Background for new subscribers:
Crush Sleep is a productized-service administering the leading insomnia treatment, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for Insomnia (CBT-I), and providing sleep related accountability.
I mention people I know in my newsletters not only to show them appreciation but also to connect you all together. If anyone mentioned sounds interesting, let me know and I can put you in touch.
What’s better than free rent, fresh Indian food, and hexagenarian roommates? Austin, Texas. A month ago I left my parents’ place and the cold NYC winter to break out of a momentum-killing holding-pattern. I was following my hunch that I could reactivate my network in Austin, benefit from the ambient entrepreneurial spirit, and connect with those living lives unconventional in the way I want to be unconventional.
On Saturday I took a moment to appreciate how much Austin has delivered exactly those things.
First, I went on a walk with my grand-hearted, resilient entrepreneur friend, Alan (currently Lumira). Whether we were speaking about relationships or entrepreneurship, the aspect he was always most concerned with was the integrity of his actions. I really appreciated that.
Side note about ethics and entrepreneurship – I’ll write someday about the this because in practice I don’t think people stress test their initiatives against it enough. Yes, there are claims of being motivated by “making the world a better place”, but they are sometimes stop signs that buckle under scrutiny. I think the vast majority of profit-seeking endeavors are good (and their profits are evidence of that) but for reasons idiosyncratic to our current technology, there are increasingly frequent exceptions. Entrepreneurs working on those businesses should be interested in knowing if they are working on an exception.
Alan and I ran into his friend Noah Kagan, who also happens to be the author of Million Dollar Weekend. It’s the book that addressed the exact problem I was having a month ago: not being able to gain conviction in an idea long enough to see it through. His approach is deceptively simple. Try getting paid for something before you build it so you know they care about the problem. I’ve heard that advice from others but Noah takes it to the next level by insisting that the right business for you can be validated this way with nothing but your warm network.
I told him that thanks to his book the idea that eventually became Crush Sleep passed the validation test (3 paying customers in 48 hours). He loved the idea and we riffed on what it could become for a while. That was very validating so working on the business felt easy this week.
My living situation is great too. Primarily because my roommate, John, is great.
He’s extremely on-top-of-his-shit.
He is the most game-understanding-driven person I’ve ever met. There are a lot of people who play a lot of games, especially video games, but he loves getting to the bottom of every game and figuring out optimal strategies. I also lean that way so it’s been fun playing games with him.
He’s a cofounder of a VR game publishing business that controls its own destiny (Andromeda Entertainment).
He’s very embodied and knows how to have a good time.
I’m onboarding one person every week so I can take the learnings from each week of the program to improve the delivery of the same week of the program for the next person. I’m not charging them right now as I’m more interested in getting feedback and testimonials. I’m doing daily data collection calls and using easily available CBT-I materials to formulate the program and recommendations. It feels like a cheat code because the materials leave nothing for me to figure out regarding the core program.
I’m not certain where the aversion to shortcuts comes from (probably Ethereum and smart contract engineering culture) but I know how to turn it down now. Sometimes it is the right move to play on hard mode but hard mode is harder so you should make sure that easy mode isn’t what you want first. See also: Half-assing it with everything you've got.
Another small-but-feels-big win is a new acquaintance sending me this. It’s small because at the end of the day it’s just one person. But it feels big because this person was moved to the point of texting me. It shows motivation.
There’s a huge grab bag of mental work I’m doing under the assumption that I can drastically reduce my neuroticism. I’m doing them in parallel so it would be too much to describe my experiences with them all and I don’t know if any of you care anyways. I’m just going to list some of them here to gauge interest in hearing more.
Circling - Socializing with awareness and norms much closer to radical honesty than everyday polite society. Has resulted in some surprisingly hard collisions with dark parts of my mind.
Existential Kink - A frame in which things we don’t consciously want in our life are perhaps fulfilling disowned desires.
Embodiment coaching with a focus on women and romance – Coaches that offer this are very high variance. They’re usually charlatans that are mostly good at getting you high with guided meditations or they’re one of the relatively few people in the world that know which screw to turn.
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