Friday Fuel - July 31st, 2020
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It’s that time again. Here’s your weekly dosage of Friday Fuel, a collection of things that I’ve been learning from or enjoying recently.
📕What I’ve Been Reading - With the looming coronavirus, students and educators were forced to adapt to virtual classes. For most, the switch was far from seamless. Technical difficulties, lack of enthusiasm from students, revised lesson plans, you name it. It wasn’t the same. But for David J. Malan, not much has changed. David is the professor of CS50, one of Harvard’s most popular courses. A pioneer in computer science education, David has been experimenting with remote learning for over a decade. CS50 isn’t a computer science course for Harvard students only. It’s a course for the world, built to be accessible to anyone with an internet connection. Through Edx, an online learning platform built by Harvard and MIT, David has taught over a million students from hundreds of different countries. Just last week alone, one of David’s renowned virtual CS50 “office hour” sessions brought together over 350 students from 114 countries.
David isn’t just the professor teaching the course, he is the course. His charisma and attitude toward teaching are unlike any professor I’ve ever seen. He makes even the most dense, boring concepts exciting and relatable. Last week, the New Yorker released a profile on David covering the rise of his career and one of the most revolutionary educational experiments in history. I highly recommend you give his story and the course a look. No technical experience required.
🎧What I’ve Been Listening To - A couple of weeks ago, I shared an episode of Jordan Harbinger’s podcast where he interviewed Mark Cuban. This week, I listened to Jordan on the other side of the interview. In this episode of Mark Metry’s Human’s 2.0 Podcast, Jordan discusses how he went from being a lawyer to a world-class podcaster and media aficionado. While he now spends most of his time deconstructing the minds of the world’s most successful humans, he also had a pretty wild childhood. At age 15, he worked with the FBI to take down sex-offenders. I’ll let you discover the rest of the story when you listen to the episode.
🤯What’s Blown My Mind Part 1 -
In a data-driven world, we often forget how important it is to go with your gut. Data should be an important factor in decision making, but it shouldn’t be the only factor. Those who are able to successfully synthesize data and emotion are often the best, most strategic decision makers. Sometimes you need to operate on instinct, no matter what the data says or how your competitors are responding. This thread is a perfect example of that (click below to read):
🤯What’s Blown My Mind Part 2 - On Wednesday, Shopify released blowout earnings reporting over $30.1 billion of merchandise sold on its platform and $714 million in revenue in Q2. Both of these increased by at least 100% year over year (YoY). E-commerce sales in the first quarter of 2020 accounted for only 11.8 percent of total retail sales. This leaves a lot of room for Shopify to continue its momentous growth. The Street seems to agree as Shopify’s stock has shot up over 70% in the last three months and over 174% this year alone.
Shopify and founder Tobi Lutke have come a long way since its launch in 2004. Here’s a photo of the homepage in 2006.
Everyone starts somewhere.
🎤A Quote I Enjoyed - “Writing makes you see how unsure you are about things you thought you were 100% sure about” - David Perell
🧠What I’ve Been Working On - Making this the best it can be. Subscribers have increased over 170% this month alone and I’m so excited for what’s to come. In the next few months you can expect exclusive founder interviews, guest posts, audio newsletters and more. Have a topic you want me to cover? Someone you want me to interview? Something you aren’t liking? Reach out and let me know. Some of you have already started to reach out on Twitter and I’ve been loving it. Keep it coming!
Thanks for reading,
Randy