Medley 247: Climate, Notion, Short Squeeze, Permanent Remote, Questions, GameStop...
This is the Monday Medley, a newsletter that goes out, you guessed it, every Monday. I republish it here for sharing and referencing, but if you'd like to sign up you can do so right here:
Happy Monday!
I had a very productive writing week last week. I published one post on my site: "Be Yourself Not a Niche," and updated my 2021 Goals with a January reflection.
And on the Creator Towns blog, I published a post on the importance of taking a "locals first" approach to development.
Alright, on to the Medley!
The World of GameStop
📈 Last week was certainly exciting. I would not have expected Wall Street Bets to have a bigger impact on Wall Street hedge funds than Occupy Wall Street, but here we are!
💵 If you don't know the long year and a half history leading up to this, and how much foresight DeepFuckingValue actually had, definitely read this story. Most people made money just piling in for fun, but he seemed to legitimately know what he was doing back when he placed the initial trade in 2019.
🤔 If you're curious what went down last week, and why Melvin capital (among others) got hurt so badly by all the action on reddit, this is a really good summary of how the short squeeze worked.
👾 Things got particularly interesting on Thursday and Friday, particularly when Robinhood decided to prevent their customers from buying more GameStop stock, but still allowed them to sell it. This was, understandably, seen by most as a self-interested and possibly externally motivated push to drive the stock price back down to prevent Robinhood getting bankrupted by the whole affair. This is a good, less conspiracy-y explanation of why they did it.
🤝 Legitimate reasons or not, it was still a huge breach of trust with their community. I decided to quit the app and move the portfolio I had with them to Public, which has done an incredible job of being public (hah) about their decision making and the restrictions placed on them during the madness last week. The whole portfolio migration process is remarkably easy. I'm just sad they don't have options trading.
The World of Knowledge Management
🗓 My friend Khe's "Supercharge Your Productivity with Notion" course starts tomorrow.
🧠 If you prefer Notion to Roam, this is the best course to take. I actually went through it last year and used it to set up Growth Machine's whole knowledge wiki system. Khe's model is the best I've found for shared knowledge management, even though he wasn't even focused on that!
The World of Climate
❄️☀️ This article makes a point I don't hear so often: we're pretty much past the point of being able to sufficiently "slow" climate change. We need to actively pull carbon out of the atmosphere.
🏷 One interesting initiative is Stripe Climate. It's a setting you can enable in your Stripe account, where Stripe will commit whatever % of each sale you make to their initiatives supporting carbon removal. I love this, and I wish there were a good way to enable it from other platforms.
The World of Remote Work
💻 Here's a fascinating analysis on how tech jobs have changed in the last year. Shin Kim scraped Hacker News to analyze new job listings, and plotted the shift to remote work throughout COVID.
📑 From the article:
"The first three months of 2020 are essentially free of the impacts of COVID-19. During these months 33-34% of companies posting jobs on Hacker News were hiring remote positions."
"The shift towards remote continued during these months and eventually stabilized with 67–68% of companies posting remote jobs by October and November. Overall, the proportion had more than doubled from 33% — truly a sea change in the hiring landscape in the short span of a year."
"With Pfizer-BioNTech announcing landmark COVID-19 vaccine trial results in November and the vaccine receiving FDA approval in December, companies could finally start creating a timeline for a return to normalcy. However, this did not translate to a reversion in hiring trends where more companies asked candidates to report to the office post-COVID. If anything, the remote hiring trend continued edging upwards, with 70% of companies posting remote jobs in January 2021."
The World of Questions
💬 Tony Robbins has this great quotation from "Awaken the Giant Within"
"I realized that the main difference between the people who seemed to be successful— in any area!— and those who weren’t was that successful people asked better questions, and as a result, they got better answers."
❓ In that spirit, Greg Isenberg shared some great questions for your life or company.
Here are a few of my favorites he included:
- "Can you really control that?"
- "What are you optimizing for?"
- "Are you reacting or responding?"
- "Are you thinking in decades or years?"
- "Are you building something authentic?"
- "If you could be paid to do absolutely anything on earth, what would you do for a living?"
- "If you could be paid to do absolutely anything on earth, what would you do for a living?"
End Note
As always, if you're enjoying the Medley, I'd love it if you shared it with a friend or two. You can send them here to sign up. I try to make it one of the best emails you get each week, and I hope you're enjoying it.
And should you come across anything interesting this week, send it my way! I love finding new things to read through members of this newsletter.
Have a great week,
Nat