📝 Embracing Our Flaws, David Perell on Writing & more

Sup friends 👋🏼,

It’s been a busy week in London, due to ETHGlobal.

I met a bunch of operators, teams and devs who are all building great projects across DeFi (Decentralized Finance), DePIN (Decentralized Physical Infrastructure), and more.

I’ve not been super plugged into the London web3 scene as much as I like, so i enjoyed meeting builders based here, and i wanna help build the community in this great city.

Some 📷:

Anyway, let’s get to it 🙂

1/ Robert Downey Jr’s Redemption Arc

This was an astounding read - RDJ just capped a multi-decade comeback by winning Best Supporting Actor for his role in Oppenheimer.

A ton of interesting insights like:

• Downey Jr coming to prominence in the early 90’s for his role in Charlie Chaplin

• Went to jail and suffered from drug addiction

• Marvel sold the rights to Spider Man & X-Men to stay out of liquidation

• They decided to make their content and borrowed $500m+ to make this bet 

• RDJ took a lower base fee ($500k, so still not bad!) and earned a % of the box office figures

Tons more insights around how he was chosen as action lead, and how much he earned for each film (culminating in almost half a billion (with a b) in earnings).

(Saying that, wasn’t a fan of him ignoring Ke Huy Quan when he went up to accept his award)

2/ Writing Lessons from David Perell

There’s a ton of writing advice out there, and Perell is someone I respect (the guy is obsessed with evangelizing the benefits of writing and making everyone participate in the Great Online Game).

• Read to Collect Dots, Write to Connect Them

• Write from Abundance (always collect ideas)

• Create a Personal Monopoly

• Make it POP (good writing is: Personal, Observational & Playful = POP)

• Imitate, then Innovate

• Practice Analytically, Perform Intuitively

• Expression is Compression

Good writing is about saying more with less.

3/ A Japanese Philosophy to Embrace our Flaws

You may have come across the Japanese artform of kintsugi.

In kintsugi, pottery is intentionally broken, then repaired with a golden lacquer to highlight its damage.

What makes us unique beings is our combination of imperfections and flaws.

Instead of trying to airbrush them away, we should highlight them.

Our imperfections aren’t bugs.

4/ Max Levchin on Being a Better Leader

I’ve always enjoyed the writings of Max Levchin - he was the co-founder at PayPal and has founded a bunch of interesting companies since then.

He’s an OG legend in the startup world.

He wrote a great post a few years on how he “gave up coding in the short term to become a better leader long term” - this was a leadership masterclass, but will share a quote I liked:

That’s a wrap - let me know your favourite link 🙂 

Till next week,

Fahim ✌️