Cool Stuff #2 - Ukraine-Russia thoughts, Book summary, Passive Income fail, and a new podcast.
Making passive income is hard. Mainstream media is misleading and one-sided.
Passive Income
My first attempt at generating some passive income has so far proved to be a big fat flop. I made this tool that makes it a lot easier to add voiceovers to powerpoint slides, it so far has 1 sale in the past 6 weeks, generating me a net €4.14. Have a look at it here: harryobrien.eu/pptool
MSISS Podcast
Some of you may know about Tim Ferriss’s 2 most recent books, Tribe of Mentors and Tools of Titans. Tim spent years writing his other 3 books, all of which I loved. The most recent 2 he wrote in less than 6 months and each sold millions of copies. How did he do it? He came up with a few easy questions and emailed them to his network of super successful of friends, and put all the responses together into a tidy little book. I tried a somewhat similar method where I asked a bunch of people in my course to send me a voice note on their top tips for first years and put all the voice notes together. The result is the first ever episode of the MSISS podcast, which you can listen to below. (DUMSS stands for Dublin University Management Science Society). There are 5 more episodes in the pipeline so subscribe to the podcast to listen to those.
Shopping Calculator
Anybody who knows me knows I hate wasting time and try to minimize the amount of time spent on chores, and I like to value my time. I made this little tool to help decide if you should shop online or in-person, depending on how much you value your time at. Have a look here: harryobrien.eu/shopping-calculator
Some thoughts on the Ukraine-Russia stuff
I thoroughly recommend anybody who believes that the current Ukraine crisis is just Putin trying to trump up support at home or a blatant 19th-century power grab to read this paper on Why the Ukraine Crisis is the West’s Fault: Delusions that Provoked Putin. While this PDF is 44 pages, the actual argument made is only in the first 10, the rest is supporting text. The author also gives a lecture and Q&A on the paper which you can find here. In summary:
The Russian state originated in Ukraine, and half of Ukrainians speak Russian. Eastern Ukrainians are especially pro-Russian.
Russia wants Ukraine to remain a neutral state, a buffer state between the West and Russia, and to preserve Russian culture and influence in the region. The US has reneged on promises made in the 90s that NATO would not expand “1 inch eastward” and has tried to expand NATO to include Ukraine.
The West has offered the struggling Ukrainian economy an EU-IMF relief program. Russia wanted to be included in the deal, the West said no. Russia was forced to offer a better deal.
Putin knows he cannot take over Ukraine, but he can ruin it and will do so before it becomes a Western state to protect his nation and sphere of influence.
This viewpoint is largely shared by Henry Kissinger, who wrote on the topic in 2014 here.
Very interesting and brief (24 min) take on the situation in this podcast here. (I’ve linked to YouTube the video shows sources, diagrams, and other good stuff. You can find the episode on spotify and apple podcast also. if listening on one of these platforms skip to the 15 minute mark).
Fooled by Randomness by Nassim Taleb: Book Summary
I’ve followed in the foot steps of one of my favorite bloggers and started taking notes of non-fiction books I read and publishing them online. I’ve started with Fooled by Randomness because Nassim Taleb has been recommended to me by lots of people. I will be done this series in about a month and will put out about one post a week You can see the first post here:
Cal Newport’s Interview on the Tim Ferriss show
I love Cal Newport’s books, in particular Deep Work and So Good They Can’t Ignore You. I took a few notes from his interview with Tim, and while it started off talking about productivity and happiness, the conversation drifted to meaning, religion, and the idea of God, which very much reminded me of the introduction to Jordan Peterson’s lecture series on the Bible, which you can find on YouTube. I’ve included my notes from the podcast below.
Somewhere around 30:00 - slow productivity. The most successful people are not those who answer the most emails, do the most meetings, spend the least amount of time cooking and eating, etc etc. ties right in with what nassim taleb writes in fooled by randomness: things that are optimized for the short to medium term are, be definition, not optimized for the long term. At our ripe young age of 22 those who are most successful now will probably not be the most successful in 10,20, or 50 years time. Optimize for the long term.
59:00 - roles and values document. Use this to define your 5 year goals, which defines your 1 year goals, and trickles down to quarterly, weekly, and daily goals. Straight out of 7 habits of highly effective people habit 7 - sharpen the saw
1:02:00 - key to living a deep life and being productive: committing to a structure to achieving your biggest goals instead of just winging it
1:04:30 - blocking off extended periods of time on an annual basis to be with no phone or internet. Allows you to check in with yourself, make sure you’re happy with your life and where you’re going, you’re not running away from your problems by keeping yourself busy, don’t need to rely on self control to not check your phone , stress tests the systems around you to ensure they allow you to be off the grid for multiple weeks
1:08:00 - seasonality is key - having hours, days, weeks, and months where you’re not busy is key
1:20:00 - we are busying ourselves with endless todo lists, social media, and avoiding facing the reality of death. Slow productivity is pushing back against this. Focuses on getting the right things done without rushing through life stressed.
1:39:00- talking about carl Jung who wrote about archetypes, which are deep instincts things that I don’t fully understand. Historically we have believed when we felt these instincts the gods were literally inhabiting us and acting through us. Now that god is dead we have to construct our understanding of this, or something like that.
1:43:00 - the solution may be craft. Without a craft, one thing is no better than another. When you care about and focus on a craft, some things are better and worse ie if you’re an athlete, staying healthy and hydrated and going to bed early and going to the gym everyday is better than partying and doing drugs and eating like shit. You can get better or worse, which is very satisfying.
1:46:20 - humans are not designed to have lots of freedom. We are all very familiar with analysis paralysis. More freedom most certainly does not result in more happiness. Having rules you must abide by makes life a lot easier because you’re not always conducting an impossibly large cost-benefit analysis and dealing with uncertainty