Up and down

Forget the presentation skills this time, I’m not even going to bother tying this one in, today we’re just going to geek about microchips and cocaine a little …

As most of you know, I’m a huge fan-boy of the Acquired podcast. In fact, I’m such a fan-boy that not only do I listen to the back catalog of Acquired episodes, they also have a secondary podcast, “ACQ2,” and I listen to that one, too.

In Acquired, and ACQ2 also, we learn about ARM, a microchip designer in the UK.

ARM was pretty close to nowhere 20 years ago. They had developed a chip technology few could use. There were few devices around that needed it, and most of those devices, like the Apple Newton, lived very short lives.

Now, however, ARM is one of the hottest games in town. If you are reading this email on your phone, there’s about a 100% chance that the device in your hands is, at this very moment, using ARM technology. When you drive your car, you’re using ARM. When you walk into your house, you’re surrounded by dozens of ARM chips.

One of the things I love about the ARM story: They didn’t become popular because they were trying to become popular, they became popular simply because they kept doing what they were doing, and then when the world needed them, they became the belle of the ball.

This reminds me of a phrase my grandma drilled into me when I was a kid: “Be nice to people on your way up, because you’ll bump into them again on your way down, and you’ll want them to return the favor.”

The opposite is equally true. Be nice to people on your way down (which is harder, by the way, because you tend to be angry and resentful), because you are going to bump into them again on your way up, and you’ll want them to return the favor.

As George’s father says in the movie Blow (one of my favorite movies), “Sometimes you’re flush, and sometimes you’re bust. And when you’re up, it’s never as good as it seems, and when you’re down, you never think you’re going to be up again. But life goes on.”


And I know I said there wasn’t going to be a presentation element in this one, but there kind of is. In what should make me a Grand Prize Finalist in the “World’s Biggest Dork” competition, I plugged a presentation tip from my website into Google’s NotebookLM, and uploaded the result into Spotify, laughing all the way:

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