Capitalogix

The Shapes of Stories

Seemingly complex things are often simpler when understood.

This applies to many things.

For example, great writing is diverse and nuanced ... but its underlying structure isn't.

Kurt Vonnegut wrote a number of "Classics", including Cat's Cradle, Slaughterhouse-Five, and The Sirens of Titan.

For all his great writing, and all the complexities, he simplified stories into a few basic story shapes.

Here is a graphic that explains the concept.

Here is a 17-minute video of Vonnegut discussing his theory of the Shape of Stories.  You can get the basic concepts in the first 7 minutes ... but he is witty and the whole video is worth watching. 

 

 

You can explore a bit more elaborate version of his "Shapes of Stories" from his rejected Master's thesis from the University of Chicago.

Vonnegut's idea was fulfilled not too long ago--a computer was used to identify story shapes. Researchers extracted the emotional trajectories of 1,327 stories and discovered that there are six core emotional arcs:

• Rags to riches (a rise)
• Tragedy (a fall)
• Man in a hole (fall, then a rise)
• Icarus (rise, then a fall)
• Cinderella (rise, then a fall, then a rise)
• Oedipus (fall, then a rise, then a fall)

 For more on writing from Kurt Vonnegut:

• How To Write With Style
• Eight Rules For Writing Fiction

 

It's Not About The Nail...

Apparently, a lot of wisdom can be learned from nails. I've shared the story about the Nail in the Fence in the past. 

This week a funny video called "It's Not About The Nail" recycled through my inbox again. 

Have you seen it yet? It has had 20+ million views across various social media and syndication sites.  So, you've likely run across it even if you haven't watched it.

 

 

via Jason Headley

The short version is that a woman tries to communicate with her significant other about her headache, which he quickly identifies as (literally) a nail in her forehead, with a seemingly obvious solution: Let’s get rid of that nail. She insists that that is absolutely NOT the problem, and if he would just listen to her, that would be clear to him. She explains, clarifies, objects, etc. Eventually, he does see the light ... and gives her not the solution he found so (literally) painfully obvious, but the solution she asked for.

 

"Don't try to fix it. I just need you to listen." It's obvious.

 

Good for a laugh, but, also good as a reminder. Simply put, a problem that may seem apparent to you may not be so obvious to the person with a problem ... and that might be the real problem.

Whether your takeaway is that we often miss the answer right in front of our face, or that we have to be aware of what other people need, or that you can't help people that don't want to be helped ... you're right. 

 

Here Are Some Links For Your Weekly Reading - June 9th, 2019

Tuesday was the 30th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square Protests. Here's a video of Chinese college students being asked about the event. It is a pretty interesting look at censorship and fear of government consequences for lack of free speech. 

Here are some of the posts that caught my eye recently. Hope you find something interesting.

 

Lighter Links:

• China's Big AI Advantage: Humans. (News)
• The Natural Genius of Ants is Helping Us Build Better Algorithms. (Wired)
• 5 Myths about Strategy. (HBR)
• Percentage of Americans Who Never Traveled beyond the State Where They Were Born? A Surprise? (Forbes)
• At Disneyland's New Star Wars' Attraction – Brace Yourself for $200 Lightsabers, $42 Cocktails and 4 A.M. Lines. (MarketWatch)

 

Trading Links:

• Billionaire Mike Bloomberg Tells Harvard Graduates that Money Isn't Important. (TheLadders)
• The Radical Plan to Change How Harvard Teaches Economics. (Vox)
• Apple Patents the Foldable iPhone Display; Here's What It Looks Like. (ValueWalk)
• Quantum Computing Will Change the Digital World beyond Recognition. (Metro)
• Atlanta Fed President Bostic Does Not See a Rate Cut this Year like the Market is Telegraphing. (CNBC)

 

Social Media Is Changing Everything: A Reprisal

I came across a post from 2009 about social media. 10 years later, with the knowledge of how much data we use today, it's quite a read.

Here it is in its full glory. 

Social Media Is Changing Everything: October 18th, 2009

My son won't use e-mail the way I did. So how will people communicate and collaborate in the next wave of communications?

Here is a peek into the difference that is taking hold.  I was looking at recent phone use.  The numbers you are about to see are from the first 20 days of our current billing cycle.

• • My wife, Jennifer, has used 21 text messages and 38 MB of data.
  • I have used 120 text messages and 29 MB of data.
  • My son, at college, used 420 text messages, and is on a WiFi campus so doesn't use 3G data.
  • My son, in high school, used 5,798 text messages and 472 MB of data.

How can that be?  That level of emotional sluttiness makes porn seem downright wholesome. 

But, of course, that isn't how he sees it.  He is holding many conversations at once.  Some are social; some are about the logistics of who, what, when, where and why ... some are even about homework.  Yet, most don't use full sentences, let alone paragraphs.  There is near instant gratification.  And, the next generation of business people will consider this normal.

Is social media a fad? Or is it the biggest shift since the Industrial Revolution?

Welcome to the World of Socialnomics.  This video has a bunch of interesting statistics ... and is fun to watch. 

 

 

Other Resources:

• • Here is a link to a short-version of this video.
  • This reminds me of the "Shift Happens!" video.
  • Worth Looking At ... Here are the Stats.

Social Media Is Changing Everything: April 20th, 2019 

Looking at the stats from 2009 is pretty funny

• My son was using 472 MB of data a month
• Hulu had grown from to 373 million total streams in April 2009
• Only 25% of Americans in the past month said they watched a short video on their phone

For some context, I looked up the comparative numbers for 2018. 

• I picked a random month in 2018 ... in August my son used 10.85 GB of data. He doesn't text as often - but has sent/received 282,000 snapchats since downloading it 5 years ago.
• Hulu has over 20 million subscribers who streamed more than 26 million hours a day in 2018 
• People spend over five hours a day on their smartphones on average. 70% of web traffic happens on a mobile device, and more than 50% of videos are watched on mobile (93% of twitter videos). 

Here's what happens every minute of every day on the internet

via Lori Lewis and Chadd Callahan

 

A little different than 2009 ...

Here Are Some Links For Your Weekly Reading - March 24th, 2019

via KDNuggets

 

Here are some of the posts that caught my eye recently. Hope you find something interesting.

Lighter Links:

• Jeff Bezos Predictions from 20 Years Ago that Were Right on the Money. (BusinessInsider)
• Imagining the Smart Cities of 2050. (SingularityHub)
• Secrets of the FBI's Ten Most Wanted List. (CNN)
• How Designers Engineer Luck into Video Games. (Nautilus)
• CRISPR Gene Editing: Why We Need Slow Science. (The Conversation)

 

Trading Links:

• Why Companies like Lyft and Uber are Going Public without Having Profits. (Re/code)
• Are Animal Spirits Making a Comeback? (Bloomberg)
• This is What the Average American Spends in a Day. (Fool)
• The AI-Art Gold Rush is Here. (The Atlantic)
• Who Wants to See a Movie about High-Frequency Trading? High-Frequency Traders. (Wall Street Journal)

 

 

Mr. Kim Jong Un, Give Up Those Nukes!

Donald Trump and Kim Jong Un met last week in Singapore. At the meeting, Donald shared a four-minute movie trailer called "A Story of Opportunity for North Korea"

I was a little surprised by the video clip that Trump brought with him.  I don't normally think about diplomacy and videos.  But, it is a new world.

It depicts a brighter future for North Korea in the event of a nuclear deal.  It also presents a stark choice to Kim ... trade in your nuclear weapons for a peace deal with the U.S., or don't and you'll be decimated. 

Was it me, or does the video seem strangely reminiscent of a pitch you might receive for a real estate deal or a timeshare? 

It's worth a watch. 

 

Was the intended audience Kim Jong Un, American voters, or the World?

Did it remind you of  Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev?

It will be interesting to see the results of the movie ... and this meeting. 

What did you think?

Here Are Some Links For Your Weekly Reading - March 11th, 2018

 

Here are some of the posts that caught my eye recently. Hope you find something interesting.

Lighter Links:

• Google Teaches AI to Fool Humans So It Can Learn from Our Mistakes. (TheNextWeb)
• Bill Gates and Warren Buffett Explain a Simple Way to Build an Inner Circle that Helps You Be Great. (Inc)
• The Moon is Getting a Reliable 4G Connection before Certain Parts of the UK. (Alphr)
• Ce*sored! China Bans Letter N (Briefly) from Internet as Xi Jinping Extends Grip on Power. (TheGuardian)
• Here's the One Thing that Would Make Oprah Run for President. (Huffington Post)

 

Trading Links:

• Does Anne Hathaway News Drive Berkshire Hathaway's Stock? (The Atlantic)
• Billionaires Warren Buffett and Ray Dalio Agree on What to Do in a Volatile Market. (USAToday)
• Who is a Better Insider Trader, Gary Cohn, Carl Icahn, or the Folks at the SEC? (ComplianceX)
• Opening a Bank is a Genius Move for Amazon. (TheNextWeb)
• S&P Global Buys Startup in Artificial-Intelligence Push. (Wall Street Journal)

Here Are Some Links For Your Weekly Reading - December 17th, 2017

I just saw the new Star Wars with my family.

It's a bit crazy to think about what percentage of my life occurred since the original came out

I can still remember watching the first one. 

 

BTW, I'm not 60 yet ... but, I am pushing double nickels.

Here are some of the posts that caught my eye recently. Hope you find something interesting.

Lighter Links:

• LeBron James: Keeping a Billion-dollar Body in Shape. (CNN)
• Success Strategies from a Self-made Billionaire. (TonyRobbins)
• When Robots Dream: AI Systems May Learn Better and Faster If They Can Sleep'. (Siliconangle)
• Machine Ethics and Artificial Moral Agents. (KDNuggets)
• The CIA is Telling Us How the Agency Uses Americans' Data. (Mashable)

Trading Links:

• FCC Revokes the Net Neutrality Rules. (NordVPN)
• Janet Yellen Calls Bitcoin 'Highly Speculative'. (CNN)
• Driverless Cars Will Change Auto Insurance. Here's How Insurers Can Adapt. (HBR)
• This Investor Says Millennials are 'Starting to Buy Homes in a Big Way'. (CNBC)
• Google Leads in the Race to Dominate Artificial Intelligence. (Economist)

 

Rich People Spend Their Time Differently: An Income Distribution in Americans' Pastimes

When it comes to American pastimes, many people focus on the big 3 sports: Football, Basketball, and Baseball. Nevertheless, there are a lot of different ways people spend their time.  It is interesting to see what they watch - and what they actually play. 

Nevertheless, there are a lot of different ways people spend their time.  It is interesting to see what they watch - and what they actually play. 

There is also a big difference based on income distribution.   Here is an infographic.

 

via VisualCapitalist

Apparently, rich people like golfing,  yoga and racquet sports ... while poorer people disproportionately liked relaxing, writing for personal interest, and having hobbies.

It is also kind of interesting to see when people tend to do certain activities.   Here is a chart showing the peak time for various sports and activities.

via Henrik Lindberg

You could build a business around data like that.

Interesting?

Here Are Some Links For Your Weekly Reading - April 8th, 2017

 

Here are some of the posts that caught my eye. Hope you find something interesting. 

 

Lighter Links:

• How AI and Blockchain Will Change Business Organization. (HuffPost)
• Pluto Has Been Officially Reclassified as a Planet!. (Futurism)
• The Philosophy of the Matrix: from Plato and Descartes, to Eastern Philosophy. (OpenCulture)
• Tony Romo to Replace Phil Simms in Broadcast Booth. (NFL)
• The 13 Best April Fools’ Day Pranks of 2017. (Slate)

Trading Links:

• How Hackers Hijacked a Bank’s Entire Online Operation. (Wired)
• America’s System of Checks and Balances Seems to Be Working. (Economist)
• How Much People in the Trump Administration are Worth. (NYTimes)
• Santoli: Here's Why BlackRock is Throwing in the Towel on Human Stock Picking. (CNBC)
• Here’s 48 Hedge Fund Terms Every Investor Should Know. (VisualCapitalist)