Hi everyone!

This week's BrainPint goes out to 915 of you. Extending a warm welcome to all the curious minds who've just joined.

Yesterday was a special day! I launched the pre-order of my very first info product, the Newsletter Operating System. It's such a thrilling feeling to finally sell my own product. Just crossed $1K in sales in under 24 hours, and am so thankful for everyone who has purchased it. Read more below!

This week, I'm sharing about email tips, advice from Harvard's Class of 1963, sustainable competitive advantages, and an array of fun stuff.

Again, thanks for reading BrainPint and sharing about it. Excited to get to 1,000 soon.

With gratitude,
Janel

Sustainable Sources of Competitive Advantage
Morgan Housel shares sources of competitive advantage. There's a lot to unpack in the article, but this is my favorite: The ability to empathize with customers more than your competition. So many people build things from an ivory tower without figuring out who their customers are, and what needs they have. If you're an executive, get down and have conversations on the ground. Understand how people experience your product. Do User Research.

If I Knew Then (Advice From Harvard's Class of 1963)
Advice from life, careers & more from Harvard's Class of 1963 on their 50th class reunion.

Some highlights:

• Do not be content to be average. Mediocrity breeds boredom, poor opportunity, and an unsatisfactory lifestyle. Instead, decide to excel in everything you do, and be distinctive, if not unique, in your approach.
• Embrace humility and learn from your mistakes, but do not let them consume you with the paralysis of indecision or the depression of regret.
• The totality of one’s life is the sum of the many, many choices that one will face and make. Make your choices thoughtfully.

Being Smart Is Not Enough
We often focus on rewarding the best ideas, and forget that for any innovation to be successful, it needs to be promoted and shared widely within an organization. You need both Geniuses & Butterflies (social people who share & teach) in your teams. Don't overindex on a single type of team member.

We Like What We Choose, Not The Other Way Around
If we commit to something, we can learn to love it. "New research confirms that random choices lead to preferences, and then it follows that preferences lead to habits and habits lead us to become the person we somehow decide we were born to be."

Email Tips Collection
We spend so much time on emails. Time to learn how to do email right. Here's a collection of links to articles that will help you:

• Figure out how to write better emails
• Manage your emails and inbox
• Use email as a sales and networking tool.

Wonderful stuff by Josh of For The Interested (which by the way, you should subscribe to)

How To Remember What You Learn
Metacognition is so important in the learning process. This article shows how you can learn better, with practical tips. Make learning time-based, not goal-based. Write summaries of what you've learned. Talk to friends about what you learn.

A Guide To Deep Learning & Neural Networks
Deep learning (a subset of machine learning) powers various innovations like self-driving cars, natural language processing, image recognition and more.

UTM Builder - Marketers or even newsletter writers, this one's for you. Free Google sheet that helps you add UTM parameters to your links, so you can track where traffic is coming from, or send signals to other sites to tell them "Hey! I'm sending you traffic!"

Carbon - Create beautiful images of your source code.

Logo Search - Blazing fast logo search that helps you get svg logos from different brands. You know those presentations where you're pitching to clients and want to find their logos? This helps.

Productivize - Invest in learning the ins and outs of great products, exceptional champions, valuable gems on UI/UX, effective early adopter strategies, leveraging power users, and more. If you're a product person, you'll love it.

Saas Investing Digest - My new weekly newsletter for investors in publicly listed SaaS companies. Pulls the best content from SaaS analysts & writers.

I love investing in SaaS companies, and wanted to get all my sources curated so I created this. 540 subscribers and counting in under a week. Fully automated using Mailbrew (aff)

Sharkle - A Stumble-Upon like website that surfaces awesome (an entirely random) things on the Internet.

Learn Geography While Having Fun - We can't travel much now but that doesn't mean we can't brush up our map skills.

Calligrapher.AI - Type in text and watch as a neural network changes text into realistic handwriting.