Welcome to end of the world week.

You’ve made it this far, so give yourself a pat on the back. And give your brain some happy juice by solving this lateral thinking exercise:

I absolutely love this one. As usual, you’ll find the answer at the end of this newsletter.

Before our usual programming, I’m going to start introducing a new section called Open Circle.

This is where I’ll shout out job openings, share resumes from promising people, ask for help on behalf of other founders or other similar stuff.

None of these are paid or sponsored. They’re simply resources I think would be valuable to the thousands of founders, marketers and business people reading this newsletter.

Open Circle

A young & aspiring data analyst is looking for an opportunity in a startup or fast growing company. If we didn’t already have a robust BI team at Blindspot, I would hire him.

He did his BA in psychology in London and is currently working on his MS in behavioral sciences.

Ideally looking for a London based role or remote (US timezone is fine).

If you need someone to help you measure and take data-driven decisions, reply to this email and I’ll connect you with him. No referral fees or anything like that.

7 questions that changed my life

I hope I don’t need to explain why questions are so important. The wrong question can lead you down the wrong path.

In case you didn’t read or see The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy (spoilers ahead), there’s a famous scene where people have a chance to ask an all-knowing AI a single question. That question ends up being:

What is the answer to life, universe and everything else?

To which, the AI replies: 42.

Pretty disappointing answer, despite the fact that you can go down a Reddit rabbit hole analyzing the number 42 in detail.

Not getting trolled by an AI will become a pretty important reason to ask good questions in the next decade or so. But until then, here’s a few good questions to ask in various fields of personal and professional growth.

When working for a business:

1. Who’s our internal stakeholder for this project?

   (in larger companies, certain projects only exist because the CEO is heavily involved)

2. How will we tell if this is successful or not?

3. Do we have to make this work at any cost and if the answer is no, what’s the ceiling for the cost?

Bonus: if you want to seem smart in meetings, just ask “can you go back a slide?”.

Just make sure you ask that question when someone is holding a presentation, otherwise keep in mind I am not liable for you landing in a mental asylum.

When starting a business:

1. What’s an unfair advantage I have building this? (experience, distribution, first mover advantage etc.)

2. What’s the biggest assumption your success depends on, and how are you validating it?

3. If you were to hire an A-level player, what would be the one non-negotiable trait they would need to have? 

And an extra 2 for your personal wellbeing:

1. Is this a hill I want to die on? (bit dramatic, I’ll admit, but it’s helped me save a lot of time and friendships)

2. If I were to die today, what would I regret the most? (it’s usually a great idea to start planning doing that thing once you realize what it is)

I realize the last two were a bit dark, but that’s usually a good place to start if you want to shine a light on things.

As always, remember I get happy juice pumped into my brain when someone new subscribes to Lateral Thinking, so feel free to share this with a friend!

Answer:

The campaign team convinced a local janitor named Joe Russo to run against John F. Kennedy in order to confuse the voters with two candidates having the same name, thus splitting the votes.

This strategy was used to increase Kennedy's chances of winning the election.

If that’s not lateral thinking, I don’t know what is. Read the full story here.