I’m flat on my back in bed waiting for my Advil to kick in. I’m the kind of satisfied tired that only comes from a good day. But I’m also in pain as I did so much today that eking out this blog post is a bit intimidating. As with all good things they become bad when you over do it.
I am that stage of tired where I can’t even work myself up to go wash my face. I’m in bed texting and scrolling Twitter and hoping I’ll get a surge of energy to do what needs to be done. Alas it’s been an hour so I think I’ll need to go with sheer force of will.
I packed a lot in today as I’m headed for my first in person event since the pandemic started. I’ll be at Ethereum Denver through Saturday. And in March I’ll be in Europe for the whole month which is another whole thing. Having travel plans means more errands and more preparations than I’m used to incorporating. Which is just such a foreign feeling. Remember when we all traveled a ton?
I’m one of those “life optimization” types. I spend a lot of time on various wellness applications. My health stack is deep. Over the years I have attempted to integrate more productivity applications into my life. But beyond a basic “to do” list I’ve found myself failing to maintain anything more complicated than ToDoist task list.
I think my failure is related to the challenge inherent in optimizing deep work. A lot of what passes for work in regular jobs isn’t a big part of my work. I don’t have a ton of alignment meetings because I am accountable to my LPs and my founders but not horizontal stakeholders. I don’t have tons of reporting as again the buy-in is pretty contained.
Ultimately I am only responsible for outcomes. And my outcomes will take years to materialize. I’ve got to get conviction on a decision largely on my own. I am responsible for my own success. And yes it’s a little bit scary to realize I’m in control.
This means I can’t fixate on signifiers of work. Which is largely what productivity apps track. The representation of the work is usually what gets tracked and measured. Arguably I can have my own OKRs (objectives and key results) but I’ve not encountered any personal productivity apps that work well for that framework. It basically boils down to the harsh truth that most of my work is deep work and it’s harder to measure. Deep work is the stuff of slow integration and accumulating knowledge up until it turns into catalysts, breakthroughs and ambush predation.
A gamer friend called me a glass cannon. I’d never heard the term before. It basically boils down to a character that has impressive offensive work but little stamina or defensive work. When they hit crit they go off. Boom! When facing a glass cannon you’d better hope you kill them before they rock your world as if they cycle back for another hit you are fucked. Glass cannons are hard to kill despite the appearance of weakness.
I spend my time preparing for action. Integrating knowledge. Widening my horizons. Intaking potential opportunities. None of which is easy to measure and moderate in traditional work culture. But when I go off you know I’ve made a move. It’s clear. Decisive. But the intervening time between? I’m preparing to go critical. You don’t know when or how but then it’s all in. A glass cannon may be the ideal archetype for venture investors.
My first piece of international travel since the pandemic began is coming up. I’ve not been on an airplane in over two years which is wild. But I needed to get a booster shot for my travel papers.
I got caught in a snowstorm getting the booster yesterday. Which is so far the only inconvenience. I slept fine last night. I didn’t appear to spike a fever. I had no aches or pains other than the ones I live with normally. I’m so far enjoying having little to no reaction.
I did however take very good care of myself. I felt a migraine coming on mid-morning and I rushed in with all the good drugs. I wasn’t going to let myself suffer at all. And I am suspecting that keeping any and all stresses away has in fact been excellent for my body. Just another reminder that drugs are in fact good. Loving yourself can often mean mean treating yourself kindly. Removing the option for suffering and maybe all recovery can be this easy.
We’d scheduled booster shots for this afternoon. Even though we’ve both recently had Covid, I’ve got travel coming up so I needed to get a booster to get into Europe. I probably have never had better immunity to the disease than I do right now so I’m feeling optimistic about being around people again.
But I didn’t realize it was going to snow today. The forecast said it would lightly snow for an hour or two. So I thought it’s fine to schedule vaccines now. I wanted them right before the weekend so I had maximum time to rest and recover.
But clearly the forecasts were we wrong as we headed into a significant storm to get our shots. An hour later as we wrapped it up we were in driving snow with very little visibility. The roads were accumulating snowfall fast. The normally fifteen minute drive hour stretched into triple time.
Thankfully we made it home safely. And we’ve been shot up for the sake of paperwork. I only feel marginally worse for wear.
I wasn’t in my “okayness” this morning. My focus on self love hit a snag on hormones. I woke up with a migraine and menstruation and I wanted to treat myself as an attack surface. So I asked my Twitter feed to tell me how they got to okayness. And it was beautiful.
I am often struck by how if you share your vulnerability with people they will open up with their own. The joy I get from connecting with you in the fullness of being ourselves gives my entire life meaning.
What seems even wilder to me is that this kind of connection happens on Twitter. It’s crazy that out in some virtual world, the metaverse if you will, the most human needs are met. We can see each other on a phone application. It’s enough to take your breathe away.
It’s ok if someone hates me. It’s ok if someone thinks I’m bitchy, stupid, obnoxious and self serving. Hell I’m ok if people think I’m a lesser human being. Which judging by Twitter could be a multitude of reasons ranging from “I’m a woman” to “I’ve got bad taste in tv.”
I am alright with you not being alright with me. My existence is not threatened by your philosophy or personal preferences. My existence is only threatened if you literally threaten me. Call me evil if you like. I’m not offended. Until you take an action against me it’s alright that we disagree. Even if the disagreements are existential.
It’s quite possible this is wrong. I’m open to debate on what constitutes harm. In fact, my entire philosophy centers on that debate being fine. I can take it. I actually pay someone to cuss me out for being stupid and then I pay again to spend time in a group where we regularly tell each other how much the group members anger us. It’s called therapy.
So take that as context when I say I wasn’t particularly personally hurt by Brantly Milligan, aka Brantly.eth aka one of the ENS Foundation cofounders, suggesting women who use contraception are perverts. I’d probably be a lot more hurt if I was a gay trans woman who had an abortion though. But I figure that demo might be used to being called evil by Catholics at this point. Like maybe it’s more of an annoyance than existential threat if you are wealthy and privileged enough to be working in crypto. We aren’t really a population that is hurting
Brantley.eth “homosexual acts are evil. Transgenderism doesn’t exist. Abortion is murder. Contraception is a perversion. So is masturbation and porn.”
The Ethereum community is experiencing this speech with a lot of pain, hurt and anger. Brantley was voted out of his contract with True Names Limited the foundation that manages ENS Domains. But he remains one of the largest holders of tokens and will obviously have plenty of influence over the future of the platform. The debate has become one of cancel culture versus DAO governance working as intended. But the split on that is not clean and it’s not always clear where people will fall. An informal poll on my timeline is pretty evenly split.
Twitter poll asking if Brantley termination is governance working or cancel culture.
I’m tempted to assign him my tokens as a delegate to be honest. Though I won’t because I think he’s unprofessional. But I want to because I don’t love how any of it played out. Brantly doubled down on telling folks to fuck off compounding the feeling of being hurt. That’s unprofessional and not the kind of behavior I’d expect out of my management team. But I also don’t know that simply holding unpleasant or intolerant beliefs is enough. And it shouldn’t be in a decentralized system. I respect that the right voting and governance may have happened here but I’d argue we all want more control spread out over more people for exactly these scenarios.
I think Brantly basically Shrekli’d himself by doubling down on asshole antisocial shit and the DAO equivalent of the Feds coming for you happened. You can’t attract negative attention and be shocked when bad shit happens to you. But I don’t think being a retrograde weirdo is enough on it’s own to get you booted from an ecosystem.
The entire reason I’m walking you through this sensitive topic today is that I am committing my year to self love. And you might think how does self love and DAO governance overlap. But I really do feel empathy to everyone involved in ENS and the ethereum ecosystem right now. The pain of feeling like you are not seen and loved for who you are is primal shit. This is core human nature “do I belong” to my tribe stuff.
If you don’t love yourself than you are going to have a reactive stance to something that questions your morality and worth. And I’m guessing a lot of people are reactive judging by the uproar. But the thing about self love is that you just won’t be as hurt by assholes being assholes. Because you’ve taken care of yourself first. So whatever the right and just outcome of this ENS governance issue, I think it’s important we all check in on ourselves and why we reacted in the first place. Only then can we get on with the business of design the future and it’s technology.
I am coming slowly into 2022 in its fullness. Perhaps I am living in seasonal time this year. I am feeling the wholeness of what the moment brings and January is about becoming. So it wasn’t surprisingly that clarity of purpose has been sharpening for me. I am ready to commit to self acceptance as the theme of my year.
I felt somehow today that the only thing that really mattered for my success in the world was radically altering any perception I had of myself as negative. That I was here to love even the parts of myself that cause me shame and fear. The only thing that will take me where I want to go is loving myself. That self love was actually the key to all troubles personal and professional.
“You know, loving awareness—even if you haven’t heard the phrase before, you know what it is. Those moments of spacious, calm, thorough, tranquil connection with whatever portion of existence you’re currently exposed to, where nothing is being challenged or conceptualized, but rather is just allowed to appear, in radiant suchness, without resistance or fear.”
I’ve discussed the emotional work I do on the blog at length. The Family Systems Therapy and it’s exploration of the inner child. The shadow work and integrating of the whole of oneself. But I do often reject the crucial step of feeling like I am fundamentally alright. I am ok. I am enough.
I’ve committed to “a bit” where I lavish myself with self improvement and luxuriate in needing to make every measurement better. I’m obsessed with finding metrics to improve. And so I give myself little problems to fix. Maybe I’ll eat poorly so I can feel bad about my body composition. When instead I could just eat what I like and accept that maybe I’ve made other priorities than my figure. I don’t need to agonize over trivial shit.
But equally I don’t need to agonize over big shit. So I’m not a perfectly credentialed super star. I’m more of an eccentric. I don’t live like other people so I see other things. My existence is the selling point. If what I bring to the table is what you want then I am the right partner for you. If am I not then well tautologically I’m not for you. Partnerships are accepting what everyone brings.
So through the end of this year I am going to bring self love and acceptance to my writing here. In letting myself be seen I can more fully bring myself to my partners. Being a startup investor that means I must be present for my founders, their teams, and my own LPs and stakeholders. I’m bringing the full depth of my being because that’s also going to bring the best returns. Because being ok. Accepting the moment and it’s inhabitants? That brings us the creative potential to solve whatever is in front of us without judgement.
Life is a pretty indecisive process. You go through with, at best, some genetic heuristics for truth and a couple half verified data sets. So when the feeling of clarity hits you it’s hard not to notice. The clarion call of seeing reality (which sounds like me mixing two sense based metaphors) is edifying.
When you know you know. Popular culture loves this phenomenon. You get it. Knowing is head to toes and taint to tip stuff. You just get what’s happening in your gut. Somewhere in the shared brain space of your conscious reality and the microbiology of your intestinal fauna there exists clarity.
Surely there is a reason we describe knowing as a process that isn’t strictly data driven. Sure we can have facts and methods and process. But somewhere along the line we can only know if our biology agrees. Your gut knows what I mean.
I had a bit of that feeling earlier today. I got some feedback from someone I like and trust. It wasn’t positive feedback. Me and mine had fucked up something in our approach. But then I had clarity. I knew what we needed to do to fix it. I saw the path that would lead to our success together. And I just knew it. In every part of me. And the best part is when I share it with my partner they will get it too. In their mind and body. That’s clarity.
Daily overstimulation is starting to rub the pressure sores of America’s downer induced depression into a full blown mental health crisis. Like, even more than usual. War with Russia in the imagination, inflation and market volatility coaxing a recession, culture war skirmishes over every basic fact in the pandemic, along with generalized anxiety are fucking us up focus wise. And every propaganda outlet and publicist on the planet is having a field day.
I’m listing to The Prodigy’s Breath and mumbling lyrics like pyschosomatic insane. So I guess, come play my game?
I try not to listen too much music as it overstimulates my nervous system to be honest so its kind of rare for me to have Spotify playing. I’ve got a finely tuned propaganda radar that benefits from sensing subtle shifts in tone and extremely online discourse. I can’t do that if I’m too worked up from the rough stimulus that comes from pop music. I mostly use it to run my portfolio and investing but sometimes I think I should really be used in the service of some autocrat or multi-national. I’m the doubt factory
I guess it is nice I can make a buck during the end of the empire. I’m one of those post structuralism, post-capitalism babies. A regular Bane “born to the darkness” of hyper objects like markets and climate change. So I guess I’d better be molded to being the kind of villain that survives a world of agitprop and meme warfare. Thanks Adbusters!
Frankly I’m having a fucking blast. Sure I’m scared I don’t have my homestead property all shored up for civilization hiccups, but I’m of the mind that the crumbles is going to take a while so might as well enjoy the gains that come from a massive upheaval. I guess its true venture capitalists are ghouls. I mean at least we aren’t private equity carrion birds but it is wild that the system rewards a class of people that invest in creative destruction.
But even as I want to paint myself as bad, I do stereotypically think what venture capital does is often good. We can’t predict second order effects. Chaos theory doesn’t let us see all the future paths. But stochastic as shit power laws are just math so we’ve got a shot at accidentally making things better. So while the agitprop tries to sway your opinions might I recommend you just Breath? That is my professional advice.
I used to be something of a perma-bear. I was always somewhat convinced that bad shit was just around the corner. I guess you can see that in my persistent interest in doomer culture. But as the world continues to experience “the crumbles” I’ve softened my general stance on everything is awful.
Crypto is arguably responsible for much of my stance. For all the bitching about Web3’s lack of decentralization and heady “takes” on how this has all been done before, I actaully do this think is the next wave. Do I think we are due for a lot of crashing and failures and unrealized promise? Also yes.
So when the market decided to do a January bubble bursting I was surprised at how sanguine I was. I kind of didn’t believe it was going to turn into a full blown recession rout. Now this is not to say I don’t think stuff is frothy, as I clearly do. But I think the weirding has so confused markets that who knows when contagion bubble popping is going to hit for real. I don’t think we are there yet.
And indeed I started this post in the morning and by market close stuff kinda bounced. Maybe a dead cat bounce. But who even knows is my point. I don’t think we will see a genuine correction till a real market leader like Facebook or Microsoft pulls a Worldcom or an Enron. I wouldn’t be shocked if it was Tesla but I ain’t playing that short. I think it’s more likely that “Meta” fucks itself in the transition to the metaverse or whatever and then we get a real systemic crash. Right now no one gives a single fuck if all of crypto goes to zero. We need much bigger game to drive a recession. Systemic Lehman brother shit.
Which is long way of me making an elaborate Community joke. That TV show with the Talk Soup guy. They had a plot where someone misspoke or made a bad joke and the theme at their community college dance was “Bear Down for Midterms” and no it isn’t a real phrase. My basic feeling on a recession is that the Fed will toss us a couple rate hikes to deal with inflation. But half of America is convinced the pandemic isn’t over. Congress could be talked into more stimulus since the midterms are bearing down on us and well the Democrats are going to lose. The exponential age, the end of American empire and global weirding means no one knows what is going on. The next real marker on our calendar is the midterms. So bear down for midterms. I’ll be wash trading to get some actual cost basis losses till then.
