Tag: Confidence

Categories
Biohacking Finance

Day 1009 and Non-Reactivity

I’ve been working on my Q3 investor update all day. I am a little behind my own artificial deadline for it as I believe it’s good to get it out in the first week of the new quarter. I am chasing down a bigger theme in my market insights section that is being refined as I rework my own narrative understanding in real time.

I feel that there is a collective disagreement on consensus reality. We’ve got multiple worldviews that are being hotly contested. Epistemic status humble as the kids say. And so I am doing what I can to get outside the presumed worldview of my own geography and nation and see if a more global perspective is helpful.

But being able to see any of these different vantage points and narratives will require me to be accepting of other competing or adjacent narratives. The presumption is that I can control my own reactions. My body has to be open. So I am here with my Apollo Neuro band sending sound waves to my body while I listen to Endel’s chill program on my noise canceling headphones. I plan to do a Non-Sleep Deep Rest mediation after I’m finished.

I can only give my best performance when I’m sure my body is in a non-reactive place. Parasympathetic is sometimes called “rest and digest” versus its more active sympathetic nervous system partner “fight or flight.” We must assess our world and the many competing perceptions from a place of non-reactivity. It is the only way through the fog of the moment. Never let the stress of the moment distract you.

Categories
Startups

Day 1006 and Startup Towns

I was born in the startup Fertile Crescent of Silicon Valley. But I grew up outside of one of the many ecosystem towns. Boulder Colorado always took pride in not only its technical roots in aerospace and defense, but in its new software startups as well.

I admire people that build out a startup ecosystem. Understanding that a certain environment of agency breeds good outcomes. Maybe it’s a kind of boom town mentality in the good years. But in any year it’s good to be on the team that believes in the future. It feels as if people are pulling in the same direction.

I get the sense that Tallinn as a city and Estonia in general as a country believe in a better future. I can’t tell you how much I enjoy seeing a city with a lot of construction. Offices also appear to be full but there is also housing in the city core. Everyone seems to have kids. I’ve never seen more first graders in a city.

The gentleman I met today said that in the future every country will be competing for every global citizen. I think that insight is at the heart of believing in a better future. You have to believe that if you are talented that countries will rightly compete to have you as its citizen. The frontier of the future will be found in finding the optimistic folks who believe that their efforts will make their chosen place better.

Categories
Finance Internet Culture

Day 1001 and Circumstances Change, People Do Not

“The last sustainable edge in markets is arbitraging human nature.”

I had the good fortune to spend an hour and a half with an iconic Wall Street investor last week. I was invited to be a guest on Jim O’Shaughessy’s podcast Infinite Loops. I felt like the luckiest woman in the world.

I’m blessed to have Jim as one of my “Twitter mutuals” where I’ve come to appreciate his endless curiosity, deep empathy and kind friendship for the players of the “infinite game” of life. Plus he’s got the strongest gif game in the business. You should follow him if you don’t already.

I’ve been privileged to work with Jim and the OSV team as one of my LPs in chaotic.capital. Being entrusted with capital from some of finest minds in investing has been as intimidating as it is inspiring.

My fund is an early stage pre-seed venture fund that backs weirdos. Our thesis is simple. The world is increasingly complex, chaotic if you will, and only the most agile will win. We look for those that have the agency to adapt to the one true constant; change. Circumstances changed by the moment but humans remain reassuringly the same.

Obviously it’s hard to imagine a better LP than OSV for chaotic.capital. We are deeply aligned in our thinking on agency, agility, and adaptability. As much as I’d love to prattle on here, I’d recommend you check out the very wide ranging conversations between Jim and I. We cover a lot of ground practically and philosophically. I hope you enjoy it.

Categories
Chronicle

Day 1000 and The Milestone

When I first started writing every single day I had modest goals. I wanted to instill a habit of writing more often. My initial goal was to write daily for one month as that seemed both significant but also manageable. But I deliberately didn’t put any pressure on what I would write or for how long I’d keep at it.

Once I had reached my first milestone of writing daily for an entire month, I began considering extending the habit. Maybe I could do it for two months? Maybe I could do it for 100 days? Every new milestone made me excited to reach for a new one.

Once I got to 500 days, I began to feel confident discussing the possibility of reaching 1000 days of writing. I even called that blog post my halfway point. Still I wasn’t sure even then that I’d actually make it to a thousand days. A lot can go wrong in a year or two. But as I learned, with a little bit of perseverance, a lot can go right. Or if you will indulge the pun, a lot can go “write” too.

Still, even as I became accustomed to the habit, I didn’t want to do anything to jinx it. Locking myself into an outcome seemed like a recipe for disappointment. But locking myself into a daily habit? That seemed like a recipe for success. I knew I could keep showing up.

My philosophy for writing has been to take it one day at a time. Habits compound just like money. Small change over time can have a dramatic outcome. I committed to showing up and putting the proverbial pen to paper every day.

And here I am a thousand days later with enough writing for any number of other goals. I’ve got answers to most of the regular questions I encounter in my personal and professional life. I’ve got enough content to turn into a book if I’m so inclined. The volume of my writing is so extensive I could easily train my own artificial intelligence agent.

I don’t know what I’ll do with this body of work other than continue to hyperlink it together and see where it takes me.

And to answer the most obvious question, I do plan to keep writing. I don’t have any desire to stop. I enjoy this practice. It’s conceivable there are other milestones ahead of me. Maybe I double it. Or maybe at the end of the year I decide three years of writing daily is enough.

Who can say? I reached the stretch goal I set for myself. It’s an unbounded journey from here.

Categories
Culture

Day 997 and Brain Fog

I have felt a bit disappointed in my recent writing. I’ve not felt the urge to produce anything of much substance or synthesis in a week or two.

The exercise of writing daily isn’t meant to produce anything but the consistent repetition of a habit of critical thinking about my daily experiences. I sometimes have to accept that there will be weeks where it all feels a bit half baked. I’ve got no conclusions to share.

I am not the only one experiencing a lack of clarity. Confident assurances read as naive at best or manipulative at worst. No one is certain of anything at the moment. The widening gyre has our best struggling with conviction.

I have been following Venkatash Rao’s working theory on the breakdown of world narratability in his series on Protocal Narratives. If you are not a Ribbonfarm reader I’d encourage you to begin.

He is grappling very well with these themes considering the deep sense making challenges facing all of us. Attempting to find workable worldviews that are manageable to our human minds is a challenge as consensus reality is a competition between thousands of different competing narratives.

To retain fluidity, you must retain an unmediated connection to reality. But the unaugmented brain is clearly not enough for that connection to be tractable to manage.


How do you resolve this paradox?


I think the trick is to inhabit more than one interposing intelligence layer. If you’re only an economist or only a deep-state institutionalist, you’ll retreat to a fixed logic of caring; a terminal derp.

Fluid Fogs and Fixed Flows

I’m doing my best to stay out of terminal derp but I’m still feeling like the fog is impeding my view. I’ll just have to keep putting out my own beacons and hope the lighthouse network illuminates enough for us to navigate together.

Categories
Aesthetics Culture

Day 993 and Service Expectations

We are in a weird moment for transactional goods and services. As more people draw inwards towards themselves, the social contract is less clear. What do we expect when we pay someone to do something for us? Do we make small talk? Do we smile? Do we reach for connection?

I went to a nail salon today. I’d called ahead looking for a specific nail technician. I was really relying on having her as I treat pedicures as more of a medical grooming need than a strictly aesthetic one.

I get pedicures mostly because the bending over required for clipping, filing, and cuticle trimming is hard on my Ankylosing Spondylitis. I prefer to have someone handle that grooming for me to avoid the unnecessary discomfort.

Especially because an ingrown nail can be a significant infection for someone like me as I take immune suppressants for my autoimmune condition. A little nick or cut gone wrong can get me quite sick.

I like to know I’m working with a careful nail technician. I went through cosmetology school and am familiar with what is in a safe aesthetician environment.

So I was surprised to find myself trying to communicate via non verbal cues with a gentleman who seemed unclear about what tools to use for what job. The woman is scheduled the appointment with was busy with someone else. I said I’d wait but it got lost in translation.

I got more anxious as an acrylic nail drill got involved. I don’t use acrylics. And I really started to panic when a razor came out. I definitely didn’t want that used on my cuticles.

And I found myself unsure in the moment. Do I just trust this gentleman who cannot understand a word I am saying with razors and drills? Or do I just get up and go?

I stayed for too long. The drill was used on my big toe and cut down too far. I finally after some shock extricated myself and left cash on the table and drove home feeling scared and unsettled without letting him finish.

If we can’t figure out how to communicate with each it’s complicates your social expectations. I didn’t want to ruin a service or not trust the person in front of me. But I also have expectations for the experience and safety from knowing something about the job and it’s safety requirements.

I found myself unsettled by the whole experience. That my expectations are high trust and I find myself simply not being able to make the transactional moment work. I’d failed. I paid in full for a service I didn’t get what I needed. I left.

Categories
Emotional Work

Day 992 and What We Can’t Know

Most of my life I’ve been been awash in assurances. Maybe this wasn’t so bad when I was a child. Approaching life with confidence in the world breeds positivity.

We’ve come to expect certitude. Our institutions and elders deliver most of their hard-earned knowledge with certainty.

Nuance and shades of grey feel dangerous these days. Too much room for interpretation leaves room for confusion. After all, if it’s just a small percentage on the edges, why give people cause to worry?

Except we all find ourselves in the small percentage at some point. As normal as we may be in some areas, or even most, you will probably find yourself being on the edge.

You will want assurances. And as it turns out we are not yet good enough at math to know many things. You can get close to the limit. Infinitely so. But we can never get there. Just try calculating out Pi if you are skeptical of my math.

Categories
Culture Preparedness

Day 986 and Risky Business

I’ve been giving a lot of thought to how we see risk the past few years. What is an acceptable risk? What are the boundaries of risk perception and how much variability is there between two people? How much of those tolerances are innate versus cultural? Can you consent to risks you don’t understand?

Philosophers have been working on these questions for a while and we don’t seem to have gotten much further on the problem than some of us dislike change and some of us are more open to change. Figuring out any grand causal theories of openness doesn’t seem any more legible with regression analysis.

We have little coordination of acceptable risks at the individual, local, national, planetary and species level, just as we most need to understand if we can all collectively tolerate significant social, economic and political risks associated with new technologies.

We just don’t seem to have consensus on risk much beyond “don’t get someone killed.” Yelling “slow down” barely works with toddlers, so I don’t see how anyone considers it a viable tactic for coping with, let’s just say, artificial intelligence.

I don’t consider myself to be someone who takes a lot of unnecessary risks. I like to do my homework. While I was never a Boy Scout, I do subscribe to their motto. “Be Prepared!” But if you asked my friends and family they’d probably say I am a risk taker. Who is right? It’s clear that preparation and planning mitigate known risks. Beyond that it’s not up to me. It’s probably not up to you either.

Categories
Culture Internet Culture

Day 977 and Insecurities

A toxic morass of content has been circling on Twitter and corners of the chattering classes on TikTok, Substack, and podcasts that I’ve taken to calling gender bait.

Topics like “body counts” and the relative degrees of acceptable promiscuity in women (as little as possible) is everywhere. We are main charactering single women for sleeping in on Sundays. Hot takes on how women are failing men is everywhere.

The insecurity is palpable. The lust for control is high. How many people you’ve had sex with and how it affects marriage and family formation has been a contentious topic in culture wars in America for sometime. For a private matter between partners, it’s shocking how much it’s become fodder for social media grist.

Presenting scorn to women for being without significant others and children strike me as callus. Fertility is one of the most sensitive possible areas for anyone. I know it has been for me. You never know why someone is childless.

I wouldn’t recommend diving into gender bait topics if you aren’t already aware of the discourse and it’s champions. This variant appears to have gained momentum with a YouTube celebrity boxer feud.

It’s now percolated out to every engagement farmer looking to grow their outrage crops. And it looks like business is booming. Sadly, lonely people are desperately searching for control and reassurance and gender bait gives it to them.

It feels as if we are repeating the same slut shaming I saw as a teenage girl but on some new variant of reactionary steroids.

If you are looking for ways to judge, shame and coerce others into behaving in a way that provides you comfort without their consent please consider that the problem might be you. It’s your insecurities speaking when you apply sweeping generalization to an individual you may not even know.

Once you are secure in your value and worth it’s a lot easier to get what you want from others simply by having boundaries and standards. There is no need to rain judgement on others. You wouldn’t want them doing it to you. Apply the golden rule and nurture empathy. The security you will find will last longer than any temporary control you may find through shame or judgement.

Categories
Community Startups

Day 967 and Good Moods

Everyone in my social circle was in a terrific mood yesterday. A small company that was widely supported by angels in my ecosystem was acquired by a larger startup that we all like. Happy investors that we were, Alex and I read the cap table over dinner and celebrated each co-investor that we liked.

It was a jubilant moment across my group chats in a darker wider climate for startups. The federal reserve’s inflation fight has meant tighter dollars. And that means less funding for early stage companies at lower valuations.

The focus has been good for the industry. A reminder that we can’t spend our way to innovation. We’ve relied on bigger companies, weaker talent, and unsustainable growth policies while the cash spigot was on.

I enjoyed the win. I’m happy for the founder and the team who will be going to such a great company. I’m happy a lot of investors got a win. But I know that the good mood will have to sustain us through some rough patches. So it’s good we are all banding together and the wins are shared.