Legos, airdrops, and cats

Hi nerds -

I salute you from Miami, where, on Monday, I received my first crypto airdrop. Yayyy 🎉

Worth 7$ when the first ENS tokens were released, they have since reached 85$ and back over the last few days. Needless to say, it's an emotional roller coaster.

But, what is a crypto airdrop anyway? Well, you can imagine it as the moment a company goes public and gives employees stocks. Except in Web3, organizations have started rewarding early members through gifting them governance tokens.

But more on this on later editions..

3 brain farts

🧩 Lego World: The internet is made up of lego blocks.

Built upon open-source software, most of the web today exists thanks to open code engineers use for development.

In Web2, companies have built profitable projects on top of these building blocks and sold their software at a premium. Problem is, most of them have kept their innovations private assuming that’s where their company's value lies.

Web3 changes this paradigm. Because every contract deployed is found openly on the blockchain, anyone can revise it and adapt it to their needs. This is key to why the space is growing so fast and why Web3's value is not in their private codebases, but rather in the ownership given to participating members.

This composability is to software what compounding is to finance: it increases the speed of innovation and creates an ecosystem of inevitable collaboration.

🛠 Fear toolkit: Last week I bought myself some roller skates.

But the moment I put them on, a fear of falling took over.

I stood up and took it slow. Grabbing on to walls, I observed other skaters on the boardwalk. Within a few minutes, I trusted myself to lean away, increase speed, and after an hour, I was on the boardwalk by myself.

Why am I telling you this? Because overcoming fear is the same no matter the task.

Fear comes from a lack of trust in ourselves. That is the barrier we're aiming to overcome.
The way to break it is often by starting small under conditions we consider manageable.
We slowly build up confidence, until we dare take bigger bets on ourselves.

Whether it’s a fear of falling, failing, or succeeding, we’re building our personal fear toolkit every time we take a risk. And the more fears we break, the more robust the toolkit, the bigger the bets we'll feel comfortable undertaking.

👩🏼‍🎤 Your Third Person: A few years ago I decided I would write a fiction piece.

First on the agenda was crafting the main character. I mapped out her dreams, fears, and personal paradoxes, only to realize I was writing about myself in more honesty than I had ever before.

Writing about ourselves in third person is powerful because it confuses the brain to think we’re describing someone else. This creates space for the empathy and raw feedback that is often hard to get with our natural, self-inflicting bias.

2 intellectual goodies

"The problem with obsessing over productivity is that the kind of curiosity that leads to big breakthroughs rarely feels productive in the moment."

~ David Perell