Hump day and we bring you stories from story makers, people we can believe in, music for thinkers and how to fight crazy with beautiful truth.

A friend of the work, Nik Goke, wrote in his newsletter, The True Power of Money. In the last paragraph of his post, he says, “money is nothing but potential”. This is a great way to look at money, and money is a subject most of us have a complicated relationship with. If we see money as potential, money could have less of a stranglehold on us. Potential also helps determine what to spend, save or invest your money. Do you want to use it as discretionary potential or growth potential? Maybe a little of both.

Another way to look at it is as a resource. You can use the money to build a community or a business or to help someone else. You can use the funds to adjust the time, the age-old “build or buy” decision that suggests you can pay someone to build your website, or make it yourself. If you pay someone, you buy time you can use elsewhere. Money itself is also amoral; it is not good or bad, money has potential, and the potential does have the ability to be good or bad.

If you can see money as amoral and as one part of many things you bring to a financial table, it can open you up to get organized and use the money earned to expand your own situation potentially.

People with a lot of money can use it to increase or keep power. The money continues to be amoral, but the potential is not. Nik also discusses this; people like Warren Buffett and Mackenzie Bezos have given millions to charitable causes. They gave a tremendous amount of potential to the causes they supported. As far as we know, you can’t take money with you after you die; the potential can live on depending on what you did with it when you are alive.

In 2018 The Weekly Standard wrote its final news story. Editor-in-Cheif Charlie Sykes and several other contributors to the Standard moved on to start The Bulwark. As the slow death of newspapers continues, a new group, of journalists, reporters and writers are finding a new home online.

Some things will never change; in this case, that’s a good thing. Get the best people to investigate, research, and write about big stories, and the audience will find you. The medium is different, but the talent and product are not. The shuffle continues, and many in the industry have been displaced, put out to pasture, or moved on to a different career. Fortunately for those who crave excellent writing and information that will make us think, the people who rose to the top of the New News are some of the best in the business.

Axios, Morning Brew, and Puck News serve excellent news in many different formats. Many new formats are digital, and everyone is experimenting with additional revenue streams—advertising for some, subscriptions for others, and hybrid forms that cater to both.

When the Internet punched all of us in the face twenty years ago, the fear was that it was too easy to get online, and anyone could create and write whatever they wanted online. It turns out, many crazy people are too lazy to develop websites, pay for hosting and send out crazy things. The comparison between the beginning of the commercial Internet and now would be interesting. A safe bet says the crazy today is more significant than it was then. Social Media changed everything; the best thing to happen to lazy & crazy, give them an easy way to put up whatever they want, promote whatever they want, share, comment, like, and exploit whatever they want. No gatekeepers, no barriers to entry, access to a phone and the web; let the party begin.

New Media is coming strong and coming for lazy & crazy. Fight of our lives!

Derek Sivers is a musician who turned his frustration with the music recording industry into CD Baby in the 90s. His story is a masterclass in how Just to Do It. From a circus clown to CEO, Derek eventually sold CD Baby for seven figures. His book Anything You Want details a part of his life and how he built CD Baby on simple principles.

These days Derek writes a blog and recently posted about Make Believe. Derek talks about the fun we had as kids pretending the floor was lava and monsters in the closet in the post. When we are kids, “make-believe” has a purpose. When we grow up, we tend not to believe anything or, worse believe things we know are not valid. Believe in what serves you and makes you better.

Come to think of it, is the floor lava? Are there monsters in the closet?

[Music Notes]

Another entry from Pitchfork’s Goth Series is The Cure A Forest. One of the things you start to notice when looking back at music you love is some of the similarities. In the 80s part of the British Invasion on the alternative scene is filled with echo and reverb, more than distortion and overdrive. Bands like The Cure and The Psychedelic Furs, and The Cult all played catchy riffs and melodic rolling peices that you could get lost in for days. A Forest has all the same qualities; the echo, the melancholy, and the static rhythm played repeatedly. We get lost (in a forest) thinking about it now.

[More New Stuff]

Words | Music | Art | Unknown

Lost.

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With A Shout Team