#81 - Notes on Playlists, Thinking and Wrexham
Education Coffee is a Newsletter on People, Ideas and Culture.
In each edition of this newsletter, I will share some inspiring web resources that I have curated after hours of research to ensure that you have the best education coffee in your inbox. In upcoming editions, I will focus on sharing insights, notes and realizations that I gather from people, ideas, books, films and podcasts. This month I have taken up a #30DaySubstackChallenge. I want to challenge myself to write a newsletter everyday for the next thirty days. I have really enjoyed writing this newsletter and this is a way for me to build my skill set as a newsletter writer. I will go back to writing a 2xWeekly Newsletter in January 2025.
1. Learning from People
Neelesh Misra is an Indian journalist, author, radio storyteller, scriptwriter and lyricist. He hosted Yaadon Ka IdiotBox on BIG FM 92.7. He is co-founder and editor of Gaon Connection, a rural newspaper. He is working on "The Neelesh Misra Show" on Red FM 93.5 and "Kahaani Express" on Saavn. I am a big fan of his audio stories and have been listening to them for years. You can find him on Youtube and on his website. Here is a glimpse of his work in this video from his channel.
2. Learning from Ideas and Questions
A Mental Model is an internal representation of external reality: that is, a way of representing reality within one's mind. Shane Parrish from the Farnam Street blog has one of the best defintions of a mental model which goes as follows,
A mental model is a compression of how something works. Any idea, belief, or concept can be distilled down. Like a map, mental models reveal key information while ignoring irrelevant details. Models concentrate the world into understandable and useable chunks.
First Principles Thinking is one of the most effective Mental Model that we can apply in our life. Elon Musk (founder of Tesla) is a big proponent of this approach to look at the world and solve messy problems. He breaks it down in this interview with Kevin Rose (founder of Instagram).
3. Learning from Books, Websites and Blogs
I believe most people have gotten used to consuming information on the Internet through the medium of newsletters. Here is one such newsletter I discovered on the topic of Finance and Stock markets on Substack. It is called Investing in India. I like this blog because it demystifies the stock market in a simple and easy to read manner. I enjoy how the author analyses companies and investing concepts in his posts.
The author’s name is Siddharth Bothra and here are some notes on his mission and goals with the newsletter.
I am Siddharth Bothra, a Chartered Accountant passionate about the developments in the finance and business space. I like giving fresh perspectives & exploring new angles when it comes to finance and I like talking about disruptive technologies.
4. Learning from Films, Videos and Shows
In Welcome to Wrexham, Rob McElhenney and Ryan Reynolds learn to run the third oldest professional football club in the world. In 2020, Rob and Ryan team up to purchase the fifth tier Red Dragons in the hope of turning Wrexham AFC into an underdog story the whole world can root for, but the concern is that neither have any experience in football or working with each other. From Hollywood to Wales, from the pitch to the locker room, and the front office to the pub, the docuseries will track Rob and Ryan's crash course in football club ownership and the inextricably connected fates of a team and a town counting on two actors to bring some serious hope and change to a community that could use it. As a sports and documentary buff this was a dream show. I learned how sports can build and sustain community when things are difficult.
I did some research and found out that since 2020 the club has been promoted from the National League to League Two and now to League One in the English Football League structure. It takes one year to move from one divison to the next and you have to be one of the top 3 teams to go to the next stage. This is a rare achievement for a football club to achieve in a short period of 5 years. It shows you how community support and inspired leadership can help build a strong sports culture in any city in the world.
5. Learning from Podcasts and Music
A playlist is a list of recordings to be played on the air by a radio station or a similar list used for organizing a personal digital music collection. I have created several playlists of my favourite music and favourite podcasts on Spotify. I think playlists are a great way to discover new music based on interests, moods and genres. Here is my favourite quote on playlists by Natasha Bedingfield, a British song writer and musician.
I love arranging my music, not in alphabetical order but by mood, creating playlists for when I have energy and want to work out or go-out party mixes and music to chill out to.
I was curious about the history of the idea of a playlist and came across some fascinating statistics and stories.
I read this article by Jeffrey Boakye on the BBC 4 UK Radio website titled ‘A Brief History of the Playlist’. He shared a few important dates in the history of the idea of a playlist in this article as seen below
1918: An apparatus that automatically changed records is patented, leading to one of the first selective jukeboxes being introduced in 1927.
1935: American radio personality Walter Winchell coins the term "disc jockey" to describe radio announcer Martin Block, the first person to gain fame for playing popular recorded music over the air.
1964: The mass production of blank Compact Cassette tapes begins in Hanover, Germany, eventually allowing consumers to record and re-order music.
1971: Motown Chartbusters Volume 3 becomes the first non-soundtrack compilation album to reach number 1 in the UK charts.
1972: The first recorded use of the word ‘playlist’ occurs, used to describe the curations of radio DJs in America.
1982: CDs are first made available to the public and quickly become the most efficient way of storing music.
2001: Apple release the iPod, allowing you to curate and “shuffle” your own library of digital music.
2001: Rhapsody (later known as Napster) becomes the first streaming on-demand subscription service to offer unlimited access to a library of digital music.
2005: Streaming service Pandora Radio uses algorithms and a complex song sorting program to create personalized radio stations based on listener's preferences.
Today we create playlists on streaming services like Spotify, Jio Saavn or Apple Music. Here is a link to my music playlist and my podcast playlist. Have you created a playlist that you are proud of? Do share the same with me on any social media account.
Thank you for reading this edition of #EducationCoffee. I look forward to writing weekly editions of this newsletter this year. I hope to continue to share resources that will add value to your life. You can also review the archive of Education Coffee for free at this link (80 past newsletters). You can subscribe to this newsletter for more such recommendations on people, ideas and culture.
Please do send me your thoughts and resources on any edition of this newsletter through email at abhishekashokshetty@gmail.com, Linkedin or on Twitter. You can find all my work online on my website. If you would like to read pieces in the future please do consider subscribing to this newsletter by clicking the button below. I love taking these discussions forward on those platforms and look forward to hearing your feedback.
Abhishek Shetty