Issue #28

Hey friends 👋🏽,

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

📚 BOOK GIVEAWAY!

So going straight into my book giveaway, as I've promised last week, I’m giving away 3 books this month to 3 of my newsletter subscribers.

To join the raffle, simply invite 3 friends or family members to my newsletter and reply to this email with their email addresses. I will then raffle the inviters and announce the winners this weekend.

I’ll be informing the winners via email so be sure to check your inbox from time to time. (Follow my Instagram and Twitter for the latest).

Enter the Contest 📚

🚽 The Hotel Bathroom Principle

David Perell defines the Hotel Bathroom Principle as a dress code to cultivate serendipity.

Since fancy hotels always have nice bathrooms, it makes for a good plan B if you're in the city and suddenly need to use one. If you dress well and act confidently enough, you won't be hassled for using them, even if you're not staying guests. The world is however, normalising casual dressing at the expense of looking sloppy and careless, so this privilege may not work for everyone.

The Hotel Bathroom Principle simply means you always dress well enough to walk into a restroom at a hotel you're not staying at and get away with it. One side effect is that you'll always look sharp enough to capitalise on a serendipitous encounter.

🤔 The paradoxes of human life

• The Paradox of News: By telling us to care about everything, the news leads to apathy instead of action.
• The Paradox of Reading: The books you read will profoundly change you even though you’ll forget the vast majority of what you read.
• The Abilene Paradox: Tell 10 people to get ice cream. If they have to agree on a flavour, they’ll pick chocolate or vanilla every time. Groups of people don’t agree on what’s cool or unique. Since people agree on what’s easy, “consensus” is just another way of saying average.

🙂 Other things I've been enjoying

1. Cryptocurrency: I'm finally dipping my toes into the murky & mysterious crypto waters and it feels quite... strange. I guess money works from social consensus. And should people trust the BTC, then I'd simply look silly as a contrarian. That said, I'm setting my expectation bar low to mitigate against disappointment.
2. Song: Canopée by Polo & Pan: Funky, psychedelic chill vibes. I have stumbled upon a true gem here. The audio itself is a craft to behold but the music video takes the experience to a different world.
3. Banana & peanut butter combo: If you think this sounds good, that's because it is. If you think otherwise, you haven't tried it yet.
4. Screenshots & the Macbook shortcut: This week I realised how powerful screenshots are. I'm able to save important diagrams & tables from presentation slides quickly and type away my notes on the fly, streamlining the lecture review process. Shortcut: Cmd+shift+3 (whole screen), Cmd+shift+4 (custom area).

📖 Quote of the Week

"What another person thinks of you—if he or she likes you or dislikes you—that is that person’s task, not mine."

From The Courage To Be Disliked by Ichiro Kishimi. Resurfaced via Readwise.

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Hope you have a great week! 👟

John