another krappy newsletter #1
a newsletter about nothing
Congratulations! You are the proud recipient of the first krappy newsletter. What an incredible honor. You must feel great. I know I do.
I will be sending this out every Tuesday. Tuesday historically sucks. It is the day where you realize you still have most of the week left. It is the day that people have mental breakdowns. No one has a mental breakdown on a Friday. Always on a Tuesday. My hope is that this newsletter can make Tuesday suck less.
This newsletter doesn’t have a theme. Like Seinfeld was a show about nothing, this is going to be a newsletter about nothing. It will be a random smattering of personal updates and fun tidbits that I learned over the week with my personality inserted throughout.
Reply back to this email and let me know what you think or if something I wrote about resonates with you!
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PERSONAL UPDATE
Kayfabe in manufacturing
This week, I published an essay on how we use story building tactics from professional wrestling (kayfabe) to oversell automation in manufacturing.
The reality of automating the factory is really boring. We make tiny incremental progress and rarely remove total number of humans. To make this subject more exciting for the outsiders, we spice up the story lines. Which is exactly what they do in professional wrestling. Because people like exciting fakery more than boring reality.
My concern is that this emphasis on how close we are to full automation may slow us down from getting there at all.
https://fullofkrapp.com/kayfabe-manufacturing/
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MAKING STUFF
Vaccine manufacturing
Now that we have good vaccine candidates, manufacturing will make its way into the media narrative. We will start to hear a lot about how hard it is to manufacture millions of high quality things. A subject that is near and dear to my heart.
There are two major questions every one has to work through when you try to make a million of something:
How are we going to make these quickly?
How are you going to ensure that every thing you make is high quality?
The easiest way to safely and effectively answer those two questions for vaccines is to leverage large existing manufacturers.
However, we have a media narrative that paints big pharmaceutical manufacturers as evil. Respecting the cultural zeitgeist, I would imagine the media will focus mostly on the smaller names (like Moderna) and do their best to avoid saying the word Pfizer on television. But big manufacturers could be our only hope for getting a vaccine rolled out before 2022. Should be fun to watch!
Two great sources that go over this:
McKinsey report:
https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/pharmaceuticals-and-medical-products/our-insights/on-pins-and-needles-will-covid-19-vaccines-save-the-world#
Vaccine developers and government officials are publicly reporting timelines for potential emergency use of vaccine candidates between the fourth quarter of 2020 and the first quarter of 2021.
The discrete characteristics of the virus, the sheer number of development efforts, and innovators’ unprecedented access to funding all provide reasons to believe that a COVID-19 vaccine can be developed faster than any other vaccine in history.
Vaccine manufacturers have announced cumulative capacity that could produce as many as one billion doses by the end of 2020 and nine billion doses by the end of 2021.
Peter Diamandis on Vaccine development:
https://www.diamandis.com/blog/manufacturing-a-covid-vaccine
We need 4.4 billion annual doses to vaccinate adults worldwide. That number will increase if we also have to vaccinate children. And it will increase further if more than one dose per adult is required. (Note: Most scientists believe that two doses per adult will be needed, a primary and a booster shot some weeks later.)
Meeting this challenge will likely require the combined output of several vaccine manufactures over the next 12-18 months.
Several of the top vaccine candidates, including the AstraZeneca / Oxford partnership, Moderna, and Pfizer, have committed to producing at least 100 million doses in 2020. Additionally, each company has pledged to produce at least 1 billion doses in 2021.
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Working with Jeff Bezos on the original Kindle
It is in vogue to hate Jeff Bezos, but let’s drop our billionaire envy for a second and enjoy a flashback to 2004 where Dan Rose talks about the lessons he learned developing the original Kindle with Bezos. Love these behind the scenes looks at the products that shape our world.
2/ Ignore the “institutional no”. Amazon’s core retail business was pummeled after dot-com crash, and we were still pulling out of the tail spin in 2004 when Jeff started the Kindle team (same year he started AWS team). Everyone told him it was a distraction, he ignored them.
5/ Just because it ain’t broke, doesn’t mean you can’t make it better. Jeff told us “Physical books are one of the greatest inventions ever and there’s nothing wrong with them. How do we make the reading experience even better?” Our answer: lighter, portable, easy to sync.
7/ Set unrealistic expectations. Jeff wanted 100k books in store at launch for $9.99 each.
9/ Hardware is hard. Every software/internet platform eventually builds hardware. And they learn the same lesson every time, it’s much harder than building software. Slow iteration cycles, atoms vs bits, etc. The only way to learn is to ship. It took 3.5 years to ship Kindle v1!
Fun fact I learned: Bezos was in a helicopter crash in 2003. Thankfully he was unharmed. World almost looked a lot different...
Source: https://www.businessinsider.com/jeff-bezos-blue-origin-helicopter-crash-2018-3
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HOW FUN IS THAT!?
Things I learned that will make you say “how fun is that?"
Writing tips
I am very into writing tips. This is classic me. I start a new thing and I love the tips. Just the tips. Just to get the feelz. Mostly this is a procrastination mechanism, but occasionally I find a great new resource.
Julian’s Twitter account (https://twitter.com/Julian) is great for writing tips. Below is his advice for aspiring writers:
Aspiring writers are scared of having their ideas judged.
They fear that their blog posts will be taken as well-researched, high-conviction opinions.
Therefore, they worry that making errors gives readers license to intellectually attack them.
My solutions to this anxiety 👇
Add a disclaimer to your posts: “I’m sharing my rough thoughts as I explore ideas that interest me. I encourage readers to leave comments sharing their own experiences."
Instead of claiming ownership over the ideas in your posts, curate other people’s ideas and attribute them. Many newsletters, blogs, and Twitter accounts exclusively curate third party content. Over time, weave in your original thoughts alongside the curated ones. Continually increase the original proportion until you’re comfortable being the dominant voice in every post
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Burnout
I was totally looking this up for a friend. No way I was doing personal research on this topic…
Before I started researching burnout, I thought the cause was straight forward: You are overworked. Ends up that is not always the case.
Non-intuitive burnout highlights:
Burnout doesn't always look like drowning in work till you've no energy left. Sometimes it looks being stuck in a toxic workplace, not learning anything new, unproductivity, or slowly chipping away at your sense of self-worth draining you completely.
Quickest way to burn out? Being in a job you deeply care about, but had no autonomy to bring about change.
More often than not, the shortest road to burn out passes through bad manager(s).
The cure for burnout in my mind was always taking a vacation. Ends up, it is more complicated than that.
Tips on how to avoid or come out of burnout:
Pursuing non-work hobbies.
Work on something that you truly enjoy, work that you find personally meaningful.
Establishing boundaries around when to work.
Physical exercise
Remove yourself from toxic people.
I have been exploring the non-work hobbies tip through this newsletter and the blog! Has definitely helped take my mind off of the quarantine induced perpetual existential dread I have been feeling the last five months.
I found all of these tips on the following Twitter account: https://twitter.com/ScribblingOn
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CLOSING THOUGHTS
Thanks again for signing up to receive the newsletter! Let me know what resonated with you most and what you would like to hear me talk about more.
This was pretty good. I thought you said it was going to be crappy, but I'm just realizing you said it was krappy, not crappy. Totally different thing.