Medley 264: Cabins, Lessons, Trust, Teams, Work, Notion, DAOs...
This is the Monday Medley, a newsletter that goes out, you guessed it, every Monday. I republish it here for sharing and referencing, but if you'd like to sign up you can do so right here:
Happy Monday!
I added a bunch of new videos to SEO for Solopreneurs today, focused on Tracking, Analytics, and Monetization!
I also wanted to let you know about Khe Hy's "Supercharge Your Productivity" course launching this week. It's the best Notion training resource I've found, and I used it to streamline all our knowledge & SOP management at Growth Machine. Definitely recommend checking it out!
I also released another edition of DeFriday last week all about Polygon, Ethereum's Future, and other exciting DeFi news.
Alright, on to the Medley
The World of Decentralization
🤖 I've been writing a lot about Decentralized Finance, but there are tons of other interesting experiments going on around using software to remove middleware or management from legacy systems.
🤝 "Decentralized Autonomous Organizations" are one of these new experimental areas, exploring how we might be able to use software and smart contracts to organize amongst ourselves without needing as powerful of an authority figure. Pure democracy on the blockchain.
🌎 DAOs have started popping up to govern internet organizations, including many DeFi projects, but very little has been done around trying to use DAOs for real world governance.
🏕 One interesting new project in the space is CabinDAO, a project started by Jonathan Hillis as part of his Creator Cabins project. (Disclaimer, I contributed to this fundraiser).
🗳 Contributors receive $CABIN tokens, which give them voting rights on future CabinDAO proposals, including deciding who to invite for creative residencies. It's not clear if there's any kind of revenue generating mechanism planned for the DAO, but it is possible that something could be set up where a portion of residency earnings are kept in the DAO treasury to fund bounties paid to DAO members for helping with different tasks.
🔎 It's very early, but it's neat to sees someone experimenting with using these new consensus mechanisms to make "real world" decisions. I'll be curious to see where it goes.
The World of Media
👏 A new substack I'm enjoying is "Lessons from the Crisis." It's all about what we can try to learn from the events of last year and early this year.
😷 This edition on the anti-mask campaign at the start of the pandemic is particularly interesting. It was so painfully obvious that masks would help reduce the spread, but this is what our news looked like for a while:
🤯 And then once people realized that no, they do actually help, the political flippening around the topic happened at almost breakneck speed:
"Now it was those not wearing masks who were stigmatised- those who adopted the prevailing view of March 2020 only a few months later found themselves accused of psychopathy or toxic masculinity."
🙅♂️ The article doesn't come out and say it explicitly, but I think the top lesson we should take from this is to just not take health advice from journalists, or even government officials. Especially since it seems the government intentionally lied about mask effectiveness.
🤿 Masks would have helped a lot earlier, potentially preventing the NYC meltdown. And we also obviously did not need to keep wearing them as long as we have. Everyone thought Texas was going to implode when it removed the mask and occupancy mandates back in early March, and it ended up being perfectly fine.
📈 There's probably an analogy to be made here to investing and other trends. If you wait for it to go mainstream, you're too late. Getting good at doing our own research is one of the most important skills we can develop, especially since we have access to almost all of the same information most reporters do.
"The cumulative effect of all this is that right before an impending crisis, life will look very normal and people will not be panicking."
The World of Small Teams
👨👩👧👦 I love this list of small teams accomplishing big things from Steve Pulec.
🏦 Some of the crypto ones would be equally or more impressive. Bitcoin might have been started by one anonymous person. Compound has over 7 billion in AUM with maybe 12 employees. Polygon is worth $11.5 billion with maybe 50 employees.
The World of Work
🐣 And in case you missed it, I shared this last week:
✍️ It's kinda crazy to think that pretty much every way I make money didn't exist as a "job" when my parents were my age. From an income perspective I'm a writer and teacher, which you wouldn't have historically thought of as particularly lucrative careers. Now you can make 6 figures as a meme maker.
👶 It'll probably be challenging to keep that in mind with my kids, but I feel like a good rule of thumb is just that if you're obsessed with anything, there's a way to make money from it today. You just have to learn how to monetize and market yourself well enough to turn that obsession into a career.