Five Points newsletter (#31)

Peter Kos -

Title photo: Brooklyn Bridge, shot in May 2017. I'm determined to get to the Big Apple this year. 3 days will do.

[self-marketing] I just updated The Elements of Lifestyle book landing page with links to all editions and Amazon stores globally: It's available on Amazon as Kindle eBook, paperback, and hardcover edition.

Welcome to issue #31 of my newsletter! Or issue #1 of the freshly called Five Points.  
Wait, what? Isn't this supposed to be the BlackBird's Bullets newsletter?

When I started this newsletter in November 2020, it was first called .kaizen:

Here it is, a brand-new newsletter titled .kaizen. That's Japanese for continuous improvement and is a concept that I recommend applying for your personal development as well.

Then the second edition got renamed to Finding Your Enough. The third became the BlackBird's Bullets:

So what’s new in 3.0? —I'm trying to find something meaningful for my audience, so I'm going with short bullet-points, something you can quickly scan without scrolling. If it doesn't fit on one smartphone screen, I missed the point (or your zoom is too big; you might want to get your eyes checked).
Kos, as in Peter Kos, is a Slavic name for Turdus merula, aka “common blackbird”.
So BlackBird is my last name, and that’s how I came up with BlackBird’s Bullets – BBB. –It’s not precisely a Nobel Prize for Creativity material, is it?

And then I told myself I'd stick to it at least until the end (it was supposed to be 20 editions only). But as more than 100 of you signed up and found these weekly musings interesting, I decided to keep going.

However, this newsletter's identity crisis isn't going away. In its 4.0 version, it's getting a dose of simplification by calling it what it is: Five Points. Every week I've been consistent about curating 5 points that interested me:

I try to keep it within the 500-word radius, and it consists of my own content, plus a selection of smart stuff across productivity, personal growth/development, leadership, self-care, and other topics for the modern professional.

—That's you. A modern professional. Hope you like that!

#5points

This week's #FivePoints:

... sleep is one of the most important but least understood aspects of our life. Until very recently, science had no answer to the question of why we sleep, or what good it served, or why we suffer such devastating health consequences when it is absent. Compared to the other basic drives in life—eating, drinking, and reproducing—the purpose of sleep remains more elusive.
  • 🧸 [Long Read] an awesome story of How Pixar’s Toy Story 2 was deleted twice, once by technology and again for its own good.
    Personal advice: Back up early, back up often. Use cloud storage services. Multiple copies. And when you're not sure of your (life's) work: scrape everything and start over.
  • 🇪🇸 ... which is exactly what Spain's postal service should do after introducing skin-tone stamps to fight racism — and making the whitest stamp the most valuable. —I won't bet you 70 euro cents to guess which color was the least worthy?
    {bursting into laughter just trying to imagine the meeting(s) that took place as Spain's Postal Service offices to sketch this idea, design, review, approve, and promote it.} #HowDoYouSayFAILinSpanish
  • 🙅‍♂️ The next time you need to reject a bad idea, use this AI Startup Rejection Generator.  Their roadmap also mentions that Job Candidates and Movie/TV pitch rejection generators are coming up next. I guess I can submit some rejection generator ideas to them as well (but I am afraid of them rejecting my rejection generator X idea!).

Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish.
Peter K.