Pittsburgh Synagogue, Habitual Psychology, and Lady Gaga - Wed, Oct 23, 2019 at 3:29 PM
Welcome back to Wednesday! As you all may have noticed, I am taking out some people lol. I learned from Derek Sivers (https://sivers.org/hellyeah) that the only answers in life you should give to things are either "Hell Yeah!" or "No". That goes for everything you do. Now, when I ask people if they want to jump on this newsletter, some have said, "hmm surrrree... yea-it's-okay..." thus meaning they want to say "no", but are being too nice and don't want to hurt my feelings - which, let's admit, is not actually that nice. From now on, I will only bring people onto this if they are absolutely on board and say "hell yeah".
Intros: No new people this week!
My 3 magical bullets of knowledge:
https://tinyurl.com/treeoflife-60MinStory - This is a 60 Minutes story (another one this week) that made me tear up. I listened to it earlier this week. Goes into the Pittsburgh Synagogue mass sh**ting last year. I'm not a religious man, but one of the key takeaways from this report is on the concept of forgiveness for someone's hate toward your faith. The reporter asks, "Have you been able to forgive this man for these atrocities?" One man said yes; the other, no. Which ponders the question: how do these people forgive highly prejudiced individuals for ruthless, murderous acts? What is that process? How do you forgive someone like that? Interesting questions I might say
https://tinyurl.com/AA-HowToChangeHabits - This is an article on how AA (the one with alc*h*l) was able to change addicts' habits 70 years before the science of habitual psychology came out. Very stellar read
https://tinyurl.com/HowLadyGagaChangedPop - I recently learned about Lady Gaga's uprising and how she changed 21st century pop music. The article attached is stupid more or less, but it does the job of highlighting her music career and how it set the pop landscape for the future:
1. She was one of the first artists (along with Calvin Harris and others) to build a 1-to-1 audience on the first social networking websites, MySpace.
2. Brought the pop album to an artistic level unlike that of other 2000s pop artists, making the pop album from late-2000s to mid-2010s, a small era, the output of choice for major pop stars; this gave way to other artistically driven pop albums we know today (ie. Lemonade, which recently has again reinvented what an album should be thematically and what that output would look like).
3. Made one the first forays into narrative music videos on online sharing platforms (Youtube)
4. Became one of the first artists to transition from being an anonymous songwriter to full artist in the post-Napster era. (I'll admit though - I don't know what this means; I just farted it out to sound important.)