Breakfast Notes #63 (Forecasts, Donuts & Data, Slowness)

KEITH YAP -

Hello friends,

Here is the 63rd serving of the Breakfast Notes.

This year, I resolved to focus on writing high-quality and insightful essays that would nourish your mind.

This means It’s time to go big on ideas that matter.

This means that from today onwards, I will be starting a new chapter in my writing career. For my weekly newsletter, I will focus on sharing the best links of the internet that I have come across this week.

(I hope this explains the stylistic change you are seeing here!)

  • 9 Forecasts For The Future of The Internet. The internet buzzword of the 2010s was "social". The internet was all about making the worldwide web as small as possible. The buzzword for this decade would be "A.I".  The greatest implication of A.I is hyper-personalization. Goodbye mass market, welcome me market. But, buyer beware! Belsky issues a warning on what the past decade has really been about, “In 2022, it became abundantly clear that we shared and shared only to, unbeknownst to us, train artificial intelligence to leverage all of our collective genius and develop mega ML models that pose a viable alternative to…everything humans have traditionally done. Now what?”
  • Tom Platz Seminar. Tom Platz is a former professional bodybuilder, a fitness icon and bodybuilding’s true philosopher. He was best known for his impressive quadriceps that earned him the moniker, “Quadfather” throughout the 1980s and 90s. I love this seminar because he uses bodybuilding as an analogue to reality. It conveys an appreciative disposition that we would all benefit from. This is my favourite quote,  “You think life is about how many breaths you take. No! Life is about the moments that take your breath away.” It is a reminder to chase and appreciate beauty while we still can.
  • Donuts & Data. I just finished reading Around The Corner, Around The World by the former 25-year CEO of Dunkin Donuts. It’s a wisdom-dense book on communication, leadership and strategy. Here is his answer to the question, “how do you choose where to put your next store?”  His answer, “Basically a lot of regression analysis, a lot of data. We buy information on every community. We map out all the competition and we take a look at all the demographics within one to three miles. Most retail businesses, in my experience, generate eighty per cent of their business within a ten-minute driving time, or walking time, be it an in-town location or a suburban location. All of that data is generally systematized and evaluated.”
  • Going Slow. You might think the best way to train for a marathon is to run fast and return to huffing and puffing. But great athletes run far but slowly. The idea is that it allows you to truly push the pace on “hard” days, as well as build up the necessary stamina needed for longer runs. The best runners are “not influenced by somebody running past them on their easy day, and when it comes to paces during training, they put their ego at the door.” A useful life lesson for non-runners too!

Visualization Of The Week

The Impressiveness of CGI

I still cannot believe this is NOT Morgan Freeman.

May The Sun Shine Upon Your Face,

Keith