Dickie's Digest - Spotify, Jocko, and the Lessons of History
Amigos,
Another Synthetic Saturday is upon us and it sure feels good. The Digest is packed this week – a couple of great podcasts, a twitter thread, two articles, and a pair of quotes and questions – so I’ll keep the intro short.
Thanks to those of you who signed up over the past few days — here is this week’s edition of the Digest. As always, reach out if you find anything particularly interesting. Have an epic week!
Best Listens of the Week
Rich Greenfield, Partner at LightShed Partners: The War for Time and Attention
Rich Greenfield is a TMT (technology, media, and telecom) analyst at LightShed Partners, focusing on consumer media companies.
This episode explores Rich’s view on the streaming wars, the future of audio consumption and Spotify’s excellent position, and the ongoing battle for consumer attention between Netflix, Instagram, and every other media company.
Few people have their finger closer to the pulse of the evolving media landscape than Rich Greenfield. This one is a can’t miss.
Jocko Willink | Jocko Podcast on ego, detachment from your ecosystem, and leadership lessons from his new book
The best episodes of the Jocko Podcast are the Q&A sessions. In this episode, Jocko talks ego and keeping the ego in check, detaching from your ecosystem to put your issues in perspective, and gives a preview of his new book Leadership Strategy and Tactics, a follow-up to his earlier book Discipline Equals Freedom.
A complete breakdown of the episode including the biggest takeaways and best quotes can be found here.
“If you find yourself distraught about your failure inside some random ecosystem, remember that if you can detach and step outside that ecosystem, you’re going to realize that the ecosystem, in most cases, doesn’t matter much at all” – Jocko Willink
Best Reads of the Week
What’s a quick read (<1hr), in any format, that either changed your life or is something you’d recommend to everyone?
11:52 AM - 5 Feb 2020
This replies to this tweet thread are some of the best short books and articles from all over the internet.
Two of the most common replies are The Lessons of History by Will and Ariel Durant and Sleep by Nick Littlehales, both of which I highly recommend checking out.
You can find my thoughts and takeaways on these two books and a growing list of others here.
Spotify: The Ambient Media Company - Venture Desktop
After listening to the podcast with Rich Greenfield, I started thinking a lot about Spotify and the future of audio consumption.
This article explores AirPods as the first augmented reality device and how we might eventually have them in at all times, just like we always have our phones on us.
The author then lays out an argument for why Spotify will come to have a monopoly over our ambient hours - commuting, running errands, and other times during which we could listen to something but not watch something.
“The rise of AirPods, smart speakers, and other wearable devices may not signal the onset of a true platform shift, but it undoubtedly represents a transformational evolution in the way we will consume media — and this emerging paradigm of distributed, "eyes up” device interaction directly benefits audio more than other content categories.“
Quotes and Questions
“Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, magic, and power in it. Begin it now.”—W. H. Murray
When making your next decision, run it through this simple criteria: Will this decision bring me more or less energy in the future?
End Note
If you’re enjoying the Digest so far, I’d love it if you shared it with a friend or two by forwarding it or sending them here to sign up. In a world full of noise, I’m trying to make this email the one with the most signal that you receive each week — I hope you’re enjoying it.
Be sure to follow me on Twitter or respond directly to this email to get in touch. And should you come across anything interesting this week, send it my way! I love finding new things to read through members of this newsletter.
Have an epic week,
Dickie