Digital Coffee (Free) #13 — product management, Amazon & climate change!
Happy Monday!
P.S. remember to list your 3 main goals for this week, so that come Friday you can get joy in the fact that you’ve ticked some stuff off your to-do list.
Apologies about the lack of Digital Coffee yesterday; it turned out to be a rather action packed day spent catching up on a lot of projects & tasks that had been accumulating and neglected.
Just a reminder that if you enjoy this week’s paid post to please hit the like button and tell a couple of friends about it!
Now onto the content 🚀
Want to become an AI Product Manager?
This week I launched AIPMCourse.com, a free 10 week course that teaches you all the basics on how to build and launch artificial intelligence products. Check it out, or recommend it to a friend who you think would find it useful.
Some thoughts worth pondering
All of our thinking and acting is subject to the pleasure and pain principle. We hate to entertain thoughts, or take actions that are perceived as being painful (they cost effort, time, money, go against our values... this is the source of procrastination). Think that you are above this principle? That you’re somehow better? This is the first evidence of this principle in play!
Some interesting articles to read
✈️ Amazon logistics has arrived early
Amazon is now its own largest parcel carrier. Let that sink in. How did a company that started selling books out of a garage in Bellevue, WA build the world’s largest vertically-integrated D2C supply chain? Amazon has entered the market as the top third-party logistics carrier (or 3PL in industry parlance) globally --before anyone was able to take notice. They now employ more workers (648,000) than either FedEx (450,000), UPS (481,000) or USPS (497,000) - up from just 117,000 in 2013. And they’ve built the infrastructure, which is very hard to replicate: 390 warehouses, 50 planes, 300 truck power units and 20,000 delivery vans.
❄️ Scientists bid farewell to the first Icelandic glacier lose to climate change
Scientists say they are bidding farewell to Okjökull, the first Icelandic glacier lost to climate change, in a funeral of sorts. Researchers will gather Sunday in Borgarfjörður, Iceland, to memorialize Okjökull, known as Ok for short, after it lost its status as a glacier in 2014. The inscription, titled "A letter to the future," on the monument paints a bleak picture. "Ok is the first Icelandic glacier to lose its status as a glacier. In the next 200 years, all our glaciers are expected to follow the same path. This monument is to acknowledge that we know what is happening and know what needs to be done. Only you know if we did it," the plaque reads in English and Icelandic.
🤡 Witch hunting 10 years of Trump’s tweets
If there’s one characteristic that is unique about the Trump presidency it’s Twitter. It’s hard to find an example of a world leader who has embraced direct mass communication in the same way as the President. And despite promises that he would cease, or at least moderate, his Twitter usage once he was sworn in, Trump has continued transmitting his stream of consciousness unabated.
😬 Markets in an age of anxiety
A dozen years ago, investors were complacent about the risk of recession. Not any more. Looking for meaning in financial markets is like looking for patterns in a violent sea. The information that emerges is the product of buying and selling by people, with all their contradictions. Prices reflect a mix of emotion, biases and cold-eyed calculation. Yet taken together markets express something about both the mood of investors and the temper of the times. The most commonly ascribed signal is complacency. Dangers are often ignored until too late. However, the dominant mood in markets today, as it has been for much of the past decade, is not complacency but anxiety. And it is deepening by the day.
If you want others to follow, learn to be alone with your thoughts. “My title must seem like a contradiction. What can solitude have to do with leadership? Solitude means being alone, and leadership necessitates the presence of others—the people you’re leading. When we think about leadership in American history we are likely to think of Washington, at the head of an army, or Lincoln, at the head of a nation, or King, at the head of a movement—people with multitudes behind them, looking to them for direction. And when we think of solitude, we are apt to think of Thoreau, a man alone in the woods, keeping a journal and communing with nature in silence....”
Healthy living? What!?
I’m just going to write a brief update for this week’s health living series... but as a reminder — I think I’m about 2 months into my latest health kick. Overall lots changing as always — in both mind and body, as I get used to healthy food, more sleep, and a lot more exercise.
I have to say I’m not losing weight as quick as I thought I would — maybe it’s more to do with my age (30) than anything — but still I was hoping that after 2 months of healthy eating and exercise that I’d be dropping the KGs... still I think I’ve shifted around 2kg.
What tips and tricks have you picked up in your healthy living — be sure to share in the comments!
That’s it for this week — short but sweet. I hope you enjoyed 🚀 good luck!