📝 LIB: Life Lessons from 30 to 44

Sup friends 👋,

Appreciate all the feedback on the previous newsletter 💙 - going to keep a similar flow.

I’m back in the UK and ready for the final sprint till end of year - the weekend was busy, but I’ve got content to share so let’s get it :)

#1:

A list of life lessons from a 44-year old woman

I’m going to start as I look to end this newsletter - with life lessons (i’m a sucker for them!).

A few I enjoyed:

• Start or end every day with writing about your life. There’s always something buried underneath the to do list in your head, something you didn’t realise you felt, that when written down, will make everything clearer.

• The best place for ideas is alone and on the move.

• All kids ever want is you. Your full undivided attention. Even twenty minutes of that in a day is better than a whole afternoon of scrappy conversations and phone scrolling.

• The small details of your day matter. Be it your first cup of coffee in the morning,  or the way you make your bed, or a walk through the park on the way to work, life is year upon year of stacked up small joys like these. Take pleasure and pride in them.

• Put your phone down. Put your phone down. Put your phone down.

#2: How to build a world class products users love

This was a great interview with Jennifer Phan, the CEO at Passionfroot - it’s a platform that makes it easy for creators and media companies to find and manage brand partnerships.

Some of the key learnings:

• This is an important problem to solve as millions of people don’t want a linear career anymore and choose a diversified portfolio of income

• Brand partnerships is one of the biggest revenue streams for a creator

• They did 100+ user interviews with creators before they even built anything to ensure they developed an essential product

• Jen uses David Allen’s Getting Things Done to prioritise her todo list, so all tasks fall in one of the following lists: Next Actions, Waiting For, Someday, Agenda

• One central leadership philosopher of hers is to give frequent, candid feedback to magnify the speed and effectiveness of the team

There’s a lot more gems, so I’d encourage you to read the full thing (they’re dealing with an internal issue as the site is down, but beehiiv are fixing)

#3: Getting traction in crypto

This tweet was timely; at times, i’ve been drinking the crypto/web3 kool-aid around building ethos-driven focused products, when actually, we just need to focus on building better, faster and cheaper products.

If we listen to what users want and build based on behaviours we’re seeing, we’ll likely build something valuable.

#4: Being lucky vs hard work (Peter Dinklage)

First thought - when I saw these two photos, I thought ‘damn! this guy’s range is crazy’

Second thought - you have to read the story, going to actually paste it below - it’s so well articulated when we think about what we consider to be lucky, but is most likely years of graft to get to a certain point.

#5: 30 lessons at 30

I remember sitting down to write up my own version of these (found here) - i’m a sucker for a good life lesson post (as you can tell by #1), so here’s the key ones I resonated with from this post:

• There’s no substitute for focus

• If you’re not scared, you’re not pushing

• Meditate when your mind gets noisy

• Take the time to teach, even when you don’t have much to teach

• Hone your strengths, avoid your weaknesses

• If you can’t write it, you aren’t thinking it

• The time will pass whether you worry about it or not

• Walking everyday is the best way to touch the grass

That’s all for today 🙂 

Fahim