Tiny Sticks #3 | 3.31
Q1 done, speed skating, and Maggie Rogers.
I blinked and we’re 25% through the year. Time is moving fast and it feels like we're in lockstep with it. A jam packed month with no shortage of reflections to round it out.
Let’s get into it.
📚 Recap:
What got published this month:
Performative Wellness and Forgotten Foundations: on where the wellness world went wrong
The Hunt for High-Leverage Health: the importance of the spaces we live in for 90% of our lives.
The House Always Wins: How to Win The House: why we’re building Nestwell.
🌀 Undercurrents:
I’ve long been familiar with Viktor Frankl’s idea that when people can’t find meaning in their life, they fill the void with pleasure and distraction. But I recently came across the inverse of this, and it hit closer to home. When someone has trouble finding happiness, they distract themselves with meaning.
I’ve been in both buckets. My late teens and early twenties were definitely the former and recently it’s shifted.
Something about building a company lends itself to obsessing over meaning and the impact you could eventually make. But I’ve had glimpses into how easily that slides into making it happen by any means necessary, which quietly puts happiness and rest on the back burner. If you’re not careful, the thing slowly becomes a replacement for happiness rather than a source of it. It would be easy to blink and have five years pass with all of it postponed.
So I’ve been thinking about what it looks like to build with intensity without letting it consume everything. Nils van der Poel, the Swedish speed skater who broke the 10k world record and won double Olympic gold in 2022, published a 62-page training manifesto after his win. One of the core principles was a strict 5 days on, 2 days off rhythm. Not because the work wasn’t important, but because the rest was what made the work hold. He firmly believes that you don’t get faster by never stopping but by building stopping into the system.
I think building a company works the same way. One step I’m taking is shutting it down for 24 hours on Saturdays. Contrary to what the 996 work schedule suggests, this isn’t new. It’s called a Sabbath. A small but deliberate act to protect the person building the thing, not just the thing being built.
🪵 Build Log:
I’m starting to map out our first handful of hires and have been reflecting that the most impactful people I’ve worked with have been business athletes. People who can play multiple positions, shift when things inevitably shift, and figure things out without a playbook. With so many things in flight, hiring someone who can only do one specific thing is a trap. You lose the ability to pivot with that person when priorities change, which they will, constantly. There’s a point where specialized roles become necessary, but we’re not there yet.
Marc Andreessen’s hiring criteria has been circulating again and it maps almost perfectly to what I think a business athlete looks like:
On intelligence: raw intelligence is overrated. There’s no real correlation between standard intelligence metrics and company success.
On drive: he defines it as self-motivation. People who walk through walls on their own power without needing to be asked. Independent of education, GPA, or background.
On curiosity: anyone who loves what they do is inherently curious about their craft. They read about it, study it, talk to other people about it. Not because they have to, but because they love to.
Low ego, high scrappiness, and relentless curiosity are the key ingredients IMO.
🔌 Inputs:
The Plastic Detox: follows six couples dealing with unexplained infertility and explores how everyday plastic products seep into daily life. It’s beyond shocking/scary but a necessary watch in understanding that we’re kind of sitting ducks with regard to toxin exposure…
Optimizing Ourselves to Death by Brad Stulberg is probably my favorite piece by him yet. Flat out saying that optimization is counterproductive is something the world needs to hear more of IMO. Usain Bolt winning three gold medals off of 1,000 McDondald’s chicken nuggets is quite the mic drop too.
I’m about 4 years late on this one but I recently came across The Playlist on Netflix, which highlight’s Daniel Ek’s journey building Spotify. It’s one of my favorite founder stories I’ve come across, not just for the company-building arc but because it captures what it actually looks like when an entire industry gets disrupted in real time. He basically had to change the minds of massive music labels who weren’t just stuck in the past but fighting legal battles to stay there.
🤿 Sights & Sounds:
The anniversary of Pharrell discovering Maggie Rogers popped up on my feed this week and I watched all 9 minutes of it (as I do yearly now). It’s timeless and goosebump worthy. She said she didn’t even plan on going to class that day. Imagine that.
⚓️ Anchors:
“The hardest thing about this program was getting through it with a smile upon my face. When I found ways to enjoy it I was unstoppable. Sometimes, to get through more hours, what was needed was an ice cream and sometimes it was multiple ice creams. The good news was that ice cream was pretty cheap. So even though other skaters had millions of euros going into their careers, I was able to skate faster than all of them, because I had found a way to enhance my performance with ice cream. To me the challenge was not about suffering, but finding a way to endure hardships with ease” - Nils van der Poel
- Keep picking up tiny sticks. See you next month.
