Wednesday Wisdom (#9)
The Cost of Consistency, Population Density, Amazon's 6-Pager, Kevin Kelly's Life Advice, Visualize Value
Hey everybody đ,
Greetings from Chicago! I hope youâre doing well and making the best of life in quarantine. Personally, Iâm very much due for a haircut!
I published a new blog post this week called The Cost of Consistency. I was proud to co-author this with my Write of Passage classmate, Adam Tank. We reflected on what we learned in a five-week online writing course.
If you missed last weekâs newsletter, you can check it out here. I wrote about General Mattisâ Books of Wisdom, Costcoâs Kirkland Signature Brand, How to Make Better Content.
What I Learned This Week
Population Density
The maps of the United States below were created by Alasdair Rae, professor of Urban Studies and Planning at The University of Sheffield.
Traditional measurements of population density treat cities and rural areas the same way, simply dividing the number of people by the land area of a country. To accurately judge how people experience population density in their daily lives, Rae looked at Europeâs population count per each 1 km².
The birdâs eye view showed a high population density from north-west England to Milan, the area so-called âblue bananaâ which is home to more than 110 million people.
Spain is a good example of why traditional population density figures donât work. It has a population density of 93 people/km², giving the impression of a sparsely populated country. However, only 13% of Spainâs 505,000 1 km squares are populated, which means that actual âlived densityâ is 737 people/km².
Rae has written several articles about population density, specifically this one highlighting Europeâs most densely populated single square kilometers. The most densely populated area in Europe is a single square kilometer in Barcelona, with more than 53,000 people.
Interactive map: World Population Density



Amazonâs 6-Page Memo

Amazon is known to not have any slide presentations in meetings. Brad Porter describes the beauty of Amazonâs 6-Pager.
âWe have study hall at the beginning of our meetings.â - Jeff Bezos
Staff meetings at Amazon begin with 30 minutes of silent reading.
The preparation required to write a good 6-page memo does two things:
It requires the team to deeply understand their space, gather their data, understand their operating tenants, and be able to communicate them clearly.
A great document enables senior executives to internalize a whole new space they may not be familiar with in 30 minutes of reading.
âOutsiders sometimes look at Amazon and wonder how Amazon can possibly focus on so many different businesses at once. The answer is that Amazon has fundamentally innovated in how to scale the process of bringing groups of people deeply up to speed in new spaces and making critical decisions based on that insight quickly.â
68 Bits of Unsolicited Advice
Iâm currently reading Kevin Kellyâs book, The Inevitable which I will write about in next weekâs newsletter.

Kelly, the founding executive editor of WIRED Magazine recently turned 68 and offered some lessons on life. Here are a few that stood out to me:
âAlways demand a deadline. A deadline weeds out the extraneous and the ordinary. It prevents you from trying to make it perfect, so you have to make it different. Different is better.â
âTreating a person to a meal never fails, and is so easy to do. Itâs powerful with old friends and a great way to make new friends.â
âBeing able to listen well is a superpower. While listening to someone you love keep asking them âIs there more?â, until there is no more.â
âHow to apologize: Quickly, specifically, sincerely.â
âTo make something good, just do it. To make something great, just re-do it, re-do it, re-do it. The secret to making fine things is in remaking them.â
âExperience is overrated. When hiring, hire for aptitude, train for skills. Most really amazing or great things are done by people doing them for the first time.â
I highly recommend reading the other 62. Pure wisdom.
Visualize Value

I continue to be amazed at the internet and what talented people are doing on it.
Jack Butcher turned an idea from a tweet into a live, revenue-generating product in 11 hours.
Butcher worked in corporate advertising for years with clients like Mercedes-Benz, Michelin, Tiffany & Co., and others. He then took two years to build Visualize Value to help people build out content ecosystems that help them start/scale businesses remotely.
What people see on the surface seems to happen instantly, but it takes years of work behind the scenes. It reminds me of James Clearâs idea about The Plateau of Latent Potential:
âPeople will call it an overnight success. The outside world only sees the most dramatic event rather than all that preceded it. But you know that itâs the work you did long agoâwhen it seemed that you werenât making any progressâthat makes the jump today possible. Change can take yearsâbefore it happens all at once.â
Photos of the Week
I was going through my Google Photos library and saw that I was traveling through Japan with my family this time four years ago.
For me, travel is like a good meal for the soul. I canât wait to travel again and I certainly canât wait to come back to Japan again one day.




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Thatâs all for this week. Feel free to forward this to anyone you like. If you have any feedback, advice, or thoughts on what I shared, email me at lev.naginsky@gmail.com or tweet me at @levnaginsky
Until next week,
Lev