Medley 266: Apple, Self-Paying Loans, PR, Money, Adderall, Billboard, SEO Workshop...

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!

SEO for Solopreneurs is officially live! And for anyone who has already purchased, or who purchases before Friday, I'll be doing a few live demos, site teardowns, and SEO strategy workshopping on Friday afternoon at 1pm CT. The recording will be sent out after, too.

I also published another DeFi article about one of my favorite protocols, Alchemix, and how it's able to provide you with self-repaying loans.

Alright, on to the Medley!

The World of Money

I finished Morgan Housel's "The Psychology of Money" last week. It's a great read, it reminds me of "The Most Important Thing" by Howard Marks.

The book covers 20 lessons or insights on how to better understand our psychology around money, which Morgan argues is more important than understanding quantitative financial strategies.

Here are a few of my favorite quotations:

"Failure can be a lousy teacher, because it seduces smart people into thinking their decisions were terrible when sometimes they just reflect the unforgiving realities of risk. The trick when dealing with failure is arranging your financial life in a way that a bad investment here and a missed financial goal there won't wipe you out so you can keep playing until the odds fall in your favor."

"The hardest financial skill is getting the goalpost to stop moving."

"It's not whether you're right or wrong that's important... but how much money you make when you're right and how much you lose when you're wrong."

"Past a certain level of income, what you need is just what sits below your ego."

"Progress happens too slowly to notice, but setbacks happen too quickly to ignore."

"I once calculated that if you just assume that the market goes up every year by its historic average, your accuracy is better than if you follow the average annual forecasts of the top 20 market strategists from large Wall Street banks."

"If you can meet all your goals without having to take the added risk that comes from trying to outperform the market, then what's the point of even trying? I can afford to not be the greatest investor in the world, but I can't afford to be a bad one."

The World of Interviews

I love this story about Steve Jobs from a Quora question about how hard he worked.

What stands out is how much he seemed to recognize the importance of people being excited about the projects they were working on. Instead of putting them through annoying interview questions, he wanted to show this interviewee how magical of a place he felt Apple was.

Even though it would have been easy for Jobs to make it seem like Apple was this super exclusionary, elite place this person would be lucky to work at, he was focused on all the really cool stuff Apple was building and why it would be so fun to work there. He made it intrinsically motivating.

The World of Marketing

Pieter Levels pulled a clever move on Twitter by buying some ad time on a billboard near Apple's campus for about $24, and then tweeting about it:

The real "billboard," though, was the tweet, which went on to get about 1.5 million views between some sponsored push and organic reach. It's a great example of the "Unconventional PR" strategy discussed at length in "Trust Me I'm Lying."

The World of Drugs

Scott Alexander published a short read on the huge difference between the amount of drugs used by abusers and the amount needed for clinical benefits.

It's an important comparison to keep in mind for when we think about the harms of drugs. If you hear "Ketamine causes cognitive issues" that might put you off using it in a therapeutic setting. But it turns out those dosages are orders of magnitude different:

"They find that severe abusers, who are taking an average of 60,000 mg/month [of Ketamine], experience cognitive problems. But mild abusers, who take more like 3,500 mg/month, don't. Again, psychiatric patients are taking about 280 mg/month. I think this is pretty strong evidence that the psych patients shouldn’t worry that much."

He makes a similar argument for Adderall:

"The average Crystal Meth addict uses about 500 mg a day. And they snort it, which probably produces about double the peak plasma level as taking it orally. So they're getting the equivalent of 1000 mg oral amphetamine daily. The average Adderall patient takes 20 mg. The most important reason meth makes your teeth fall out and ruins your life but Adderall just makes you study a little harder is that the meth users are taking 50x higher doses (yeah, okay, there are also some pharmacokinetic differences, but those are less important)."

Drug users use a lot of drugs!

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