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Hi nerds -

I salute you from Miami, where I had dinner this week with the original Wonder Woman. A serendipitous story for another time, I’ll just say Lynda Carter is still as beautiful and lovely as she was in the 1970’s.

This is my second week mentoring students in Write of Passage and the energy and transformation is unlike anything I've experienced online!

In honor of this journey, I've decided this newsletter we’re going full META: a newsletter about newsletters. Let’s begin.

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3 brain farts

🌟 Online lighthouse: The online world rewards the weird and genuine. Authenticity and uniqueness are the fastest ways to avoid competition and by publishing our ideas, we’re able to attract like-minded individuals so they come knocking our door.

Publishing this newsletter has two components for me:

1. Introspection: clarifying my ideas, making them concise and crisp to build upon them easier.
2. Attraction: becoming a lighthouse that attracts people geeking out to the same topics I’m interested in.

Whereas relationships before were born based on geography, relationships today can be born purely out of shared interests. And if you ask me, this seems like a much more natural way to meet the right people.

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🧐 CRIBS: All writing is better when done collaboratively.

In that sense, feedback is a rubber band - what feels like a push back when others dismantle your pieces, is in fact the only way to improve and sky rocket forward.

A great framework to give people’s feedback on their work is to ask yourself CRIBS:

• Is it confusing?: Re-write it until it is clear.
• Is it repeated?: Delete that section or replace the word.
• Is it insightful?: Double down on that idea.
• Is it boring?: Delete it or add sass to the section.
• Is it surprising?: There’s potential to increase tension throughout the piece.

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✍🏼 Writing ritual: The hardest part about launching a weekly newsletter is finding the time and courage to publish your work on a regular basis.

• On finding the time: Every time I say “I don’t have the time”, I’m really saying “I haven’t prioritized it high enough”. Prioritizing means:
  • I care enough to put in the effort because I know the potential of the outcome,
  • I have a format that is attainable within my current lifestyle.
• On finding the courage: If we never share our ideas, we’ll live in intellectual isolation. We may feel like our work is never “good enough”, but in the grand scheme of things:
  • done is better than perfect,
  • we never know what we know that other people don’t know,
  • the earlier we start building our team of like-minded individuals, the faster we can start constructing that world together.

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2 intellectual goodies

“The thing that happens which you don’t see until you write is that your content engages some of the smartest people who are lurking around the internet. And they reach out to you”

~ Steve Cheney

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“Opportunities don’t last forever. If we wait until we are certain many opportunities will pass us by. Thus, failures to decide are still decisions.”

~ Chris Sparks

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1 funky audio

​This song hits all the spots: nice instrumental piano, upbeat beats, and a sneaky guitar halfway through.

Recommended for commutes where you want to forget about traffic and indulge in deep thought.

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& some featured snacks

Currently, my favorite newsletters are the following:

• ​Luca from Refactoring: Writes weekly about engineering teams and management. His writing is clear, easy-to-read, and digestible for a topic that tends to be dense and technical.
• ​Doug Antin's Sovereign Individual Weekly: Writes weekly about becoming self sovereign and taking advantage of digital assets. His format includes a few links and reasons why they’re relevant.
• ​Ana Lorena Fabrega’s Fab Fridays: Writes about the future of education and how kids learn. Her writing is crisp, to the point, and insightfully complemented with assets.
• ​David Perell’s Monday Musings: Writes weekly about writing, finding ideas, and connecting seemingly unrelated thoughts. His format is links and short idea snippets.

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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 🤸🏻‍♂️