May Update

🦉Ideas

1️⃣ Social media is a place to perform, not a place to connect.

Authentic conversations are hard to come by in the current social media landscape. I find it difficult to stay in touch with the friends I really care about (this is one of the reasons for writing this newsletter).

Most of the social internet is about connecting people to brands and influencers, not with their friends. Social platforms shifted from helping us foster friendships to bombarding us with ads, misinformation and the content equivalent of methamphetamine. We’re more connected, yet more isolated than ever.

The Internet we’ve built rewards noisy, marketable people, not people doing good things quietly. We need better spaces where we can find depth, kindness and opportunities for serendipity.

A recent trend I noticed is that the people I find most interesting on social media are using it as a sort of diary/note to self, not broadcasting to an audience.

2️⃣ Pessimists don’t make history. Optimists are the ones that shape our future. 🌞

Optimists are the gas, pessimists are the breaks. Breaks are important, but they won’t lead you anywhere. Too much breaks and you won’t move.

It’s much harder to imagine how things can work than how things can break down. Entropy and disorder are the natural way of things. Complicated things are unlikely to work.

But there’s a difference between active optimism (doing the work to make things better) and passive optimism (just waiting for things to get better).

Being an active optimist is having courage. Once you get your courage up and believe that you can do important problems, then you can. If you think you can't, almost surely you are not going to.

3️⃣ 10 years or 1 hour. Those are the two time frames worth prioritizing. ⏳

10 years is shorthand for thinking longer-term than nearly everyone else and doing things that are really ambitious or meaningful. Most of the deeply meaningful things in life require long time horizons: building a business, cultivating a happy marriage, growing a family, getting in the best shape of your life, etc.

How do you work toward the 10-year things? In 1 hour increments. 1 hour is shorthand for doing things that can be accomplished from start to finish in a single session like a good workout, a good writing session, reading a chapter of a book, going on a fun date, etc. The key is that you finish with something accomplished, not with half-work still waiting to be completed.

If you spend 1 hour working toward a 10-year project—and you repeat this day after day—you're going to end up living a lovely life.

Source: James Clear

⭐️ Recommendations

1. 🎬️ I loved AIR because: basketball is my sport, Nike is my brand, marketing is my career and 80s is my decade. It’s a well-crafted story with a nostalgic vibe, that reminded me how Nike challenged marketing, product design, and business models back in 1984, when they were the underdog brand.

2. 🍸 Non-alcoholic cocktails at Momus, in Madrid. The best I’ve ever had. They use non-alcoholic spirits from Undone and Seedlip, that extract the alcohol from a real, high-quality alcoholic drinks. Martini also has a line of non-alcoholic drinks, by the way.

3. 🔗 Untools, a collection of thinking tools and frameworks to help you solve problems, make decisions and understand systems.

🌨️ Problems

1. I struggled to balance deep work with operational work. I don’t spend enough time building. More than half of my time is “chatting” on Discord and Notion. And I’ve already reduced external comms and email to a minimum. One rule that helps is to leave my phone in the bedroom. To resist the urge to even look at my phone or to open email or any messaging platform. Because to me, an hour before 9 is worth 2 after 5. ⏰ 

2. My fuel tank is low. I need a quick pit stop.

   • Building a startup is like racing cars. You ramp up the pace in work and in life, and push your body and mind to the max. But to cope with the speed (and the stress that comes with it), you need to be healthy. 🏎️

   • My fuel tank is low. I’m loosing consistency in my sleep and exercise routine, feeling more tired, irritated and unbalanced. I need a pit stop. 😫 

   • Three simple rules to keep the tank full: sweat everyday, eat healthy, go to bed before midnight. When you're operating at a high level, you need high-octane fuel. Food is fuel. Sleep is fuel. Exercise is fuel. Family is fuel. ⛽