Good Morning, RadReaders!
I’m so excited to share this issue with you. Two 1-minute articles (#1,3) pack so much punch that I promise they’ll shift (or at least, challenge) your thinking.
We’ve got lots 🍳 over at RadJobs. Check out new roles at Adobe, Managed by Q, and Anchor and our customizable filters. We’ll be releasing our first Rad Jobs newsletter next week. Don’t sleep on it, and sign up here.
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10 Startups in 24 Hours by Ben Tossell
1 Minutes | Medium | @arjunblj
This is so dang cool and is the ultimate guide to creating kick-ass side projects. The tools in this article are powerful and free — Airtable (database), Zapier (API across cloud services), Typeform (forms), Carrds (web pages) and Stripe (payments) and none require any coding. In fact, @patricksouth and I are building RadJobs using this exact framework. What is required is technical sensibility, knowing what they do and how they work together. And some good ideas! Follow the full thread on Twitter.
🎧 Bart Lorang: The world’s gonna have its way with you
Rad Awakenings Podcast | Apple Podcasts | Google Play | Stitcher | RSS
Bart Lorang is the founder and CEO of FullContact. FullContact is a high-growth, venture-backed company (having raised $50 mm) with 250 employees and multiple offices across the world. Bart and I discuss work-life balance and how he balances self-care, spending time with two young kids, while being a devoted father/husband. Bart drops amazing CEO wisdom on how empathy can be learned, thwarting your team’s fight or flight reflex and how culture is meaningless if it doesn’t terrify people. Finally, we talk control — both in business, but how with age we realize that we control much less than we think.
Rad Awakenings is sponsored by Skillshare. Join the online learning community with 17,000+ classes in business, design and more. Get one free month of unlimited access and try out amazing classes taught by experts such as Seth Godin, Simon Sinek, and Mari Andrew.
The deafening cacophony of social media and the spread of blind tribalism by Naval Ravikant
Naval Ravikant Tweetstorm | HT: @joemccann
We all want to belong to a tribe. These tribes are bound by a series of shared myths (the Sapiens argument). Enter social media, which eliminates the barriers for signaling goods, whether it’s conspicuous consumption, editorial outrage and campus social action. Naval then asks: “How does the move from real goods to signaling goods impact truth?”
13 ways to turn your career into an f-ing rocket ship
11 Minutes | Hackernoon | @miamabanta
I try to avoid listicles, but this is really good. There were lessons that really worked well for me when I was earlier in my career (no task is too small, take great notes); some I’m learning now (importance of design, good writing/speaking, everything is a sale); and new ones (the 5/25/150 for cultivating a network; Bart and I discuss my approach here @ 9:11). I do agree, if you follow these approaches there’s a good chance you’ll create your own luck.
Red Yellow Green: Bringing Personal Check-Ins to the Office by Bart Lorang
5 Minutes | Bart Lorang
This is a great example of “applied mindfulness.” Not the sitting under a tree kind, but the kind you can use in a business setting to excel. It starts by checking in with yourself, are you red (lizard brain), yellow (anxious) , or green (calm) — a simple practice, yet one that requires intention. Imagine creating the space with your executive team to put those feelings into the open. Presumably, if you keep it inside, they will bleed out into the discussion, through passive-aggression, conflict, or close-mindedness.
Below the Fold
FOUR PODCASTS
💰 Invest Like the Best: Understanding Blockchains (60 mins): A 💯 documentary on all things crypto, by the one and only Patrick_oshag featuring all the key players in this new ecosystem.
🔮 Rad Awakenings: Fred Ehrsam (60 mins): The backstory from a Crypto OG (Coinbase co-founder) on why he left Goldman and how newbies should consider the space.
😳 Rationally Speaking: Tim Urban on “Trying to live well as semi-rational animals” (50 mins): Incredible and hilarious conversation on the limits of human rationality.
🃏 Masters in Business: Ed Thorp the Man Who Beat the Dealer and the Market(1hr 40 mins): One of the godfathers of quant investing, agrees with Urban that humans as “locally rational.”
FROM THE COMMUNITY
🗣 Life@Work Conference (Oct 17–18 in Brooklyn): I’ll be speaking at this conference discussing fostering culture and innovation at Airbnb, Etsy, Uber, and WeWork. Use RADREADS for 30% off tickets.
💼 RadJobs: Dope new roles at Village (Ben Casnocha and Erik Torenberg’s new Venture firm) and Inspiring Capital. Sign-up for updates.
LAST WEEK’S MOST READ
🎯 What are cryptocurrencies? (50 mins, Ellington Management Group): Jargon-free, yet so well explained.
EDITOR’S NOTE
🙀 Are Anxiety and Performance Inversely Related (2 mins, RadReads): I appended this piece on the Sharpe ratio to clarify that it didn’t mean avoiding risk; on the contrary, regulating emotional volatility is the 🔑 to taking risk.
Postscript
I woke up this morning unsure about what I’d write in this section. At about 7:45 am the Internet Gods quickly took care of that situation.
Last week I got the iPhone 8 (it rocks). And all year, I’ve been very proud digital security. Pretty much all of my accounts have 2-Factor Authorization and I disabled SMS recovery (for this reason). But here’s the catch, I hadn’t saved all my back-up codes. And I awoke to find myself locked out of my Mailchimp account.
“Oh the places you’ll go” when something like this happens. Here’s a list of the feelings it triggered: sunk cost fallacy (“There goes 10 hours of work this week”), blame (“Man, I’m really going to let people down), poverty mindset (“This is my ‘job,’ and I can’t do it”), self-doubt (“You idiot, why didn’t you write the codes down”).
Not having your back-up codes is a pretty big deal, to the point that it’s still unclear how I’m going to get back into all my accounts. Thankfully, I wrote a blog post about this last week. 🙄
I was in a deep, dark valley, with no way out. At this point, there’s a decision to be made. Double down on your anxiety, lash out, or pause, regroup, and put things into perspective.
I started with my “go to” question: “What’s the worst thing that could happen to you?” Yes, there was the real possibility of losing 16k email accounts and the 2.5 year history of RadReads. (But I’m sure someone at customer support could eventually help.) I then did a quick Shirzad-inspired meditation, (rubbing your thumbs and forefinger) to settle my lizard brain. And then poof, a longshot solution emerged. I might have been logged in to Mailchimp on another computer at home, from which I could temporarily disable 2-FA. BOOM — problem solved.
These situations will inevitably happen in both life and as an entrepreneur. Knowing that a few quick tools (a question and a finger-rub) can help, gives me the confidence to plow forward. And the ability to get you guys today’s newsletter 😊.
