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Hi friends,

Greetings from Utrecht!

The last week has been a bit rough for me. I don't know if it's side effects from my second COVID vaccine, the consequence of some weird developments at work or both, but I've slept terribly all week and generally been low on energy and motivation. I'm hoping this will improve, because the first thing to suffer when I feel like this is always extracurricular activities like reading and writing. Let's see how next week goes!

(seriously, go watch Burnham's special Inside on Netflix)

As part of the upcoming essay on strategy modeling, I've edited and uploaded my notes on the excellent Understanding Michael Porter. Porter's concepts like the five forces and competitive advantage are well known and used often. They are also often misunderstood. This book does a wonderful job of laying out all of his concepts and connecting them to each other, presenting almost a blueprint for being more deliberate about your strategy. The final section of the book is an interview with Porter where he discusses the most common strategy mistakes, which is worth the price of admission just by itself. I might do an overview of this interview as a separate essay soon -- it's that good.

Here's what I want to share with you this week:

​Michael Porter book notes: I though I understood Porter’s work, but never have I seen it presented so clearly and cleanly as in this book. Mandatory reading for anyone involved in strategy.

The Best Bits

On Information visualization: A long time ago, when I was in college, I took an information vizualization course. It was mostly based on the work of Edward Tufte, who is the undisputed godfather of the infoviz field. It was a pleasant surprise to find him mentioned as a must-read by investor Carl Kawaja on Patrick OShaughnessy's podcast. He linked to a deep dive on Tufte by Blas Moros that summarizes most of his work in one handy overview, which is absolutely worth reading and saving for future reference.

​Your lifestyle has already been designed: This blog post highlights the commercial interests vested in the life of a typical American (/European/consumer). It argues that consumer brands and the 40+ hour workweek work in tandem to keep people from questioning what the hell they're doing with their life, and eager to consume things to ease their life or keep their mind off their troubles. Maybe some people don't experience it this way, but as a parent of a toddler and with precious little time to myself, it's sometimes hard not to feel like this is exactly what society expects from me. Definitely feeding into my motivation for breaking out of the default path!

How to spend your breaks wisely: Working from home, it's easy to forget about things like taking a break, or stretching your legs. This blog post by Nir Eyal shares a couple of very helpful tips for taking better breaks. So far the one that's helped me the most is staring off in the distance to break your eyes and facial muscles out of focus mode.

See you in two weeks!

Martijn

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