A small thought:
I spent the last week in Virginia Beach and did a lot of strolling up and down the city’s beautiful boardwalk. If people-watching is your thing, this is the place to do it.
There’s also no shortage of performers, either.
Want to hear a song? You certainly can.
Magic show? Sure.
Painting? Yep, that too.
Some of these performers were amazing. Others…decidedly less so. But all of them were doing more than many others ever will— they were practicing in public. They weren’t waiting to take one more class or to get it just right before even trying. No, they were out there getting feedback in real-time; similar to what I mentioned last week, but at scale. They were just doing the damn thing.
If you want to test your talents against a broad base, a place like Virginia beach is where to go. It’s hard to imagine a more randomized group all in one setting.
Wherever you decide to go/decide what to do, just commit to doing it. That alone puts you above 99% of everyone else.
Or as Gary Vee put it:
On to the good stuff:
What Bobby McIlvaine Left Behind
By Jennifer Senior for The Atlantic
And Bobby: My God. The boy was incandescent. When he smiled it looked for all the world like he’d swallowed the moon.
Then, on the morning of September 11, 2001, Bobby headed off to a conference at Windows on the World, a restaurant in a building to which he seldom had reason to go, for a media-relations job at Merrill Lynch he’d had only since July. My brother waited and waited. Bobby never came home. From that point forward, I watched as everyone in the blast radius of this horrible event tried to make sense of it, tried to cope.
‘Welcome to the Mesh, Brother’: Guerrilla Wi-Fi Comes to New York
By Bliss Broyard for the New York Times
“Initially everyone united around hating Time Warner Cable,” Hall said. A manifesto on NYC Mesh’s website lists the reasons members were behind community Wi-Fi: to build a neutral network that doesn’t block content or sell personal data, to bridge the digital divide, and to “stand in opposition to the telecom oligopoly in New York of Verizon, Optimum and Spectrum.”
My Kind of Contract
By Jason fried for Signal vs. Noise
For those who will be quick to point out legal holes or missing protections, there are many ways to do business. One way is working with clients you trust — people who appreciate this approach to work.
The Trial of Chesa Boudin
By Benjamin Wallace-Wells for The New Yorker
At moments of anxiety about crime, politicians have often tried to make people feel safe by insisting on more enforcement and punishment. The recall campaign’s case against Boudin is that he has not been willing to do this. “It’s similar to a mortician playing surgeon in the operating room—he’s in the wrong job,” Richie Greenberg, the leader of the first recall campaign, told me. Greenberg showed me a video of Boudin at a town hall at which residents had asked what could be done about some drug dealers. Boudin noted, in his reply, that many of the drug dealers had been brought to the United States by human traffickers—that they were, in a sense, victims themselves. “He’s excusing the Honduran drug dealers,” Greenberg said. “Not holding them accountable greenlights.”
Silicon Valley’s Fake Diversity Problem (Op-ed)
By Antonio Garcia-Martinez for Unherd
But herein lies the problem: if venture-capital-fuelled technology is one of the most brutal, though effective, amplifiers of human talent, then the outcomes will be spectacularly unequal. Which is why the diversity agenda — the thought that all groups must enjoy equal representation everywhere we choose to measure — reaches such a crusading fervour inside the tech industry.
Two For the Road
49ers quarterbacks have been working through center Alex Mack's profuse sweating in training camp
Thanks for being here,
Kevin—
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