"Success Is No Accident"

Last week I spoke to friend of Must Read Newsletter (& very talented) Beth on her upcoming Podcast “Content Makers”, it was an absolute pleasure and cannot wait to share our episode with you.

Following on from last week’s really popular tech addiction newsletter, The Guardian published a good read on why the machine always wins and onto…

This Week it is another week where the Big 4 (Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google) have been caught recording your commands and conversations, Facebook have tightened their ad rules, Pinterest are going to have trusted sources and the web mob does web things with attacking podcasts with 1 star ratings.

Onto this week’s Must Reads

🤩 10 Must Reads 🤩

1. 🍭Why retro sweets are doing so well 

2. 👙Audience: Amazon over YouTube: RiRi picks Amazon over YouTube - this demonstrates why the streaming wars will continue to heat up

3. 👟Retro: How New Balance took the summer - hint; it took a lot of work

4. 💬 “MESSAGE”: While Marketers have burnt other channels, Pew Research finds we have gone back to SMS Or in other cases WhatsApp in 🇪🇺, WeChat in 🇨🇳, Telegram in 🇷🇺

5. 📺 Netflix+? How innovation at Netflix works and how Carla Engelbrecht drives the Netflix binge factory and craves the feedback to drive Netflix forward. BTW Did you know Netflix spends $15 billion per year on content? Up $3b YoY.

6. 🚖Not so Uber Marketplace: Is the ride sharing/hailing wheels about to come off? - Uber and Lyft aren’t playing fair with their supply side (drivers) and taking more commission than agreed. One way to try and make money?

7. 📍Location Matters: Foursquare (the popular check in app) has gone through many face lifts since releasing ten years ago (it’s now a b2b data company) - this article become popular this week, if you are a podcast fan and something that drove the content in the article listen to Recode Media podcast. This is also my must listen of the week.

8. 🥑 Trend Jacking: Even Lewis Hamilton is jumping on the Vegan train with a London restaurant - this week KFC Beyond Fried Chicken sold out in 5 hours.

9. 🤗Please Make Me Relatable: It is not just you, celebrities have flocked to YouTube to become or mostly likely to appear more approachable. Expect this trend to continue. 💡 A way to think about it below💡

10. 🎮 Collab: Adidas and Ninja teamed up this week - It’s incredible how many endorsements Ninja has racked up (Red Bull, Microsoft etc) and his general influence on e-sports and game streaming culture. Adidas have been shrewd with recent partnerships, will this be their authentic way into the next sporting arena?

⁉️Question: Do you like a slack? Would you like me to set up a private slack channel for Must Reads? Let me know on email, Twitter or LinkedIn ⁉️

📼 Video 📼

🤔 Final Thought 🤔

Time is vital. It’s one of the things that is constant in our lives. The calendar is the app that drives people crazy, the debates that almost every company goes through: - Open vs Closed calendar & - It’s my time vs other people requesting/claiming your time. I took the extreme measure of reviewing the previous 18 months of my calendar and categorising the time and valuing meeting blocks and my need to attend, it was liberating and shocking. I highly recommend you take a few hours, funnily enough you will have to block it out in your calendar and see how much time you can reclaim and move forward to manage more effectively. Managing my time has been vital recently and reducing the cognitive load of notifications has really helped me (I cover it in the upcoming podcast episode), alongside my obsessive nature of being overly prepared and planned it has cleared a lot of headspace. I plan my week ahead with daily morning reviews (Notion (app) has been a real gem for me).

My Tips: If you want to hack your brain into owning and managing your time:

• Colour coding meetings is proven to help your mood pre meeting,

• If you like dopamine kicks (technically we all do) write the tasks and lists out by hand and cross off as you complete.

• Or if you like Trello or kanban - organise into columns (apps are available) and create not started, in progress, completed, to follow up and de-prioritised with reminders and you will be manage more effectively. Alternatively this calendar article on medium might strike a cord with you around planning your time religiously and owning your calendar (and ultimately your time and owning it).

Thanks, Danny Denhard The Obvious Disclaimer ~ All views (mostly in italic) are my own, apart from if you click a link, then that’s the authors. Image credit - Doritos // Gif credit - Giphy

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