What You Need to Know Today: February 25
Good afternoon, Early Risers!
Here’s what you need to know
TECH
Look mom, no hands. Would you believe that I typed this in Google Docs without touching my keyboard? No lie. Google announced today updates to Google Docs, and one of those updates is new voice recognition software. You can write, edit, and format documents with only your voice. Full details.
These headphones will get you high? Imagine getting home from a long day at the office, exhausted, you kick off your shoes, pop open that top button, and ever so gently loosen the tie around your neck. Before you settle into your favorite chair to unwind, you stop by the kitchen to pick your poison. What’ll it be tonight? Scotch, whisky, beer, wine, weed? How about none of the above. What if instead, you slip in a pair of earbuds, hit play on your iPod, and instantly feel the day’s stresses melt away. The cleverly named Florida-based tech company Nervana has built the world’s first dopamine-inducing headphones, and according to multiple sources they really, “get you high.” Through a conducive earbud the headphones send an electrical signal through the ear canal stimulating the vagus nerve, which sends a signal to the brain to release your “feel-good” neurotransmitter dopamine. The result: You not only smell like teen spirit, you feel like it.
CAREER
Why Elon Musk is a great communicator. Two words: present tense. Musk uses the present tense four times as much as average communicators do. How do we know this? Noah Zandan the founder and CEO of Quantified Communications, a company that measures and evaluates videos and speeches, looked at 40 transcripts of Musk’s speeches taken from the last five years and concluded that Musk uses the present tense a lot. Why is the present tense such a powerful tool as a communicator? Check this out.
Have I got a formula for you. Do you smell that? Smells like this guy is full of it. But here’s where you’re wrong. The guy I’m talking about, his name is William (not actually, for anonymity’s sake), and he’s created a formula for building million-dollar… wait for it… clickbait websites. His most successful website generates $200,000 per month and costs $30,000 to maintain. His most successful website launched only 12 months ago and already has 100-million plus page views and 3.5 million monthly users. Ri-di-cu-lous. Context: It took Business Insider over a year to reach its first 1 million page views. Now all this sounds suspicious, I know. But it gets better. William cold-emailed The Hustle telling them his story and happened to live “nearby.” The Hustle team invited William over to chat and see whether this guy was for real or not. Turns out William is the real deal. He was even willing to log in to his Google Analytics account to prove it. The best part: William agreed to share his formula with us, at no cost, and you don’t need to be a tech whiz to copy William’s success. You want to read this.
LIFESTYLE
Newsletters are the new ‘zines. Think about this before you start another newsletter business.
Jurassic World was surprisingly deep. “A movie or a book is like a seduction. It’s like a legal brief, a sales pitch, a TED talk. If it’s going to work, it must be focused. It has to make one point — and make that point with all the concentrated power it can muster,” says Steven Pressfield. “In the same way that an iPhone possesses unity, or a St. Laurent gown, or a Ferarri Testarossa, a story must be structured to deliver one unified punch.” How do you structure that one punch? Steven Pressfield explains using the many layers of Jurassic World. You’ll need some scotch tape and paper for this…
#NOWYOUKNOW
Diary of a ‘Muggle IT’ guy at Hogwarts
First Day On The Job
Where in the world do I begin? Hello, my name is Jonathan Dart and, as of today, I am officially the IT guy at Hogwarts School for Witchcraft and Wizardry.
You read that correctly. It took them until 2016, but both students and staff alike have finally caved and demanded that their cell phones work on school grounds, and with that request they had to find a “muggle” (a term I’m quickly learning to detest) to install wifi and maintain any technology that functions on school grounds… Read more.
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