🫠 Reflecting on the 12 things I learned this year

Small things leading to big things, how to choose what to work on, why social capital is important, underhyped AI, removing notifications and more. #personal #startups #productivity

Hey there,

I know I haven’t been active on here recently — isn’t it weird how hard it is for us to keep sharing stuff? Obviously, a lot is happening on my end, but it’s tough to find the time to consistently be present.

How are you dealing with this if you have your own blog/are actively creating content?

Anyways, one more 🌎 turn around the ☀️ for me today.

Here are the 10-ish things I learned this year, straight from this morning’s journaling/reflection:

1. Small things inevitably lead to big things if they’re applied in the same direction. Might sound obvious but y’all know that the hardest part is to keep going. Starting Fundraising Hackers a year ago I couldn’t have imagined the turn of events (will announce soon, stay tuned!)

2. When in doubt about what to work on, prioritize your natural curiosity, stay lean, and experiment. The things you’ll be curious about aren’t always easy, no, and oftentimes you face a lot of fears. But this curiosity allows you to eventually push through

3. All good things and opportunities in life come through network or, in other words, social capital. If you don’t actively try to maintain and grow it, you’re already losing on a lot. I’m not talking only about direct connections (1st-degree connections), I’m also talking about 2nd and 3rd-degree connections or weaker ties.

4. Even though everyone has heard of ChatGPT, the real effect of the drastic evolution of all things GenAI is still very much underhyped. VC money inflow increased to 35% of the total pool (staggering $70B) and most of the results are still underwater, not counting the R&D race to develop models with bigger context window and better reasoning capabilities.

5. Notifications and being online and available all the time is extremely overrated and flat out harmful. Remove your notifications and get online only when it’s really needed to maximize focused work. Use this guide if you want.

6. Accountability in pairs/groups/communities is a powerful driving force to get things done (or get more things done/do them better). If I need to do something, I find people who can built an accountability system for that. Recently I joined a health hacking group and an investing group, not counting the 1-1 accountability coaching I’m doing myself.

7. The seeming feeling of world order is just an illusion. It doesn’t mean that everything is bad — on the contrary, data shows that almost all things have improved drastically over the last century or so. It just means that you personally and your own context (family, projects, etc) are more important than any concept of countries, nations, or any other artificial things pushed from above — because it’s nothing but a weird attempt to control chaos by random people. Here’s an example — Belarusians have lost the ability to use ANY consulate services abroad — a complete and utter violation of their citizen rights, if you ask me. Yet no one cares.

8. True (and deep) friendships need the occasional proactive involvement of both parties. When one of the parties doesn’t do this anymore, the friendship turns into an acquaintance-ship.

9. The best way to test an idea is to sell the description of what you’re gonna provide, receive the money, and use this money to actually help (build a solution/provide service, etc). I called it the pre-product sales sprint.

10. Allergy is not that bad when you’re prepared for it — starting to use tablets and nose sprays at least a couple of weeks before the active season (in my case, grass pollen, it’s May).

BONUS — things I’m contemplating about

1. I realized that I struggle with identifying the right moment for taking a break/saying no to things and find myself with too many things to be done but too little energy to handle them at the same time. This applies especially to comms (seeing the numbers of unread messages go brrr). This is certainly an area for growth — let me know if you have ideas on how to tackle this.

2. I feel like I could do much better (and more consistent) in being aware of what I focus on each given day, hour, and minute. Usually, for me this requires a non-negotiable planning routine — if I miss it and don’t have any other anchors (calls, etc) it’s easy to fall into the trap of feeling like you have “too much” to do. I’m currently experimenting with the variation of a daily Marc Andreesen’s routine but open to suggestions!

I’m pretty sure some of these sparked some thoughts — the comments here are turned off, but you’re always welcome to simply reply to this email or engage under my most recent post on LinkedIn / Twitter (sorry Elon, not calling this the letter thing)!