Hi <<First Name>>,
Congratulations on a new month! With all of the things that happened in January (virus, Brexit, etc.), let's focus on the future, shall we?
Although I indicated I would be writing every week, it's not always easy to do. So I must admit that I'll sometimes send this newsletter once per two weeks. I hope you'll forgive me ;)
Anyway, this week I have a blog article for you on Pricing and Economic Irrationality, and an article below on Making Friends.
At the end, I'll cover Honey, a cool tool that you can use to save some money when doing online shopping.
Take a look and read on!
We're irrational beings. Perhaps you knew this already, or perhaps this is new info to you.
How can we notice this? Well, just look at pricing! The way in which we price and value items in an economic transaction is often quite irrational.
In this article, I'll discuss a few examples of our irrational pricing, and end with how we may take advantage of our (or other's) irrationality.
→ Read the article here
2. The Challenge of Making Friends
As a child, making friends is easy. You don't really actively pick someone to be your friend, but the universe seems to decide for you. Whether it's your neighbor or someone at school whose company you enjoy, you just 'are' friends.
Later in life, things get more difficult. As a student, you have to put a bit more work in to actually become friends with someone. You have to study together, party together, and talk about life together — on a more structural basis.
Still, friendships from school or university are easily made, and not easily broken.
You spend so much time together, that you have to become friends. Whether you live together with housemates or see each other every day in class; you experience each other at your best and at your worst — if you still accept the other person, then that's a solid friendship.
But once you actually start working, making friends seems to get harder and harder.
For example, anytime you meet new people (in a bar, at a sports club, or at work), you first have to exchange the usual pleasantries. "Where do you work? What do you do in your free time? Where do you come from? Do you have any siblings?"...
It's a bit similar to when you're backpacking. Every day you meet new people, and every day you have to have the same superficial conversations.
In contrast, if I speak to my current friends, we don't always talk about work or who we are. Instead, we may talk about stupid things like the hangover we experienced or the party we're going to — or sometimes deeper topics like the status of our relationships or even the meaning of life.
Sure, these 'stupid things' are also rather superficial, but I think that the conversations we have with friends feel less awkward, and take place on a deeper level.
And ideally, that's the level of intimacy I would want to quickly reach with new friends I make.
But it seems that you really need a minimum number of meetings, conversations about boring topics, and doing things together before you can actually reach that level — and make it so that your friendship feels normal. That you don't have to try your best every time you meet the other person, and that you always have interesting things to talk about.
Unfortunately, I haven't really figured out yet how to make friends without simply seeing them really often. I'm sure you could make a rule out of this:
"Know a person for 2 years and see him or her at least 20 times, and you're officially friends."
That is still quite a lot of effort. In an ideal world, we would not just be up front about our intention to become friends, but could also easily go from being strangers to having a solid friendship. We would say: "Let's be friends, ok?" and once the other person agrees, you can dive into the fun stuff right away.
3. And then some — Honey: Internet Discounts
A while ago I read about PayPal's acquisition of startup Honey. A few things struck me:
1. Honey offers just one simple product, which does not even work as a stand-alone: It's a simple browser extension (!)
2. And PayPal paid a whopping $4 billion for this startup you've probably never heard of.
So what is it? Honey is a Chrome extension that let's you automatically fill in discounts and coupon codes at online stores.
Considering the size of online shopping, it's no wonder that PayPal paid big money for this company.
And after using it myself a couple of times, I do see why it's useful: it can save you some money, particularly when shopping at big international companies like Amazon and Booking.com.
In addition, you don't have to google anymore for "Booking.com discount coupon" and end up on a number of shitty websites that don't actually have them.
While there aren't so many discount coupons for Dutch stores like Bol yet, it's just a matter of time before more of these are integrated.
If you're interested, take a look here. You do have to sign up first, and to be fully transparent, this is in fact a 'refer a friend' link.
Take a look, let me know what you think, and see you next week!
Jochem
P.S.
Feedback? Send it my way.
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