One Year of Another Excuse Newsletter🥳 

Welcome back to the Another Excuse Newsletter. It isn’t just another excuse, but a reason to start that thing you’ve been putting off.

It’s crazy to think that I’ve been doing this for a year.

Thank you for joining me on this journey.

What to expect this week:
👓Perspective - We Have It Easy
🔨 Tool - Remember Everything
🍿Consume - Spurious Correlations
📖Concept - Friction

Reflections On One Year

This year has flown by.

It’s hard to believe that I’ve written 52 of these.

It has been one of the best things I could have done for personal growth and improving my idea generation.

By highlighting 4 main categories that I wanted to learn more about, I could stay interested and consistent.

Setting a weekly cadence and confining myself to these 4 categories helped me find new content inspiration.

I feel that learning about and focusing on each one of these categories has helped me grow a lot.

Our perspectives should always be challenged, tools can make us more efficient, content and creators can educate us and concepts help us understand complex ideas.

I couldn’t recommend a regular writing habit enough.

It helps you understand topics by ensuring that you’re able to explain them in an easy-to-understand way.

It’s a practice that is now a part of my routine and I don’t plan on stopping.

Thank you for following along. I appreciate you checking your inbox and responding with your thoughts and feedback.

Perspective

We Have It Easy

Ernest Shackleton, the famous explorer, made the above job posting.

It was for the expedition to cross the Antarctic in 1914.

He got stranded there and survived for 2 years in horrible conditions, but that’s another story.

Today we’re focusing on that job ad.

How many people do you think applied for that job?

Over 5000

Back then, from a newspaper advert, that’s pretty staggering.

The ad didn’t sugarcoat it all. By reading that short paragraph, you instantly knew what you were getting yourself into.

And yet they still applied. Why?

Because life was mundane back then.

Most men were factory workers and an opportunity to live a little far outweighed the poor pay or even the possibility of death.

I learn 2 things from this.

The first is that we’re hungry for adventure. It makes us feel alive and we should try to replicate the feeling of adventure as much as we can.

The second is that our lives are far less mundane now and we should be grateful for that.

There are opportunities to make a living in ways that we truly enjoy.

So next time you need a push in either of these directions, just remember the thousands of people competing for a chance to go on an adventure that had an extremely high chance of death.

Tool

Remember Everything

My Mind is an app that helps you remember everything without having to organise it all.

You can save your notes, bookmarks, inspiration, articles, and images in one place.

Think of it as one place for everything you care about. It can organise and visualise it all for you too.

There are so many use cases for this.

I could use it to save ideas for my newsletter. Or a designer can use it to save inspiration for a new project.

Instead of it being another messy folder with all of your inspiration in one place that eventually gets too full and you stop going in there because it’s more anxiety-inducing than inspirational, it’s a place of automatic organisation with AI.

So each time you save something, the AI categorizes it in many different ways. So when you search for it, it definitely comes up.

And this means groups can be created in ways you hadn’t thought of.

So if you’re saving things and struggling to keep track of it all, check this out.

Consume (Read / Watch / Listen)

Spurious Correlations

Correlation is not causation, but it’s still fun to look at these correlations.

Some are so closely correlated it’s quite strange.

Tyler Vigen has a website devoted to strange correlations.

Over 5 thousand of them.

He breaks down how the correlation works and all of the data behind them.

He also has a function where you can click a button and randomly discover a new correlation.

So why am I showing this?

Firstly because there might be a small chance that some of you find this fascinating and may spend hours clicking the randomize button to find more correlations.

But I understand that’s not most of you.

The second reason is to show you that you can build a following by doing literally anything.

If you’re fascinated by something, and you do it for long enough, people will notice.

You don’t need to do the popular thing. If you don’t enjoy it, you won’t stick to it.

Concept

Friction

This may seem counterintuitive, but friction creates value.

The type of friction has many forms.

For instance, the worse something tastes, the easier it is to believable the product works, or the more seemingly scarce an item is, the more valuable it seems.

An example of the taste is Red Bull.

They intentionally made their drink taste that way. Because if it tasted nice and refreshing it wouldn’t be as believable that it gives you energy.

And scarcity is a very common tactic in high-end clothing brands. I mean the hoops you have to jump through to get a chance to purchase a Birkin bag by Hermes are crazy.

Buyers feel so lucky to have the chance to spend $25k.

You can use this concept of friction to your advantage.

Ensure your customers have some skin in the game, and that they’ve worked to get your product or service.

They’re more likely to perceive its value and be a repeat customer.

If it’s healthy, maybe it doesn’t need to taste so good. If it’s expensive, everyone shouldn’t be able to get/afford it.

Thanks for Reading

Now start something!

P.S. Feedback is welcome and needed! If you’d prefer to send me an email and not respond, you can do so here: [email protected]

Check out my socials below 👇