July 2022: Capacity, Fruit, Energy, Connection
What I Did This Month
Published “Building Community Capacity” and “How DAOs Create Community Capacity.” Also published "Put Information Where Developers Want It” for Codex.
Camp Social started onboarding communities. If you are a part of a DAO and want to build connections between members, check us out.
Open sourced code for Write Concise and Smart Young BC. Worked on a new Chrome extension to help people learn hotkeys and keyboard shortcuts for their favourite site. Made some changes to Mocha Match, including options on what to do with leftover users.
Read Third World to First by Lee Kwan Yew (the first 200 pages are excellent, the next 500 are skippable), Deep Nutrition (the Twitter bro’s nutrition bible), and The Precipice (there are a lot of risks to humanity).
I painted (poorly), went to Ikea, ate a bunch of fruit (it is apricot season) and more BBQ, drove a go-kart, saw a big moon, Luisa became a citizen, hung out with lots of friends, and met plenty of cool people.
Thoughts
Doing lots of things require lots of energy. We know this at a personal and geographical level, but we rarely think about it at an organizational level. Many organizations that succeed manage to have higher energy levels for longer than others. It starts at the top. In my review of Working Backwards, I stated that a lot of the book is hinting that Amazon’s success stems from high energy executives and enabling them to stay high energy over time.
What you tell yourself and the people around you impact your energy a lot. Changing these two things can dramatically impact your life. Reshaping the areas you can control, shapes many of the areas you can’t.
We are in the early days of internet communities impacting the real world. Part of what inspired my thinking around community capacity this month is that many communities are way below their potential capacity. Their impact on their members and the world could be much higher with some aspirations towards goals and basic project management skills. Of course, saying this is easy, but implementing it is difficult.
Areas I’d like to learn more about: end-to-end housing development (from an empty lot to houses for sale), personalized nutrition and medicine, computer hardware (especially specifically designed for AI/machine learning), religious denomination effectiveness (and how to leverage that for communities).
Encouraging people to experiment more with all things in life would be a good thing, right? Like before focusing on one option, you should learn about and test the other options. Theorizing about them isn’t enough. When in doubt, try 100 things.
A lot of the effort is in the little details.
There are still a lot of utilities to be built for DAOs, and still lots of potential for DAOs to make an impact in the broader world. I think DeFi, NFTs, and altcoins have all had their time to shine, and DAOs will have theirs soon enough. The ecosystem needs to be ready for it.
Young talent flows to areas where permissionless opportunity exists. At the moment, this is largely “crypto” but in the past, it has been other frontiers, education, war, and cities. There will be more.
What people are living their globally maxima lives? Out of all possible options, what is the best way for them to spend their time? Alternatively, out of all possible people, what would they be the best at?
Recommendations
Nabeel’s “Advice That Actually Worked For Me.” I identify very strongly with the advice that energy is important, do important things first, tell the right stories about yourself, and think in writing. Basic but constantly need to be repeated and reminded. Along similar lines, Nat Friedman’s (GitHub CEO) beliefs.
Where are all the world historical figures? Could you just say you want to be one and work to become one? Someone is trying.
How Coinbase operates efficiently at scale (single-threaded leadership, ownership over P&Ls, small teams, shipping products).
When others are patient or lazy, it pays to be impatient. Being patient is a thing that isn’t doing the thing.
Matt Lakeman is underrated, “Everything You Need to Know About Napoleon Bonaparte” is an excellent and useful summary. I’ve also been listening to Age of Napoleon.
Always interesting listening to the most elite talk about their craft, and Lance Armstrong is no exception. Matt Clifford also has lots of interesting ideas about expanding entrepreneurship. Balaji inspired some ideas with “The Network State” but I still need to dig in more.
Reality is 3D, frameworks are 2D. Let the garbage flow to get at the clean water. Everyone has ideas, it’s about getting up and doing them. Inspiration for creators: Not But comics. Bible recommends testing it. Be output focused. To be better at your job, go to the gym. Innovation is hard, social product innovation is harder. Avoid yacht problems.
“The average illiterate shepherd in 1500 BC had memorized more verse and slept in more sacred groves than you will read or see in your life.” You need to learn everything. If a book sucks, and you skip it, it still counts.
Income spent on rent by country. Crypto Metaverse DAUs (shockingly bad). Canadian house prices vs income (vs America). A proposal for the future city of Hyperdrive, Nebraska. Antidepressants must be bad for you because if they worked people would take them recreationally. People are working on fake things.
Them’s the breaks. Dril right yet again. What’s your squat to backflip PR? Tony Hawk cover band featuring Tony Hawk. Halo Forge was ahead of its time.
Bruno Cucinelli is cool. RIP Dee Hock, underrated Twitter poster and creator of Visa.
Autoregex is great.
Upcoming
Writing on DAOs, global maxima, BeReal, how headphones are bad for you and more. An update on Smart Young BC too.
The (potential) launch my new hotkey and keyboard shortcut learning Chrome extension. Continue to tinker, improve, and grow other projects.
Continue building and meeting cool people, enjoying summer.