Greetings, comrades!
Welcome to another edition of Digestable, the short, weekly email where we follow curiosity and wrestle with great questions. This edition was emailed to subscribers on November 7th, 2021.
Here’s what’s up:
Rover – The Dog Walking Network: My son Judah has earned thou$and$ walking dogs for owners that found him via this app.Rover.com is a website/app that connects dog owners with dog walkers in their area. It’s Uber for dog owners. Judah loves running outside and has enjoyed earning cash while going for his runs. Similar to Uber, dog owners leave reviews of the dog walkers so that they can build a reputation as a reliable and trustworthy dog walker. If you are interested in helping your kids earn $$ via Rover, note that you need to be 18+ to create a dog-walker profile. Here’s the workaround: my wife Amanda created a profile under her name and would then introduce the dog-owner to Judah. If the dog-owner was comfortable having Judah walk the dogs then Amanda would accept the job on Judah’s behalf.
Backcountry Mountaineering Camp with Galena Mountain Guides: Check out this beautiful video produced by Matt Blacklock that showcases the magic of Galena’s backcountry mountaineering camp. There’s still room in Pierre’s camps in 2022 if you need more adventure in your life. Watch the video closely and you’ll see a number of familiar faces from the Frontier Lodge community.
Gall’s Law: John Gall was a pediatrician but a systems theorist on the side. He is best known for a statement that is now known as Gall’s Law: “A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. The inverse proposition also appears to be true: a complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be made to work. You have to start over, beginning with a simple system.” If you are curious about how to apply this law to create a product, business, or system, Josh Kaufman elaborates further on Personal MBA. Credit to Naval Ravikant for introducing me to Gall’s Law.
Quotes I’m Pondering: Pair this quote with Gall’s Law: “A better system will not automatically ensure a better life. In fact, the opposite is true: only by creating a better life can a better system be developed.” – Václav Havel, banned playwright, communist dissident, first democratically elected president of the Czech Republic, recipient of the Order of Canada, co-founder of the Committee for the Defense of the Unjustly Prosecuted, public defender of the Czech psychedelic rock band The Plastic People of the Universe . . . to list just a small portion of his bio!
Another quote from Havel: “We never decided to become dissidents. We have been transformed into them, without quite knowing how, sometimes we have ended up in prison without precisely knowing how. We simply went ahead and did certain things that we felt we ought to do, and that seemed to us decent to do, nothing more nor less.”
Where did your curiosity lead you this week? I’d love to hear from you!
Thanks again for following along. I’m having a riot putting these together, so if you are enjoying this newsletter I’d love it if you shared it with a friend or two and we can keep the great conversations growing.
Yours truly,
Jeff
P.S. Watch my son Salem and his friends get pranked in this video!
Jeff Sutherland 