May 18, 2021
Hello family. 🤗 This is version 1 of Move Fast, Think Slow a newsletter on cultural trends and meditations. In today’s issue, you can find a tl;dr summary below but hopefully, you stick around to read this post in it’s entirety. Better yet, please subscribe to get more notes in the future.
Version 1 | Cultural Trends + Meditations
As Brian Morrisey pointed out we are indeed at peak Newsletter. There has been a big upswing in Newsletters from publications and writers alike. Hustle Co just sold to Hubspot for $27MM and Morning Brew just sold to Business Insider for $75MM. These are news publications hyper-focused on the medium of email (and social). After years of media and PR spinsters hyping us all up on social media being the wave of the future, it is looking like the best “deep media” experiences are happening via email. Not websites. Not social media. No, the medium of choice to get readers to engage in deep literary news content is email. And as someone who has been an internet geek since the internet started, I have to say: I AM HERE FOR IT.
I started Move Fast, Think Slow for a few reasons. Some are selfish (I just want to write more). The other reason is in hopes that it can become a resource for you, the reader. With this newsletter, the aim will be to deliver on two areas of focus. The first is trends within culture, the weak and strong signals pointing to how the world is shifting towards a great unknown. The second is meditations. The hope is between the two, you will find use in knowledge being shared and meditations to find your center.
So without further ado…here’s v1.
Cultural Trends | The Cyrpto Hype (or new internet frontier) 📈
After Bitcoin grew 116% (to $63,000 per Bitcoin) from January 1 - April 15 in 2021 the internet has been a buzzing. Etherum is hitting new highs as well and yet the mainstream is skeptical on what the heck is going on in this big new world of Cyrpto. Who can blame them, it’s very early days and it’s barely functional or fulfilling on it’s promise. But it’s a lot more than just a storage of value via a Bitcoin in the Blockchain. There really is so. much. more. Check out Not Borings’s Who Disrupts the Disruptors piece - a great read that pointed out this fact:
If you were to look forward from the late 1990s or early 2000s, it would have been much easier to predict that the internet was going to disrupt offline businesses than which internet businesses would win. The same is true in Web3.
The internet allowed disrupters to deliver products more cheaply at scale. Disruption was inevitable, even if its form was unclear.
Web3 allows a new generation of disrupters to create products that actually pay people to use them, and aligns the incentives of creators, consumers, suppliers, and investors. Disruption is inevitable, even if its form is unclear.
Seeing what will happen to the internet (and the world) once this new architecture formulates and efficiently scales is flat-out fascinating (and somewhat scary). If you are curious to learn more I encourage you to check out this primer on Crypto. It’s a great 101 way of seeing the fundamentals behind this emerging Cyrpto universe, what’s happening now, and what is potentially ahead. It’s going to be a wild, disjointed journey towards an uncertain future, but keep an eye on this. It’s early days and a lot of hype but if one of these organizations currencies such as Etherum can find profitability as Mark Cuban says they must, then it just might chart a path to disrupt the disruptors.
Meditations (Making new habits) 🧘
In today’s Daily Stoic (at least when I first wrote this on Sunday 5/16) the chapter discussed setting chains, a primary theme in setting new habits. I found this to be a synchronous moment when reading this meditation. At the same time in which I was writing the first Move Fast, Think Slow newsletter, the Stoics were reminding me that the only way to be the new thing you want to be is to consistently be that thing. And in this case, a writer of a newsletter. Can I set a new chain (habit)? A worthy challenge in a life that is tightly scheduled. Yet, it is possible and the hope is with a new habit-forming some good thought and meditation can come out of it. One foot in front of the other. Hoping to not break the chain. Here’s to not breaking the chain.
Photos of the week 📸
Some desert vibes. The air up there. First time leaving home to see my parents in over a year. Praise be. 🙏