Wisereads Vol. 39 — Richard Mulholland's Here Be Dragons, Tiago Forte on creating content, and more
Last week, we shared the entirety of How to Write a Book by David Kadavy, a short read with tips on writing. This week, we're sharing a preview of Richard Mulholland's Here Be Dragons, a guide to winning sales with storytelling.
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Most highlighted Articles of the week
Where to Start with Strategy?
Challenging the pursuit of a perfect strategy, management thinker and former Dean of the Rotman School of Management Roger Martin suggests focusing on betterment. "Executive teams can get overwhelmed by the task of creating from scratch a perfect overall strategy. That often feels too daunting and too abstract… The superior mindset and approach is betterment. Start by deeply understanding the choices that have produced the most painful gaps between what we wish was happening and what is happening."
The Age Of The Generalist (How To Thrive With Multiple Interests)
Dan Koe, brand advisor to 7-8 figure creators and influencers, explains how generalists can attract a broad audience and monetize diverse skills. "The internet has decentralized wealth generation to individuals who value self-education, personal responsibility, and amounting to something in your life by doing good work."
The Great Flattening
Reflecting on the abundance and ubiquity of the digital world, Ben Thompson weighs in on Apple's latest iPad ad. "Moreover, this is just as much a feather in Apple’s cap as the commoditization of everything is a black mark: Apple creates devices — tools — that let everyone be a creator. Indeed, that is why the ad works in both directions: the flattening of everything means there has been a loss; the flattening of everything also means there is entirely new opportunity."
Most highlighted YouTube Video of the week
How to Create More & Consume Less in 2024
Building a Second Brain author Tiago Forte makes a case for shifting energy from consuming content to curating and creating content. "Have you ever heard the saying, 'When one person teaches, two people learn'? Whether it's writing a blog post, recording a video, or even crafting a social media update, those acts of creation act as a forcing function to organize your thoughts and then present them in a coherent way."
Most highlighted Twitter Thread of the week
The most overlooked part of the 2008 Great Financial Crisis
Lauren Self, CEO of Roots Homes, analyzes the motivations behind credit rating agencies inflating the ratings of subprime mortgages leading up to the 2008 financial crisis. "So began a decades long, still enduring misinformation campaign designed by lobbyists to paint the people behind the programs that helped Americans as the bad guys and the private lenders that profited from their reduction in market share as the good guys."
Most highlighted PDF of the week
The Straussian Moment
PayPal co-founder and Zero to One author Peter Thiel examines the philosophical underpinnings of modern politics, religion, and conflict. "From the Enlightenment on, modern political philosophy has been characterized by the abandonment of a set of questions that an earlier age had deemed central: What is a well-lived life? What does it mean to be human? What is the nature of the city and humanity? How does culture and religion fit into all of this?"
Hand-picked book of the week
Here Be Dragons
Richard Mulholland, a punk-rocking, jiu-jitsu rolling public speaker, reveals storytelling as the key to winning deals in his newest book, Here Be Dragons. His central advice: help your audience recognize and slay the villains of their own stories.
"I’ll say this again so it really sinks in – stop telling them your story, start selling them theirs. The same is true for Gandalf and Dumbledore but is absolutely not limited to the realm of old white dudes with long beards. As I say to the speakers I train on my Story-to-Stage programme, 'The champion is on the chair, the sage is on the stage.' That’s you, the sage. This is not your movie."
Rich is generously sharing a preview of Here Be Dragons with Wisereads readers. If you enjoy the preview, we invite you to grab a full copy here, or check out his other books Legacide and Boredom Slayer.
Handpicked RSS feed of the week
ByteByteGo
Alex Xu, Sahn Lam, and Hua Li publish a deep dive on system design every Saturday on their Substack for developers, ByteByteGo. From the Evolution of Java Usage at Netflix: "While Netflix tried to keep a consistent look and feel for the UI and its behavior on every device, each device still has different limitations… To handle this, Netflix used the backend for frontend (BFF) pattern. In this pattern, every frontend or UI gets its own mini backend. The mini backend is responsible for performing the fanout and fetching the data that the UI needs."