Check your Pulse #19
🎡 slowing down vs. calming down, the thinking ladder, and a dreaming octopus 🐙
Welcome to the 19th edition of Check your Pulse, a weekly newsletter where I share a collection of thought provoking things designed to help you stay inspired and create meaningful impact. If you know someone who’d like this sort of thing in their inbox, they can subscribe here.
Greetings from NYC!
I always feel the energy in me shift when I’m here – the people, the ambition, the high standards, the fast pace, it’s all exhilarating.
Slowing down has never made sense to me. When I look back on my favorite days, it’s usually the busy days when I’m in my office, creating, meeting with entrepreneurs, doing intense thinking for large chunks of time. None of those things feel like work.
When you slow down, you risk losing your confidence and it’s harder to get back in the game. When it comes to time, I agree with Darwin when he said: “A man who dares to waste one hour of time has not discovered the value of life.” Time is the single most important non-renewable resource we all have.
But calming down is a great idea – we carry too much anxiety and taking a break, going for a walk, spending time in solitude, and letting our minds wander can give us the mental space we need to truly feel alive.
Can we live a life that is fast-paced and exhilarating yet simultaneously mindful, intentional, and calm?
That’s what’s on my mind after four days in NYC.
🙏🏼
Sari
“The most important thing in life is your inner energy. If you’re always tired and never enthused, then life is no fun. But if you’re always inspired and filled with energy, then every minute of every day is an exciting experience. Learn to work with these things. Through meditation, through awareness and willful efforts, you can learn to keep your centers open. You do this by just relaxing and releasing. You do this by not buying into the concept that there is anything worth closing over. Remember, if you love life, nothing is worth closing over.”
― Michael A. Singer
caught my attention
links to love this week
Vanity Fair gets up close and personal with Glossier CEO Emily Weiss (@emilyweiss). Earlier this week, Emily reflected on the company turning 5 in a beautifully written post. One of the bigger takeaways from their success is that brands are becoming more like people. More evidence of that here if you want a laugh. 💯
Wow, this is incredible footage of an octopus changing colors while dreaming. 🐙
Really solid thread on turning 40. Two things in particular stood out to me: 1) The idea that "I'll be happy when" is the greatest lie of all. 2) The people you hold up as heroes are just as broken as you (and that's good news). 🎂
How 25 famous women get their ideas including quotes from women like Taylor Swift, Amy Poehler, and Judy Blume about how their creative process works. 🎨
This made me laugh 👇🏽😂
I enjoyed this piece on the NY Times reporting on what happened when a non-profit invited 526 American voters across party lines to spend a weekend in a resort debating a range of topics. The results show American people are not as polarized as the American political class. The group was surveyed before the conference, and again on the same questions at the end; the results were compared with a similar panel of voters who did not get an intense dose of deliberative democracy in the interim. Voters at the event on both the left and the right appeared to edge toward the center. Democratic support receded for a $15 federal minimum wage and for “Medicare for all”; Republican support grew for rejoining the Paris climate agreement and for protecting from deportation immigrants brought to the United States as children. 🇺🇸
The key to bliss for a dual-career couple? A contract. Jennifer Petriglieri, a professor specializing in management, recalls when her and her husband were first dating: Pen and paper in hand, we each wrote answers to questions that we were well accustomed to asking in our consulting work. But this time the project was us. This will be a meaningful relationship for me if…What scares me is… What I’m willing to give is… What I want is… The lines I’m not prepared to cross are… The lines you better not cross are… Couples that work don’t wait, I found, to discuss openly and deliberately what they want their life together, their couple, to be like. They do it early and often…This is especially important at the 3 major transition points, each transition revolves around a critical question. The first, ‘How can we make this work?’, comes early in a couple’s relationship, when they need to combine parallel lives into one joint one. The second question, ‘What do we really want?’, comes when couples can afford to be fed up with doing what they feel they ought to do. The third, ‘Who are we now?’, hits when the commitments that often sustained couples early on—mortgages, children, and career acceleration—are behind them. At each of these transition points, couples who are accustomed to doing the work of talking about what they want, what they need, and who they are, fare much better than those who just try to work out a solution to the challenge of the day. 📝
The Thinking Ladder on Wait But Why is a long, dense, but excellent read on why we believe what we believe. It contains my new favorite equation: Arrogance = Ignorance + Conviction. The chart below sums it up 👇🏽
In A Like Can’t Go Anywhere, But A Compliment Can Go A Long Way, Frank Chimero (@frank_chimero) shares some great thoughts on how social media inherently amplifies negativity and silences positivity. Liking stays attached to the original tweet and makes most positive interactions static. Negative reactions must be written as tweets, creating more material for the machine. These negative tweets can spread through retweets and further replies. This means negativity grows in number and presence, because most positivity is silent and immobilized. Passive positivity isn’t enough; active positivity is needed... Otherwise, we are left with the skewed, inaccurate, and dangerous nature of what’s been built: an environment where most positivity is small, vague, and immobile, and negativity is large, precise, and spreadable. 👍🏼
On a related note, Instagram may be getting rid of ‘Likes’ on the platform. 👈🏽
This refreshing piece on self-care questions the narrative of self-care and argues that what we really need is community care. Unlike self-care, community care does not place the onus on the individual. Shouting "self-care" at people who actually need "community care" is how we fail people. 🌎
This passage from Brene Brown’s Daring Greatly, page 150 is 💯
venture corner
a roundup of startupy things from around the web
In A Taxonomy of Moats, Jerry Neumann exposes a very comprehensive framework to categorize and evaluate moats in the context of starting a company. I highly recommend reading this and testing it with your own business. 👑
Li Jin of a16z on going from the gig economy to the passion economy and the future of work is a highly recommended read. 👀
Solid roundup by CB Insights of industries that are being threatened by changing consumer preferences amongst millennials - everything from cereal to gyms and canned tuna. The message from millennials is clear: brands that prioritize convenience, personalization, and sustainability will thrive. Brands that continue to cling to outmoded ideas of consumer behavior will continue to struggle. 👍🏼
Really well done presentation by Union Square Ventures on why trust matters in the context of startups. Here are some takeaways from that presentation: 1) Trust is offense (trust gaps create opportunities for startups) as well as defense (trust is a moat). 2) Promise Market Fit. Every brand has a core promise. Choose your core promise right and keep it. Breaking that core promise is the biggest threat to any brand. Keeping that promise creates long-term loyalty even as competition proliferates. 👥
I’m anticipating the launch of Ben Horowitz’ (@bhorowitz) upcoming book, What You Do is Who You Are. His first book, The Hard Thing About Hard Things, is one of the most valuable books I’ve read on startup management and leadership, hands down. 📚
This 2007 email from Joe Gebbia to Brian Chesky led to the founding of Airbnb Airbnb was recently valued at $35 billion. 😳👇🏽
Yep, people are tired of the roses and butterflies startup stories made for Techcrunch 👇🏽
have you heard of?
I’m intrigued by a new business called Social Studies, which is basically “Rent the Runway for fancy party settings” and has launched in New York and the Hamptons. It’s not cheap — $30 to $50 per place setting, which includes dinnerware and flatware, menus and place cards, and tabletop decorations like runners, flowers, etc… The delivery also includes an easy to follow guide to make setting up easy, along with tips, tricks, and even playlists to throw the perfect party. You also don’t have to wash anything before sending it back. At this price point, it’s hard to imagine how they scale beyond NYC/Hamptons. For an 8-person dinner, you’re looking at ~$400 in table settings alone, without food, wine, and service. I’m generally skeptical of applying the “rent, not own” mentality to all things — for categories like fancy evening dresses a rental makes sense. But for categories like table settings, where using the same dinnerware is socially acceptable, I think consumers prefer to own “less, but better” or “more and better.” Personally, I would spend a few bucks per guest on table decor, florals, inspiration, and guidance, but I’d still want to use my dinnerware and flatware. A good product team can grow and iterate, and I’m excited to see how they evolve their offering. Until then, I’ll be following them on Instagram.
overheard on twitter
If you’re wondering who’s behind this newsletter:
My name is Sari Azout. I am a design-thinker, strategist, storyteller, and early stage startup investor at Level Ventures and Rokk3r Labs. My mission is to bring more humanity and creativity to technology and business.
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Thanks for being here!
Sari