One way to size the NFT market would be a bottom up approach – looking at the current market cap of Topshots, Cryptopunks, Artblocks, etc and projecting their growth. Nansen estimates the market cap of the top collections to be greater than $4 Billion.

While securities NFTs potentially constitute a massive market, the infrastructure and regulations required are still in nascent stages of development. Comparatively, collectible NFTs have exploded this year into a multi-billion dollar market with trading volume recently surpassing $100m daily.

As mentioned above, liquidity is both essential, and problematic. It’s expensive, mercenary, and concentrated within the hands of a few entities.

And a liquidity mining program requires a protocol to dilute its existing supply.

DeFi runs on liquidity. DEXs need it to facilitate token swaps, money market protocols like Aave or Compound need it for lending and borrowing activity, and more.

Historic web traffic data for DeFi protocols shows us how DeFi adoption has unfolded over time at the regional level.

The data suggests that while grassroots cryptocurrency adoption generally is highest in emerging markets, DeFi adoption is strongest in high-income countries that already had substantial cryptocurrency usage, especially amongst traders and institutional investors.

Unlike the briefly ascendant proprietary networks such as CompuServe, AOL, and Prodigy, content and network would be separated. Indeed, the internet had and has no main menu, no CEO, no public stock offering, no formal organization at all. There are only engineers who meet every so often to refine its suggested communications protocols that hardware and software makers, and network builders, are then free to take up as they please.

Rather than a single centralized network modeled after the legacy telephone system, operated by a government or a few massive utilities, the internet was designed to allow any device anywhere to interoperate with any other device, allowing any provider able to bring whatever networking capacity it had to the growing party. And because the network’s creators did not mean to monetize, much less monopolize, any of it, the key was for desirable content to be provided naturally by the network’s users, some of whom would act as content producers or hosts, setting up watering holes for others to frequent.

Practice in 20 minute bursts

Create fast feedback loops.

Eliminate barriers to practice.

Obtain critical tools.

If you want to get good at anything where real-life performance matters, you have to actually practice that skill in context.

Deconstructing a skill into the smallest possible sub-skills;

Are there any consumer-level privacy/data preserving tools or online hygiene techniques you might recommend? Certainly we advise to keep all sensitive data off-chain and use ZKPs or hashes of linked data (and other methods) if information must be linked to blockchain operations and functions.

The value of permissioned blockchain is hard to understand since it does not implement the most revolutionary aspect of public blockchains – i.e. trust minimization and elimination of central authority, achieved via decentralized consensus. Instead of eliminating central authority, permissioned blockchain replaces it with task force authority managed by consortia. Task forces are good at producing studies and academic papers but often fail at getting projects implemented. Too many cooks in the kitchen translates to competing priorities and budgets.

I intimately believe that DeFi will eat TradFi AND that the proportions of the markets in DeFi will eventually look the same as the ones in TradFi.

We’ve seen how debt markets protocols like AAVE or COMPOUND started to eat their equivalent in TradFi and CeFi.

But this gigantic market is about to be disrupted by decentralized derivatives. Not because derivatives traders care about decentralization, but because it brings real added value to the table.

Below are a few examples...

And if you want to see how ridiculously predictable technological progress has been for the last 60 years, I recommend watching this video. It is awe-inspiring...

To create the 10-Year Rule, Kurzweil plotted the largest milestones of biological and technological development on a single graph…

“My models show that we are doubling the paradigm-shift rate every decade.” — Ray Kurzweil

Furthermore, when I look at the last 40 years, major events blend together. The pace changes, but then I get used to it. It is hard to feel the exponential nature either way. Sure, I can intellectually understand exponential change, but I don’t feel it.

Self-deprecate but don’t undercut yourself.

After all that’s all that community is about in the first place — groups of passionate people coming together to connect over things they’re passionate about.

The community creator economy relies on individuals to facilitate connection with one another. Whether it’s providing content to connect around (Rosieland), or bringing people together over a shared topic (r/lightsabers), or even connecting over a similar passion (Makerpad).

Look at it from a fan perspective and you’ll see this has been going on for some time now: sports fans make pilgrimages to major games, fans of the musical Hamilton trekked around the world and coughed up some serious dough to participate, and some book series fans participate in unique traditions and events (like what Pottermore is to Harry Potter fans), while startup junkies might participate in a hackathon (Startup Weekend).

From no-coders, communities about communities, lightsaber builders, or even ADHD comic creators — community has become a major perk for their fans, and something they’ll even cough up a pretty penny for.  They’re looking for folks just like them – folks that want to nerd out and geek out about the same sort of world they’re interested in.No longer selling services or resources, these creators are selling access to a community for connection. Exclusive rights to be part of that exclusive inner circle.

In comparison to other startups — community creators have a different mindset than indie businesses, they want to see a change in the world, and a change in the world that starts with themselves.

Never, ever say that you have no competitors. That signals naivete. Great markets draw competitors, and so if you really have no competition, you must not be in a great market. Even if you really believe you have no competitors, create a competitive landscape slide with adjacent companies in related market segments and be ready to talk crisply about how you are like and unlike those adjacent companies.

Marketing risk -- will this startup be able to cut through the noise? How much will marketing cost? Do the economics of customer acquisition -- the cost to acquire a customer, and the revenue that customer will generate -- work?

Financing risk -- after we invest in this round, how many additional rounds of financing will be required for the company to become profitable, and what will the dollar total be? How certain are we about these estimates? How do we know?

Market risk -- is there a market for the product (using the term product and service interchangeably)? Will anyone want it? Will they pay for it? How much will they pay? How do we know?

as a board member, as an angel investor, as an advisor, as a friend of various founders, and as a participant in various venture capital funds.

Conversely, you see a surprising number of really well-run startups that have all aspects of operations completely buttoned down, HR policies in place, great sales model, thoroughly thought-through marketing plan, great interview processes, outstanding catered food, 30" monitors for all the programmers, top tier VCs on the board -- heading straight off a cliff due to not ever finding product/market fit.

Carried a step further, I believe that the life of any startup can be divided into two parts: before product/market fit (call this "BPMF") and after product/market fit ("APMF"). When you are BPMF, focus obsessively on getting to product/market fit. Do whatever is required to get to product/market fit. Including changing out people, rewriting your product, moving into a different market, telling customers no when you don't want to, telling customers yes when you don't want to, raising that fourth round of highly dilutive venture capital -- whatever is required. When you get right down to it, you can ignore almost everything else. I'm not suggesting that you do ignore everything else -- just that judging from what I've seen in successful startups, you can.

You can always feel when product/market fit isn't happening. The customers aren't quite getting value out of the product, word of mouth isn't spreading, usage isn't growing that fast, press reviews are kind of "blah", the sales cycle takes too long, and lots of deals never close. And you can always feel product/market fit when it's happening. The customers are buying the product just as fast as you can make it -- or usage is growing just as fast as you can add more servers. Money from customers is piling up in your company checking account. You're hiring sales and customer support staff as fast as you can. Reporters are calling because they've heard about your hot new thing and they want to talk to you about it. You start getting entrepreneur of the year awards from Harvard Business School. Investment bankers are staking out your house. You could eat free for a year at Buck's.

Great products are really, really hard to build.

Well, first question: Since team is the thing you have the most control over at the start, and everyone wants to have a great team, what does a great team actually get you?

Market matters most.

This is the story of videoconferencing, and workflow software, and micropayments.

This is the story of search keyword advertising, and Internet auctions, and TCP/IP routers.

And when you have a great market, the team is remarkably easy to upgrade on the fly.

In a great market -- a market with lots of real potential customers -- the market pulls product out of the startup.

If you ask entrepreneurs or VCs which of team, product, or market is most important, many will say team. This is the obvious answer, in part because in the beginning of a startup, you know a lot more about the team than you do the product, which hasn't been built yet, or the market, which hasn't been explored yet.

Some people have been objecting to my classification as follows: "How great can a product be if nobody wants it?" In other words, isn't the quality of a product defined by how appealing it is to lots of customers? No. Product quality and market size are completely different. Here's the classic scenario: the world's best software application for an operating system nobody runs. Just ask any software developer targeting the market for BeOS, Amiga, OS/2, or NeXT applications what the difference is between great product and big market.

cost of acquiring a customer isn't higher than the revenue that customer will generate

The quality of a startup's product can be defined as how impressive the product is to one customer or user who actually uses it: How easy is the product to use? How feature rich is it? How fast is it? How extensible is it? How polished is it? How many (or rather, how few) bugs does it have?

The caliber of a startup team can be defined as the suitability of the CEO, senior staff, engineers, and other key staff relative to the opportunity in front of them. You look at a startup and ask, will this team be able to optimally execute against their opportunity? I focus on effectiveness as opposed to experience, since the history of the tech industry is full of highly successful startups that were staffed primarily by people who had never "done it before".

And, for those of us who are students of startup failure -- what's most dangerous: a bad team, a weak product, or a poor market?

At any given startup, the team will range from outstanding to remarkably flawed; the product will range from a masterpiece of engineering to barely functional; and the market will range from booming to comatose.

What the virtual economy will look like in the future is a blurry picture, but every day, it’s gradually getting sharper.

Of course, NFTs are not the only form of digital ownership. Cryptocurrencies too, while fungible—meaning each token is interchangeable, like for like—can also be used to store value in apps and games.

And there’s excitement that NFTs are a way for content creators to earn income more directly from their fans. Through online marketplaces and auctions that anyone can take part in, they are able to find how much their art is really worth.

Others have been looking at how NFTs can create revenue for their holders. EulerBeats, owned by Ethereum studio ConsenSys (which also funds an editorially independent Decrypt), created 27 LPs where the holder of each LP gets royalties each time someone creates a “print” of the LP, akin to buying a vinyl plate with a licensed music track on it.

Some artists have been experimenting with the makeup of NFTs themselves. Beeple created an NFT that changed form depending on the outcome of the 2020 US election. The final version turned into a picture of a lifeless Trump—if he had won, it would have shown a crowned Trump storming through fire.

This started in 2017 when CryptoKitties really caught fire, before the term NFT was being widely used. The platform lets you collect and breed digital cats, each with their own characteristics. Ownership of each cat is represented by an NFT, stored in your digital wallet. CryptoKitties was so popular at the time that it clogged the Ethereum network, leading developer Dapper Labs to build out the separate Flow blockchain to host NBA Top Shot.

With the birth of new technology comes an explosion of experimentation. Developers and investors are not only building out the blockchain technology underpinning NFTs, but countless projects are trying different ways of using them.

Alex Masmej, CEO of NFT-focused social network Showtime, told Decrypt, “I can think of more NFT use cases than [use cases for] cryptocurrencies: social media content, collectibles, physical item receipts, domain names, advertising slots, etc. If Facebook controls our virtual world, this is pretty dystopian. NFTs allow us to be economically free in our increasingly online world.”

Decentralized digital ownership opens up a world of possibilities. You could have an in-game item that gets transferred between different games. You could have secret rooms in multiple virtual worlds that can only be accessed with a rare NFT. You can own land in a virtual world, tokenize it and sell portions of it to other people. Everything is on the table.

The fundamental difference here is that NFTs are decentralizeddecentralized. They run on a blockchainblockchain that is run by thousands of people around the world, where transactions remain as long as the blockchain lasts. But this means they exist on their own, and while any app or game can integrate them, it can’t possess them.

What’s important about NFTs is that each is unique. Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey sold an NFT that represents the first ever tweet—and only one exists. So, whoever owns that NFT has some sort of a claim to the tweet.

What is new is owning this digital value without being reliant on a third party. In all of those previous examples, if the company shuts down, your in-game currency becomes worthless.

The idea of digital items having value is not new. On Reddit, receiving upvotes for your posts gives you Karma, which can help to elevate your status in the Reddit community. And plenty of games like Runescape and World of Warcraft have digital resources that can be spent within the game—sometimes people will even buy up other accounts that have big reserves. Most apps nowadays have some kind of in-game currency, like the K stars in Kim Kardashian’s app Hollywood.

hey've let the concept of digital ownership out of Pandora’s box, and it’s here to stay.

So, NFTs face a host of problems. But these technical and legal challenges will either be fixed, or new technology will arise that solves them.

On the legal front, there is a big lack of clarity. In many cases, it’s unclear whether possessing the NFT actually gives you ownership of the linked artwork. And in some cases, when companies issue NFTs, like NBA Top Shot, they make it clear that the NFTs do not carry reproduction or commercialization rights, meaning the ownership is somewhat limited.

On the technical front, NFTs are really just cryptographic signatures that point to a location on the Internet where the artwork or video lies. So, if the artwork is changed in that location, the NFT will change (regardless of what the NFT owner wants). Plus, while the NFT can’t be duplicated, the artwork can be reproduced identically online—casting questions about what value the NFT actually holds.

Right now, however, they’re certainly in some kind of market mania. Crypto artist Beeple recently sold a collection of NFTs for $69 million at Christie’s auction house. These rocketing prices have led to a gold rush of sorts, with artists, musicians, brands and celebrities auctioning off their own NFTs to their most ardent followers. While there’s plenty of value flowing around, as Beeple himself noted, they could be in a bubble poised to pop.

This NFT sold for $69 million at Christie's. Image: Beeple

“People just like collecting interesting things and they’ll keep doing that. Whether they’re virtual or physical, it doesn’t matter,” Moe Levin, CEO of NFT hardware maker Qonos, told Decrypt.

And while it can be absurd to some to think that digital-only items can have real value, the more our lives become intertwined with the metaverse, the more we’ll acknowledge it.

They introduce scarcity to a cyberspace where anything can be duplicated a million times over.

ou talk to your friends through your smartphone, you speak to your colleagues in Slack, you jump on video conferences over Zoom, you tweet at people you’ve never met, you record events in your Google calendar, you date through an app, and if you’re bored, you play games against other people online. This isn’t all happening in a single virtual world, like Second Life, but it’s not that far off.

I call this the Learning Loop mental model, and it is the fundamental learning process of the universe. It’s a durable model of learning that will last you the rest of your life. Each step builds on the next in a compounding loop. Information. Taking in information via people, info, and experiences. Algorithms. Processing that information unconsciously and via reflective questions. Experimentation. Taking action on the reflections to identify and move forward on the highest leverage actions without procrastination. Feedback. Identifying key variables and rapidly seeing the impact of your experiments on those variables.

Boyd's Law of Iteration: speed of iteration beats quality of iteration. So what does iteration mean in this context? It means how quickly you go through Boyd’s OODA loop. In the aerial dogfight, the loop looks like this… Observe the other aircraft Orient yourself by analyzing the situation Decide what to do Act (steer or fire)

The East Cape has more development in the pipeline over the next few years.

If you do not have access to banking services, you finally have an alternative to your local institutions which may not be reliable, may not offer low-cost services, or may exclude you for a variety of reasons. Globally, 1.7 billion people cannot access simple banking services. Billions more find it hard to access sophisticated financial services, stunting growth. 

Decentralized finance or DeFi is the term used for applications that use a type of software called “blockchains” from the simple transfer of value to more comprehensive financial activities. Most DeFi activity occurs on Ethereum. These decentralized applications (Dapps) and protocols (instructions for interactions between computers) allow for anyone to access them and allow anyone to build services on top of them without requiring permission. DeFi provides solutions and new capabilities to the same timeless economic needs: Pay, Save, Trade, Invest.

For anyone hodling idle assets, wondering how to put them to work, providing liquidity to a platform like Uniswap is one of the simplest ways of understanding how to earn a passive income with DeFi.

One of the easiest ways to learn how to earn a passive income with DeFi is by becoming a Liquidity Provider (LP). Uniswap is a decentralized exchange whereby users can swap ERC-20 tokens directly from a web3 wallet to almost any other ERC-20 token. The key difference between DEXs such as Uniswap and centralized exchanges (CEXs) such as Coinbase and Binance, is that the tokens are made available by liquidity providers

DeFi has attracted the attention of many traditional traders.

DeFi allows users to participate with much smaller investments than are required by many traditional services. As an example of how to earn a passive income with DeFi, an investor could gain access to the price of gold or stocks via the blockchain, without the need for a vault or a brokerage account.

Another factor that makes DeFi so popular is the proliferation of stablecoins.

Why is DeFi So Popular?

However, there are many good reasons that the majority of DeFi has been built on Ethereum.

I wouldn’t be able to highlight a specific project, but I would say that I’m a big fan of deflationary tokens. I’ve seen those become the most profitable asset to traders in the long term.

And also you can share that this is an ethical value chain, that when you go to the grocery, you say well, I'm going to I'm going to buy the coffee, because not only is a good coffee, we have the right quality, but also it's a coffee that promotes social kabita and promotes a positive impact to the environment.

We also believe that when everybody are in the blockchain, the transaction costs are going to be reduced, every at every trailer of any application, you might want them to have a physical document and just tell the son of the front the front burner, not only we're talking about the quantity of documents, also, they also have to wait to receive the documents. So, there are a lot of efficent that blockchain can bring, and also going to increase reputation. Because if you if you provide more transparency, the consumer are going to have more trust in you. And at the end of the day, you're going to increase reputation reputation for company reputation for a brand also for IBM, and also we want to position our small farmer in in the new market is a market that is inclusive.

And what is happening in agriculture is that the small farmer are invisible and, and the consumer are blind. We don't see what our our foot come from, we don't see how our foot work prepare. And also we don't see the small farmer and the same is happening with the with the farmer. So we believe that blockchain technology bring the opportunity to have a radical transparency that at the end of the day is going to improve the market and also the business process.

So, in the case of paper, we are doing blockchain asset to to accelerate our mission our mission to end hunger and poverty why we got taken care of there. And more than two years ago when we start working with blockchain we stipulate ambition. And we say well I want to retire what role in the in the agricultural sector is to create a blockchain network we are farmer can have asset to working capital, tannic acid and assets to fair market. And our approach is to work with with partnership with government with university another, another organization

My favorite types of passive-income-earning alternative hard assets are real estate and agriculture.

Anyone operating a business outside the United States should be using an offshore corporation. The key to maximizing the tax benefits of incorporating offshore is to retain profits over and above the Foreign Earned Income Exclusion (FEIE) in your offshore corporation. This allows you to accumulate (in effect) unlimited amounts of tax-deferred dollars in your company.

But location is just as important. To that end, buying into beachfront property (or as near to the beach as you can get) almost anywhere in the world… or into a top touristed city can put you ahead of the game.

Buying in an undervalued market, like Brazil or Colombia right now (thanks to a favorable currency exchange), is one way of setting yourself up for appreciation in your property value.

What Are You In It For? Capital Appreciation Vs. Rental Income

Examples include the steam engine, railroad, interchangeable parts, electricity, electronics, material handling, mechanization, control theory (automation), the automobile, the computer, the Internet, medicine, and artificial intelligence

Mary Karr: I used to do this thing. Yeah, that’s so funny. I used to do this thing where I would stage a fight in my class with someone who was opposite from me. And so let’s say like my colleague, George Saunders, who is just the sweetest guy, I can’t even tell you. I was in the car with him once and there was a bug on his shirt and I was like, “George, there’s a big beetle on your shirt.” And he’d be like, “Well, he has to be somewhere.” I’d be like, “Kill it.” And he’s like this Tibetan Buddhist with this amazing practice, just the sweetest guy. So George comes in and starts arguing with me that my classroom is in fact his classroom and— Tim Ferriss: This is in front of all the students? Mary Karr: In front of all the students. And it’s for them it’s the first day of school, and it’s like having their parents fight. And I script it so that I say only nice, conciliatory things. I back up, he walks forward. He’s bigger than I am. And then it ends with him throwing the papers up and telling me to go fuck myself or something. And/or telling me to go hang maybe, I don’t know if you can say the F-word, can you say the F-word? Tim Ferriss: F-word is not only allowed, but endorsed— Mary Karr: Okay, good. Tim Ferriss: —since I grew up on Long Island, you’re in good company. Mary Karr: I feel so much better! Just telling me to go fuck myself. And then we asked the students to write. So let’s say there are 17, 18 students in this class, or 20, somewhere between 15 and 22. And they’re all smart, and they’re all young. They were all incredibly juiced on adrenaline and cortisol because they were scared and it’s a public scene. And they don’t really know each other that well. And they don’t know us that well. So they’re all extremely alert. They’re hypervigilant. And we ask them to write down what happens. And everybody writes something just a little different. Interestingly, people will describe me in very aggressive terms. Like even though I’m the one backing up and I’m saying, “Well, I can clear out during the break, George, but like, I don’t understand why you’re so upset.” And he’ll say, “You don’t understand why I’m so…” I mean, and he walks forward and I’m backing up and my head is down and I’m every conciliatory gesture I can think of. And people will say, “She stood her ground like a bulldog,” or “She had military strength, facing off against him.” And one year I did it with my student assistant, who was an undergraduate, just a beautiful young track star, Betsy. And Betsy just threw her papers up in the air and was screeching at me. Well, she’s this kid, and here I am, this professor with fancy clothes in a position of power. So people would, in that class of undergraduates, assume that I had done horrible things to Betsy that had—in one class there was a young woman. One of the ruses I set up is that I leave my cell phone on so I can start to argue with George before he comes in and then ask the students, “How often did he call? How long between each call?” And ask them to guess things or remember things about time. And some people say, “He called three times.” Some people will say, “He called once.” Some people, “Four times.” So all those details are very influenced by who they are. The young woman with sickle cell anemia will have this enormous compassion for me, because I’ll say, “I have to leave my phone on, I’m waiting for medical results.” And she’ll assume I’m waiting to hear if I have some awful ailment. And she sees George as a complete beast. And me as this woman, perhaps ill, who dragged herself to class, while everybody else in the class thinks, “What a diva, she’s answering her phone in the middle of class. She can’t wait an hour to get medical results? I mean, come on.” So there are always people in class who have eidetic, who have those perfect memories. I remember one kid—often they’re musicians—this kid was a jazz saxophone player who was very famous in Brooklyn for giving these amazing house parties. I think he made a living giving house parties for like, I don’t know, years. So this kid had this amazing memory. We had a script and he remembered the script exactly. He remembered what George had on. He remembered where we stood. He remembered that I’d backed up every step. And then when he wrote it, he wrote it exactly as it happened, he didn’t miss anything. And he said, “George was the aggressor, but I wonder what she’d done to make him act that way.” I guess the purpose of the exercise is for you to realize that you remember through a filter of who you are. Memory is not a computer. It’s not a perfect storage system. Obviously we, even these fine minds of these young people, very alert and paying attention in their first class and wanting to get everything right, and do well, misremember. But what’s more, what I want them to think about is how they are not just perceiving things, but beaming the world, the landscape, into being with whoever they are inside. It’s important, as a writer of anything, to realize what kind of filters you’re strapping on that prevent you from seeing what’s going on.

the hardest thing about blockchain is saying, trying to apply a network solution where a network has to be built. In this instance, we haven't a network per se, meaning it is the states and the states are already starting behaviourally to act together. So that part of the foundation is done. So the technology is just the next step that has to be built. And it would be really interesting to start to work with a number of states to build up this infrastructure, that certainly would make them much more agile in being able to handle any sort of data requests in the future.

So the issue really is data, a very messy data data standardization problem. So every state is charged. You know, much like in the insurance world, states have a lot of power here. And in the US, every state is charged with issuing out the public health information and publishing it. But they're not told how to publish it, in what form to make it available. They just put it up on their website. And so accessibility becomes how you access the website? Sure, you can pull it up and look at it. That's unstructured data. But how do you download the active data that you need in a timely fashion? It's not like there's easy dashboard data to download. It's not like it's easily aggregated or sortable. Every state has their own choice about how to do this, there isn't a standard.

I start off with the view that public health is everybody's health

One thing I'm doing is a consortium advisor for the Mining and Metals industry blockchain initiative, which concerns itself with sustainability. I sit on a few boards, including diversity and blockchain.

There are a variety of reasons people rent rather than own, but one of the major ones is cost. Home prices in Seattle have long been higher than the national average, but in the last decade, they’ve soared out of reach even for many who have good incomes. The typical Seattle home had a value of $804,500 in November, according to real estate data firm Zillow.

Part of the reason the population in owner-occupied homes was so much larger was because of household size. Families with children were more likely to live in an owned home, while single people were more likely to live in a rental unit. That’s still true today. But in 1960, the baby boom was in full swing, and Seattle had a lot more children than it does now.

To this day, the majority of city residential land is zoned exclusively for single-family homes (which is a source of constant frustration to our many local urbanists).

In fact, the peak year of homeownership in Seattle is long behind us. That happened in 1960, at a time when Boeing, not Amazon, was the engine behind the city’s boom.

Census data shows that in 1910, there were about 15,000 more Seattle residents living in a rental than in an owned home. But by 1920, owners had moved into the majority, and it remained that way for a century.

The problem with being a full-time creator is you have to start caring about the business of what you create. When you primarily make money from your following, you are no longer as free to say whatever you want or create whatever you want to create.

The most interesting writers and "thought leaders" to me are the ones who are out doing something, and then use what they're working on to influence their writing and other media.

#4: Live a low clockspeed lifestyle

Also, as I share in Your Work Peak Is Later Than You Think, According To Research, many of history's greatest artists, scientists, and artists had their greatest works when they were older, because they followed the 5-Hour Rule and spent their whole life learning and experimenting while maintaining the love for their craft.

But maybe all of these are part of a deeper phenomenon… time acceleration. 

We’re also seeing inequality skyrocket. One of the craziest statistics here is that the world’s 2,153 billionaires have more wealth than 4.6 billion people combined, according to Oxfam. Even more surprising, the 26 richest people own as much as the poorest 50%. It’s astounding.

At the global level, these dominant US players were dominated by the international competition. Then, at the next professional level when all of the top global players are thrown into one pile no matter their age, only the top 100 or so players make enough money to even play tennis full-time. Then, within the top professional players, Roger Federer, Rafael Nadal, and Novak Djokovic have combined to win 57 of the past 67 Slams. Out of all of the hundreds of men’s professional tennis players, only three account for almost all of the attention, prize money, and endorsements over the last decade. It’s brutal when you think about it. That’s what it’s like when markets go global and digital.

Matt Ridley, author of The Red Queen Effect, explains the tit for tat like this...If a competitor makes an improvement, you must make an equal or greater improvement just to stay neck-and-neck with them. Stay the same and you fall behind. Lauren Bacall said it even better…"Standing still is the fastest way of moving backwards in a rapidly changing world."— Lauren BacallIn other words, evolution is a double-edged sword. On one hand, innovations increase survival. On the other hand, they also increase competition, which reduces survival.Evolution does not rest on its laurels. It accelerates. 

Just like evolution, when we evolve new technologies, things don’t slow down and become a utopia. Rather things get faster and more competitive.

While each of these researchers provide a different perspective, they point to the same fundamental root cause…

Rather than inhabiting a world of time wealth, we’re inhabiting a world of time poverty. Rather than feeling the luxury of time freedom, we’re feeling the burden of constant hurry.

Pay a machine or person for their time

But if you’re focused on finding the right productivity apps and hacks, you’re in the second.

When faced with a behavior you want to change or improve, don't pretend you can think your way into better actions. You can't. Treat that part of your brain like a stupid monkey, and find a way to flip the incentive model to automatically encourage better behavior.

The most powerful way though is through magnifying the consequences. I sent a tweet early October that if I drank at all before October 28th, I would have to donate $100 to Trump's campaign for each drink, and post the donation on Twitter:

Another way is accountability. I've never been as consistent with my fitness as I have been since I started working with Central Athlete.

how do you get a stupid monkey to not do something it really wants to do?Well, one way is to make it difficult. When Cosette and I host a barbecue or something and there's a bunch of Claw and other drinks left over, I'll often hide them in the garage or in the cooler upstairs so they're harder to get to. Simply increasing the barriers to consumption tends to help.

I have no interest in trying to "build more willpower" because I don't trust it. When you're tired, burned out from the day, and there's a bottle of Southhold in the fridge, I'm going to want to drink it and I'm going to find a way to justify to myself that it's a good idea. For all his faults, Evening Nat is very convincing.

This concept dispenses with any foolish notions of "willpower" and "self-discipline." I have a certain amount of those things, sure, but they're unreliable and tend to falter when you need them most. Maybe some people have superhuman willpower and can just think themselves into being exceptional, but I'm not one of them, and honestly I'm skeptical that they are too (except Jocko perhaps).

When you want to learn or build something new, it’s tempting to just get going. Read as much as you can, do some tutorials, work on some related projects. Short-term, this gives you a motivation boost. You feel like you’re making progress. But, after a while, you notice that you’re not progressing as fast as you expected. Turns out, cramming content inside your brain is not the most effective way to learn. Instead, you need to use metacognitive strategies. Metacognition, put simply, is “thinking about thinking” or “knowing about knowing.”

With first-level thinking often come snapshot decisions. We just look at the information in front of us and other obvious indicators, and we make our choice. This is a perfectly natural reaction, but more often than not we don’t need to make decisions this quickly.

It’s also good practice to write down any questions or ideas for further research you may have.

This is a great way to encourage combinational creativity and idea sex, but it is by no mean necessary.

imilarly, if you are reading an ebook, highlight the parts you deem important, and write a couple of words to add contextual information.

If you are reading a physical book, grab a pen and write down key ideas in the margins.

Learning versus creating.

Serendipity versus control.

f your goal is to study the content of a book—to better understand and remember—studies suggest that paper is the way to go. Reading paper books leads to better comprehension and better long-term memory.

It means there is a fine balance between taking too many notes—and reading extremely slowly—and taking too few notes, which leaves much of the knowledge from the book on the table.

It’s easier to take notes when we’re listening to content. That’s because our hands are free and we can focus on writing down whatever seems important to remember. However, when reading a book, taking notes interrupts our reading flow.

And given the enormous scale of the stated goal, of administering these chemicals to hundreds of millions of people, when there is normally some rate of severe complications to the use of vaccines, the negative results may be significant. For example, one study of influenza vaccines administered to adults over 65 years of age, found a rate of approximately 1% which experienced severe side effects. If a COVID-19 vaccine is merely similar for individuals in the same age bracket (54M in population), that would equate to 540,000 individuals in this age bracket alone who may need medical care in a hospital system which provides less than 925,000 total beds. 

Immediate results from some of these trials have included “severe” complications, involving headaches, fever, body aches and symptoms similar to a “severe hangover.” Further, as the New York Times emphasized, Pfizer’s initial claim that their vaccine was “more than 90 percent effective,” was “delivered in a news release, not a peer-reviewed medical journal. It is not conclusive evidence that the vaccine is safe and effective.”

Notwithstanding the fact that no vaccine has ever been successfully developed for any coronavirus, and such an endeavor would normally take years to safely and adequately complete, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has permitted the fast-tracking of this process skipping the standard stage of testing on animals to directly test these vaccines on humans.

Despite an estimated 65 to 72% of the population now having immunity to COVID-19, a percentage which indicates a critical level of herd immunity, Operation Warp Speed in the United States appears intent to follow the globalist campaign advanced by Bill Gates and vaccinate all 328 million people in the nation with the Pfizerproduct or others emerging for approved distribution in the coming months.

There is absolutely no need for vaccines to extinguish the pandemic. I’ve never heard such nonsense talked about vaccines. You do not vaccinate people who aren’t at risk from a disease.

Treat each article as a little MVP, and when one does well, find a way to better monetize that line of thinking.

What’s the lesson here? Well, if a few of your smart friends tell you to make something you're also motivated to make, it's worth taking a stab at. And when you make something that does well (in this case, the Roam article) and there's a clear way to double down, you should go for it.

I wrote the article about Roam which blew up, and turned a number of my smart friends on to using the platform.

So, I created an Evernote notebook of all my highly annotated notes, turned it into a product, and started selling it on all the book notes pages

Best of all, I've only had to update it twice since it's such a simple product. Tons of other people have tried to make competing male kegel apps since then (including literally copy & pasting the design), but since I have the traffic none of them have done particularly well.

ReadersI don't recommend fixating on marketing or SEO or "what your readers want to read." Again, if you’re writing something for clicks and you're not interested in it, it's unlikely to turn into a good piece.

The only real rule is don't be boring. If you're repeating what other people have said, and not sparking new ideas or insights in your readers' minds, your articles are unlikely to do well.

if you can stick to publishing regularly then you can invest in making it pretty. 

I suggest starting with a new database. It’ll be easier to integrate a new database with your main database later than it would be to separate it out

There are many decision-making frameworks such as the Eisenhower matrix of prioritisation, where you categorise your tasks based on whether they are urgent and important, important but not urgent, urgent but not important, or neither urgent nor important.

Unless you’re extremely diligent in controlling lifestyle creep, retirement gets further away as your income increases. 

Today, 20 per cent of tech-based Delaware C-Corps started on Stripe Atlas.

The two brothers pitched a vision of more internet commerce, driven by more connectivity and it being easy to use.

“The problem has always been the layers of intermediation,” explains Chris Higson, a professor of accounting at the London Business School. “The annual cost of financial intermediation in the US is roughly 2 per cent – the same as it was in the late nineteenth century. The US finance industry has showed no efficiency gains at all over 130 years.”

Amin is not used to this way of thinking. In 2014, he moved to Berlin for a couple of years Berlin to earn some cash as a coder and there the startup philosophy was, as he puts it, “reach the first million in your user base, and then see how you can monetise. But in the Middle East, we don’t work like that. From day one, investors want you to show something tangible. They don’t speak about the next generation, they want to talk about something basic people will pay for on the spot.”

In this context, launching Breadfast, a home-delivery startup promising fresh loaves delivered to by 5am, was a no brainer to Amin: a huge population, bread’s enormous popularity and a service that could grow quickly into the Ocado or Amazon Fresh of Egypt and on into the rest of the Middle East.

On 17 January 2011, a baker called Abdou Abdel Monaam set himself on fire in the port city of Alexandria over the price of bread, sparking an uprising that kickstarted Egypt’s Arab Spring and led to the fall of President Hosni Mubarak’s government.

“In Egyptian Arabic, we call bread ‘aish’, which translates as ‘life’,” Amin explains. “We are a culture of bread - not rice, not meat or potatoes. Most of us eat Egyptian baladi bread with all three meals across the day. Last year we were the world’s number-two consumer of flour and we produced – not consumed, okay — 28 billion loaves of baladi. It’s important.”

they were accomplishing something because they were struggling.

Working hard is great, but struggle porn has a dangerous side effect: not quitting. When you believe the normal state of affairs is to feel like you’re struggling to make progress, you’ll be less likely to quit something that isn’t going anywhere.

I call this "struggle porn": a masochistic obsession with pushing yourself harder, listening to people tell you to work harder, and broadcasting how hard you’re working.

Tsundoku (積ん読) is a beautiful Japanese word describing the habit of acquiring books but letting them pile up without reading them.

That’s called the Generation Effect. In a research paper published in 1978 in the Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, scientists described it as the phenomenon where information is better remembered if it is actively created from one’s own mind rather than simply read in a passive way.

Andy Matuschak’s working notes. A thinking environment featuring evergreen notes with a unique navigation system, where you can compare notes side by side and explore various sub-links in an organic way. As you will see later in this article, my own digital garden was heavily inspired by Andy’s.

Creating a digital garden

When you find some of these new combinations particularly interesting, share the seeds with fellow gardeners. Leverage the knowledge of other mind explorers. Keeping a digital garden where you can have a shareable copy of your ideas is a great way to contribute to the growth of our collective intelligence.

A mind garden is not a mind backyard. It’s not about dumping notes in there and forgetting about them.

Over time, you will find yourself going back to certain corners of your mind garden more often than others, and that’s alright. That’s you developing your unique perspective and own gardening expertise.

When consuming content, grow branches on your knowledge tree by taking notes. Short notes, long notes—it doesn’t matter as much as writing your thoughts in your own words. That’s called the generation effect, and it states that you better remember information when you create your own version of it.

Having a diverse information diet is more important than striving for an unattainably perfect information diet.

To explore one potential solution, we created an experimental quantum computing textbook, Quantum Country. It’s written in a “mnemonic medium,” interleaving expert-authored spaced repetition prompts into the reading experience. Our goal was to help readers engage with challenging technical material by supporting their memory. As we interviewed readers, though, we noticed that the regular review sessions didn’t just build detailed retention: the ongoing practice also changed readers’ relationship to the material by maintaining their contact with it over time. These people didn’t just read the book once and proceed with their lives. Quantum Country’s review sessions returned readers to its ideas again and again over weeks and months.

To engage with a book’s ideas over time, readers must remember its details, and that’s already a challenge. One promising solution lies in spaced repetition memory systems, which allow users to retain large quantities of knowledge reliably and efficiently. Like meditation, these systems involve a daily practice: every day, a reader maintains their memory library by reviewing a few dozen lightweight prompts. Each prompt asks a detailed question, like “What types of stimuli does George Miller’s span of absolute judgment describe?” Each day’s session is different because each prompt repeats on its own schedule. When a user remembers or forgets the answer to a prompt, the system expands or contracts that prompt’s repetition interval along an exponential curve. These expanding intervals allow readers to maintain a collection of thousands of prompts while reviewing only a few dozen each day. Practitioners generally complete their review sessions in moments which would otherwise go unused, like when waiting in line.

Guided meditation smartphone apps offer a promising design approach. Meditation’s insights unfold slowly. Aspirants are typically advised to practice daily. Over weeks and months, they may begin to experience the world differently. Some concepts in meditation make no sense if you still can’t perceive your breath clearly, so they’re best introduced later. A book on meditation isn’t well-suited to this kind of slow unfurling: much of it may not make sense initially; readers will need to re-read it again and again as their practice progresses. But a guided meditation app’s experience is naturally spread over time. Each day’s session begins and ends with brief instruction. Instructors offer topical prompts throughout the practice. Intermittent repetition can keep old ideas active in students’ minds until they’re ready to engage. Rather than delivering a bound monograph on meditation, instructors can slowly unfurl an idea over hundreds of days. Critically, these apps are a mass medium, just as books are: lessons can be “written” once and redistributed cheaply to huge audiences. Could this approach be applied more generally?

How might we design texts to more widely enable such practices?

As we consider alternative approaches, we can find inspiration in the world’s most transformative books. Consider texts like the Bible and the Analects of Confucius. People integrate ideas from those books into their lives over time—but not because authors designed them that way. Those books work because they’re surrounded by rich cultural activity.

texts which continue the conversation with the reader as they slowly integrate those ideas into their lives?

timeful texts

How might one create a medium which does the job of a book, but which escapes a book’s shackled sense of time?

To be transformed by a book, readers must do more than absorb information: they must bathe in the book’s ideas, relate those ideas to experiences in their lives over weeks and months, try on the book’s mental models like a new hat.

The most powerful books reach beyond their pages—beyond those few hours in which they’re read—and indelibly transform how serious readers see the world. Few books achieve such transcendent impact, yet given their physical constraints, it’s remarkable that any do.

A reference management system (Zotero for instance, which is free)

After a while, you will start seeing patterns emerging in your notes. These patterns—and not the raw, fleeting notes you took in the beginning of the process—will form the basis of your original work.

Permanent notes. Once a day (ideally), go through the notes you created in the first two steps, and turn them into permanent notes. These are more detailed, and carefully written to capture your exact thought or idea. It’s an atomic process: one index card should correspond to one idea and one idea only.

Literature notes. Whenever you read something interesting, take notes of the main points.

Fleeting notes. These are all the ideas that pop into your mind.

Proactively connect ideas together. Block time for mind gardening.

Be selective when saving ideas. Before adding something to your note-taking app, ask yourself: does this idea connect to any other idea that’s already in the system?

Idea sex, on the other hand, is active: you can proactively decide to combine two or more ideas and to see what interesting new idea may come out of the experiment. It’s programmable: if you create a sustainable system for yourself to combine ideas together, you will be able to create new ideas on demand. And it’s mindful: instead of forcing yourself to stare at a blank page until your muse pays you a visit, it’s about looking through your network of ideas to find a trail to explore.

Idea sex is the process through which ideas “mate” to produce new ideas.