Check your Pulse #66
calling all rabbit hole voyagers, paying you to think, and cultivating a long term mindset
Hi, I’m Sari Azout and this is the the 66th edition of Check your Pulse, a tech and startups newsletter designed to make you feel human. If you’ve been sent this email and you’re not a subscriber, you can join by clicking on this big red button below.
Hi, friends, old and new.
It’s been a while. As I shared in the last issue, I stopped publishing Check your Pulse consistently because I went all in on startupy and there is less than zero time for me to stare in luxury at a Google doc these days, but I do have some fun thoughts/updates/links to share today, and I suspect I’ll be back sporadically with more.
Sari
✨ Apply to join Startupy Season Zero We recently announced the launch of startupy’s Season Zero and are inviting all rabbit hole voyagers, curators, concept librarians, and knowledge remixers who want to get in on the ground floor to help us shape startupy to be the best human-curated knowledge graph. If you get a high from collecting, highlighting, and organizing interesting links on the Internet, I’d love for you to join us! Full deets here, but the tl;dr is:
At startupy, we are building the first true social knowledge graph on the Internet. The best insights on the Internet are scattered across, tweets, podcasts, newsletters, and videos. Most people are laboring away in their solo note-taking tools, curating in their private-or semi-private Notion or Airtable databases… all while search engines are deteriorating in quality. We need less people laboring away in their solo tools, more people coming together to make their curated content searchable and discoverable by others. You can think of startupy as Pinterest for knowledge. Admittedly - we are Day Zero on this vision, but I have no doubt startupy will in time morph into one of the most nourishing and delightful places on the Internet. If this speaks to you, join us.
✨ On the relationship between inputs and outputs. I haven’t stopped thinking about this passage from Rob Hardy’s The Pattern since I read it a few weeks back:
As humans, we're evolutionarily wired to prioritize short-term gain. Hunter gatherers had no use for five-year plans, and those instincts are still within us. Combine that with our current economic system, ad-driven business models, and algorithmic social media platforms, all of which visibly reward cynical short-term games, and you've got the perfect recipe to get lots of people prioritizing what's easy, quick, and shallow. There's so much opportunity waiting for the people who do deep, meaningful work, and who play long games. But our wiring and our current environment make it very difficult to see those possibilities, and trust them.
The relationship between inputs and outputs is rarely linear. This has become especially apparent in my day to day work as a founder - where the decision of where I allocate my time - say, chasing another 1,000 members for an immediate outcome - means spending less time on the things that lead to greater payoffs down the road. I’m spending a lot of time thinking about how to cultivate a long-term mindset, and drawing inspiration from the startupy community’s contribution to this topic.
✨ On paying you to think Two years ago, when I started this newsletter, I was in the lucky position that I was slightly underemployed - I had a team, some spare time and decided to allocate more of that time to reading, writing, and exploring my interests. What I didn’t realize at the time was how much of a luxury it is to have time to think. That feeling hasn’t left me. It's weird that most people are either thinkers/researchers for a living or not and there's no middle ground. I’ve been thinking of how I can pay it forward. The only way to do great work in any field is to find time to consider the large questions, read, and think. But unless you’re in school or academia, this usually doesn’t happen. What would a microgrants program where we pay people to go down intellectually rich rabbit holes of their choosing and share their insights look like? As you probably know, I’m obsessed with thinking about new ways of incentivizing quality, nourishing content on the Internet (see ghost knowledge) so expect me to take action on this insight soon. 👀
🧠 This is a really great collection of quotes
"There are no solutions in life, only tradeoffs." — Thomas Sowell
“You can’t get much done in life if you only work on days when you feel good.” — Jerry West
“When you buy something cheap and bad, the best you’re going to feel about it is when you buy it. When you buy something expensive and good, the worst you’re going to feel about it is when you buy it.” — Sasha Aickin
💭 There is so much gold in the founder mindset page I’ve been curating on startupy. If you are a founder navigating through the messy middle, you’ll enjoy this.
🧘🏾♀️ This from Sam Harriss is one of the most compelling descriptions on the benefit of meditation: Your mind is the most rambling, chaotic, needling, insulting, insufferable person you will ever meet. Thoughts do not hold rightful claims on your life—meditation helps you welcome the good ones and ignore the bad ones
📜 Advice has no value until it is parsed into specifics. In my experience, breakthroughs happen when the advice gets specific. “Seize the day” is good advice, in the sense that it contains a powerful truth about living well. But it’s not nearly as useful as, “Do something that intimidates you before noon,” or “Never put something off a third time, if you plan to ever do it.”
So good 👇🏽
If you’re wondering who’s behind this newsletter:
My name is Sari Azout and I am the founder of startupy - the world’s first community-curated knowledge graph. Our curators collect, organize, and store the most interesting links on the Internet, and make them easily searchable and discoverable.
Want more?
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Want to chat?
Drop me a note at sari@startupy.world
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Thanks for being here!
I have to admit: spending 6 months to a year on reading and research does sound very tempting.