DAOs, procrastilearning, and Panamanian beats

Hi nerds -

I salute you from Panama City, already settled back into my yoga routine and healthy habits.

When we’re in the same place for too long, we tend to become blinded by the bad aspects of where we live. Traveling is important to get some breadth of gratefulness and inspiration.

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3 brain farts

⭐️ Superstar Meetings: As meetings pile up in my calendar, I’ve been pondering about how to have the most effective + efficient meetings.

Some patterns have become clear:

1. Asynchronous > Synchronous: The best meetings are the ones we avoid to have. Anything that can be done asynchronously should be done asynchronously, so we don’t lose additional productivity time.

2. Audience: Having the right amount of people is equally important as having the right people. Too many and nothing gets done, too few and you can’t make any decision.

3. Agenda: Always come into meetings with an outline of what should be discussed. If we finish the agenda, we finish the meeting. Shorter calls force people to go straight to the point faster - avoid 60min meetings whenever possible.

4. Next steps: We should always strive to leave the meeting with clear decisions, an outcome roadmap, and next steps with owners and due dates.

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👷🏻‍♀️ Consumption-Production Ratio: The Age of Information Abundance has become a booster for our procrastilearning habits.

​Procrastilearning means that rather than producing, we hide in the consumption safety net until we “feel” ready.

• When consumption is high and production is low, it usually means fear and/or insecurities are driving our life-train.

• When production is high and consumption is too low, it usually means we have an unfounded, haphazard wild card on our driver seat.

Finding the balance means having self-enforced deadlines and understanding that done is better than perfect. It’s having a consumption strategy based around the projects you want to produce and knowing when to stop digging rabbit holes.

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🤝 DAO: The internet has become the breeding ground for idea-based communities, but it’s been almost impossible to organize those conversations into world-changing action. Until the DAO.

A DAO is a decentralized autonomous organization; a way for people to organize collaboratively based on smart contracts.

• Decentralized: there is not a main centralized leader. All members run the organization by executing votes. These votes are weighted based on the amount of tokens a member has. The organization decides how a user earns tokens.

• Autonomous: the code is the law so the DAO runs itself based on the results from people’s votes. It encourages and discourages behaviors through how it’s set up.

• Organization: groups of strangers are able organize matters like how to manage their funds, who performs what task, etc in an easy, transparent, and secure way.

Here are some potential use-cases and examples:

• Companies who want to share equity among their employees distributed around the world

• NGOs who want to make sure every transaction is transparent and open to their stakeholders

• Initial political parties who still don’t have a set centralized leader

• Disruptive ideas like ResearchHub, tokenizing the sharing of research articles, or GitCoin, tokenizing coding for open-source software.

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2 intellectual goodies

"You have to be willing to look like an idiot in the short term to look like a genius in the long term."

~ Shane Parrish​

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“Everyone is winging it. Yes, experts too. What we call expertise is nothing but a mix of self-deception, ruthless focus, pattern matching ability, and just enough training data.”

~ Avy Faingezicht, "Here’s to the crazy ones: lessons learned at Apple"​

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1 funky audio

In a true Panamanian fashion, this playlist is a Spanglish collection of retro, tropical beats from emergent artists in the scene.

Great to listen to while swimming at the pool or tanning under the sun. ☀️

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Thanks for reading.

As always, feel free to connect by hitting reply and sharing a juicy thought 💡.

We all help the curious community grow 🧠.

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Best,

Jules 🤸🏻‍♂️