A couple of bottles of 5-hour Energy are a staple in our car’s glove compartment. Reserved for long drives, they provide a quick shot of, well, energy- of the taurine+caffeine kind. If you’re not familiar with the brand, its brightly colored mini-bottles are ubiquitous across gas stations in the US and represent a masterclass in guerrilla marketing and distribution.
Those little bottles made the company’s founder, Lucknow-born entrepreneur, Manoj Bhargava a billionaire. A philanthropist to the core, he has pledged to give away over 99% of his wealth and is doing some path-breaking work in the area of water availability in developing countries with his dishwasher-sized desalination machines.
But I digress.
Mr.Bhargava is known for his pragmatism and has a simple and powerful lens for ideas. They need to be useful or entertaining. If neither, they’re useless. That’s it!
In other words, the unuseless domain is where one’s ideas need to be, as he explains in his TED talk.
I’ve been thinking a lot about this in terms of a Venn diagram:
I’m fascinated by the “Both” intersection. To me, it includes software applications like mmhmm (founded by the man who founded Evernote) that are simultaneously useful and fun, entertaining documentaries, films like Interstellar that educate and entertain, almost the entire gamut of gamification, a new and potentially huge startup idea I’m furiously working on with my founding team from my previous startup journey at Unmetric, and the genre of books that Name, Place, Animal, Thing belongs to. As I’d detailed in a recent essay, a non-fiction book in a story format is, to me, a marriage of useful and (hopefully) entertaining. Fingers crossed.
Speaking of the book…
Happy New Year!
I usually go into a “why celebrate non-decimal planetary revolutions” tangent when it comes to Happy _______ {insert occasion here}.
The new year is different since it is celebrated or acknowledged almost globally. This unifying date warrants a celebration, IMHO.
But I digress. Again.
My book opens with a conversation that includes some banter on planetary revolutions. Here, for the first time ever, are the first few pages of the book-in-progress. The book launches in approximately 30 days.
Please:
a) let me know if you have any thoughts - simple reply to this. I read and reply to every single email.
b) let me know if you’d like to join my launch team. Simply reply to this email and say Yes or something to that effect. Very simply, I’ll give you early access to the book so you can read it and thereafter perhaps buy+write a review if you liked what you read. It’s one of those “if you like it, tell others. If not, tell us” scenarios that I stole from my favorite restaurant.
Oh, and thanks to the 100+ people who gave me feedback on my cover design questionnaire. You rock!
Your feedback was useful. And entertaining. Mr.Bhargava would approve.
Here’s a word cloud of all the podcasts you recommended I listen to. Bigger=more people recommended it:
But seriously, Happy 2021. May the force be with us.
Lux. Good thoughts. I haven't seen the TED talk and probably won't. This said, why don't you simplify the Venn diagram. Anything that isn't useful is useless. Why confuse the pic with the 'entertaining'? If you believe all entertaining stuff has a certain use, ie , is entertaining, make entertaining a subset of useful. Thoughts? PS: I value entertainment quite a bit and know so do you. :-) - Bond
Thanks Lux! I agree that the intersection between useful and entertaining is the sweet spot. Your newsletter is exactly that!