A state of the union, perhaps

Some interesting things I've been thinking about, reading, and working on.

Aug 16, 2022

Hey all,

It has been some time since I have published anything. I’ve realized it’s pretty challenging to write often when I’m busy!

I hoard away ideas and journal entries and hope that someday they’ll materialize into something meaningful with enough inspiration. In the meantime, I wanted to share some scattered thoughts and updates.

As always, if you’re looking for something else, feel free to delete or unsubscribe :)

"The cost of failure is as close to zero as it's ever been in the history of the world."
– Harley Finkelstein (Shopify President)

What I’m Thinking About

You can just do things. It sounds so stupid to say, but you just can. You can throw meetups with people just by inviting them, you can apply for jobs you are way underqualified for, you can rent out spaces and throw events, ask for free stuff, you can consult for people for $50/hr, you can email people you look up to for advice. We’re practically living in Minecraft, you can shake up the tried and true and make your own world exactly how you want it.
The world doesn’t reward closed-door discussions, ideas, fifty-page business proposals, idle plans, or anything you’re ever “planning on doing”. The world rewards people who build quickly and take action. Don’t waste too much time thinking about what you can build, or which family you’ll see, when. Just do it.
Something I only recently became aware of when I was reading Make: $1,000,000 is actually a lot closer than most people realize. Most of us have some sort of skill or talent that people want to learn and is worth some marketable amount of money. There are 7.7 billion people on the earth and you only need to sell 10,000 of them something for $100 to have an extremely strong start towards a retire-able amount of money.

A lot of people struggle with setting boundaries, myself included. However, many of us (myself included) also expect others to somehow know that. The first (and most often forgotten) step for improving boundaries in life and in work is defining + sharing them.
The gig marketplace is one of the most unbelievable things and I don’t understand why more people don’t realize this. You can hire someone anywhere in the world – for nearly any marketable skill – on websites like Upwork or Fiverr. I’m constantly leveraging this for rogue side-projects!
It’s incredibly challenging to balance too many things at once.
Hobbies are so important! Find things that give you energy outside of day-to-day life and work. I’ve taken up golf over the last few months and it has been extremely fulfilling. The hobby is even better if you can share it with friends.

Content I’ve Enjoyed

Start With Creation
This video on the Full Story of Mr Beast is incredible, as well as any other content around his empire such as: this video about his manager or Mr Beast on Joe Rogan. He has been described as the “Walt Disney” of YouTube and his story is incredibly impressive and inspiring.
what we find in other people
Steve Jobs On Recruiting People
Working Multiple Jobs
A Brief History of Nobody Wants to Work Anymore
There was an incredible challenge over the last month: I Survived On $0.01 For 30 Days. In this series, he daily-vlogged his experience traveling across the country starting with only a penny. The raw talent it took to orchestrate a story, hire a team around this, upload daily, and fulfill on it all is unparalleled. The videos collectively garnished roughly 215 million views and he raised $1.4M for Feeding America. Powerful what you can do with a penny!
0544 – a man lives in a box
Chase ideas not skills

What I’m Working On

Pneuma

We met as a leadership team and set a vision for the next year. It has been really refreshing because we were growing, but there were still a lot of opportunities for us to define what towards.
We have brought on a lot of people since I last spoke. We’re constantly hiring for talented website professionals as well as SEO analysts/content writers!
We sent out a culture survey to our team and received incredible marks. So excited to work with awesome people.

Side Projects

My friends and I launched a local community for professionals over the last few months! Our first event was a raving success! Here’s a cool video from that! Here’s our website as well.
Speaking of websites, I updated my personal website. I’m really excited about it! Alex, if you still read this, yes I’m still out here changing this every season.
I was struggling to find easy organizations to do drop-in volunteering around Grand Rapids. I scraped organizations from Google and various other sites and built a website that will have an easy filterable directory for people. Still a work in progress, but hoping to have it live next week with 55+ organizations!
- These types of projects are both fulfilling and extremely fun to build. I’d love to have a portfolio of these passion projects someday.
I started messing around with growing a TikTok account to later flip and sell. I was able to get it to around 150 followers with minimum effort and using virtual assistants but found the work to be unfulfilling and I stopped trying to do this. I did this back in 2017 with an Instagram account that I got to ~20K followers or so. Sharing candidly as some ideas just really suck but are worth trying.