Learn: Starting Principles, Viral Tweet Breakdown, City Templates

Read: 3 min

Hola from Buenos Aires, 

If you’re new here, welcome! 

This newsletter is like a garden, but for your brain… Nutrient-dense, fertile foundation for growth, and occasionally spicy. 🌶️

Best of all, it's delivered in just 3 minutes a week, so this garden is sustainable. 

Let’s get growing. 

📍 Starting Principles 

Julian Shapiro claims we don’t act on most advice.

“We treat life advice the same way we learn someone’s name: briefly acknowledge it then assume we’ll remember it.”

So instead, he proposes picking a few Starting Principles or rules for navigating life.

Here are the Starting Principles I keep in my 2023 note: 

• Luck is a function of surface area
• In life and career, prioritize what compounds
• A year from now, you'll regret not having started today
• Half doing something is an expensive way of not doing it

🔍 Viral Psychology 

In case you missed it, this tweet nearly broke the internet this week. 

This single tweet has 12.9 million views, bigger than the populations of New York City and Los Angeles combined. 

On the surface, the content formula is simple:

[Recognizable thing] but with [unexpected twist] using [humor and/or relatability]

• Everyone recognizes a Google calendar & many relate to meeting fatigue
• Seeing the “cost” of a meeting is the unexpected twist (both humorous & relatable for meeting junkies)

But below the surface, this was just one of more than 13,000 tweets from gaut’s account (aka he tweets a lot). 

Here are a few other funny tweets where he used the exact same formula. 

And:

While these prior tweets weren’t viral, they were popular. And therefore served as the breadcrumbs leading him to the viral calendar tweet.  

So what's the takeaway? 

It wasn’t just a “lucky” tweet that randomly popped. Instead, he consistently created content, tweaked it along the way, found a formula that worked, THEN went viral. 

Luck is a function of surface area. 

Keep creating. 

🌎 City Travel Templates

I started making Notion templates for places I’ve been (Mexico City, Playa del Carmen, Medellin, Buenos Aires) 

I wish I started this sooner. 

3 reasons why I’ve been loving it:

• Easy way to share with friends and give/get recs 
• Great reminder of my favorite spots to revisit (links to google maps saved places)
• Simplifies new city research by targeting the top things I’m seeking out (new city checklist)

Here’s my travel page with each city linked. Feel free to copy any of the templates. :) 

Con mucho gusto,

Mitchell

Ps. Cauliflower season