uncertainty killers, restaurant chainness & side hustles
CC#23 - Knowing your enemies, the death and resurgence of behavioral economics & joining SODAS
Hey there an welcome to ✨ CuratedCuriosity - a bi-weekly newsletter delivering inspiration from all over the internet to the notoriously curious.
Hey there! Quite some interesting, inspiring and provoking stuff this time - enjoy! :)
Things I Enjoyed Reading.
🔪 Want to Improve Your Career? Become an Uncertainty Killer
Simple, yet powerful advice.
Become an uncertainty killer. That’s it.
I guarantee that if you can make other peoples’ lives more certain, they will sing your praises. You will build trust at every turn and create allies wherever you go. People may even publicly call you “a machine” and impart positive attributes to you that you may not actually have.
Why does this work? Because people hate uncertainty. And there’s overwhelming evidence to demonstrate this.
For example, a University College of London study found that people were far more stressed when there was a chance of getting an electrical shock than when they knew one was coming with confidence. (…) These stories illustrate how the uncertainty around a stressor can cause more harm than the stressor itself. This is why reducing uncertainty creates so much value for people.
🍬 On Hreha On Behavioral Economics
Some worrying insights into the “business of science” packed into an entertaining verbal exchange between two legends in the blogging/newsletter space.
There are about 90 million eligible Americans who haven’t gotten their COVID vaccine, and although some of them are hard-core conspiracy theorists, others are just lazy or nervous or feel safe already. (..) If some sort of behavioral econ campaign can convince 1.5% of those 90 million Americans to get their vaccines, that’s 1.4 million more vaccinations and, under reasonable assumptions, maybe a few thousand lives saved.
Hreha says that:
Every single intervention requires, at the very minimum, administrative overhead. If you're going to do something, you need someone (or some system) to implement and keep track of it. If an intervention is only going to get you a 1% improvement, it's probably not even worth it.
This depends on scale! 1% of a small number isn’t worth it! 1% of a big number is very worth it, especially if that big number is a number of lives!
💸 The 4 Types of Side-Hustles and how to launch a $100M DTC brand [Podcast]
Some hustle motivation and hardcore business advice to end your week.
Justin Mares (@jwmares) joins Sam (@TheSamParr) and Shaan (@ShaanVP) on this episode. Justin breaks down his most popular blog post, the 4 types of side hustles, and brings all kinds of ideas for how you can start your own. They also talk about Justin's DTC businesses - Kettle & Fire, Perfect Keto, and Surely Wines. They end the episode with a few ideas around camping, a new dating app, and how to leverage VAs & no code tools.
Food for Thought.
🧲 How well do you know your enemies?
💻 Does remote work bring us one step closer to a perfectly competitive job market? What should we think about that?
⚖ 2021 has seen a disruption of power relations in the VC world - what’s next?
Random Cool Stuff.
🍟 Researchers in the U.S. investigated the “chainness” of restaurants (how likely a restaurant is to be part of a chain of 5 or more restaurants). They found that high chainness is associated with car-dependent small towns, low walkability and close distance to highways - no wonder Americans invented the drive-in…
💉 The first malaria vaccine has been approved - what a giant leap for humankind! To my mind definitely one of the top 3 most historically important events in 2021.
🏳 As a native Austrian I couldn’t resist sharing this - of course we love our neighbours but from time to time we also like to tease them a bit. Seems we’re not the only ones.
My update.
I moved to Copenhagen a bit more than a week ago. So far, the weather has been great and I really enjoyed taking long walks on my mission to discover the city.
I am now officially part of the Copenhagen Center for Social Data Science (SODAS). Excited to dive into this new experience and kick start some exciting projects. Follow us on Twitter to stay up to date.
Have a good week! 🌞