September Favourites 2020
Table of Contents
🍿 My Favourite Movies of the Month
A Time to Kill
Let Me In
Neighbors
U.S. Marshals
Con Air
Life of Pie
The First Purge
Upgrade
Gone Baby Gone
Men of Honour
The Social Dilemma
War of the Worlds (2005)
📺 My Favourite Show of the Month
🛠️ My Favourite Tools of the Month
The modern way to build for the web
Webflow empowers designers to build professional, custom websites in a completely visual canvas with no code.
💪🏽 My Favourite Lifestyle Changes of the Month
Reconceptualized my birthday date for the start of the year
I've always been impressed by people who seem to have the ability to easily recall the chronological order of their life events. If someone was to ask me what my life looked like in 2002, for example, I would have to go through a bunch of mental gymnastics in order to figure it out. My birthday is in September and I have a theory that if it was on January first, my autobiographical chronoception would be a lot more impressive. My thought process is that being able to attribute each year to a single age would double down on my ability to trigger age specific memories.
🎥 My Favourite YouTubers & Playlists of the Month
🎬 My Favourite Videos of the Month
- By the end of their first decade they were the first major company to be carbon neutral in their operations
- By the end of their second decade they had achieved 100% renewable energy matching their energy consumption with clean energy for their data centers and offices around the world
- Last year they made the largest corporate purchase of renewable energy in history, and earlier this year they issued $5.75 billion in sustainability bonds, the largest by any company in history
- As of today, Google is the first major company to eliminate their entire carbon legacy, including all of their operational emissions before they became carbon neutral in 2007
- Their current goal is to become the first major company to operate carbon free, purchasing around the clock carbon free energy from anywhere they operate, catalyzing technologies that make them possible, and supporting policies that will create a zero carbon electricity system; and in the process, enabling more than 10,000 green jobs in the first five years
- Is the Monsanto company responsible for industrial-chemical agriculture?
- This environmental video essay looks at the industrial agriculture and multinational food and seed corporation Monsanto, which is now owned by the company Bayer.
- Specifically, this video looks at how Monsanto and now Bayer continue to profit off of and perpetuate a toxic chemical and industrialized farm system through their food empire.
- Monsanto continues to sell glyphosate or Roundup despite the overwhelming evidence and lawsuits showing it's harmful effects on humans and animals.
- Monsanto and Bayer along with three other seed companies now control over 60% of the seed market by patenting GMO seeds. GMO seeds sold by Monsanto have led to increased industrialization and ultimately increased costs in rural areas.
- Monsanto has essentially created a food empire based on control of GMO seeds, toxic chemicals like neonicotinoids and Roundup glyphosate, and high costs systems that unsustainable for the earth, humans, and the pocketbooks of farmers.
- There's a whole set of activities that has been eroding for years and decades in the US that most people would agree are positive stuff that the market doesn't tend to love (local news paper)
- The idea is to create a whole parallel economy around that whole suite of other activities that you could use another currency for. Based on the concept of time banking, where you could use something non-monetary for certain activities that you want to see more of.
- It's a system where time actually has value, and if people have elected to spend time on your art for example, then you can actually build up a time currency that you could trade for dollars
Christina's Philosophy
- Do what you love, and love what you do
- Be a shark
- She is unapologetic about her ambition and feels that to succeed you must be a shark
- To really rise to the top of your field you need drive and assertiveness
- Don't aim to please, aim to win
- Work hard, play hard
- Humans have both a legacy drive (a desire to leave behind a legacy) and a leisure drive (desire for fun) - Lonnie Aarssen
- Turn hardships into strengths
- Pick your people
- Egocentric bias: most people think that they do most of the work
- One study asked authors of multi-authored papers what percentage of the work they personally did. When they add up those percentages, the sum is on average 140%
- A similar study on the topic asked couples what percentage of the housework they do and the combined percentage almost always surpassed 100%
- This egocentric bias is not limited to spotlighting yourself as better: studies also find that when couples are asked what percentage of the fights they start or how much of the mess is theirs the total is, again, over 100%
- People think they do more of the work but they also think that they cause more of the problems
- Potential conclusion to takeaway: you experience and remember vividly all of what you do, but not all of what everyone else does. So naturally, you over estimate your own contributions and underestimate others
- The egocentric bias could result in leading us to underestimate the influence of other things in our life, like the role luck plays in our success - he mentions a really interesting statistic about the role that being lucky enough to have a birthday in January has on the success of hockey players [1:15]
- Ironically, downplaying the importance of chance events may actually improve your probability of success, because if you perceive an outcome to be uncertain, you're less likely to invest effort in it, which further decreases you chances of success. So, it is a useful delusion to believe that you are in full control of your destiny.
- The egocentric bias also makes it easier to accept inequality, by making it easier to justify your place in society by chalking up your wealth and power to your own intelligence, effort and perseverance - he uses a potent visualisation to demonstrate his point [7:24]
- Our circumstances and psychology conspire to make us oblivious to our own luck and this leads successful people to view the world as fair and those less successful than them as less talented or less hard-working; this is before you factor in any discrimination or prejudice
"When competition is fierce, being talented and hard-working is important, but it's not enough to guarantee success; you also need to catch a break."
- Aside from great horror movies, it might be difficult to uncover a consistent pattern between the content of Blumhouse movies coming out of Blumhouse, because as Jason Blum States,
- One pattern that remains consistent, however, is that unlike other studios that pour tens of millions of dollars into their films, Blumhouse tries to make sure that each film costs no more than $5 million
"Wearing my entrepreneur's hat, I'm very conscious of not falling into a pattern... the tenets of the company are the same, but the kinds of things that we're doing are very very different than 10 years ago." - Jason Blum, Producer & CEO of Blumhouse
- A mystery movie is about revealing information; sometimes it's about false information and other times it's about correct information
- Every movie needs something to keep people in their seats. Action movies need fun set pieces, comedies need to make people laugh, horrors need to scare people, thriller/mysteries need to have really good revelations and twists
- The mid-point of a movie is often a "but, then" moment which seamlessly joins together the plot in the first half and the plot in the second half of the story
