Medley 74: Article MVPs, Snapchat Reality, Sleep for Your Brain, & Good Commas

This is a copy of this week’s email that I sent to my newsletter, which you can join here.

Happy Monday! I hope your last week was great.

New Article: “The Article MVP: How to Test Business Ideas Fast, Free, and Solo.” A friend asked me a couple weeks ago what the benefit was to having a blog with such diverse topics, and this is the biggest one. Creating a platform to test business ideas fast, free, and without needing a team.

New Episodes: I published my interview with the always fun always awesome Zen Dudes of Zen Dude Fitness, where we talked about fitness, entrepreneurship, getting YouTube famous, and the subtle art of looking good naked. On Made You Think, Neil and I published our episode on In Praise of Idleness by Bertrand Russell about why you shouldn’t work so much and how to mediate between pursuing your goals and taking advantage of the leisure that modern technology affords us.

New Lessons: I added my notes on Enchiridion by Epictetus (8/10), and The Way of Zen by Alan Watts (8/10).

Features: I went on the Life Skills that Matter podcast to talk about learning new skills through experimentation, it was a fun interview!

I took Tiago Forte’s “Getting Stuff Done” course last week. It’s phenomenal. The recordings are a little outdated since the tools have been updated, but it’s by far the best $50 you could spend on improving your productivity processes. Not an affiliate link, I just really loved it.

Snapchat is getting into AR with their new Snapchat Art. It’s not very exciting yet, and I still hate the platform, but if they advance it to the point of truly having a Second Life type digital layer over your normal reality that you can see through their Spectacles… that’d be pretty cool.

This research indicates that one of the core functions of sleep is to “clean out the trash” that builds up in your brain during the day and help it shrink back down to a “cleaner” size. This would suggest that chronic sleep deprivation can lead to brain damage by not allowing this clean out process, so get your 8 hours!

Benedict Evans wrote a long post on the second-order consequences of self-driving cars. I’d highly recommend taking the time to read it — it’s fascinating.

I also came across this research that established a reciprocal relationship between depression and obesity. Essentially, being obese can make you depressed, and being depressed can make you obese. Not a good cycle.

Finally, don’t forget your oxford commas folks.

Have a great week!Nat