Hey uguba ndubuisi, happy Sunday!
Welcome to another edition of Life Reimagined.
In case you missed it, Steph and I launched the first part of a two-part podcast series about The Future of Work.
In the first episode, we discuss the second and third order effects of the remote work revolution. If you're interested in how to not fall behind in the remote working world and what changes are coming for people and companies, this episode is worth a listen.
On a semi-related career note, Steph and I also spoke with David Nebinski on the Portfolio Career Podcast this week about how you can ditch the common career narratives and create your own path.
If you're feeling lost or in a rut in your career, this might be a good start placing for getting unstuck. You can check it out here.
🇺🇸 Coddling of the American Mind
I published my notes on The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure.
The book explores the spread of a potentially dangerous set of ideas being adopted on college campuses and beyond.
The thesis is that these ideas are making people more fragile, subject to emotional reasoning, and comfortable using an "us versus them" lens to view the world. The authors discuss how and why these ideas have developed a stronghold, the ways in which they're manifesting, and the potential harm to human progress and happiness.
On the whole, I think the book could have presented more evidence from "the other side." That said, it does raise some interesting questions about ideas that are being popularized in the world and whether or not those are ultimately helping move us forward in a good direction.
You can see my notes here, but I'd recommend reading the book if you're interested since I didn't cover a lot of the material:
The Coddling of the American Mind Summary and Notes.
👨💻 Explorations in Decentralized Finance
I initially wrote off crypto's 2020 rebirth as a speculative bubble with cult-like behavior that clustered around certain coins.
And while there is undeniably a lot of that behavior in the web3 space, there is also a world of interesting new ways of thinking about ownership, lending, corporate structures, incentives, and more.
In Longevity, Smarter Travel, DeFi, and Less Drinking from June this year, I mentioned my growing interest in one facet of the web3 space: the world of decentralized finance (DeFi).
I found it interesting that you could earn 8-13%+ and take out loans on your holdings by simply depositing stable coins in some protocols.
Since then, I've gone deeper in the DeFi space by joining discords of interesting projects, following people on Twitter, and most importantly, taking my own cash and learning how to deploy it into this emerging world.
Here's a sample of what I've done so far.
(1) Lending + Loans: I used the Alchemix vault to earn a yield on a stable coin and take out a self-paying loan worth 50% of my collateral. I then used that loan to take other yield-generating actions in the DeFi space.
Learnings: This first step taught me how to set up a wallet to interact with the DeFi space, how gas fees play a role on the Ethereum network, how to think about the risk of a protocol based on where it sits in a stack, how you can earn yield in the DeFi world, and a new way to take out a loan without having to fill out paperwork or visit a bank.
(2) Play to Earn + Losing Money: I invested in a play-to-earn game with Nurses and Robots who battled and where you would earn yield by taking certain actions. I mostly did this because my friends were shilling the project and made me think I could get-rich-quick if I got involved.
Learnings: THERE ARE NO EASY WAYS TO GET RICH QUICK (duh). Also, gas fees destroyed my earnings during this period and so did the endless dumping of the coin from the game. I ended up losing more than 50% of my initial investment in a few weeks. The big lesson was to know what I'm getting into before doing it. I also figured out how to use Uniswap and Sushiswap.
(3) Staking + Bonds: I used Olympus Finance to enter a 7-day bond where I deposited my ownership in a liquidity pool on Uniswap and earned more of one of the tokens in my liquidity pool. I also staked OHM, the token for Olympus and am letting that sit in the protocol over the long-run to earn more OHM.
Learnings: This taught me about liquidity pools, staking, impermanent loss, and doing complicated things like entering a 7-day bond with a token that can fluctuate vastly in price.
I've played around a lot more than this, but these are some of the actions that got me in the game. And if they don't make sense to you, they didn't to me either. But each one proved to be interesting in its own way.
Now that I'm in the game, I'm starting to see how everything works.
My hypothesis from earlier this year was that investing money into the Defi ecosystem would be a forcing function for learning more about the world of DeFi.
That hypothesis proved to be true. Having skin in the game is a great way to learn.
Along the way, I also have come to believe that the only reliable way to learn about DeFi is to play around in the ecosystem and make mistakes. Articles, Discord channels, and Twitter can help you understand some of what's happening, but nothing really clicked for me until I started playing around.
Putting aside any money made or lost, I've mostly done this so that I can understand why so many smart people are so excited.
I honestly think a big part of it is the rapid wealth creation that people have benefited from, but that's certainly not everything.
Participating in this little corner of the internet feels like taking part in a new frontier that's exploring if things can be done differently.
I think a lot of what exists today is frothy speculation and that many popular projects won't exist five years from now, but that doesn't mean that everything is a scam or not interesting.
Right now, a bunch of bright and crazy people are rapidly testing new ways of doing things, and some of that testing will lead to innovations that stand the test of time.
I have no idea what will happen to coin prices, and I don't particularly care.
But for those people who can look past the idea of a bubble or scams, I think it's worth peeking under the hood of what exists in the world of DeFi and the other spaces in crypto that may interest you.
Thanks for tuning in, and see you in two weeks.
Cheers,
Cal
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