Wisereads Vol. 23 — Noah Kagan’s Million Dollar Weekend, Dan Wang’s 2023 letter, and more
Last week, we shared a preview of Todd Henry’s new release, The Brave Habit. This week, we’re sharing a chapter of Noah Kagan’s new guide to launching a business in 48 hours, Million Dollar Weekend.
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Most highlighted Articles of the week
2023 letter
Technology analyst Dan Wang writes an annual letter where he identifies upcoming trends and recaps past experiences, including the walk-and-talk, running and tangping, and memelords. “One of the questions I ask my SF friends is what the entrepreneurial 20-year-olds are doing these days. Are they starting a billion-dollar company, or are they more interested in becoming a memelord who is trying to incite a movement on the Internet?”
The Knowledge Economy Is Over. Welcome to the Allocation Economy
Dan Shipper of Every highlights a potential shift from knowledge work to management work in what he calls the "allocation economy." “You won’t be judged on how much you know, but instead on how well you can allocate and manage the resources to get work done.”
Extreme brainstorming questions to trigger new, better ideas
WP Engine founder Jason Cohen considers extreme scenarios to spark creative new ideas for his business. “If you were never allowed to provide tech support, in any form, what would have to change...What if our only goal were to create the most good in the world, personally for our customers?”
Most highlighted YouTube Video of the week
my PLANNER SYSTEM for 2024 | notion setup, iPad, Goodnotes & daily grind
Caitlin Da Silva is best known for her videos on self-care, reading, and organization. Her latest upload dives into managing tasks and goals. “Leading with my goal planning task is definitely a new approach for me in 2024. Usually, I put in all the other things and then address the goal stuff that I have to do but that often leads to my goal task being swept off my schedule.”
Most highlighted Twitter Thread of the week
People with checklists complete their work 40% faster
Serial entrepreneur and Secret Leaders podcast host, Dan Murray-Serter, offers psychology-backed tips for tackling to-do lists, including: “Do a brain dump. Write down all tasks in your head. All projects, goals, and to-dos. This releases cognitive load,” and “Separate tasks. Distill it down to 3-5 big tasks for the day. Use the Eisenhower Matrix to separate tasks by importance.”
Most highlighted PDF of the week
Self-Rewarding Language Models
Meta and NYU researchers discover merging a language model with a reward system creates a continually evolving and enhancing model. “To achieve superhuman agents, future models require superhuman feedback…Current approaches commonly train reward models from human preferences, which may then be bottlenecked by human performance level, and secondly these separate frozen reward models cannot then learn to improve.”
Hand-picked book of the week
Million Dollar Weekend
After being fired from Facebook, Noah Kagan struggled to find his footing before eventually founding AppSumo, a thriving software marketplace for entrepreneurs. In his new book, Million Dollar Weekend, Noah reflects on his journey to CEO and outlines how to launch a business in just one weekend.
“Being unafraid to start new things meant that, unlike most people, I was constantly conducting experiments in my personal and professional lives, in both big and small ways. New industries. New hobbies. New technologies. New roles. New people. New side hustles. That’s where I found my superpower, which taught me a lesson I want to pass on to you: focus above all else on being a starter, an experimenter, a learner.”
Noah is kindly sharing the first chapter of Million Dollar Weekend, releasing Tuesday. If you enjoy the preview, we invite you to consider purchasing a full copy here.
Handpicked RSS feed of the week
Ribbonfarm
In his Ribbonfarm blog, Venkatesh Rao offers deep, original insights on contemporary issues. A mainstay of the cozyweb. From Charnel Vision: “A world that desperately celebrates optimism and medicates pessimism is a world that is not truly willing to look at itself and contemplate the death and decay that must necessarily accompany life and growth.”