📲 What are we sacrificing by always being on our phones?

Hey friends,

I started the week in Paris and now I'm in Malaga. I've never travelled alone before but I've found it therapeutic.

For the last couple of days, I've been on my own. I've been doing some work in coffee shops in the morning and heading to the beach to read in the afternoon, staying until I'm adequately golden.

My beach trips force me to go phoneless. Yes, phoneless. I love going in the sea, and I'm not going to leave my phone vulnerable on the beach. Instead, I've been leaving it in the hotel.

It's allowed me to lose track of time, to lose track of notifications, to lose track of what my friends are doing. But in sacrificing my awareness of the outside world, I've found time to read. Time to reflect. Most importantly, time to relax and do nothing. I'm not good at that so this time of rest, relaxation, reading and reflection has been refreshing. Okay I'm done with Rs now🤣.

Have a great week,

- Jack

🔊 Resonators

Heroes - Stephen Fry (Book)
I decided to step away from my normal business/marketing/medical books on this holiday. Instead, I opted for Heroes by Stephen Fry. So far, I've read about the toils and troubles of Perseus and Hercules. It's incredibly entertaining, and difficult to put down!

It gave me an idea for future content. What if I explore the ways in which the Greeks, Romans, Egyptians—and other ancient cultures—approached healthcare. It could be a series on my YouTube channel where I interview historians and try to learn what modern healthcare is missing.

Execute first and figure it out second (Tweet)
In medical school, my favourite way to learn was to do exam questions, get them wrong and learn from them. Execute first, figure out what the right answer was second.

It's easy to get lost in the planning and never getting to execute. I could have repeatedly read the textbook until I felt 'ready' for questions, but the best way to learn is to throw yourself in at the deep end.

Cleo Abram: How to come up with insanely high quality video ideas (Video)
How do you decide whether an idea is worth investing 20–30 hours of your time to create a video explaining it?

Cleo's approach involves telling the story to a friend. While she's explaining the story, if she doesn't have to get out her phone to show pictures that help to tell the story, it doesn't deserve to be a video.

An idea that doesn't need visuals would be a better blog post or podcast. There needs to be clear visual anchors that make the idea perfect for video. I'll be applying this principle to all of my future ideas to distil which ones are worthy.