Is there one link, story, picture or thought that you saw online this week that you think somebody you know must see?

My friends: Alistair Croll (Solve for Interesting, Tilt the Windmill, Interesting Bits, HBS, chair of Strata, Startupfest, FWD50, and Scaletechconf; author of Lean Analytics and some other books), Hugh McGuire (Rebus Foundation, PressBooks, LibriVox) and I decided that every week the three of us are going to share one link for one another (for a total of six links) that each individual feels the other person “must see.”

Check out these six links that we’re recommending to one another: 

• Resilience and the Stockdale Paradox – SK Ventures. “Paul Kedrosky is one of the most observant investors I’ve met. He takes a long view of societal trends, and they inform his investment patterns. Here, he looks at some macroscopic trends: The retreat of globalism and the Balkanization of our society, and a desire for resilience now that the brittleness of our underlying systems has been laid bare. ‘… all of these ideas we’ve discussed here—energy, friction, relocations, financial mobility, and health, etc.—are linked. We think they are part of a much bigger meta-theme of resilience, of society finding new ways to adapt and even thrive in a more volatile world. The result will be a stronger society, one less easily buffeted by change, because those changes are an inevitability.’ It’s a good, if sobering, read.” (Alistair for Hugh).
• Decent Security. “Everyone’s going to get hacked. If that was true before, it’s even more so now, since we’re moving our money and assets into the digital realm and spending a third of our working lives online. But there are basic steps people can take to be less vulnerable, and this site (by an amazing security writer who keeps their identity online pseudonymous) is a clearly written resource free of jargon. Share it with everyone who doesn’t have a password manager (and read it yourself!).” (Alistair for Mitch).
• The Peking Battles Cape Horn by Irving Johnson – Archive.org. “Incredible footage filmed in 1929 of a voyage around Cape Horn of one of the last tall sailing ships, filmed by crew member, Irving Johnson, and narrated by him in 1980.” (Hugh for Alistair).
• Seven Day Forecast – Rick Mercer Report – YouTube. “It’s been relatively mild here in Montreal, but I’ve got a colleague in Edmonton where it’s been -30c for the past week. He passed along this video about the perfect cold winter 7-day weather report: -30s all week, but +1 on day 7.” (Hugh for Mitch). 
• It’s Time To Embrace Slow Productivity – The New Yorker. “Any talk of ‘productivity’ and ‘hacks’ for time or work optimization usually falls on deaf ears with me. I don’t want any part of it. I consider myself an adult, and I have certain strengths and weaknesses when it comes to my work. Work shaming myself won’t make it any better. Still, when Cal Newport talks, I listen (and read). Can you be productive and slow? I think you can… and here’s his argument about it. ‘The central goal of Slow Productivity is to keep an individual worker’s volume at a sustainable level. A natural fear is that by reducing the amount of work each employee tackles at any given time, it might reduce the total amount of work an organization is able to complete, making it less competitive. This fear is unfounded. As argued, when an individual’s work volume increases, so does the accompanying overhead and stress, reducing both the time remaining to actually execute the tasks and the quality of the results. If you instead enable the individual to work more sequentially, focussing on a small number of things at a time, waiting until she is done before bringing on new obligations, the rate at which she completes tasks might actually increase.’ Amen.” (Mitch for Alistair).
• The Great Offline – Real Life Magazine. “Is going offline the same as experiencing the wilderness, in today’s world? ‘As concepts, ‘wilderness’ and ‘the offline’ are deeply enmeshed. Both offer mythologies of ahistoricity and unaccountability, an escape clause from the dilemmas of a globalized world. They cloak themselves in the language of embodiment (the wind in your hair, the sand under your feet), while offering up the fantasy of moving through the world without a digital or ecological footprint, as a little wisp of pure soul. Together — in setting up a binaristic opposition between the corrupted, connected, digital self on the one hand, and the pure, wild, disconnected self on the other — they pose major obstacles to thinking through the complexity of human-technological-ecological relations.’ Here’s a long and beautiful piece all about what it truly means to take a break and get away from the screens and connectivity…” (Mitch for Hugh).

Feel free to share these links and add your picks on Twitter, Facebook, in the comments below or wherever you play.

Are you interested in what’s next? How to decode the future? I publish between 2-3 times per week and then the Six Pixels of Separation Podcast comes out every Sunday. Feel free to subscribe