Happy Monday Amigos,

I hope you had a fantastic weekend – whatever it held for you – and woke up refreshed and ready for a big week! For whatever reason, I’m really jazzed about this week’s Mailbag and think you will be too after reading. Grab a coffee and let’s get rolling…

• Who is Joe Murphy? Why is he living on the streets of Kenora, ON? If you’re a hockey fan, you’d recognize Joe Murphy as the #1 overall pick in the 1986 NHL Entry Draft. Stanley Cup Winner with the Oilers in 1990 alongside some of the all-time greats. 532 career points over an 15-year NHL career. Something changed after his Stanley Cup winning season in 1991… Tune into Rick Westhead’s quest alongside Trevor Kidd to find Joe Murphy and learn his story in a TSN original “Finding Murph“. Sports fan or not, this is one to tune in. I think anyone and everyone will take something from this feature.
• A friendly reminder to us all to support our local bookstores in a piece called “Good Things Happen in Bookstores“. “There was the time I was in a Barnes and Noble in Portland and a man buying some manga books seemed to be a couple dollars short. I fished some money out of my pocket and paid the difference. He started to cry. “I’ve just recovered from cancer,” he told me. “I was buying these books tonight to restart my normal life. I’m supposed to begin looking for a job tomorrow.” It was an experience far more gratifying to me than the first time I saw my own name up on a bookstore marquee for a signing.” – Ryan Holiday. Thanks for the reminder, Ryan.
• Are you familiar with the term “minimum desirable product“? If you’re an entrepreneur, thinking about becoming one, or looking at launching a new product/service at work, I would HIGHLY recommend understanding this concept. Take it from my own hard lessons learned as an entrepreneur. In all seriousness, grasping your MDP before launching full-scale or investing a significant amount of capital could be the best thing you ever do for your business. Thanks for the great perspective, Andrew Chen.
• Do you have an Alexa in your home? Google Home? Something of the sort… This is an incredibly interesting and thought provoking read by Josh Elman about how technology has fundamentally changed our homes and will continue to do so. Its just a matter of which products and services become as much a part of our home as the nuts and bolts that hold its structure in place versus ones that stay in gadget territory. It’s called “Thinking About Home IT Budgets” and is well worth the read.
• Parts Unknown – Anthony Bourdain’s brave quest to explore worldly cuisines of all shapes, sizes and levels of sophistication (available on Netflix). I’ve been enjoying watching this show while cooking my own exciting dishes thanks to the invention of meal-kits. So far, my favorite episodes are his trip to Colombia and Quebec. What are yours?

Song(s) of the Week: It’s Five Cover Friday on a Monday. Why? Because these versions are just that damn good.

• “Hold on We’re Going Home” – Arctic Monkeys (Drake)
• “The Chain” – Harry Styles (Fleetwood Mac)
• “I Can’t Make You Love Me” – Bon Iver (Bonnie Raitt)
• “Black Hole Sun” – Norah Jones (Chris Cornell)
• “You Are My Sunshine” – Chris & Morgane Stapleton (Jimmie Davis)

Quote of the Week: “A slavish concern for the composition of words is the sign of a bankrupt intellect” – Norton Juster.

Make it a Great Week,

Mike