck.
Here's the philosophy:
Harry Dry is the best copywriter I know.
He's built a 130,000-person newsletter teaching people how to do it, and by the end of this interview, you'll be at least a Green Belt in copywriting.
Some of his rules for writing:
1) A great sentence is a good sentence made shorter.
2) Writing great copy begins with having something to say in the first place.
3) Copy is like food. How it looks matters.
4) Since the look of copy matters so much, don't write copy in Google Docs. Write it in Figma (so you can write and design at the same time).
5) Kaplan's Law of Words: Any word that isn't working for you is working against you.
6) You know a paragraph is ready to ship when there's nothing left to remove. It's like a Jenga tower. The entire thing should collapse if you remove something.
7) Make a promise in the title so the reader knows exactly what they're going to get if they click. Then, deliver on the promise.
8) The three laws of copywriting: (1) Make it concrete, (2) make it visual, and (3) make it falsifiable.
9) Make it concrete: Don't be abstract. For an example, say you're writing about habits. Don't talk about "productive routines." That's abstract. Write about "waking up at 6am to write" instead. It's concrete — and much more vibrant.
10) Make it visual: People see in pictures. This is why instead of memorizing card numbers directly, world memory champions memorize cards by turning them into pictures and then back to cards.
11) Make it falsifiable: When you write a sentence that's true or false, you put your head on the chopping block, which makes people sit up in their seat.
12) When has a falsifiable statement resonated? Galileo got sentenced to a decade of house arrest for saying that the earth spins around the sun. That's a falsifiable sentence. But nobody would've done anything if he'd said that the earth has a harmonious connection with a celestial object.
13) Write with the delete key. Using fewer words lets you be more impactful with the words you keep.
14) The job of a sales page is to make a bold claim at the top. Then spend the rest of the page backing up what you've said... with a ridiculous amount of proof.
15) If your competitor could've written the sentence, cut it.
16) Good copy is differentiated. Here's an example: Elon Musk shouldn't write "The Cybertruck is the world's best truck." Ford or Dodge can write that sentence. But only Elon can write: "The Cybertruck is tougher than an F-150 and faster than a Porsche."
17) Some days, the writing comes easily. Some days, it takes sweat. The reader doesn't care if you wrote for two minutes, two hours, or two days. The ink looks the same.
18) Great copy reads like your customer wrote it. Talk to them.
That's just an introduction to the copywriting philosophy of @harrydry.
I've shared the full interview below. I recommend you watch this one because we pull from so many visual references and do a lot of screen sharing. If you'd rather watch on YouTube, I've shared the link in the reply tweets.
Want to start a local service business?
I've used the same process to start multiple businesses
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2022 - land clearing
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Get your first customer using the 7 steps in the Service Startup Playbook below👇
2023 is half over.
But it's not too late to start writing every day.
And luckily, you don't have to wake up & stare at a blank page.
Instead, use these 23 templates to kickstart your daily writing habit:
1 year ago, I moved from the Uk to Mallorca, Spain with my wife and 4 children 🌴
A few thoughts ☀��
1) Sunshine makes an immense difference to your overall health.
2) A great day can be as simple as a beach, a cool box and a towel.
3) Children are happier when they're outside.
4) Time close to or in the sea is great for the soul.
5) You can't go against culture, only with it.
6) Eating well doesn't have to be complicated. Simple ingredients cooked well is the game.
7) Processed food is out of control in the Uk.
8) Baseline health standards are much higher in Spain.
9) Obesity is much less tolerated.
10) Big families are loved and encouraged.
11) Children are the center of the universe in Spain.
12) Teachers hug, kiss and comfort the children at school. It's a travesty this is not allowed in the Uk and other countries.
13) Learning languages at age 5 is play. 3/5 languages by early 10's is the target.
14) 4 children can attend the best private international school for the same cost as 1 child private in the Uk.
15) Teachers are vastly underpaid.
16) Great teachers are immeasurably beneficial for your children.
17) Everything takes 3x as long, in some cases 10x.
18) The slower pace of life is enforced.
19) Paper is still the default. Digital is lagging way behind.
20) People don't fuck with the police. The Guardia Civil will destroy you.
21) 99% of the police (especially Guardia) are in incredible shape.
22) Healthcare is fantastic.
23) Attempting to speak in Spanish (even when a clear beginner) is always well received.
24) Shift from Socialist to Conservative is starting. Taxes should come down.
25) Digital nomad visas are now available.
26) Although painful, there's huge opportunity for innovation.
27) Long lunches and late dinners are incredible.
28) Being out late with your children is normal.
29) The school run is the ultimate networking opportunity.
30) Splitting twins into separate classes is extremely beneficial for their development.
31) Having 4 children in 4 classes is the social life hack.
32) Nothing happens quickly, you have to accept it.
32) If you can live in the sun, you should.
33) You will make closer friends by moving somewhere with intention as other people have done the same. Likely you share similar values.
34) Taking your children to the beach after school is one of the greatest pleasures in life.
That's it for now :)
May add some more as I think of them!
This chart blows my mind. I checked the data three times to make sure it was right. Data from StatsCan and FRED.
Canada vs. USA, population growth (YoY) 1965 to now
In 2011, Pixar employee Emma Coats shared its “22 Rules of Storytelling.”
They’re a masterclass in story, psychology, and human connection.
Here are 7 gems:
🧵
20 ideas from Edwin Land’s biography
[Founder of Polaroid and Steve Jobs’s hero]
1. There's a rule that they don't teach you at the Harvard business school. It is, if anything is worth doing it's worth doing to excess.
2. Perhaps the single most important aspect of Land's character is his ability to regard things around him in a new and totally different way.
3. Land paid scant attention to what experts had to say, trusting his own instincts instead.
4. Land believed that for any item sufficiently ingenious and intriguing, a new market could be created.
4b. Conventional wisdom has little capacity with which to evaluate a market that did not exist prior to the product that defines it. (What a line!)
5. He feels that creativity is an individual thing. Not generally applicable to group generation.
6. Land is a man deeply caught up in the creative potential of the individual.
7. An institution is the lengthened shadow of one man.
8. The word “problem” had completely departed from Edwin land's vocabulary to be replaced by the word “opportunity”.
9. Steve Jobs: I always thought of myself as a humanities person as a kid, but I liked electronics. Then I read something that one of my heroes, Edwin Land of Polaroid said about the importance of people who could stand at the intersection of humanities and sciences. And I decided that's what I wanted to do.
10. In a world full of cooks Edwin Land was a chef.
11. Land was asked what he wanted to be when he was younger: I had two goals.
To be the world's greatest scientist and to be the world's greatest novelist.
12. Everyone acknowledged that the future of Polaroid corporation would be determined by what went on in the brain of Edwin Land.
13. My motto is very personal and may not fit anyone else or any other company. It is: Don't do anything that someone else can do.
14. Our company has been dedicated to making only things which others can not make.
15. Land had far more faith in his own potential, and that of the company he inspired, than he did in any of the experts looking in from the outside.
16. Land realized he needed to control the relationship with the customer. He realized he needed to sell directly to the end user.
17. Edwin Land was not worried about the marketing of a new product because Alexander Graham Bell went through the same thing:
Land lost little sleep over the initial situation, calling to mind that the same sort of reaction had greeted the public introduction of Bell's telephone, 70 years earlier.
The telephone had been a dominant symbol in Land's thinking.
He began making numerous connections between his camera and the telephone.
18. Over the years I have learned that every significant invention has several characteristics.
By definition it must be startling, unexpected, and must come into a world that is not prepared for it.
If the world were prepared for it, it would not be much of an invention.
18b. It is the public's role to resist a new invention/product/service
18c. It took us a lifetime to understand that we must be prepared for the extensive teaching program needed to prepare society for the magnitude of our invention.
19. Only the individual— and not the large group— can see a part of the world in a totally new and different way.
20. Among all the components in Land's intellectual arsenal, the chief one seems to be simple concentration.
If Steve Jobs studied the life and work of Edwin Land so should you
Listen to these 3 episodes to get started:
#134 A Triumph of Genius: Edwin Land, Polaroid, and the Kodak Patent War by Ronald Fierstein #133 Land's Polaroid: A Company and the Man Who Invented It by Peter C. Wensberg #132 The Instant Image: Edwin Land and the Polaroid Experienceby Mark Olshaker
https://t.co/Rv8nJH5aCP
These clips are two of the best pieces of writing advice you will ever get about writing on the internet.
I promise.
It is so good we show it to our newsletter students.
1st: Most of us should write to help ourselves think.