Week 10 – Games have the best user experience

Hi Reader,

This week we saw a lot of advice on how to choose things to work on. We are bringing it together in this issue. Identifying things we work on involves not only multiple factors related to the risk-adjusted benefits of our chosen project, but also is intimately tied to our identity as individuals.

🐦 Tech (mainly) tweets I'm reading

Daniel Gross says, if you want to make something truly magical, benchmark your UX against games.
Jordan Rudner sums up Alaska's bizarre election, a true Lyndonian tale.
Ben Evans reminds us that at most 100m users will use your complex professional application

🌴 Planning

What to work on is an older blog post by Julian Shapiro that I've chosen to include because it's relevant and comes to contrarian conclusions on how things that are useful to work on look.

Reminded me of Tim Ferris who stopped being a top angel investor and dedicating himself fully to writing when he realized how his writing was changing people's lives. The tech industry expects us to invest, run or work at a start-up and it's not right for everyone.

📚 Learning

Skill-stacking is a heuristic to achieve career success by investing in multiple skills broadly. Darius Foroux argues that this leads one to position well for emerging fields at the cross-section of industries.

⚡️ Productivity

In Choosing Projects, Creating Value and Finding Purpose, Sam Altman opens up in winning strategies he uses not to waste his life away. He claims most of us are highly distracted on non-priorities and need to think through what we want to do and dedicate more quality time to it.