Athletes & Innovation: Flopping, Hot Dogs, and Granny Shots

From 1890 to 1967 the sport of high jumping saw little innovation. Participants went over the bar in a handful of ways, with the intent to jump and land on their feet.

Jumpers preferred landing on their feet because it prevented them from getting hurt. And while there were many small changes in high jumping techniques over those 77 years, nothing compared to what happened in the summer of 1968.

At the Summer Games in Mexico City, a young college athlete named Dick Fosbury did something unfathomable. He jumped over the bar backwards.

This article highlights innovations like the Fosbury Flop, and the lessons in innovation that we can apply to our own lives.

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A Write of Passage Review

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Reflections from a 5 week online writing course

You probably already write. You may have a journal, an old blog, or a semi-active Twitter account. But you’ve always wanted to do more. You follow authors and writers that inspire you. You want to publish consistently. You want to write more compelling pieces. You want to have a regular newsletter that people actively engage with. But you never really knew how - or where - to start.

If this resonates with you, you’re not alone. Lev Naginsky and I shared a similar experience. Here we share the most impactful principles and tools we learned from our time in an online writing course, as well as the tangible benefits we’ve seen since the course ended.

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My (Failed) Attempt at the 4-Hour Workweek

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The year was 2012. Tim Ferriss’ best-selling book, The 4-Hour Workweek, had peaked on the NYT bestseller list for 5 years running. Everyone in my immediate social network and on Twitter was raving about it – this was the path to building a six figure plus ‘passive’ income… focused on outsourcing most, if not all, of the operations of a company to third parties around the world for dirt cheap prices.

The goal? Work from anywhere, anytime, with nothing more than a laptop and internet connection to gain freedom from the 9-5. How? By systematizing your company – having other people complete all the minutiae of the day-to-day operations – you are free to pursue other projects of your choosing. Or not, and just live on a beach in Mexico forever while your machine made money for you.

I, like many others, was shocked that this could even be a possibility let alone reality.

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The fastest way to learn a new language? Act like a child.

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I was two months into my new job in Rio de Janeiro when I asked my co-worker to hand me a hard penis.

His gaze shifted towards me and his eyes paused, narrowed, and a cheeky grin slowly came across his face. Within ten seconds the normally stoic Jose was on the floor, doubled over laughing. “Oh shit,” I thought, “What did I just say?”

It wasn’t the first time I’d made a mistake when learning Portuguese and it wouldn’t be the last. Confusing ‘pão duro’ for ‘pau duro’ (the squiggly line, the tilde, above the ‘a’) proved to be the fatal error – instead of asking for bread, like I had intended, I had asked Jose for something very different.

The nasal tone of the tilde is a critical distinction among many similarly sounding words in Brazilian Portuguese. But no matter how many times I had tried learning the language with audio tapes, YouTube videos, or through immersion, the lesson had never really sunk in until that one fatal error I made with Jose.

I now pay very close attention to the tilde when speaking Portuguese.

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The definitive answer when someone asks 'What do you do?'

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This is a curious question.

When asked by an Uber driver I often respond with “I am in the water industry” - and quickly follow-up by asking ‘And you? Is this your 9-5?” That’s often enough to keep them talking and take the focus off of me.

I’ve never been particularly good at answering this question. I don’t know why.

In part I feel like most people that ask aren’t genuinely interested in hearing the answer. At best, it’s meant to be a conversation starter and a way to build common ground so they can find a way to make a potentially awkward car ride more enjoyable. At worst it’s a way to discover how much money you make, your political or religious affiliations, your sexuality, ethnicity, or something more secret.

And then, typically, talk about themselves.

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