Good Morning. Families spend $40 billion a year on youth sports, nearly twice what the NFL takes in. Plus, the best in red light therapy, overcoming a career plateau, and a DIY Gatorade recipe (forwarded this email? Join 523k readers).

Yesterday’s most clicked link: Jennifer Gardner’s “Happy Sauce” recipe (which actually comes from Marcella Hazan’s 1973 cookbook)

Families now spend $40 billion a year on youth sports, nearly twice what the NFL takes in, and private equity has spent a decade buying up the teams, facilities, tournaments, and hotels.

One apparel and cheer company sold for $1.5 billion in 2014 and $4.5 billion a decade later. Parents now post staged contract signings for five-year-olds, balloons and team hats included.

Some programs make exploding offers, giving families 24 to 48 hours to accept a roster spot before it goes to someone else. The average family spends $1,016 a year on a primary sport.

The move: never decide inside the window, and check the price against the $1,016 average.

[High Protein Walking Tacos] Season and brown the beef, cut open a bag of protein chips longways, and load it with cheddar, salsa, and Greek yogurt/ranch powder.

Dolly Parton passed away yesterday at age 80. She sold more than 160 million albums, won 11 Grammys, and wrote both “Jolene” and “I Will Always Love You,” the best-selling female country artist in history.

She was one of 12 children in a poor Tennessee family and started her book program in 1995 because her father never learned to read. The first order was 1,700 books.

It now mails more than three million books a month worldwide, free, addressed to each child by name, birth through age five. Roughly one in seven American children under five is enrolled. Enroll a child by zip code.

▲ Listen to the 9-part podcast about Dolly, here

Researchers at Southern Illinois University presented a method yesterday for turning plastic bottles into edible cookies, using engineered yeast and funding from NASA's Deep Space Food Challenge. The team calls them microbites.

Water and oxygen at high heat and pressure break the plastic down. Engineered yeast rebuilds it into proteins, fats, vanilla flavoring, and vitamin A precursors. A 3D printer then shapes the result into a cookie.

Nobody has eaten one yet, since the team is waiting on institutional approval for taste tests. Production runs about $60 a kilogram, and the world generates 400 million tons of plastic waste annually. The cost, and the catch.

Sam Altman says the postmortem is overrated. His reasoning is mechanical. Most things fail, and they fail for many different reasons, so the causation is nearly impossible to isolate. What you pull out is usually generic. Work harder. Do not give up. Things you already knew.

Success has fewer causes (listen here). When something works, the reasons are narrower and easier to trace, which is what makes them repeatable.

He points to Tolstoy for the shape of it. Happy families are all alike. Unhappy ones are unhappy in their own way. Altman says the lessons he took from his wins were the ones worth applying, and that he wishes he had applied them more.

This week, skip the postmortem. Take the last thing that actually worked and name the three decisions that made it work. Then run them again.

Also in this podcast: The one piece of advice he never had to ask Paul Graham for (1:09:29), the four and a half years before OpenAI shipped anything (1:09:55), and what he writes to his son every Sunday (1:16:00)

“The thing I’ve learned about leveling up in your career, or breaking through different ceilings, is that you really only realize that it happened in retrospect. Just like you don’t notice your hair growing or your face aging, you can’t really feel it as it’s happening. Be patient — evaluate later. Don’t kick yourself now because you think you’re stuck. You might be the opposite of stuck and just not know it.”

- Ryan Holiday

▲ LeBron James borrowed nearly $300M in 2018 against future off-court income | How a securities-backed line of credit works

▲ Dick's stock fell 30% as Foot Locker's unsold retro sneakers force heavy discounting | Dick's own stores grew 4.9%

▲ Nvidia now backstops financing for cloud companies it also holds equity stakes in, worth $72.5B | The backstopped party repays the backstop

▲ CTE affects under 1% of the general population and at least 24.5% of former NFL players | The range runs to 97.7%

▲ New York would require Amazon to directly employ the 5,000 contract drivers delivering its packages | Who is fighting it besides Amazon

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