Hey Reader!
It’s a classic rainy and chilly spring weekend here in Portland and we’ve been enjoying it with pancakes, at the zoo, and with some delicious coffee and tea from our favorite local spots.
I normally send this newsletter early on Saturday mornings, but I was exhausted after traveling solo with my son last weekend and two podcast recordings in a shortened week for me. I caught up on some sleep this weekend instead. Thanks for reading on Sunday :).
If you missed it, Sophie Purdom joined me this week on the podcast. Sophie is a venture capitalist and the co-founder of CTVC (now called SightLine climate). She works at the intersection of reversing climate change and high capital returns.
Listen here:
- Apple Podcasts
- Spotify
- YouTube
- Show notes
I always love hearing from you, so drop me a note and let me know what you’re enjoying about the podcast so far (and ideas to make it better).
If you prefer to only get emails about the podcast, click this link and I’ll exclude you from the Saturday newsletter going forward. The link is automagic so don’t worry when it just takes you to the podcast site.
Let’s get to it.
A quote to make you think from a book worth reading
“How we approach our sorrows profoundly affects what comes to us in return. We often hold grief at a distance, hoping to avoid our entanglement with this challenging emotion. This leads to our feeling detached, disconnected, and cold. At other times, there is no space between us and the grief we are feeling. We are then swept up in the tidal surge of sorrow and often feel as though we are drowning. An approach of reverence offers us the chance to learn a more skillful pattern of relating with grief.”
-Frances Weller, The Wild Edge of Sorrow
I continue to find myself recommending this book more often than any other. It once again came to mind after a friend who is going through injury recovery texted me this week about the sadness of the process… and then again this morning when I learned an old friend passed away unexpectedly at the age of 34, leaving behind two young daughters.
Changing my relationship to grief changed me as a person. I have more capacity for both grief and joy today than I did in the many years when I worked as hard as I could to repress sadness and grief.
Our capacity to hold, process, and integrate our own grief is directly related to sit with others as they do the same. This is an act of compassionate leadership, whether in our personal lives or in the organizations we build.
Three links to encourage deep thought and breakthrough growth
1 The Case for Working with Your Hands (2009) by Matthew B. Crawford | Read time: 25min
“The imperative of the last 20 years to round up every warm body and send it to college, then to the cubicle, was tied to a vision of the future in which we somehow take leave of material reality and glide about in a pure information economy.”
At the Zoo yesterday, my son wanted to know how one becomes an elephant handler, so my wife asked the trainer for him.
The man answered, “First, you have to love animals. Then you have to study animal science. Then you have to get lucky because these jobs are very competitive. But more than anything you have to be willing to do manual labor.
I’ve been doing this 35 years and it’s a lot of hard work. A lot of being away from my family. Not a lot of money. But we do it because the animals deserve it.”
Software changed the world. AI will do the same. They form a digital layer over the material world we interact with everyday. But at the end of the day, we are subject to the constraints of the physical planet we live on. The most important work of the next 100 years will happen in the real world, using digital tools to augment.
Are you ready? Are your kids?
Questions to consider as you read: What hobby could you build to reconnect to the world of atoms? How does your business ultimately relate back to the offline world? What could your children or mentees start learning now to prepare them for a world of work at the intersection of technology and the real world?
2 What I Learned at Clubhouse by Anu Atluru (2022) | Read time: 20min
“I spent the last 2 years at Clubhouse, where my learning was supercharged by the caliber of our team, the rate of growth, and the very nature of building in a new product category.”
Clubhouse was one of the hottest startups of the pandemic-creator-economy era and Anu was at the heart of the rocket ship growth as head of community.
These are 25 of the lessons Anu took away from the experience grouped into tidy categories of:
- Product
- Community
- Go-To-Market & Growth
- Strategy & ops
- Building & managing teams
- Working at a startup
Question to consider as you read: Which lessons apply to what you’re building right now? What’s one experiment you could run based on Anu’s learnings?
3 The Days are Long but the Decades are Short by Sam Altman (2015) | Read time: 9min
“Go out of your way to be around smart, interesting, ambitious people. Work for them and hire them (in fact, one of the most satisfying parts of work is forging deep relationships with really good people). Try to spend time with people who are either among the best in the world at what they do or extremely promising but totally unknown.”
On his 30th birthday, Sam Altman (CEO of OpenAI, maker of ChatGPT) was still early in his tenure as president of Y Combinator. He took time to try to write a useful rather than trite, reflection on the most distilled life lessons he had learned by that point in time.
Nearly ten years later, as he approaches his 40th birthday, the essay still holds up.
Questions to consider as you read: What’s one change you can make at work or in your personal life based on what Sam shared?
A Short Essay Based on My Work with Founders
Life is challenging by default. Choosing to lead — either implicitly or explicitly — means you’re signing up to take on more than your default share of those challenges.
How you experience the challenges life offers is largely determined by your mindset and your ability to build resilience. Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning is perhaps the greatest manual of all time on developing resilience and finding purpose in hardship.
Anxiety is something I’ve struggled with throughout my life and something I commonly see in the founders I work with as a coach. It is an anticipatory feeling towards hardship and challenge that hasn’t happened yet. For me, it takes a particularly hyper-vigilant shape where I try to anticipate all possible bad things before they can happen so that I’m ready for them.
This is an exhausting way to move through life. I see many founders burn themselves out waiting for the unforeseen bad thing to happen.
You have to develop the ability to see this pattern and release it so that you can focus your energy on what you control. You need to be able to increase your surface area for luck (James Clear and I talked about this). You need to be able to sustain yourself without being overrun by the anxiety of what you can’t predict.
This requires tools you can apply when hardship and challenge arise. Knowing you have the tools means you can answer your anxiety with, “Thanks for letting me know that this matters. We know what to do if and when something bad happens.”
I’m a TV buff and enjoy the golden era of storytelling we’re experiencing in TV programming ushered in by streaming services. My recent favorite show, Shogun, delivered a perfect tool via the central character, Mariko-sama.
Early in her adult life, her father dies after committing her to marry into a family and to a man that she feels disgraced by. She lives her adult life hoping to die, waiting for a chance to avenge her father’s death, in keeping with the Samurai code of honor.
She endures years of hardship and challenge to serve the Samurai lord, Yoshi Toranaga, to whom her father was loyal. In one episode, she describes a concept Japanese children are taught to deal with the hardship of the era of war they are living through: the eightfold fence.
The eightfold fence is a barrier children are taught to construct within their heart or soul. It is a protector of peace and harmony within that they can access, no matter what is happening in the world around them. Mariko-sama says that even in the face of death, disgrace, or sorrow, you can retreat behind the eightfold fence to “listen to the sound of a blossom falling or a rock growing.”
As a leader it’s your job to handle hard shit. Whatever challenges your organization faces, it will be your job to confront the reality of the situation, process your emotion related to it, and make sound decisions about how to move forward.
You can’t do this well from a mindset of anxiety, worry, or dread. The eightfold fence offers a powerful strategy to create space between the hard thing that is happening outside and the mental state necessary to move forward with a sound response.
Imagine the most peaceful place you have ever experienced. For me, there is a particular hike through a forest here in Oregon where the trees are tall, a small river flows nearby, the ferns are huge, and the rocks are covered in rich moss. I can close my eyes and hear peace.
Imagine that place existing within your heart, behind an impenetrable eightfold fence. No one else can access it unless you specifically choose to allow them to join you there. It is where you can go to sit (or run or dance or play), experience peace and joy, and then return to the world more centered and whole.
When you are facing a challenging situation, or if you are anticipating a potentially challenging situation — notice the emotion it brings with it. Anxiety. Worry. Dread. Anger.
Then pause.
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Retreat behind your eightfold fence.
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…
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Then, emerge with more capacity to face whatever life and leadership require of you.
Much love and respect,
If you enjoyed this newsletter, forward it to a founder friend. You can also recommend me to a founder or creator as a coach.