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Hello <<First Name>>,
Here is your monthly update on what I’m creating and exploring!
If covid taught us a lesson, is that we shouldn’t take anything for granted, so during the past month I took advantage of every opportunity to spend time with friends out in nature here in Madeira.
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I needed some time off before planning the months to come.
It has been almost a year since I left my remote job to focus on building my ideal career. It wasn’t an easy choice to make: society doesn’t reward taking such “risks”, nor do many people around you support it or even understand it.
It takes a lot of trust and self-discipline to venture on your own and build something from scratch, especially when you don’t know exactly what you’re building.
I also wanted to see how cool I was with not having a job, and solely working on my own projects without any income in sight. For the most part it was fine, but at times I did feel that “I need a real employment”. The social pressure to conform is real and quite difficult to “rationalize away”, even when you have enough savings to support you.
Moreover, thinking of yourself “as a company” comes with a load of responsibility that is heavy to carry. At times, you just miss working for other people and turn your brain off. It takes time to adjust.
Overall, I can say I’m proud of my progress. I raised the level of my creative craft, I started this monthly newsletter (90+ readers), launched my website and my first digital product. All these efforts didn’t lead to a sustainable business just yet, but they are stepping stones to eventually get there.
One thing is clear: I will keep basing my career decisions on the opportunities of the next 50 years, not on the illusions of the past 5 decades.
I enjoyed two great podcasts this month. The first one is Global Trends Shaping Humankind with professors Yuval Noah Harari and Daniel Kahneman. Among many insights, two stood out for me:
→ Machines can learn emotional intelligence without feeling emotions. Anger, for example, is a biological process in which neurons fire, hormones are released, muscles contracts and so forth. We recognize anger by analyzing signals coming from the body, the tone of voice, the movements of the muscles on a face and so on. An algorithm can recognize these signals and derive that a person is angry without ever feeling anger. On top of that, with biometric sensors it could have direct access to information of what’s happening below the skin, and thereby be able to recognize emotions much faster, without the biases and the noise that affect human judgement.
→ For the first time in human history we have no idea how the world would look like in a very short time (e.g. 20 years). Change has always been part of our history: new invasions or diseases could always come to disrupt our reality. But at least we knew that the basic features of human life were going to be the same. Today on the other hand, with the advance of new technologies, our bodies and brains are open to greater and greater manipulation. An example? Watch this monkey playing Pong with a brain interface! 🙈 We have no clue about the impact of these innovations on our society.
The other podcast I liked is Philosophy of Bitcoin from First Principles with Robert Breedlove and Lex Fridman. I particularly liked what he said at the min 27:26 on volatility and entrepreneurship. The role of innovators/pioneers/entrepreneurs is to jump into chaos, bravely confronting its entropic nature, and converting it into order. This enables us to construct a bubble of order which we call ‘civilization’.
Some entrepreneurs fail and others succeed, but in both cases we learn something valuable about what works and what doesn’t. In this sense, our culture should reward any brave attempt of entrepreneurship, not just the successful ones.
You can find more notes from both podcasts in my collection of Wisdom.
Here is some other cool stuff I enjoyed.
→ This italo-american dj went viral for partying in the kitchen with his parents. The dad is everything I aspire to be at that age. 🍷
→ I’ve been testing this breathing technique to reduce anxiety in real-time and so far it seems to be effective. 💨
→ Fav records have been Jungle - Keep moving and Baltra - Baby 💃
→ I loved the movie Babyteeth. As someone in the YouTube comments said "it's soul-crushingly beautiful." 🦷
→ One of my fav quotes from Anaïs Nin visualized by playing Super Mario 🍄
Aaand..that's a wrap!
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Until next month,
Dario
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