Greetings everyone,
I had a great time in London this weekend. I’ve been working with a YouTuber and his team for the last few months and got the chance to meet them in person whilst I was there. It was a fantastic experience — it confirmed to me that for this next phase of my professional life, I should optimize for challenge, fun, and culture.
It also has inspired me to take my own YouTube goals more seriously and to plan to become a business owner or creatorpreneur. I think the best way to get the most out of your work life is to work for yourself. When you’re working for yourself, you get all the upside of doing high-quality work. When you’re employed, whether, at a big or small company, you’re building someone else’s dream. Why not build your own?
Enjoy today’s newsletter!
There is no law that says you need to make more than you spend each month. You are allowed to gift income from your past self who was in a job they didn’t love to your future self who is trying to find something better.
Paul Millerd
✏️ The Power of Peer Pressure
Peer pressure gets a bad rep. Most people think of peer pressure as an implicit (or explicit) pressure to do negative things, like drinking, smoking, or playing music that you don’t really like because it’s ‘cool’. But peer pressure can lift you up, inspire you, and improve you.
It is a common saying that ‘you are like the 5 people you most hang around with’. This can be for better or for worse. When you hang around people with high energy, sharp minds, and strong wills, you will inevitably begin to adopt some of those mannerisms. Being around people who are successful, intelligent, and kind is a life hack for growing yourself. When you see how they approach their craft, how they think about life and work, and how they manage their time, you will begin to connect the dots between their behaviour and their success. And if you desire to have the abilities or lifestyle that they have, you will begin to desire those habits and qualities they exhibit. Peer pressure is a powerful tool for improving one’s self. Of course, it can go the other way, but I think people don’t make enough of an effort to surround themselves, daily, with people who inspire them and motivate them to be better and do better.
It is a good thing to feel imposter syndrome in a room. It means you have much to learn, and much room to grow.
💡 Food for Thought
Tendit in ardua virtus — virtue strives for what is difficult (Ovid, Epistulae ex Ponto)
🔗 Sunday Best
Learning for Its Own Sake
A Commencement Address by Eva Brann
Teachers with a skewed notion of education incite students to “question,” even to question everything. But such questioning is quasi-aggression. Question-asking is primarily an act of care, even love—your desire to delve particularly, now that you’re leaving it, into the inside, the essence, the being of your community, so that you may stay closer to it, recollect it more effectively, and do better by it, and better for yourself.
How to Build a Product that Scales Into a Company
A lecture at the Harvard Innovation Lab by Chris Gardner
“Build it, and they will come” is a dangerous mindset in the startup world. Even if you create a great product, building a successful company around it can be nuanced and challenging. In addition to product development, you need to find and prove product-market fit—then repeat and scale through sales and marketing.
The Art of Quran Recitation (Maqamat)
With Imam Ibrahim Bakeer & Nouman Ali Khan
It’s amazing! I think recitation of religious text does something to the soul that simply reading or listening cannot provide.
A man of bad character punishes his own soul.
—Imam Al-Ghazali (1058-1111)
Thanks for coming!
AT