📍 What you missed in July, August & September
1,500 subscribers, upcoming Career Spotlights, and building community.
Every 2-3 months, I’ll send a brief recap to summarize top articles, interesting links, and share what I’m currently working on.
🙋♂️ Life & Newsletter Update
Can you believe that summer is already over?
I’m currently writing this from Toronto, Canada — a city that I spent seven years in prior to New York. Fall is in full swing here, with endless rainfall, temperatures hitting 6 °C (43 °F), and yellow-orange foliage starting to appear.
It’s been a great opportunity to escape the hustle and bustle of NYC, and to reflect, recharge, and write.
As for the newsletter, I’m 8 months into the Musings & Perspectives journey and thrilled to have hit 1,500 subscribers — a milestone I wasn’t expecting to achieve until mid-2022.
I’m eternally grateful for your continued support, feedback, and advocacy.
I’m especially appreciative of the thoughtful replies: a thank you that brightens my day, an idea that sparks a new perspective, or a piece of feedback that improves my writing.
To all the new readers — welcome.
Please feel free to introduce yourself (hit reply to this email).
➡️ What’s Next?
In the next 2-3 months, I’ll continue to evolve my newsletter by focusing on these themes:
Larger variety and more depth on ‘Career Spotlights’. In the queue, I’ve lined up founders who have successful started and exited companies, senior leaders at tech companies, entrepreneurs, investors, and artists.
More partnerships, including guest posts and brand features. I’ll be inviting other writers to do guest posts and run brand partnerships with companies that have an aligned mission of improving growth, productivity, and performance.
Domain-specific content. I’ll talk more about ‘BizOps’, as that’s my domain. I’ll also do more research-driven pieces on tech operations, marketing, and product management.
✍️ Top articles this month
These are my favorite articles that I recently published.
Watch your ego — use a three-pillar model to ensure you’re monitoring your ego, and balancing confidence with humility.
Emailing internet strangers — network, sell, and introduce yourself, or meet new friends online with this framework.
Comparative advantages & Hypergrowth goals — how to use classical economics to set more aggressive goals and optimize your career.
🏄🏽♂️ Internet things worth sharing
Read popular transcribed podcasts (in case you’re more of a reader vs listener) at Podcast Notes.
Send better emails, write superior articles with AI-assisted writing tools like HyperWrite, Smart Copy, Grammarly.
Dig into an infinite rabbit-hole, reading about a topic via similar subreddits found on similar reddits.
Make fun event pages for birthdays, corporate events, and parties with Partiful.
Need templates for running a company, organization, or team? See The Kool-Aid Factory — a set of resources and tools for builders.
Learn about angel investing — general etiquette, expectations, and logistics by referencing the beginner’s guide to angel investing
Check out famous speeches compiled by James Clear (author of Atomic Habits) at Great Talks Most People Have Never Heard.
🙋🏼♂️ What I’m working on
Hosting dinners, mixers, and meetups in New York City. Now that things are opening up, I’ve been spending majority of my time meeting people, often entrepreneurs, creatives, techies, investors, and business peeps. If you’re interested in attending, respond to this email and I’ll share some details.
I’m doing an AMA (Ask Me Anything) with Ladder on November 1st at 5:00 pm EST. Ladder is a Gen Z professional social network with 50,000 users, and past AMA guests include Lenny Rachitsky, Sal Khan, and Elizabeth Weil. I’ll be talking about my pivot to tech, side hustles, and general habits for performance and learning.
Serving as a mentor on Skillful — a tech career accelerator for early-mid career professionals looking to pivot into tech. If you have any interest in working in tech, let me know and I’ll share more details.
Piloting Intros, a personalized introduction community platform that allows readers from this newsletter to connect with each other. Sign up here. If you’re an interested investor who’d like an introduction, I’m happy to do that as well.
📚 Other stuff to share
I just finished “Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps That Explain Everything About the World” by Tim Marshall — It’s a fascinating book on the nations in our world (Russia, China, the US, Latin America, the Middle East, Africa, Europe, Japan, Korea, and the Arctic)—their weather, seas, mountains, rivers, deserts, and borders—and how the physical characteristics of these nations affect their strengths and vulnerabilities.
I’m currently reading “Inspired: How to Create Tech Products Customers Love” by Marty Cagan — Product Management is a domain that I’m looking to learn more about. It’s a core discipline that explains why products exist, how they were built, and how folks approach this kind of thought process.
I’m listening to the podcast “My First Million” by The Hustle — Entrepreneurs Shaan Puri and Sam Parr discuss current business ideas, internet growth marketing strategies, and venture economics. They’re incredibly pragmatic and I appreciate how they approach startups and business. I’ve been knocking off at least an episode a day. I’m hooked.
That’s it for now. Catch you on the next issue!