January Update

Optimize for good, not best.

Author

Filipe Macedo
February 19, 2024

Hello, superfriend!

Good news! I’m still alive, and so is this newsletter. 😅 

I missed quite a few months last year, but I compiled them into 37 lessons and moved on. Back to the monthly updates, and super excited about 2024!

🦉Ideas

Optimize for good, not best. 👍

Many people are obsessed with optimizing their lives (including me), but this might be a suboptimal way to live. There’s a dark side to maximizing everything.

In most situations, best is an illusion. The best decision is impossible to predict, sometimes even after the fact. If best doesn’t exist, why do we keep fooling ourselves trying to optimize for it? Why don’d we try to learn to optimize for good instead of always aiming for the absolute best?

I’ve realized lately that deciding fast makes me happier than actually making the best decision. The best strategy for me seems to be to use my intuition to make a fast decision, and whenever I find something better I can upgrade that decision. Optimize for good, and iterate my way to best, if I have the change. If not, good is enough.

Jiu-jitsu is chess with your body. ♟️🥋 

While in Hong Kong, last October, I had the chance to try Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu (BJJ) during 3 weeks with my friend Pedro.

The first thing that came to mind, was that BJJ feels like playing chess, but your body parts are the board pieces. In both games players attempt to outsmart their opponents and get to the point where escape is impossible. Players have to memorize different defensive and offensive techniques and sequences. It requires a lot of strategy and predicting what will happen moves ahead.

Other cool things that I experienced in BJJ include:

  • Strength and brute force don’t matter much; it’s all about efficiency, leverage and awareness.

  • The power of rituals, that helped me leave everything outside the mat.

  • Mutual respect and respect for people with more experience.

  • It doesn’t matter who you are outside; your job, wealth or status.

  • "There is no losing in jiu jitsu. You either win or you learn." - Carlos Gracie, Sr.

Can you spot me in the picture?

Dragons are a symbol of life, not death. 🐉 

I traveled to Singapore, Hong Kong and Vietnam last Fall, where I learned that dragons symbolize fertility, abundance, and prosperity rather than the destructive, fire-breathing creatures often depicted in Western lore. In Asia, dragons are often associated with water sources like rivers, seas, and rain. These water sources are essential for agriculture and sustaining life. While Western dragons are often portrayed as menacing, hoarding treasure, and breathing fire, Eastern dragons are generally seen as kind, wise, and associated with life-giving water.

This trip, and all that I learned, was so memorable that I decided to do a new tattoo with my own dragon, coming out of a tea pot.

⭐️ Recommendations

  1. A book 📚 Exhalation: Stories, by Ted Chiang. A short stories I had already recommended, but now I’ve finished all the short stories.

  2. A song 🎹 Christine and the Queens - Christine (Paradis Remix), recommended by Tom a while ago (not on Spotify, unfortunately).

  3. A movie 🎬 BlackBerry, an entertaining cautionary tale about the rise and fall of a unique gadget. Also touches: the challenges of building a company outside of the US, why it’s hard to remain innovative and the clash between the geek/tech vs sales/business mindsets.

  4. A podcast 🎙️ The problem with optimizing their lives, where Adam Grant brings together psychologist Barry Schwartz and mathematician Coco Krumme to discuss the dark side of maximizing everything.

  5. A video 📹 Weekend Wednesday propose a new way to organize our work week.

  6. A blog post 📝 The idea maze, by Chris Dixon.

☀️ Progress

  1. I love building and learning new things. Building a web3 startup has offered me lots of opportunities to do both. The builder side of crypto (as opposed to the trading, more speculative side) also seems to attract forward-thinking and risk-taking people that I enjoy spending time with. And, on top of the exponential learning, both startups and crypto also bring the possibility for asymmetric financial returns.

  2. Speaking of Talent Protocol, I feel very proud of the work we’ve been doing in the past months, which can be summarized in this recent blog post I wrote. Talent Protocol V2 feels almost like a new beginning, and I’m more aligned than ever with our vision, and confident in our success. My concerns now are mostly related with the ability to execute well and fast.

  3. Productivity tip: lately I’ve been using the timer on the mac/iphone clock to be more focused and avoid distractions. It’s a very basic technique, but it has been working for me. Just set a time to work on a task, and until the timer beeps, you’re not allowed to do anything but that task. It’s that simple. And it’s that hard.

🌨️ Problems

  1. I lost discipline with this newsletter. Things starting derailing last summer. I was first late in July, so I merged July and August into one newsletter. Then came my trip to Asia in September and October, so these 2 newsletters also got delayed. Before I knew it it was December, so I thought about making a Fall newsletter compiling 3 months. I started it, but never finished it. I was blocked with a backlog of random, unstructured thoughts piling up. But I’ve decided to let that go. I published 37 things I learned in 2023, and am now trying to get back to monthly newsletters.

  2. I’m trying to do too much at once, again. Trying to focus on too many things is usually a recipe for failure and poor execution. Trying to do to much makes me feel like losing control, which causes me to work even more, in an attempt to regain control. More work leads to less exercise and less relaxing/social moments, which leads to poor sleep and more stress and anxiety. Journaling and meditation are a good way to break these cycles, but I haven’t been able to make them part of my routine just yet.

  3. Travelling and jetlag always takes a huge toll on my sleep. I doubled my sleep debt from 6h to 12h in my first week in New York.

🦸‍♀️ IRL superfriends

João Courinha, Diogo Marques, Aline Oliveira, Pedro Dias, Inês Ramos, António Almada Guerra, Rui Gouveia, Cate, Pedro Oliveira, Francisco Leal, Tolga Dizmen, Inês Pais, Susana, Ricardo Pereira, Marta Lousada, Tiago Simões, Ana Rodeia, Jorge Silva, André Macedo

You’re receiving this email because you’re part of my superfriends group and asked to be updated every month about the progress I’m making. I’m trying to figure out how being ambitious at work can fit into a life well lived.

Thank you for your thoughts and feedback.
They always give me so much energy.

Your superfriend,

— Filipe | @filmacedo ✌️