Issue #19

Hey friends 👋🏽,

Welcome back to Thought Caffeine, a weekly newsletter where I share my favourite discoveries during the week.

I spent the week roaming my teaching hospital's makeshift psychiatry wards and came across a handful of cases, from subclinical anxiety disorders to noxiously aggressive schizophrenics. Because of the pandemic, the original psych ward has been transformed into an isolation chamber for patients with Covid-19, forcing residents to look elsewhere for psych patient placement. The end result is something slightly more than suboptimal for patient security. For example, today, one patient somehow evaded on-shift nurses and doctors and made it out of their ward and into the open. We have yet to find the patient.

🍎 Chart: Apple's revenue stream from 2007-2020

I apologise for the bootleg graphics, but here's Apple's YoY gross income statement, broken down into a simple and easy-to-understand infographic.

✍️ Kurt Vonnegut on writing short stories

1. Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted
2. Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for
3. Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water
4. Every sentence must do one of two things – reveal character or advance the action
5. Start as close to the end as possible
6. Be a sadist. No matter how sweet or innocent your leading character, make awful things happen to them, in order for the reader to see what they are made of
7. Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia
8. Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible, to heck with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, so they can finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages

Watch the video here.

💵 Donald Miller on marketing

Here's one of my favourite quotes on marketing, quoted straight from Miller's A Million Miles in a Thousand Years. Descriptive, eccentric, yet wholly accurate.

"Before I started writing for a living, I had a job as a marketing guy at a start-up company that sold textbooks to the education market. In learning about my job, I had to read all kinds of other books about how to sell people stuff they didn’t need. As near as I could tell from reading those books, marketing is a three-step process. The first step is to convince people they are miserable. The second step is to convince people they will be happy if they buy your product, and the third step is to include a half-naked woman in your pitch."

🙂 Other things I've been enjoying

1. Film: Ricky Gervais' Netflix special Humanity. Ricky is perhaps my favourite comedian of all time. His approach to comedy & dark humour persona is infamously unorthodox, but his philosophy resonates with many. “If you can laugh in the face of adversity, you’re bulletproof”. Laughing, independent of the context or content, is therapeutic.
2. Game: iMessage’s built-in quirky GamePigeon feature. Yesterday, I went on a virtual long-distance date with my girlfriend playing darts and cup pong on iMessage's native game app: a third party downloadable plug-in called GamePigeon. Technology is amazing.
3. Codie Sanchez’ substack articles. I discovered her work through Noah Kagan’s podcast while I was on a grocery run last month. I find her contrarian, millennial views on finance deeply thought-provoking and engaging. If you want to read about her work, I recommend you start here.

📖 Quote of the Week

“When you make a business, you get to make a little universe where you control al the laws. This is your utopia”

From Anything You Want by Derek Sivers. Resurfaced via Readwise.

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Hope you have a great week! 🗽

John