Medley 268: Milestones, Anon, Visibility, Comparison, Fertility, Riddles, Adulting...
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!
Last Friday, I published a DeFriday focused on where the yield in DeFi comes from, and what interest rates are legit or scammy. Check it out!
Also, I filmed the last few videos for SEO for Solopreneurs as part of a bonus 1.5 hour live session last Friday. Those will be in the course the next few days for anyone who is enrolled or signs up!
Alright, on to the Medley.
The World of NFT Games
After all the crazy NFT hype in early spring, the online buzz has died down quite a bit. But the industry is still progressing, and it's moving beyond JPG ownership.
Hello Anon is a new game that's part riddles, part scrabble. Players can purchase tiles that represent letters of the alphabet, either by minting them on the Anon site or by buying them on the secondary market on Opensea.
Then every day, new riddles are released on the Anon site. Once you figure the riddle out, you have to plug in the necessary letters or characters to solve it. If you don't have them, you can try to quickly buy them from someone else, or swap them with a friend.
Since the riddles only have a 10 minute time limit and you almost have to collaborate with friends if you don't want to spend an absurd amount of money, this creates a fast paced, exciting, team game, with serious money on the line. Among the friends I'm playing with, we've already won a few prizes worth anything from 0.05 to 4 or 5 ETH. It's kinda crazy: solve riddles, earn JPGs worth $10,000. Welcome to 2021!
Anyway, it's super fun, and if you start playing, say hi in their Discord. I'm pretty active there.
The World of Visibility
I loved this new piece from Morgan Housel: "Harder Than It Looks, Not as Fun as It Seems."
It touches on a really important concept in business and in life. It's usually easy to see what's so great about someone else's situation, but it's hard to see the shitty parts.
"Instagram is full of beach vacation photos, not flight delay photos."
I often catch myself doing this with different business models and types. When you're running an agency, you're jealous of people who have a digital product they can more easily scale. When you have a product, you're jealous of service businesses that can more easily start earning revenue. When you're running a lifestyle business, you're jealous of people with a team to handle the parts of the business you don't want to do. When you're running a team, you're jealous of the lifestyle entrepreneur who has all their time to themselves.
It's tough to keep in mind how much everyone else is struggling with things you're not thinking of, probably because you're not struggling with them. And it's easy to forget how great you have certain things, because to you those things are normal. There's always someone jealous of the things we take for granted.
The way he ends off the piece is important, too:
"Everyone’s dealing with problems they don’t advertise, at least until you get to know them well. Keep that in mind and you become more forgiving – to yourself and others."
Any time you compare yourself to someone, you're going to imagine them in a much happier, richer, successful place than they likely are or perceive themselves to be. It's helpful to keep in mind that even the absolute indisputable #1 person in a field probably compares themselves to someone in another field, or someone who's dead.
I don't think that impulse ever goes away. So we just have to try to be better about redirecting our thoughts to the things we have that others are probably jealous of. Maybe that's not a completely healthy thing to think about, but it's where I try to redirect my mind when I start getting jealous of someone.
For example, anyone older than you that you're jealous of, they'd probably give up that success to get those years back.
It's also why it helps to try to carve out some kind of hyper specific odd niche for yourself. Not having a normal niche is in some ways the ultimate niche. It makes it very hard for you to compare yourself to others, because no one else is doing the combination of things you are.
The World of Adulthood
This chart is fascinating. Delayed Adulting in one picture.
This says a lot about how financial opportunities have changed across generations. It also speaks to the infantilization of late teens and early 20-somethings. I have to imagine that encouraging kids to jump through hoops for academia is slowing their ability to achieve independence. And the insane college loan burden certainly isn't helping either.
But the other reason this chart kinda scares me is that we're getting frighteningly infertile. Environmental factors have decreased our fertility by over 50% over the last 50 years, and that trend isn't slowing down. Age has always been a factor, but the idea that we can wait till our mid 30s to have kids is getting less and less true every year.
According to Dr. Swan in Countdown, a woman in her mid-20s is less fertile today than her grandmother was at 35. Men are about the same. So if everyone is waiting till their 30s to start families... and fertility rates are dropping every year... It's not good.
Even if you're not planning on having kids any time soon, it's worth doing a simple at-home fertility test. My wife and I used Legacy and Modern Fertility. They're not perfect, but they're a good start, and if you're going to have any issues in the future it's better to find out now rather than later.