About

Welcome to 📙 The Little Almanack! — A weekly newsletter from the creator of Picking Nuggets.

What’s all About 🤔

You can think of this Newsletter as the “Anti-Newsletter” — as it only has timeless information, which is the opposite of news.

Why only Timeless 🤔

Time is the ultimate stressor of information. And the “Lindy Effect” states that the longer an idea has been relevant, the longer it will still be relevant — for instance, if an idea (or anything that is not biological) has been relevant for 20 years, you can expect that it will still be relevant for another 20 years on average.

Therefore timeless ideas are the most robust and useful.

“Don’t read newspapers. Don’t follow the news in any way or form.”

- Nassim Taleb (source)

On top of that, I source the information from only influential Doers.

Why only from Doers 🤔

It’s very easy to take credit from the Thinking. The Doing is more concrete. Usually when you dig a little deeper you find that the people that really “did it” were also the people that really worked through the hard intellectual problems as well… The Doers are the major Thinkers.

- Steve Jobs (source)

The Doers are in the fastest learning curve possible.

- Naval Ravikant (source)

“To become a philosopher king, start with being a king, not being a philosopher.”

“The problem of knowledge is that there are many more books on birds written by ornithologists than books on birds written by birds…”

- Nassim Nicholas Taleb (from his 5-book bundle Incerto)

Doers — defined by their insatiable curiosity, emotional fortitude and highest integrity (e.g./ Naval Ravikant, Nassim Taleb, Charlie Munger, Peter Thiel…) — who took the time to share timeless principles (through books / interviews) on:

• How to get Better (Character) → Sent every first Week.

• How to get Richer (Principles of Wealth Creation) → Sent every second Week.

• How to improve our Judgment (General-Worldly Wisdom) → Sent every third and last Week.

Some of them are…

How it works 🤔

Every Friday I send you a 5-min nugget — a timeless idea from an influential Doer (in their own words).

Plus, I craft a visual to make the nugget more clear and memorable! And afterwards, I deliver a personal reflection.

💥 I even did a visual to summarize all this!

“It’s kind of fun to sit there and outthink people who are way smarter than you are because you’ve trained yourself to be more objective and more multidisciplinary. Furthermore, there is a lot of money in it, as I can testify from my own personal experience.”

- Charlie Munger (from his book Poor Charlie’s Almanack)

As an extra, I share the most valuable content I found over the week (tweets, articles, videos…).

About this Publication’s Writer 🤓 📠 (you can definitely ignore this 🙏🏻 )

👋 Hi, I’m Julio. I’m 28 (born in 1996) and I live in Barcelona, Spain.

I love

I love picking insights. I get a high when I discover an idea that either I didn’t know before, or contradicts an idea that I currently hold—because the gap between my worldview and the actual world gets narrower!

I love taking long walks while I listen to my favorite Podcasts, which then makes me to obsessively type on my Google Keep (a note-taking app) anything that I find interesting.

I love reading on my Kindle with a microwaved yet tasty coffee right after waking up, usually for 30 mins - 1 hour. But lately I’ve been switching to physical books — It feels nicer, there are no distractions and I can give my eyes a break from the screen.

I love gray clouds with noisy rain—which is funny since I live in Spain. Maybe I should move to the UK?

I love the philosophy of life being a game: in the same way that hardships and challenges make a game attractive and fun, so it’s in life that it makes it more beautiful and meaningful—not talking here about basic needs or safety problems, since I haven’t experienced those types of issues luckily.

Now some stuff I hate because why not

I hate driving—don’t know why I got a driving license (probably dumb mimetic thinking).

I’m scared as f**k of planes—and YouTube knows this far too well as it feeds me with the worst plane crashes on my homepage, which then makes me click to solve the negative tension built on the title and thumbnail of the video. But I still fly anyway.

I hate that one day I’m gonna die, but I accept it and it actually makes me more appreciative of life.

More about me, again.

I’m a native Spanish speaker, and my english used to suck probably until I was 20 years old. The english level at my high-school was already pretty low (Spanish people are well-known for their bad english—barely able to have a quick weather talk) and I was one of the worst in my classroom. But after finishing high-school, in the break summer before university, I realized—or rather, became conscious—I was wasting my time binging on Netflix, so to feel better about myself I decided to only watch series and movies in English. At first it was hard, but after 2 years I could understand almost everything. As a side-note, it also helped that I lived in Barcelona where English is the official nightlife language, given the sheer amount of party-tourists in the city—Barcelona is kind of Europe’s party capital.

It’s been 10 years (as of 2024) since I made that decision and I have never seen any series or movies in my native language ever since. Although to be fair, for the last 3 years I haven’t watched any series or movies in general—except for the typical date plan every now and then—I substituted it with YouTube videos and Spotify podcasts.

I’m grateful I made that decision and sticked to it, because that led me to discover (and understand) interviews of great practitioner-thinkers such as Charlie Munger, Nassim Taleb, Mohnish Pabrai and Naval Ravikant—my role models for the last 2 years.

Sports?

I played tennis most of my life—from my first childhood memories until I was 18. Then I practiced Brazilian Jiu Jitsu for about 7 years. And now I enjoy running (not in treadmills though — makes me feel like a hamster) and lifting weights (I do it only with a barbell — to keep it simple, and only the few exercises that makes up the “20/80 of lifting weights”: Deadlifts, Military Shoulder Press, and Biceps Curl).

Hoping my Newsletter editions will contribute to a portion of your learning and growing, but most importantly that you have fun reading them :)

Until Friday!

Julio