Modern Makers #47 - How to Get More Green Lights
🚦5 learnings from Matthew McConaughey's book 🔌 Notion's API is here
Welcome to issue #47 of Modern Makers
This week in the agenda:👇
🚦 Greenlights - 5 learnings from Matthew McConaughey's first book
🔌 Notion’s API is finally available
🗣️ How to add a chatbot to your Notion pages
🆕 Stacker 2.0 is here
Enjoy.
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Welcome to the new makers who have joined us this week. A week that was undoubtedly marked by the long-awaited launch of Notion’s API.
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📚 Book of the week
Greenlights: Raucous stories and outlaw wisdom from the Academy Award-winning actor
Author: Matthew McConaughey
Release date: 2020
Do we still need to introduce Matthew McConaughey? The Oscar-winning actor for his role in Dallas Buyers Club released his first book Greenlights at the end of last year. Matthew has been keeping a diary for over 35 years and was able to use all this written content to write his book. I also recommend the audio version available on Audible(I could listen to that guy’s voice for hours). Here are 5 points to remember:
📔 How a book can change your life - The book The Greatest Salesman in the World turned Matthew's career and life upside down. This book has several key messages that you have to repeat three times a day for thirty days before moving on to the next one. The first scroll was "I will form good habits and become their slave". While Matthew seemed to be headed for a career as a lawyer, the book triggered a change in him and led him to join a film school instead. To follow his guts so he can become himself.
🌊 Going on a whim - Matthew went on a road trip to Europe for a month on the advice of his agent. Later he went to the Amazon and to Africa because of a dream he had a couple of times. Convinced it was a sign, he decided to leave everything behind him and to travel the world to understand what this dream meant. To see what was the message the universe had for him. It’s also important to let yourself be carried by the present moment. Life offers us these moments when we have to choose between what was planned and what suddenly comes our way. Because we have an initial plan, we want to stick to it. And this can prevent us from taking advantage of a more interesting and rewarding opportunity in the end.
🚦Red lights in our lives will eventually turn green - Life is hard. Shit happens to us. Red lights are painful. They can happen at any time in our lives and can demolish us or the ones we love and care about. But time can change some red lights into green lights. What was perceived at first as bad news or a challenge in our lives will in retrospect turns out to be positive. Only time will tell us which red lights were actually green ones. 2020 was hard for all of us. What we can learn from it as a society and the changes we decide to make can turn it into a green light at some point in the future.
🔄 How to pivot and change career - Matthew was famous for his roles in romantic comedies. Because of that, all the projects and scripts he received were for this kind of movie. Deep inside him, he wanted more serious roles. He took the gamble to refuse all new projects. It took him almost two years to land a project that was fitting with his new aspiration. Matthew was in a privileged position and not everyone can afford to stay two years without getting paid while maintaining a good lifestyle. Still, his decision was bold and risky. And it definitely paid off. Leading the way to roles in iconic movies such as Dallas Buyers Club or Interstellar.
❌ Find out who you are by eliminating who you're not first - Most of us have too many options available to us. We should try to get rid of the excess that is preventing us from being more of ourselves. Knowing who we are is hard. Eliminate who we're not first, and we'll find ourselves where we need to be. If we don't reject anything, it means we stand for nothing. Our identities will be defined by what we choose to reject.
“This is a book about how to catch more yeses in a world of nos and how to recognize when a no might actually be a yes. This is a book about catching greenlights and realizing that the yellows and reds eventually turn green”
“The sooner we become less impressed with our life, our accomplishments, our career, our relationships, the prospects in front of us—the sooner we become less impressed and more involved with these things—the sooner we get better at them. We must be more than just happy to be here.”
Three other content that caught my attention this week:
🎲 The Great Online Game - Newsletter - Not Boring by Packy McCormick - An excellent essay by Packy on becoming a creator and not just a consumer. A game where the gains are unlimited. Where the most important thing is to participate and experiment. Where playing this game can dramatically change the course of your life. “The Great Online Game is free to play, and it starts simply: by realizing that you’re playing a game.”
👨🏼🍳 Eleven Madison Park: Daniel Humm - Podcast - How I Built This - One of my favorite podcasts devoted an episode to Daniel Humm, the chef of the famous Eleven Madison Park restaurant in New York. A chef who had to reinvent himself following the pandemic and who has set himself a new challenge: the opening of a 100% vegan gourmet restaurant on June 10. A first in the world among the 132 restaurants that have three Michelin stars
🧗🏻♂️ The ladders of wealth creation: a step-by-step roadmap to building wealth - Article - Nathan Barry - a 2019 article by the creator of ConvertKit. Nathan details the 4 stages of the wealth creation ladder. In stage 1, where most people are, we are employed and therefore trade our time for money. Stage 4 is where we create products (physical or digital) and each new sale requires no particular investment on our part.
🌎 What’s new in the world of no-code
Notion’s API is finally available! On Thursday, Notion has launched a public BETA version of the API. All accounts (even free ones) can now use the API.
The goal of this public BETA is to test the robustness and reliability of the API. And to collect feedback from the community.
Notion is now available on Zapier, allowing you to connect it with over 3,000 apps. For this launch, this integration with Zapier has:
1 Trigger: New Database Item
2 Actions: Create Database Item & Update Database Item
Notion is also available on Automate.io, another automation tool. From what I have read, Automate.io offers more possibilities than Zapier for the moment in terms of triggers and actions. No doubt Notion will be available on Integromat soon.
Some other tools have already released their native integration with Notion, such as Typeform, Tally and Paperform.
I haven't had the time to try the API yet, but I'm planning to take a few minutes this week to set up some automation. Have you started using the Notion API? Feel free to give me more details by leaving a comment 👇🏻
Notion is also organizing a workshop on Thursday the 27th at 12:00am BST. You can register here.
Joonbot is a no-code tool that allows you to integrate a chatbot on your websites. Joonbot was on Product Hunt this week to launch Chatbot in Notion. This new product makes it easy to add a chatbot to a Notion page. The integration is done via a simple copy & paste. Try it here.
Stacker has launched its 2.0 version. Stacker makes it easy to create applications using Google Sheets or Airtable as a database. In its official press release, Stacker announces that more than 20,000 customers have already used this tool, two years after its creation in 2019.
With this new version, Stacker allows its users to group several apps within a single collaborative workspace. Stacker has also added new data sources: Stripe, Intercom, Salesforce, and SQL databases. Sharing your applications with different people also becomes more intuitive with multiple levels of access, allowing you to control who can view the data within your applications.
Pricing also got more affordable with a Starter plan now offered at $59 per month.
📦 And also…
Calendly gets a new logo and launches its Enterprise offer
A list of 30 formulas to use in Notion
Discover in video how to use Rollups and database relationships in Notion
A great guide that reviews the main no-code tools
A video with 100 tips on how to use Roam Research
Phoneflow allows you to manage the CMS and the e-commerce part of your Webflow sites directly from your phone
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Have a great week and keep learning.
Martin,