Making Better Decisions (TN08)
Happy National Brothers And Sisters Day! To my surprise, it is different from National Siblings Day (April 10). Join the newsletter here if this was forwarded to you.
I started Tolusnotes to write about risk-taking and making better decisions. I also tend to write a lot about investing because it is the perfect playground for testing your risk-taking and decision-making skills. The stock market is unpredictable and unforgiving. Most importantly, luck plays a significant role in stock market outcomes. Decision-making lessons also tend to apply directly to the stock market. I'm telling you this to let you know that I'm continuing the decision-making series on my blog. There are currently two posts (hardly a series) that anyone (not just subscribers) can read today.
The first is about embracing uncertainty – recognizing that the world is not black and white. If you've ever been sure about something that turned out to be completely wrong, then this one's for you. The second is about the illusion of understanding – knowing what you don't know. Up next, I'm exploring how the great filter bubble affects our decision-making. The gist of it is that your decisions are a combination of your beliefs, current emotions, past experiences, and whatever new information you consume. Zooming in on the new information part, how does it affect decision-making when everyone lives in an information bubble?
I'm excited to get my ideas on paper. While working on the draft, I went on a tangent exploring the relationship between information, attention, and scarcity. The idea here is that attention became more scarce as information became more abundant. Media companies had to get creative. Members can read part of my first draft here. You'll need an email to read it, but you should have full access if you're getting this newsletter. Before moving on to the new decision-making post, I want to fully explore what comes next for the intersection between media and attention. I appreciate your feedback, so email me or DM me on Twitter if you have some regarding that draft.
Weekly Chart
$AAPL consistently sees the future of hardware (& software). Either that or competitors cave and follow Apple's direction. https://t.co/axhNHsaDK0
— Tolu Salako (@tolusnotes) May 2, 2021
This is funny because I finally caved. My Airpods arrived yesterday.
What to Read
@alex_danco's Emergent Layers. In part one of the four-part series, he discusses how scarce resources are abstracted into abundance and how doing so yields a new scarce resource. The idea of emergent layers is an inspiration for my post about attention. Though attention is a human bottleneck, I believe companies have found a way to make it more abundant. Read that draft I linked above for more.
