Aug 25, 2017

GWJ RL #11: Importance of work friends, socially isolated America, the religion of economics, and much more!

By Jordan Thibodeau • Issue #11 • View online

Hi Tribe,

I hope y'all had a great week.

This week we’re going to hear from the founder of Five Guys. What I like about his story is that he didn’t have a grand vision when he started the company. He just wanted to serve burgers and fries. He didn’t get caught up in writing a 100 page business plan and thinking about every contingency. He experimented with a small burger shack and moved on from there.

We all have projects we want to get started, but we don’t because we want to launch something perfect instead of launching something that’s good enough. Look at your product launch as an alpha that will always have bugs, but odds are you won’t be able to find those bugs until you put it into someone else’s hands.

Speaking of alpha testing, I’m in the process of creating an online email course with gohighbrow.com. You can find one of my lessons from the networking course here. Let me know what you think.

Always Be Learning,
Jordan

Read

Having Work Friends Can Be Tricky, but It’s Worth It (Reading Time: 5 Minutes)

“Many companies have tried to support office bonds through perks like ping-pong tables, free lunches, or corporate retreats, but the reality is that most of us don’t have close friends at work. In a survey by Pew and the American Life Project, just 12% of respondents’ closest ties were with people from their professional life. If we expand this to people who were significant in the respondent’s life, the results aren’t wildly different. Only 19% of the people surveyed had a significant relationship with a workmate.”

hbr.org • Share

How Social Isolation Is Killing Us - The New York Times (Reading Time: 8 Minutes)

“Social isolation is a growing epidemic — one that’s increasingly recognized as having dire physical, mental and emotional consequences. Since the 1980s, the percentage of American adults who say they’re lonely has doubled from 20 percent to 40 percent.”

www.nytimes.com • Share

How economics became a religion | John Rapley | News | The Guardian (Reading Time: 21 Minutes)

“Leontief wanted economists to spend more time getting to know their data, and less time in mathematical modelling. However, as he ruefully admitted, the trend was already going in the opposite direction. Today, the economist who wanders into a village to get a deeper sense of what the data reveals is a rare creature. Once an economic model is ready to be tested, number-crunching ends up being done largely at computers plugged into large databases. It’s not a method that fully satisfies a sceptic. For, just as you can find a quotation in the Bible that will justify almost any behaviour, you can find human data to support almost any statement you want to make about the way the world works.”

www.theguardian.com • Share

From The GWJ Blog Vault

Getting Your Point Across - Grow With Jordan

If you want to get your point across in an email, blogging, or just in a basic conversation, stay away from the highbrow language. It might make you look smart, but when you do use these words you increase the odds of people not knowing what the hell you are saying and your message will be lost in translation.

www.growwithjordan.com • Share

Watch

7 times Elon Musk Proved he is a freaking Genius - YouTube

“Einstein once said that Success is 1% Genius and 99% perspiration. In case of Elon Musk , He is both a genius and a tremendous hardworker. Watch as he describes how a person putting in 100 hours of work every week would achieve his goal in half the time a typical person putting 40 hour a week.”

www.youtube.com • Share

Listen

Founder of Five Guys shares his story

Jerry Murrell’s mother used to tell him, you can always make money if you know how to make a good burger. In 1986 — after failing at a number of business ideas — Murrell opened a tiny burger joint in Northern Virginia with his four sons. Five Guys now has more than 1,400 locations worldwide and is one of the fastest growing restaurant chains in America. PLUS in our postscript “How You Built That,” how Aiden Emilio and her husband created RexSpecs — UV-protecting goggles for dogs.

www.npr.org • Share

Thanks for reading this weeks reading list

If you like what you read and you want it delivered to your inbox subscribe to my newsletter or share it with your friends. Also, you can find last week’s reading list here. If you have any articles I should check out, please email me at jt@growwithjordan.com

Did you enjoy this issue?

By Jordan Thibodeau

This list has been deprecated, you can find the new list here: www.getrevue.co/profile/InvestorsTherapy. Your weekly dose of 3 timeless articles that will make an impact in your life for years to come. Topics include: actionable career advice, free chapters from New York Time's best selling books, interviews with TED speakers, and info on what's going on in the world without the jargon. All of this content is free, but if you would like to support me, feel free to make a donation via patreon at www.patreon.com/jbt

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