Hi Friends,
Greetings from Brooklyn!
I hope you enjoy today’s short edition of the Practical Polymath.
See you in two weeks,
Florian
✍ Copywriting History: John Emory Powers is considered the godfather of creative advertising. His style of writing appealed to reason instead of emotions and made a point of sticking to the facts. Once asked to write an ad for a store that wanted to get rid of rotten gossamer (gauze), he wrote: “We have a lot of rotten gossamer and things we want to get rid of.” The entire stock sold by noon the day the ad was published.
⛓ DIY Internet: My colleague Everett Katigbak made a really cool and uplifting documentary about Cuba’s DIY internet. In the early 2010s, a community of gamers built a network to be able to play with each other. It would become the largest network in the world without an internet connection. The documentary is about how human ingenuity and creativity find a way to thrive even in the most adversarial circumstances.
🚪RIP Dee: You don’t find a lot of 93-year-olds on Twitter. Visa Founder Dee Hock regularly tweeted nuggets of wisdom until he passed away last weekend. His book “One from Many” is one of my favorites and I return to it often. If you’re curious, I dedicated a previous edition of this newsletter to his ideas.
Lateral Thought
“Nothing in nature feels like church or school. There’s no black bird ‘principal’ pecking away at the rest of the flock. There’s no ‘super’ frog telling the others how to croak. There’s no ‘teacher’ tree lining up the saplings and telling them to grow.”
Dee Hock