The Metaverse is built and we are living in it.
Apple is releasing their Mixed Reality headset in 2022.
Bitcoin and Blockchain technology is in the spotlight as Tesla buys $1.5B of BTC.
Ethereum and NFTs will be next on the stage.
We have created an alternative monetary system in the Metaverse, that is distributed globally and largely uncensorable.
Two of the richest people in the world - Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos - are now bringing humanity to stars.
We're living at a time of change, where our frontiers are once again opened up for anyone to explore.
I'm currently thinking about creating a newsletter covering topics like networked thought, polymaths, creativity, play, genius, creativity, systems thinking. The idea behind this newsletter is to discover what's happening on the edges, the frontier, and to take forward looking ideas from the past.
Who would my audience be?
How would I curate information for the newsletter?
What is the feel of the newsletter?
Potential Names
We live in a digital world dominated by algorithms. If we're not intentional about our feeds and let any idea populate it, we may end up with a cluttered feed that doesn't bring us any joy.
Do we actually have a choice in our digital environment?
We can start to take control of our feeds by setting an intention to explore a part of our selves, perhaps one of our interests, an idea that we gravitate to, and to use algorithms to give us information that helps us grow and explore.
Information feeds I want to use with more intention
Reddit and Youtube to learn anything.
Podcasts to learn about people.
Books to get inspiration and context for writing.
Are.na and Pinterest for algorithmically supported pattern matching and exploration.
Pandora for algorithm discovery of musical vibes.
Spotify for playlist curation of musical vibes.
Twitter to be a deliberately curated feed for my core interests.
We're in the early days of creators making money on the Internet.
We're in the early days of creators owning the platforms that they produce their content on.
We're in the early days of creators creating tremendous prosperity for both themselves and their true fans.
This is the time to do 100 things you can only do in crypto.
I'm inspired by the builders and new users of the new social layers on the Internet.
I was born into a world shaped by Western antiquity, yet my ancestral past is from China. My grandparents and ancestors were Buddhists but my parents studied Western anthropology and history and chose not to adopt any spiritual or religious practices. Ironically I was named after Alexander The Great, who stopped his conquests at India and never reached China. My understanding of my ancestral past is lacking because on both sides of my family, my grandparents passed away years ago. I didn't have the opportunity to hear my grandparents' life stories in their native tongue.
When I think about my blank slate, and its immersion in a culture that is a mixing pot, I am grateful that I can pursue my choices without the burden of tradition. Yet there is a sadness for my disconnection from my ancestors and the isolation of being an only child that hasn't learned his family's stories. I am the one that gets to make his own choices, but I don't know what choices my ancestors had to give up in order for me to be here. I'm sure my ancestors had dreams that are still present within myself, in my genes and way of being. And honoring my ancestors means actually making choices in my life that are fully aligned with who I am and in service to others around me.
When I think about what I want to be doing, what comes to mind is the past and the future. I want to spend my days immersed in history and technology. I want to be here to see what will happen in the next century. I want to travel to worlds different from my own as humanity expands out into the stars and dives into the deep oceans. I want to witness the frontiers of our human experience expand.
I'm thinking about creating a salon series about the theory of mind of ultra-learners and polymaths.
How can we become more courageous in how we learn?
I think the underlying secret of people who have become really great learners is a sense of going against the way we commonly learn and having the courage to figure out what actually works.
Going away from our comfort zone of what is taught in schools is one of the first steps.
Utilizing all of our intelligences, utilizing different ways of learning, and incorporating all of our senses and mental faculties in order to truly learn.
Finding the best resources is a metaskill that can be developed.
Developing taste and understanding what is considered high quality work over time and applying that to other domains.
Gratitude for being alive. At that fundamental level, just being alive is an accomplishment.
We forget that our lives are not supposed to move at the speed of social media.
We can watch the lives of people from conception to old age on a small screen and believe that we are living those lives.
Returning back to gratitude for the basic privileges we have in life enables us to honor our humanness.
Gratitude to have a home, to be able to feed ourselves delicious foods, to talk with friends over the phone, and to learn about what it means to be human in the 21st century.
Gratitude for connection.
I grew up not understanding my underlying motivations for acting. I felt like I was at the mercy of circumstances, environment, and upbringing.
I felt like I was sleep walking through life.
At around 17 years old, I decided I wanted to understand the choices I made and to start to take responsibility for my path in life.
I'm slowly peeling back the layers of this experience and I'm starting to realize that the journey is about returning back to ourselves. I'm revisiting areas of my life that I didn't have visibility into before due to trauma - "memory loss" - and reframing my experiences with the knowledge I've gained from talking to others.
Throughout the last six years, I've gone through many re-discoveries of parts hidden that are now looking to express themselves.
One of these gifts is diving deep into a game, subject or technology and then sharing my excitement about it with others.
I would love to have a career where I could follow my curiosity and be energized by new ideas and technologies, and share them with others.
Whenever I talk with someone, I'm always looking for ways they could benefit from a new tool, or an idea.
Often times, the best action to take is no action. This is true in investing. This is true in life.
We can slow down to speed up. We can choose to take the time to reflect on what is present in our lives.
Learning how to make better choices starts with a journey inward and pausing on our blind movement forward.
When you feel compelled to write, WRITE!
When you get a feeling that you are being taken by an idea, WRITE!
There's a pattern to creation: it is not always easy to write but there are moments where it becomes easy.
These are the moments to capture with as much enthusiasm as possible.
Publishing on the Internet allows you to edit past work. We can always write out what is streaming through our consciousness and then choose later what we want to develop further.
I want to find my own pattern of behaviors that lead to creativity.
Certain writers try to write at the same time every day. Becoming a factory.
Seinfeld would have a calendar on his wall where he would put a big red X over the days he wrote.
Reduce the amount of the distractions you have around you. Stop worrying about what technology you need. Stop thinking about how to be more productive.
Start to write when you feel the urge to write.
Capture your momentum by chaining your progress together.
Reduce the energy needed to get started as much as possible.
Writing from a blank sheet of paper is one of the worst feelings.
The blinking cursor taunts us
The blank page reflects our doubts about our ability to produce meaningful work.
What if we could create from a place of abundance?
What if past conversations from months ago could become the basis for our writing?
This is the power of creating a personal knowledge graph using Roam Research.
I always strive to have meaningful conversations and track them in Roam.
As I document these conversations, I trust that I'll be able to find them in the future.
In the past, the notes I took would end up lost in a notebook or in a data silo, unaccessible and unconnected.
But now, I can search up all the instances I've talked about or written about a topic and use it as a starting point for whatever I'm writing.
As I continue to remix and expand on these ideas, I'm adding to my knowledge graph. Abundance begets abundance.
We live in a world of information abundance but our mental models for how we capture information, learn, and create have not caught up to this reality.
What is our calling?
I believe that it is represented by our spirit of genius (personal), the spirit of ideas that choose us (liminal), and the spirit of the times (society).
Genius comes from Latin was defined as the ‘attendant spirit present from one's birth, innate ability or inclination’, from the root of gignere ‘beget.'
I like to imagine that we each have a spirit of genius that wants to be expressed within us. Pulling in ideas from the world through our curiosity. Collecting experiences and experimenting with choices.
Our genius may just represent the best way we communicate with the world.
Some people communicate better with art, symbols, words, touch, or through music, etc.
When people are given the opportunity to cultivate their unique gifts of communication and are recognized by society or others, they are considered geniuses.
Certainty enables energy to flow to an objective.
How much certainty do we have to take an action in our lives?
When we are full of conflicting emotions or negative emotions, certainty is not present.
This doubt causes us to make non-optimal choices.
Spiritual practice allows us to gain certainty in our lives - that we can achieve a state of inner peace and love using clear instructions and practice.
This certainty reflects to all other areas of our lives.
As we start to gain wisdom in one area of life, where else does this wisdom overlap with other areas of life?
When we achieve high performance in a field, we can identify meta-skills that can be applied to high performance in another field.
Whatever we think about is interpreted using our mind and our brain. Everything in our world is part of our consciousness.
Everything is connected.
This year's theme is about resilience.
Where can I become more adaptable in my life?
In a sense, the world that existed before COVID will not exist anymore. Apocalypse.
We're entering a new world that asks us to become more sovereign in every aspect of our lives.
We are not waiting for others to help us with our physical, mental, and emotional health, we are called to become the healer within our own life. We are building new skills that will define the new economy. We are learning how to build new systems that will replace our old and aging institutions.
It's going to be an interesting decade with tremendous upheaval.
But I am optimistic that becoming more sovereign in my own life will ripple out and show others that they can do the same in their own lives.
Leading by example is the only way we make it through this.
As I walked through the forest today, I noticed my nervous system calm down as I took deep breathes.
Suddenly, a thought comes through my head, and its energy is from a conversation someone else had in my house earlier today.
I start to feel anxious but I recognize that the anxiety is not me: It's how I am responding to energy stimulus from earlier in the day.
Emotions arise throughout our day, often times they're accompanied by our thoughts, past experiences, or judgements.
Throughout my life, I've noticed my sensitivity to the mood and energy of others and that I may adopt that energy temporarily as a response to this stimulus.
How do I get out of these states?
What happens when we make a decision? Is there a self that branches off that didn't make a decision?
When we are deliberating over a decision, do multiple selves exist at the same time?
Is there a copy of me that splits off into a new timeline?
Is it possible for us to learn about our alternate selves?
What are they doing right now? What could life have been like for them?
We live with the choices that we make, yet there may be another version of you that lives with the choices that you didn't make. Yet all we know is that we live this one life.
What I've learned is to do is to look for that magic view that awaits me every time after I have overcome the most difficult and challenging moments of my life.
I could turn back, like I've done in the past, or move forward into the unknown and see where the path takes me.
Yet I choose to move forward and choose a path that is guided by my heart, instead of by my fear.
2020 helped me realize an important lesson about movement.
When we feel stuck, when we are in quarantine, our mind starts to loop and wander and we try to use it to escape from our confined physical space and body.
What can we do to get back to our body?
Physical writing allows us to move our thoughts from our mind into physical matter. Dancing allows us to release emotions and energy that are stuck in our body. Exercise allows us to move more oxygen to our brain and grounds us through the weight of our body.
If I were have some resolutions for 2021, they would be: