The stories we tell ourselves, our self-limiting beliefs, and how they shape our lives.

Read the full post on the Bookie Substack. 

What an especially bad bout of Sunday Scaries taught me about uncertainty. 

You can read the full post on Monday morning (Jan 9, 2023) on Bookie Substack

To be special or happy?: Reflecting on 2022, exploring emotional fitness, and working through my psychological baggage.

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After those pandemic-stricken years of feeling like life was just happening to you, 2022 taught me how life is so much more fulfilling when you're present and tuned into the things that make you happy.

Obviously, not every day was sheer bliss. I've had some really crappy days too but I am grateful for how many more good days I’ve had than bad.

Looking ahead to 2023, I've been thinking about ways I can ensure those good days continue to outnumber those bad ones. How can I create, organically, more moments where I'm undistracted by what's happened prior nor wondering what's going to happen after? How can I find more opportunities just be present, enjoy the company of the people around me and feel a true sense of peace?

I stumbled upon this concept of emotional fitness. If my goal for 2022 was to be more present and intentional, the next step in that journey will be gaining a better understanding of what drives my emotions and behaviors.

A critical aspect of that is taking an honest look at my biases and psychological blindspots. We all have emotional baggage we inadvertently project onto others and none of us can change what we don't take the time to notice.

My hope is that by better understanding my emotions and how they influence my actions, I can become a more honest, resilient, and even happier version of myself.

Painful realizations about our past, present, and future

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If your Twitter feed is anything like mine, it’s probably become a torrential downpour of geopolitical hot takes. Stocks are down so yesterday’s market experts are today’s experts in economics, politics, and international relations.

I felt so much whiplash from all the contradicting opinions. I needed to somehow cut through the noise so I decided to do my own research and formulate my own point of view on what was actually happening.

Energy was at the center of every interesting question I wanted to answer for myself: What is happening in Europe? Why are we suddenly budding heads with China? Are we permanently screwed with inflation and climate change? What started as a truth-seeking exercise became a multi-month deep dive on energy policy.

Energy is clearly essential to how the world works, but it’s a total blackbox where we recognize the importance of its outputs but never think deeply about its inputs. By exploring this topic some more, I began to see how the way we procure energy, how we transport it, and how we regulate it determines living standards, influences geopolitics, and will ultimately decide the fate of this planet.

So think of this piece as “Energy 101” where I try to distill everything I’ve learned in the past couple of months into a hopefully fun-to-read Bookie article.

Why do we want the things we want (and why they tend to be things other people have)

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I recently attended my college reunion—in Las Vegas of all places—and the whole experience is just begging for a bit of reflection. Reunions are admittedly an odd topic to write about, but I figured everyone can use a break from my Web3 soapbox and read something a little more introspective.

Reunions force you to revisit your past and not only do they promote reflection, but they can also come with enough awkwardness to prompt a thorough examination of your psychological quirks.

We’ll start this reflection by talking about a great book I read about a month ago: Wanting by Luke Burgis.

We'll start there with a hopefully interesting overview of this 20th-century philosophy called Mimetic Desire. Using that theory as our lens, I'll then painstakingly try to answer some deeply personal questions like: "Why do I compare myself to others ?" and "Where do I go now that I’ve realized these things about myself?"

This won’t be a diagnosis of every Type-A person’s psyche—just my own. It’s not a prescription on how to live your life nor what it means to be “happy”. It’s just simply me writing to figure out who I am, what I believe, and what I want to do moving forward.

Read the full post on Bookie

On its surface, the concept of identity is deceptively simple to understand. It’s just who we are—that intangible “I” that ultimately defines human consciousness.

Or to flex some culture on you I’ll quote Descartes: “I think, therefore I am.”

But take this concept out of a philosophical vacuum and you quickly see the strange dichotomies our identities exist under.

Our identities are that internal, “special me thing” but also ultimately determined by how other people perceive us.  Our identities need to provide sameness and continuity throughout our lifetimes even though our physical, mental, and spiritual selves evolve over time. We’ve constructed artifacts like driver’s licenses, birth certificates, and usernames & passwords to represent our intangible uniqueness but only so institutions can define concrete, broadly applicable rules around how society operates.

As we transitioned from hunting & gathering alongside people we see every day to exchanging goods & services with people we've never met before—the rules and technologies that governed our identities were forced to evolve alongside it.

Today, I have the fun task of exploring how we’ve collectively approached this difficult task and also try to make sense of how we may approach it in the near future.

To do this, I'll be answering 3 fundamental questions:

Read the full post on Bookie 

In what's been dubbed "Meltdown Monday", a series of market events led to the $UST stablecoin losing its peg to the US dollar. At the time of this writing, $UST is valued at $0.18 after spending most of its history valued at $1. The subsequent, "de-pegging" of $UST  triggered a chain reaction that ultimately caused $50B—that’s BILLION with a B—of market value to evaporate practically overnight. So why did this happen? What does it mean for the future of crypto? And what can we all collectively learn from all this carnage?

Read the full post on Bookie

Maybe it’s the move to New York. Maybe it’s meeting new people and having to answer: “So what do you do?”. Or maybe it's just good-old-fashioned angst from my quarter-life crisis.

Either way, here we are feeling introspective, using our precious free-time to take a stab at writing a tiny career memoir.

Instead, I want to look back on some memorable career moments, clarify some of the lessons learned, and then use them to paint a picture of how they’ve impacted my personal life—particularly around discovering what gives me joy, purpose, and energy.

We'll deep dive into the wonderful world of digital currencies and examine what's next in the future of money

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The NFL is simultaneously one of the most influential brands in America while also not being very well understood. Very few businesses operate the way the NFL does and even fewer have had their degree of sustained, cultural impact on America.

In today’s episode, I’m going to explore how the NFL operates, its unique built-for-TV product, the challenges it faces, and its future prospects! 

Read the full post on Bookie