Learn: Astronaut Lessons, Chrome Extension, Amazon Prime

Read: 3 min

Hola from Buenos Aires, 

3 goodies, 3 minutes. Let’s go. 

🧑‍🚀 All The Buzz 

Buzz L̶i̶g̶h̶t̶y̶e̶a̶r̶ Aldrin was the second person to walk the moon. 

A few days ago, on his 93rd birthday, he married his 63-year-old now wife. (so the same man who once was on the moon, now is OVER the moon. Go Buzz!) 

But there’s a deeper lesson tucked in this “hero’s” journey.

After returning to earth in 1969, Buzz went on a 9-year alcohol bender, dissolved his marriage of 21 years, and ended his military career on bad terms. Yikes. 

How did this happen? 

His perspective switched from approaching (forward-looking) to avoiding (stuck in the past). 

Buzz said this himself, “The transition from ‘astronaut preparing to accomplish the next big thing’ to ‘astronaut telling about the last big thing’ did not come easily to me.” 

In other words, he had nothing more to look forward to. He peaked at 39 years old.

Psychologist Benjamin Hardy argues we should never be the “former" anything. This is a status trap (job title, income level, relationship, etc) where our motivation slips from approach-oriented to avoid-oriented, and we plateau. 

“Rather than approaching a new and expansive future self, your primary concern becomes to maintain or protect your current status or identity by avoiding failure. You’ll stop being courageous. You’ll plateau, and the energy and zest that was your growing personality fizzles out into something far less inspiring.”

Consider for yourself, are you approaching or avoiding?

🧰 Glasp 

Glasp is a social highlighter app and free chrome extension. And much more. 

Not only can you highlight and save articles, but you can also grab YouTube video transcripts (time-stamped too).

Even better, you can just copy the video transcript (one click) and paste it into chatGPT for a quick summary. 

You can see all my highlights here: glasp.co/#/Mitchell 

Check out the Chrome extension here. They also have great customer service (aka founder replies to all support tickets). 

📦 Amazon Prime Origin 

Back in the day, Amazon had a secret project they called Futurama which eventually became Amazon Prime. 

But the interesting part is how it started in the early 2000’s. 

An engineer brought up how it was “annoyingly complex, both on the backend and to shoppers” to set up their $25 minimum for free shipping back then. 

So he proposed this to the group, “Wouldn’t it be great if customers just gave us a chunk of change at the beginning of the year and we calculated zero for their shipping charges the rest of that year?”

Bezos liked it. 

But it took a LONG time for Prime to become what is today. It wasn’t until they added Video that it really started to explode. 

Funny I just assumed Prime always worked and people always loved it. Turns out, that wasn't the case. It was actually a BIG gamble.

I found this article jam-packed with interesting nuggets about the origin of Amazon Prime.

Or you can check out my glasp highlights here.

Mucho amor, 

Mitchell 

Ps. New hat