fabiochiu/medium-articles huggingface dataset:
9 Healthy Foods You Should Eat Every Week
By: Alyssa Atkinson
Tags: Health, Food, Fitness, Science, Lifestyle

9 Healthy Foods You Should Eat Every Week

And why they are so incredibly beneficial.

Photo by engin akyurt on Unsplash

I’m sure everyone has heard the saying:

“An apple a day keeps the doctor away.”

While that rhyme might roll off the tongue with ease and get children more excited to eat their fruit, there isn’t a whole lot of truth to the saying.

If you consume an apple every day, you will certainly provide your body with nutrients, but you won’t magically become immune to all illnesses and diseases like the phrase implies.

Besides, if your diet consisted entirely of apples, you wouldn’t have any substantial sources of protein and healthy fat, and your diet would be severely unbalanced.

If you want to boost your overall health, you don’t need to search for a single miracle superfood. In fact, there are many powerful foods that you should try to eat as often as possible. They will nourish your body correctly and provide you with ample energy. The following are nine foods you should attempt to eat each week (at a minimum). Some of them are foods I enjoy almost every single day.
How to Improve Your Postpartum Anxiety with an App. Today.
By: Katie Grant
Tags: Mental Health, Health, Postpartum Anxiety, Parenting, Life

Postpartum Anxiety

What I didn’t know at the time was there is a completely different set of screening questions - with completely different symptoms - for postpartum anxiety (PPA) vs. postpartum depression.

Symptoms like racing thoughts, irrational fear of harm coming to your child — with kitchen knives (I had that one!), constant worrying, OCD tendencies, feeling restless, trouble sleeping and eating. The kind of thoughts you don’t want to admit to yourself — let alone another human.

And, after taking to google, I discovered I had all twelve of those PPA symptoms. And that 10% of postpartum women experience anxiety.

That finally explained why all I could think about, all day long, was, “When was my daughter going to breastfeed next?” and “When did that mean she would nap?” and “What time would I finally get to sleep?”

It was the most debilitating and annoying tape that played in my head. All. Day. Long.

In fact, I was so incapacitated, not having a history of anxiety or depression, I hired another doula to teach me how to get out of the house with my baby. Sounds like a first world problem, I know. But, without her help, I might not be here to share this story with you.

She came every morning for a week and we went on small outings — to Target, the park, on a hike and, for my last day, on a boat ride in the marina. That felt like mommy graduation.

You see, I did not have a village where I live. You know, the village that it takes to raise a child. My family is all far away. My best friends aren’t close by. And most of my friends either don’t have kids or they already had them a decade ago.

That’s what happens when you wait until you’re in your 40s to have a baby. Although it’s super common these days. So, I needed to create my own village. I put a super honest post on Facebook asking for company. I said, “I don’t want to isolate. Please come visit me!”

And I had friends, acquaintances, moms I knew, moms I didn’t know, and even perfect strangers coming over to help me feel less lonely.

Don’t get me wrong. I did get help. In many ways. I got diagnosed by a psychiatrist. I got on Lexapro. I went to a PPA support group. But I needed more to get me through the day.

(If you are experiencing PPA or any type of anxiety, please get professional help. Call your doctor.)
Purge your Followers, Bring an Instagram Account Back to Life
By: Charles Tumiotto Jackson
Tags: Marketing, Business, Startup, Social Media, Instagram

Purge your Followers, Bring an Instagram Account Back to Life

You don't have to start from 0, but reviving an old Instagram account will take time

Photo by Pagie Page on Unsplash

Recently, someone asked me what would be the best way to grow an old, inactive account.

As you already know, Instagram rewards consistency. This makes growing an inactive account harder. The followers you may be having on this account might never see your content again as the algorithm would push other accounts, more regular and consistent ones, that they follow.

Growing an inactive account is a lot different than growing a new one.

And for this reason, many people get discouraged after they try reposting on an older account.

That’s partly why you will hear people say that they don’t like Instagram anymore, and why the free organic reach you get on TikTok is better.

But here are some truths that are worth keeping in mind:

Instagram still converts a lot more than TikTok.

than TikTok. Growing an inactive account requires some prep work.

You won’t get an incredible engagement overnight.

So pay attention to what follows if you haven’t posted in a long time, or if you’re considering posting on an old account that you have.

The first step would be to get rid of your inactive followers. Go through your existing followers and remove all the inactive, spammy, or fake accounts.

You will probably end up purging 20 to 40% of your followers, but this will help you start with a cleaner account and a higher engagement rate.

Then, go through your DMs and start engaging if you can. If you have conversations that you left pending or find ways to engage in any way with the existing messages you have, do it.

Another good practice would be to notify your followers that you will start being active again. You can manually DM some of your followers and let them know. This will help the algorithm see some activity back, and you may even show on their feed.

If you don’t know how to DM, start with your existing DMs. Reaching out to someone with whom you already had some contact will be easier.

Finally, stick to a schedule. Be consistent and regular. Post regularly, even if it’s hard, even if you’re not getting the results you were expecting. Instagram is a patience game, and too many people give up before it pays off.

Be gentle with yourself. Instagram is now a lot harder than it used to be when you had an account and were actively posting.

There are other ways to bring an account back to life, and if you know some, I would love for you to share them with me to talk about it.
How Unsplash Went From a Tumblr Page To Fully-Fledged Platform
By: Sah Kilic
Tags: Entrepreneurship, Business, Startup, Technology, Advice

How Unsplash Went From a Tumblr Page To Fully-Fledged Platform

And how we can apply it to our projects.

Photo by Rubén García on Unsplash

You’ve heard of Unsplash, no doubt. The thumbnail of this very article is integrated straight into this post from the service. I searched it within the text editor and picked one I liked. Boom, my article now has a header.

It wasn’t always this way. I couldn’t always type away and select an extremely high-quality photo straight from my text editor to be used completely royalty-free. It took a lot of work in the right places, over a lot of time.

But before putting in all that work to turn this into what it is today, it had to start somewhere. And starting is where most founders screw up. Starting has the most amount of friction. And taking that first step to publish a piece of work might take a year, several developers, and a lot of anxiety.

Unsplash, however, published its first version in 3 hours with $38. There was no umming and ahhing over the design. There was no unnecessary complexity. The first version was so basic that a teenager posting edgy content on the internet used the same technology — it was on Tumblr.

The Original Unsplash on Tumblr | GIF adapted from Source

This is the story of how Unsplash started and how you can use the same principles to launch practically any idea that comes to mind.
This Mental Exercise Can Actually Make You Smarter
By: Younes Henni
Tags: Education, Learning, Productivity, Creativity, Self Improvement

Examples — How to Think From First Principles

Imagine your problem is to make an omelette. Using first-principles, you can break down your problem to its basic facts.

Fact #1: I need eggs.

Fact #2: I need a pan.

Fact #3: I need oil.

Fact #4: I need a heat source

Just by listing the facts, you’re already halfway through solving your problem. Even if you don’t know how to cook, you made a serious step in the right direction.

Now consider a more complicated challenge to illustrate the power of first-principles: lowering battery production cost.

To make electric cars affordable, Elon Musk had to find ways to lower the cost of making batteries; the most expensive part of an electric vehicle. He reflects on this problem in an interview, wonderfully showing how to solve the issue using first-principles. Please pay close attention to what he says.

First-principles is a physics way of looking at the world. You boil things down to the most fundamental truths and say, "What are we sure is true?" and then reason up from there. Somebody can say "Battery packs are really expensive and that's just the way they will always be. Historically, it has cost $600 per kilowatt-hour, and so it’s not going to be much better than that in the future." With first principles, you block the noise and look for the absolute facts about this problem. Fact #1: A battery is made up of cobalt, nickel, aluminium, carbon, and some polymers for separation. Fact #2: If we buy every material on the London Metal Exchange, it’s going to cost us $80 per kilowatt-hour more or less. Now you just need to think of clever ways to take those materials and combine them into the shape of a battery cell. As a result you can have batteries that are much cheaper than anyone realises.

Notice how Elon starts by boiling down the problem to its bare facts — principles first. Doing so, he’s immediately able to pinpoint an area in which his team can adjust to make cheaper batteries.

That’s it. That’s how first-principles can solve tiny to huge problems: from prepping a dish to scaling a multibillion-dollar company.

I’ll cover more real-world examples — from areas that might interest you — So you can clearly understand how to use this exercise in your life.
Why Psychopaths Outperform Us
By: Project Hbe
Tags: Productivity, Psychology, Spirituality, Culture, Business

Why Psychopaths Outperform Us

Lessons from Wisdom of Psychopaths by Kevin Dutton

Too much psychopathy can lock you up behind bars, but a little bit can do wonders.

Author Kevin Dutton actually argues that “regulated psychopathy can have a positive impact on well-being and quality of life” — a life filled with accomplishments and fulfillment.

What Makes a Person a Psychopath?

Contrary to common beliefs, psychopathy lies on a spectrum, ranging from low to high levels of displayed traits. It’s not so much of a black-or-white matter.

In fact, we may all be a little psychopathic.

Psychopathy is commonly described as a personality disorder with a boosted sense of egotism and narcissism. Other traits include “superficial charm, manipulation, fabrication of intricate stories, impulsivity, and emotional poverty.”

On a positive note, psychopaths are goal-oriented, driven, charming, and unbothered by emotional hangovers.

These traits are beneficial to have in many professions, which is probably why psychopaths are more prevalent among business leaders, lawyers, and surgeons compared to those who are criminals.

Psychopaths Are Productivity Experts

Without the burden of emotions, psychopaths are able to strive towards their goal in the most efficient and effective way.

They have an “emotional tunnel vision” that facilitates the discarding of irrelevant and unbeneficial information and instead focusing on the tasks that lead to success.

People with low levels of psychopathy often get caught up in the what ifs. We procrastinate tasks that we don’t want to do. We feel emotionally damaged after traumatic events.

These thoughts cause us to step on the brakes.

In a society where productivity is rewarded, these “normal people” tendencies don’t help; they actually hinder us from achieving our goals, deeming us useless for being sensitive. We are treated as damaged goods.

Spiritually Psychopathic

Further analyzing how psychopaths view the tasks at hand, we can find some overlapping traits between psychopathy and spirituality.

Such traits are: stoicism, mindfulness, fearlessness, mental toughness, creativity, and energy.

Psychopaths are similar to monks, focused on chasing gratification. They see the goal ahead of them and run towards it.

They don’t step on the brake to dwell on all the distractions in life — they have the ruthlessness to focus on the outcomes that fulfill them.
The Limits to a Facebook Ad Budget
By: Pierre Debois
Tags: Marketing, Facebook, Social Media, Ads, Anaytics

How Ad Limits Will Work on Facebook

The ad limit consists of tiers based upon the spending from each page. The highest spend amount in a month within a rolling 12 month period is weighed against the tier limits. Facebook also considers the month with the highest spend within the period against the tier criteria.

Facebook is implementing these tiers to tailor its ad optimization. The machine learning algorithm that serves the ads on the platform discovers the best placement each time an ad appears in a Facebook user’s news feed. Running too many ads at once can hinder that assessment. When marketers issue hundreds of marketing campaigns linked to the pages under administration, each individual campaign ad runs the risk of competing against each other.

This leads to ads being delivered fewer times, reducing impressions and the opportunity to connect with the intended customer. This reduction of impressions gives Facebook fewer opportunities to learn how to best position the ads. It can cost marketers more of their budget since the ads are run without optimization initially.

The following matrix explains the four tiers that are based on the ad spend for each business page.

The tier for ad limits is expected to impact campaign budgets from large enterprises rather than small businesses.

When the limit is reached, the page won’t be able to run more ads or publish edits to existing ads until the ad volume falls below the limit. Marketers will be able to turn off the ad campaigns to help bring their accounts within the intended tier.

Facebook offers a few ways to monitor how campaigns are reaching the ad threshold. Marketers can inspect the ad limit for each Facebook page being managed on the Ad Limits Per Page tool. The Ad Limits Per Page tool is accessed through the Business Manager menu. It displays a table of pages under administration, the number of ads being running by the pages, and the ad limit for each page.
The Scam Catching LinkedIn Users Off Guard — The Fast Path to 1 Million Followers Which Exploits Jobseekers
By: Tim Denning
Tags: Social Media, Writing, Business, LinkedIn, Marketing

Here’s How the LinkedIn Scam Works

When a person is desperate to find a job they’re willing to try anything. How do I know? I was that guy last year. I thought it would be easy to find my next job. I wasn’t prepared for the overwhelming rejection and ghosting I faced.

After a while, your brain becomes a mashed potato. You start seeing jobs where jobs don’t exist.

LinkedIn wannabe influencers take advantage of these insecurities.

In order to build a big following on LinkedIn you need three things:

1) Likes 2) Comments 3) Followers.

It doesn’t matter where these metrics come from. All that matters is you get as much engagement as possible. Social media engagement has become a form of slave labor.

Wannabe influencers get you to like or comment on their post by promising the following:

You’ll get a job by leaving a “like.” (Or even a promotion.)

You’ll meet a recruiter if you leave a comment.

You’ll find more customers for your pandemic-stricken business by sharing an unrelated social media post you didn’t create.

If people think they can get something for free by engaging with your content then they’ll do anything to participate. It takes half a second to like a post. It takes 30 seconds to leave a comment.

It’s like the LinkedIn lottery.

You might get a six-figure job or you might get absolutely nothing. But the price to enter the competition is so small it feels silly not to do it. So, millions of people every month on LinkedIn engage with these scam posts.

1st sign of a scam

The original poster never engages with a single comment.

If the wannabe influencer really wanted to help you find a job they would at least engage with a few comments. They never do because they don’t need to. Their goal is followers and influence — not genuine help.

2nd sign of a scam

The number of comments in proportion to the number of likes is almost equal. These posts attract tonnes of comments, which is extremely powerful for the LinkedIn algorithm.

3rd sign of a scam

What you’re offered isn’t tangible. To say you will get a job by leaving a comment is an invisible promise. They don’t tell you how. There is no strategy. They don’t explain what success looks like or what the steps are.

4th sign of a scam

They never give examples of success stories.

You never see these wannabe influencers giving examples of real humans who won the LinkedIn lottery and got a job by liking their post. That’s because the winners don’t exist. We know deep down that finding a job goes well beyond the comments section of a LinkedIn post.

Genuine connection leads to job opportunities, not a like or comment.
Paige, AI in pathology and genomics
By: Kevin Hart
Tags: Genomics, Startup, Technology, Cancer, AI

Paige, AI in pathology and genomics

Fundamentally transforming the diagnosis and treatment of cancer

Paige has raised $25M in total. We talked with Leo Grady, its CEO.

How would you describe Paige in a single tweet?

AI in pathology and genomics will fundamentally transform the diagnosis and treatment of cancer.

How did it all start and why?

Paige was founded out of Memorial Sloan Kettering to bring technology that was developed there to doctors and patients worldwide. For over a decade, Thomas Fuchs and his colleagues have developed a new, powerful technology for pathology. This technology can improve cancer diagnostics, driving better patient care at lower cost. Paige is building clinical products from this technology and extending the technology to the development of new biomarkers for the biopharma industry.

What have you achieved so far?

TEAM: In the past year and a half, Paige has built a team with members experienced in AI, entrepreneurship, design and commercialization of clinical software.

PRODUCT: We have achieved FDA breakthrough designation for the first product we plan to launch, a testament to the impact our technology will have in this market.

CUSTOMERS: None yet, as we are working on CE and FDA regulatory clearances. We are working with several biopharma companies.

What do you plan to achieve in the next 2–3 years?

Commercialization of multiple clinical products for pathologists, as well as the development of novel biomarkers that can help speed up and better inform the diagnosis and treatment selection for patients with cancer.
The Most Successful Marketing Campaign Has Toyed With People’s Emotions Since 1948
By: Alice Vuong
Tags: Marketing, Creativity, Life, Self, Advertising

Playing to the Human Condition

The human condition has remained the same for centuries. A few things that humans have always competed for, in no particular order:

Status.

Money.

Love.

This marketing strategy played perfectly to the fundamentals of our inherent and learned values. We want all the above and more.

Diamonds are now seen as a critical part of a successful and happy relationship. Men are told that the “larger and finer the diamond, the greater expression of love” (Farnam Street).

The price

How much should a diamond cost, or rather, how much is your dream girl worth to you?

About two months’ salary, or so this ad says.

And it started with an advertising campaign.

Original ad from De Beers (Source: Goodhousekeeping.com)

The ad goes on to say:

“You can’t look at Jane and tell me she’s not worth 2 months’ salary. I mean just look at her. So I wanted to get her a diamond engagement ring that said exactly that, ‘Just look.’ I’d found out that a good spending guideline today is about 2 months’ salary. That got me the biggest and best diamond I could afford, without breaking my budget. Now the only thing that other men ask her is, “When’s the wedding day?”

I mean look at her. Cutting your food bill in half until you’re able to save two months’ worth of salary is a small sacrifice compared to her hand in marriage.

Now, 63 years later, two months is still the written rule and still being followed, although I’ve heard three months is the norm now.

The competition

When I got engaged, the first thing people said to me was “Let’s see the ring.” When I respond by saying I don’t have one, their initial response is one of shock and disappointment. My cousin’s response when she saw my sister’s huge engagement ring was to yell her husband’s name.

People are curious and also competitive. Comparing ourselves to our neighbors is natural, especially when it comes to big shiny objects. When it comes to diamond rings, first comes love then comes size.
April Update: Product Releases Focused on Customers
By: Nikos, Quadrant Protocol
Tags: Big Data, Blockchain, Cryptocurrency, Startup Lessons, AI

As we move into the middle of the year, our focus at Quadrant continues to be on building the products our customers need to meet their business goals. Last month we released our AI Models layer, and this month we’ve continued to develop our platform so that it provides the best solutions in the industry. We are preparing the launch of our Data Quality Dashboard, another microservice layer intended to boost the capabilities and user-friendliness of the Quadrant Platform, and we are building toward additional announcements in the middle of the year. As always, our team was active in the community, speaking at events around Singapore.

Here are a few highlights:

Quadrant team active at industry events

Quadrant hosted its monthly community event, focused on luxury travel, on Thursday, 25th April 2019. Luxury travel is one of the biggest sources of revenue for the tourism industry, and some of the fastest growth is seen coming from countries in the Asia-Pacific.

Quadrant decided to study the patterns exhibited by these affluent travellers with mobile location data to uncover insights into their behaviour and preferences. The findings and insights were shared at the event by members of our team.

The event was well attended and feedback from the audience has been very positive. You can read a summary of the event here, and find the full presentation materials here.

Sneak peak: Data Quality Dashboard

Quadrant’s Data Quality Dashboard, scheduled to release next month, is the second piece of the microservices layer we launched with our AI Models. It is designed to help location data evaluators gain more insights into the data feeds prior to executing expensive evaluation job batches. The first version of the dashboard consists of data quality control metrics as follows:

Global DAU and MAU

Data Completeness

Events per Device per Day

Horizontal Accuracy

Days Seen Per Month

Hours Seen Per Day

The Data Quality Dashboard will help save data buyers time and reduce data processing costs by eliminating non-qualifying data for ingestion. It will be a big step toward eliminating bad data from business processes, and we’re proud that Quadrant is the first to offer it. Stay tuned for the official launch announcement in the coming weeks.

Major announcements coming soon

We are proud of the progress we have made thus far in 2019 and the progress we have made in less than a year. But our team is working hard to deliver even bigger achievements in the coming months. These will come on both the product and the business side, so stay tuned to our blog for the latest updates.

As always, we are grateful to our customers and the members of our community for your continued support. We have already achieved a great deal, and have strong momentum toward our longer-term organisational goals. The support of the community is an integral part of this success.

Best Regards,

The Quadrant Team
Apple Is Crushing Deep Links That Were Used As Ad-Tracking Devices
By: Anupam Chugh
Tags: Marketing, Business, Technology, Privacy, Apple

Apple Is Crushing Deep Links That Were Used As Ad-Tracking Devices

iOS 14’s new opt-in ad tracking feature is about to debilitate deep links and cut advertisement revenue streams

Photo by Denis Cherkashin on Unsplash

The fact that Apple has been cracking down on privacy in recent years is no mystery.

With iOS 13, the tech giant gave users more transparency about their location use.

Subsequently, with iOS 14, Apple doubled down with the new approximate location permission. This caused distress among advertisement agencies.

But, still, the loss of revenue wasn’t significant until Apple unveiled a new opt-in ad tracking feature with iOS 14.

For those who are new, iOS 14 has plans to roll out a pop-up that lets the user choose whether they’d want ads to track them across apps and websites or not. If the user decides against ad tracking, the app cannot collect the IDFA, ad identifier.

As digital agencies heavily rely on personalized to determine user trends and ultimately monetize them, this single dialog had upheaved the entire mobile advertising ecosystem during the WWDC 2020.

Unsurprisingly, Facebook cried foul play, and Apple obliged by postponing the feature to give developers and businesses time to cope up with the changes.

Now that the controversial privacy feature is finally rolling out at the start of 2021, Deep Links that were used in the app ads are about to go obsolete.
The Shape of a Song
By: Matthias Hacksteiner
Tags: Music, Design

“The diagrams in The Shape of Song display musical form as a sequence of translucent arches. Each arch connects two repeated, identical passages of a composition. By using repeated passages as signposts, the diagram illustrates the deep structure of the composition.”

The Shape of a Song visualisiert die Musik z.B. von Aphex Twin, AC/DC, Bach, Chopin, oder Madonnas Musik mittels eines Algorithmus der auf den repetitiven Prinzip der Musik setzt.

[Via Anselm.Peischl.]
This Is How Medium Writers Get Paid
By: Tesia Blake
Tags: Writing, Self, Writing Tips, Creativity, Medium

This Is How Medium Writers Get Paid

Or: yes, your claps matter.

Two Sundays ago, I posted a story about how the behavior of some Medium users makes me extremely confused sometimes. The story was very well-received, and it generated a good number of comments from Medium users who admit that they are still confused about how the platform works.

The fact that so many people still don’t understand how the platform works might be a sign that Medium should work on clarifying things a bit better.

Meanwhile, I’m glad that so many have taken to the response section of my story to ask for clarification on details they’re still unsure about.

A big source of confusion is how Medium pays writers through the Partner Program. In other words, not all readers know that a writer’s payment depends on user engagement measured through claps — and only through claps.

To clarify, the number of views a story gets does not translate into payment for writers.

Responses do not translate into payment for writers.

Highlights do no translate into payment for writers.

Only claps by paying members do.

Medium takes every member’s $5 monthly membership fee and distributes it to writers according to how each member clapped throughout the month.

So, if you like the story you just read and want to reward the writer, make sure to clap at the end, otherwise no part of your membership fee will ever reach that writer.

If you’re not a paying member, your claps still matter.

Just think about it this way: claps are the approval units of Medium, it’s how we as writers measure if our writing has any impact on readers. We can’t rely on views alone, because views don’t tell us if our story resonated or not — and few people are compelled to leave a response at the end.

Another common concern of readers is if there’s a right or wrong way to clap, and the answer is that there isn’t.

You can come up with whatever clapping system you want. I find that sticking to the basics is the most helpful tactic: if you like a story, make sure to clap, however many times you want — you can clap up to 50 times for a single story.

If anyone would like a reference point, this is my personal system:

If I like the story, and haven’t found anything in the text that I fundamentally disagree with on a moral level, 5 claps.

If I think the story has above average quality, 10 claps.

If the story is particularly well-written, and if I deeply relate to it on an emotional level, 15–20 claps.

If the story blows my mind, 50 claps.

You can clap however you like, as long as you keep in mind these two things:

Clapping signifies to the writer that she’s doing a good job more than any other metric;

Claps by paying members are the only thing that guarantees the writer will get some money for that story.

Regardless of how you choose to clap, know this: your claps matter.

Happy reading.
Oh, The Places You’ll Go Once You Set Up Your Patient Portal!
By: Jenna Nobs
Tags: Humor, Dr Seuss, Health, Wellness, Satire

Oh, The Places You’ll Go Once You Set Up Your Patient Portal!

A Seussian journey through the medical-industrial complex.

Image by brgfx on Freepik

Congratulations!

Today is your day.

Convenient access to personal health records

Is just a one-star app away.

You have brains in your head.

You have teeth in your mouth.

Set up automatic refills

Before your insulin runs out!

Schedule an X-ray, CT scan, ultrasound, or MRI —

Here’s a confirmation code to log into our site.

Lost it already?

We can’t say we’re shocked.

Our fifteen-factor verification

Should get it unlocked.

Now the portal is active!

Strap in for the ride

As the time-space continuum tears open wide…

OH! THE PLACES YOU’LL GO!

You’ll scream, “Please God, no!

I knew I should have ignored

That green stuff on my toe!

I should have solved it with crystals!

Natural oils! Meditation!

Is that…could it be…

A missed payment notification?”

We’re sorry to say so,

But sadly, it’s true.

You owe us a lot

For the crusty green goo.

Sure, all we did was prescribe you a cream

That over the counter is $8.98

When its name-brand equal, mysteriously,

Costs ten times the amount

That it cost them to make.

But just play along! Don’t worry! Don’t let

Those Big Pharma profit margins get you upset.

What’s the harm in a little more credit card debt?

You’ll realize you’re starting

To feel a bit sweaty

When a pop-up declares:

Your MyLab™ test results are ready!

Is 1.9ng/dL good? Is 1.9ng/dL bad??

“??????!!!!!!!” you’ll type in the secure patient chat.

Should I search WebMD while I wait to hear back?

Yes, you’ll decide,

There’s no harm in trying

To crowdsource the question:

“Do you think that I’m dying?”

You’ll have settled on typhus

When a message arrives!

From your doctor, it seems —

But to your surprise,

Your session’s timed out! And your login’s all wrong!

You’ve tried too many times.

We’re not sure you belong.

So…

Be your username Bixby or Bottom or Brauer,

Be your security question, “What underlying conditions make you a liability to your insurance provider?”

Get on your way! The portal’s sealed over.

Try again in 48–72 hours.
How Ego Almost Killed My Company
By: João Vítor De Souza
Tags: Startup, Work, Business, Entrepreneurship, Management

Does a company really need to grow?

There this thinking that a company should always be growing. You have to make more money. You have to hire more people. You have to have a bigger office. Paul Jarvis, the author of the book Company of One, says that there’s a core assumption that growth is always good and is required for success. Culturally, growth feeds our ego and social standing. The bigger the company you own, with more profits and more employees than the next person, the better you might feel.

I’m a very competitive person. I always thought about being the best. I read all of Jim Collins’ books, and the Big Hairy Audacious Goal idea inspired me. BHAG is a powerful and bold long-term goal that you set as the mission for your company. Influenced by that, I defined ours as “Be the #1 word games company in the world”. That is bold! We had much work to do to make that happen.

I also always thought about selling my company one day. A business exit strategy is a plan that a founder or owner of a business makes to sell their company, or share in a company, to other investors or other firms. Initial public offerings (IPOs), strategic acquisitions, and management buyouts are among the more common exit strategies an owner might pursue. As founder and CEO, I let it clear to my partners since the beginning about my intentions.

Selling my company would help me achieve my goal of being a millionaire and eventually a billionaire. To make that happened, my company had to make much more money. To accomplish that, we needed to improve our current games and make new ones. We needed more people to help us, and I build a strategy for all that, considering that we were a company 100% remote. Having the US$1 million investment also helped.

We ended breaking revenue records again in 2017. We went from five to twelve people, and we build two more new games. We had a lot going on, and I had a lot of pressure to keep growing in 2018.
How to Start Writing a Novel
By: Michelle Richmond
Tags: Novel Writing, Writing, How To Start Writing, How To Write A Book, Creativity

How to Start Writing a Novel

Tips on Jumping into the Narrative Waters

Photo by Arisa Chattasa on Unsplash

A couple of years ago, I reached out to aspiring writers to ask what challenges they faced in their writing. More than 2,000 writers have answered my survey, 5 Quick Questions About Your Writing Life. 66% of respondents said the hardest part of writing a novel is getting started. Maintaining a writing habit came in second.

For me, maintaining a habit for the long haul is the hardest part. This was true when I wrote my first novel 17 years ago, and it’s still true today, six novels in. Beginning is fun and full of promise. It’s the novel’s middle distance where I start to get weary, wondering how I’ll reach the other side. In the beginning, you don’t yet know what can go wrong, and how long it will take to fix it.

I’ll address writing habits in a separate post, but let’s tackle the big one first: how do you sit down in the chair and begin the hard work of getting the words on the page?

Step One

Get past thinking, “I’m writing a novel.” Instead, tell yourself, “I’m writing a few words today” or “I’m writing a piece of my novel today.”

Writing a novel is a daunting challenge and a major, time-consuming endeavor. Looking from the starting line to the finish line, miles away, can be mentally paralyzing. The only way to start your novel without psyching yourself out is to break it up into small, daily tasks. Approach each day as a mini-project, not a major project. The mini-project is a scene, a chapter, or a page for that day.

Step Two

You don’t have to know where you’re going. You don’t need an outline. You don’t even need a plot to get started. Just come up with these three things:

a specific (interesting) person

in a specific place and time

facing a specific problem

Who is the protagonist? What trouble is he or she in? Where and when does your story take place?

Character, conflict, setting. From these three elements, all of the rest flows.

Step Three

Come up with a situation that is worthy of a novel. The situation has to be big enough, the problem great enough, to sustain a novel for 250–400 pages. Beyond that, the protagonist has to be deeply invested in the problem. The stakes have to be high. You have to give the reader a reason to care about what happens to your protagonist, a reason to care about the outcome of this situation.

Watch my quick lesson on how to determine if your situation is novel-worthy.

So, if you’re having trouble getting started, do this:

Stop saying, “I’m writing a novel,” and say instead, “I’m writing a piece of my novel today,” or even just, “I’m exploring ideas for my novel today.”

Remember your three essential things: person, place, desire.

Determine if your situation is novel-worthy.

Michelle Richmond is the New York Times bestselling author of five novels and two story collections, including the psychological thriller The Marriage Pact, which has been published in 30 languages. She is the founder of Fiction Master Class and Novel in 5.
If It Was Easy, Your Friends Would Be (Successfully) Doing It Too
By: Shannon Ashley
Tags: Creativity, Writing, Blogging, Self Improvement, Life Lessons

Tell me if this one sounds familiar. You reconnect with an old friend and in the course of the conversation, you tell them you’re a blogger or that you simply write online for a living.

In response, they tell you they think it’s amazing that’s even a possibility these days, and that they’ve been thinking about doing it too.

Sigh.

Now, there are endless variations of this one conversation, although, on some days, I feel pretty damn sure I’ve heard them all. Sometimes, the talk continues and the other person starts addressing all of the things you haven’t done. As in, maybe you shouldn’t really call yourself a writer if you write online for a living but have never published a book. Or, perhaps you can’t consider yourself a true professional if you don’t also sell a course or have a podcast, etc. You know, something other than writing.

Like it or not, people often have some very strong opinions about the stuff a creative should and shouldn’t, or can and can’t do. And all of those ideas differ from person to person, of course.

Worse yet, it can be hard for friends to really take you seriously when do creative work. I mean, sure. They’ll share that Buzzfeed article a hundred times and photograph a stack of their current books on tap, but sometimes, it feels like pulling teeth just to get your friends to read your stuff — even when it’s utterly adjacent to the art they already enjoy. The longer they’ve known you, the less likely it might be. In a way, I suppose that makes a certain sort of sense. People who know you from years earlier, long before you knew you could have such a creative career don’t always see you. Not really. Not the you who dreams (and does) big things.

After having this conversation once again this week, the one where a long-lost friend says in passing that it’s amazing anyone can be a blogger, and perhaps they’ll do the same thing — it got me thinking.

Maybe these friends don’t know how to be happy for us when we find a way to become successful in a creative career. And maybe that’s not entirely their fault.

Maybe it’s how they’ve grown up to think.
12 Colab Notebooks that matter
By: Vlad Alex, Merzmensch
Tags: AI, Published Tds, Merznlp, Artificial Intelligence

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A new breed of founders using data to help the planet (and their backers)
By: Pietro Invernizzi
Tags: Startup, Software, Venture Capital, Entrepreneurship, Climate Change

As a startup investor, I love learning about new spaces where problems can be solved through software.

Since these white spaces can be found in any industry, I deeply believe in a founder-first investment strategy; I think founders are much better than investors at identifying opportunities. All we can do is follow them and learn from those who spend more time than us spotting problems, getting smart about them, and coming up with compelling solutions.

More often than not, these talented founders travel in packs: from those individuals building software to reshape the Future of Work, to those working on Mental Health tech solutions, as well as those building Community Tools. The list goes on…

One of these spaces — in which I’m seeing an increasing number of remarkable people building meaningful companies — is Climate Tech Software, spurred by a couple of important trends:

Increasing awareness around sustainability & climate change — both at the consumer and business level 🌏

around sustainability & climate change — both at the consumer and business level 🌏 Regulatory and socio - political pressure towards transparency in reporting and reductions in carbon emissions (examples: 1, 2 and 3) ⚖️

and - towards transparency in reporting and reductions in carbon emissions (examples: 1, 2 and 3) ⚖️ Increasing investor interest, with a bunch of awesome new funds raising hundreds of millions around the topic (See list below) 💸

I’ve spent some time crafting a list of 80 unique companies that caught my attention in the space, and a couple of investors who are mostly, or entirely focused on it.

My plan is to keep updating this post on a regular basis, so that it can become the go-to piece for the sector. If you’re building a company that you think should be included, let me know!
3 Ways To Measure The Effectiveness of Your Leadership
By: Alyssa Leverenz
Tags: Marketing, Leadership, Branding, Business, Productivity

The challenge of cultivating leadership skills goes far beyond simply presenting an inspiring speech. When leaders tactfully pave the way for creative direction, everyone involved experiences the beneficial effects.

Directing creative aspirations requires strong leadership skills. Motivating a team to achieve common objectives while maintaining morale, leaders certainly have their work cut out. Sometimes, people in leadership roles fail to effectively lead, due to a variety of reasons. Meanwhile, there are times when strangers may demonstrate leadership in a way that leaves lasting inspiration.

Are You An Effective Leader?

Do you energize people to want to pursue a certain vision?

All humans seek purpose and meaning in their pursuits. As leaders trying to inspire people to adopt a certain vision, we must not ignore the blatant volition of freethinking individuals. When trying to gain compliance, a leader must articulate a set of aspirations that elevates people’s own sense of purpose or meaningfulness. By communicating collective aspirations that excites others, motivation is created.

Pro-Tip: Create messaging in a way that will resonate with your intended audience.

Does your direction help orientate and provide clarity?

It is important to direct people’s attention to specific aspirations at a time to help them perform optimally to achieve a vision. Giving people something to think about that inspires improvement in their own workflow is a helpful way to provide guidance. Effective leadership provides people with a general template they can use as a guideline to assess options for how they should proceed.

Pro-Tip: Be clear and concise in your communications.

Do people agree with your ideas for the future?

Achieving compliance means all parties resolve in agreement. As a leader, it is important to listen carefully to understand others’ points of view. Then, be prepared to debate why your ideas will work better in a genuinely convincing manor. Everyone has ideas. Leaders know how to effectively sell theirs. At the end of the day, anything is possible. May the most reasonable argument win.

Pro-Tip: Explain the importance of specific long-term goals and provide strategic plans.
You Need Server-Side Rendering for Your Angular/React/Vue Application
Tags: SEO, Programming, React, JavaScript, Vuejs

But Why Do I Need to Learn Yet Another Framework?

A common problem with JavaScript applications built with such frameworks as React, Angular, or Vue is that they have trouble optimizing SEO and meta tags.

The reason for this is simple: When we use JavaScript to fetch our page data or meta tags, the page is actually empty and the meta tags are undefined. Until JavaScript is executed, there is no content to index.

You can easily see this for yourself

Just run the application you built with React, Vue, or Angular locally. Right-click the browser page that’s pointing at localhost and click “View Page Source.” All the data you probably populated in the ngOnInit or mounted methods for your component will be visible on your page, but they won't show up in the page source. The page source is what is indexed by search engines.

Notice how all we have in the body is the <div id=”app”></div> . That’s where your framework puts your entire application. Unfortunately, as we can see in the page source, there is nothing for crawlers to see. Your web page would be getting more traffic if it had just been made with simple HTML. How bad does that feel?

This is the case because React, Angular, and Vue all execute in the browser. They render pages in the DOM based on user actions.

The problem here is that web crawlers — the things used by Google and other search engines to find your website’s content — don't usually support JavaScript. If your website or application can’t properly be indexed, then people aren’t going to be able to search for it.

Say, for example, you are fetching blog posts for your web app’s front page feed. And let’s say that today your front page is featuring an article about the 2020 presidential election. You would like people searching for the 2020 election on Google to be able to find your front page. However, since you fetch that blog post using JavaScript, your front page doesn’t have it available to be indexed.

You might also have issues sharing your content on social media platforms because your dynamic headers such as og:title and og:description are undefined until your JavaScript runs.

Here is an example of social media SEO meta tags and the result you get from using them. For those who don’t know, these meta tags allow you to send rich objects when you post your webpage link in a text message or on social media:

Here is the rich object your meta tags let you create. This is what it looks like when sent by text on an iOS device. Photo by the author.

Learn more about the Open Graph protocol. It’s pretty important for SEO.
Certainty
By: Thomas Gaudex
Tags: Poetry, Nature, Writing, Creativity, Life

I want words to shape my life, from the morning when I wake up to the evening when I close my eyes. Is it too much to ask? What is this remote place in the heart of nature where I could live from reading and writing?

Here, I no longer hear the birds singing. I am no longer awakened by the swallows that used to nest in the corner of the window overlooking the courtyard in front of the house. I only come across this tawny owl that says good night to me when I come home late at night. I answer her with sweet thoughts.

Here, I no longer see the insects, bumblebees, bees, and butterflies that swarmed around the lavender right next to the pear tree. I’m no longer on the lookout for the blue chickadees that used to come every morning to have breakfast under the apple tree in front of the dining room French window.

Here, I no longer hear the dry clacking of the woodpecker’s beak against the cherry tree trunk next to the clothesline. I am no longer lulled by the song of the blackbird at nightfall, perched at the top of the fir tree at the bottom of the garden.

Here, I can no longer smell the intense scent of red roses from the generous rosebush climbing up the wall next to the kitchen. I can no longer caress with my fingertips the colorful tulips planted and lovingly tended by my mother.

Where has this luxuriant nature that filled me with happiness in my young years gone? I think about it again and here I am melancholy. As I write these words, my throat closes. But what am I to do but write? Where do I have to live to find some of that childhood scent? Is there an enchanting place where the birds sing and the words dance on the pages?

Tonight, I have only one certainty. I want words to shape my life, from the morning when I wake up to the evening when I close my eyes.