If someone’s ever nice enough to ask you this, it’s generally a good idea to have a pointed, specific, answer to this question. It just takes a little bit of preparation before the meeting, or even a more intentional mindset during the meeting, to see how the other person can make a contribution.

If you’re trying to help someone else, and they don’t have an answer, you can even go a step further. “Would it be helpful if I…?”

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Your commitments will follow you wherever you live, but not where you visit. Living requires maintenance, whereas visits don’t. So while you can skip the gym for a week or hire a sitter for your cat, you don’t really get to do that when you actually move somewhere. When I visited New York City several times in the 2010s, I would tag along on my friend’s business trips or stay with another friend (sometimes both). My friends’ generosity shielded me from the financial pressures of Manhattan. 

Living somewhere is more magical and ordinary than you’d think. During my first trips to NYC, I wanted to do as much NYC stuff as I could. I did business meetings at the library bar at the NoMad. I bought my first necklace from A$AP Eva. I visited as many magazine shops as I could. But there is no way that I could do it all in a visit—since living here, with much less effort, I’ve done a lot more, but I’m also not doing that every day. As a modification of the bolded statement, the magical things feel like the most ordinary ones too. I was shopping in Soho one cloudy day and coming out of the store to sunshine, and realizing I didn’t need to take the subway—I had enough time to walk to the place where I was meeting a friend. It was a great day.

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Whenever you can, however you can, stored and published in some digital and searchable format for posterity.

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A few days after we came home from the hospital, I sent a letter to a friend, including a photo of my son and some first impressions of fatherhood. He responded, simply, “Everything is possible again.” It was the perfect thing to write, because that was exactly how it felt. We could retell our stories and make them better, more representative or aspirational. Or we could choose to tell different stories. The world itself had another chance.

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Competitions pay the bills

Competitions take place because we value stories, drama, and craft. Today, this manifests itself in award shows, lists, and big numbers. These are all organizing structures for us to discuss who the best is. 

Competitions are also inherently challenging. We develop admiration for people who can rise up to the occasion, and we are in awe of people who can do things that we can never imagine ourselves doing. If you’re practicing your creative work, when you win a contest, your victory makes us aware of your work, notice your craft, and curious about the journey you took to get here. 

For many people doing creative work, winning a competition is at least part of why they start doing art competitively in the first place.

Of course, a competition is just an imagined reality (or an imagined barrier). If you achieve what you set out to, even if it’s not first place, you can still win on your terms.

(But people who organize and watch the competitions don’t want you to believe that.)

School doesn’t teach you how to deal with competition

The problem is competitions create situations with extreme amounts of pressure. There’s the pressure to:

• Defeat your rivals and to perform at your best
• Make money—and not lose it 
• Win your first time and defend, or just to avoid losing 

This pressure is completely the opposite of the pressure that actually fuels creative work. Creative work is fueled by good health, curiosity, exploration, openness, and a love of the process. 

At some point, in order to focus on the work, a person must lose themselves in the process and temporarily forget about results like how a competition will turn out.

The best competition is when you decide what success means

It helps to know that the work itself and the pageantry are two different things. Competitions are about power, promotion, and perception. 

You can still participate in a competition to pay the bills, without needing to get first place. You can choose to focus your creativity to be about the work, and on a definition of success that you set, not one that’s set for you by someone else. Whatever happens in the competition will happen.

Whenever you hand over the power of validating your work to someone else, including a competition organizer or winner, they become your boss. 
Imagine a situation where only you can validate your own work; whether you win first place or fifth, become a winner or a finalist or just a nominee, or make more money or less, doesn’t matter as much as the process of you making the work. And maybe if you had more time you could’ve made better work, but it’s nothing to be ashamed about.

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Personal life: wash your face, work out, eat healthy and regularly, feed your cat, shower, do laundry, present yourself, journal, write, draw, etc. Do things that make you feel alive. This is actually the most important foundation.

Professional life: keep your finances in order and be an effective person. Focus on projects that move your OKRs forward or fit with org priorities. Work on projects that you want to be known for. Be a good collaborator and manage your time and energy well.

Relationships: focus on your partner, your self, your family, your friends. Avoid spending time on distractions that aren’t important.

The post Foundation first appeared first on Herbert Lui.

Write what you want to live: “Dan didn’t start Trapital because he was the most experienced, knowledgeable, Hip-Hop insider. He became an most experienced, knowledgeable, Hip-Hop insider because he started Trapital.” (via Jay Clouse.) I’ve written about writing the book you want to live, Dan wrote the newsletter he wanted to live. 

Make money on sponsorships, reports, and consulting. In fact, Dan actually shut down the paid version of his newsletter. If you want to write for a living, don’t get stuck on the medium. If you love books, make books—but don’t make the mistake of thinking that’s going to be the thing that makes you money. See a similar looking funnel from Chris Do.

Start soon and start with what you’ve got. “Dan started this podcast doing 42 episodes without video. He posted the audio on YouTube, but never included a video component until that 43rd episode. And he didn’t overthink it. This first video was blurry, he didn’t have a professional camera, and he even had his office door open during the conversation.”

P.S., I had the pleasure of guest posting for Trapital a couple of years back, it was super fun.

P.P.S., Chenell is up to something interesting here with the breakdowns. I did it for Slack a few years back, also fun.

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You will never be happy if you continue to search for what happiness consists of. You will never live if you are looking for the meaning of life.

HAPPINESS.—A butterfly, which when pursued, seems always just beyond your grasp, but if you sit down quietly may alight upon you.

New Orleans Crescent

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My friend Abdel’s lament, after watching a student “solve” the Rubik’s Cube on his desk just like the YouTube video showed her how: “You need to value your ignorance.”

When I played video games as a young boy, I constantly referred to cheat codes and guides. I wanted to play the game more efficiently. 

Now, I deliberately go out of my way to avoid these items. I don’t want my experience to be influenced by it. I value the joy of discovery, which is impossible without ignorance.

There’s probably something here about the curse of knowledge (“The better you know something, the less you remember about how hard it was to learn…”), or how external perspectives can help you break your Solomon’s Paradox, but that’s not what I want to say. 

In order to discover, you must experience ignorance. If you don’t value your ignorance, then you also won’t value the discovery. Curt Gabrielson writes, “If you tell somebody something, you’ve forever robbed them of the opportunity to discover it for themselves.” (Via Jim O’Shaughnessy).

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Sherwood, the media arm of the retail trading platform, Robinhood has poached a half-dozen high profile journalists to lead its Spring launch. Walter Hickey, the Business Insider data guru who won a Pulitzer for his role in a graphic novel-style treatment of the oppression of Uyghurs, who will be executive editor of the the new venture, and joined by Axios’ Matt Phillips; the former Vox data journalist Rani Molla; Jack Raines, who is leaving the Exec Sum newsletter; and the former Gawker and Outline chief Leah Finnegan, who will be features and magazine editor. Sam Ro, who will keep running his own TKer substack, one of our favorites, will also be a consulting editor on the project. They’re joining a team of about a dozen working on the Snacks newsletter and Chartr data product. “These editors and writers are wildly creative and deeply experienced, and are not only defining the voice of our news experience, but actively working to move journalistic storytelling forward in ways that really matter,” said Sherwood president and EIC Josh Topolsky.

What’s more curious is the original vision for Sherwood and its publication Snacks. In Axios a year ago:

Robinhood will support the creation of the outlet to start, but Topolsky plans to create commercial opportunities for the editorial products he’s building….

“It’s a significant, long-term investment,” Topolsky said when asked about Robinhood’s commitment to the new outlet. There are “a lot of resources being dedicated to this project.”

Topolsky plans to hire dozens of employees this year, including reporters, editors and social media content creators.

In addition to Snacks, he hopes to launch new newsletter products across specific verticals related to business and finance.

One idea he’s considering is creating specific newsletters that cover high-profile companies, such as Tesla or Disney….

Topolsky likened Sherwood to the media arm of Bloomberg LP, a financial software company owned by Michael Bloomberg. Bloomberg Media is supported by Bloomberg LP but operates independently.

“Robinhood essentially has created like a ‘Terminal’ for everybody,” Topolsky said. News and information “can be a great value add.”

(I had no idea about Josh’s history with Bloomberg.) 

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