My Favorite Ideas of 2021
A year in review and an exciting announcement!
Hi folks!
It’s been awhile hasn’t it? Between work, spending more time with loved ones, and planning my move to New York, I’ve been pretty neglectful of this newsletter.
I plan on committing more time to writing in 2022 and I’m excited to announce a few changes!
To make writing more sustainable, I won’t be abiding by my original 2-week per post schedule. I’m hoping that not having a set schedule will give me more flexibility to write and latitude to really deep dive on topics I’m less familiar with.
I’m gonna try expanding the focus of this newsletter beyond books to other subjects I find interesting (technology, product development, leadership principles, and economics to name a few). I don’t claim to be an expert in any of these topics but I hope writing about them will help me absorb more of what I learn 🤓.
(TBD) Given the new focus areas, this newsletter might be due for a rebrand and redesign. If you have suggestions please let me know!
All in all, I really appreciate all of you for sticking around—especially folks who contacted me during the hiatus to encourage me to keep writing. I hope I can continue making this newsletter interesting and useful for you all.
Happy New Years everyone! 🎉
Phil
Today’s Read: 15 Minutes
My parents decided to not let the Omicron variant stop us from spending Christmas in Las Vegas. It’s become a bit of an offbeat annual tradition and my parents' dedication is even more impressive considering the fact that they neither gamble, drink, nor enjoy nightlife.
In between watching Home Alone reruns and binge eating at the Bacchanal Buffet, I ducked out to the hotel bar, ordered a beer, and did a bit of reflecting on this past year.
As part of this exercise, I looked back on all the things I read in 2021 and asked: “What were some of my favorite topics of this past year?”
I had the neat idea of doing a personal 2021 Year In Review—kind of like Spotify Wrapped but instead of music, it’ll be a collection of ideas I thought would be worthwhile to write about.
I arrived at five fairly diverse topics ranging from my recommitment to writing, personal principles, and broad subject-areas I spent a lot of time learning about.
All these topics have 2 critical elements in common:
I have at least one vivid memory of trying to explain the idea in great detail—often times poorly and usually for friends who regretted getting me started
I’m hoping to spend more time writing about them in 2022
So this will be both personal reflection and a preview of the year ahead.
Without further ado, here are my 5 favorite topics of 2021 (in no particular order):
Writing
Decision-making principles
My relationship with money
Economic policy
Crypto (😅)
Writing
Writing is thinking. To write well is to think clearly. That’s why it’s so hard.
David McCullough
If I had to bet on one skill becoming more and more important in our rapidly-changing, distributed world, I would bet the house on writing.
Technology has made information abundant and easily accessible. The new challenge is curating, synthesizing, and and then making all this information useful.
The books and articles that really stood out to me this past year required someone to take a new, complicated idea and distill it into something digestible, actionable, and even inspiring.
With that in mind, I hope writing consistently in 2022 will help me (1) clarify my thinking and (2) better connect with others.
1. Clarify my thinking
I hope you finish this blog post and realize just how many interesting things happening around us!
While reading helps me learn and identify blind spots, it’s writing that forces me to focus and streamline my thoughts.
I'm not someone that can instantly understand something the first time through. Someone like me needs to invest time and effort to reframe what I just learned into concepts and models that make sense to me.
Writing forces me to organize the unstructured chaos of what goes on in my mind into language that's succinct and coherent.
2. Connect with others
If I’m to be completely honest with myself, my communication style is a little bit self-indulgent.
I ramble. I go on tangents. I tack on anecdotes that don’t necessarily help clarify my message.
Ultimately, I learned that it’s not what you say, it’s what people hear. That means I need to do a better job of understanding how to make ideas worthwhile to people other than myself.
Nic Carter sums up this challenge really well
For me, the struggle of writing is chiefly one of vanity versus utility. Being concise is hard. It requires painfully shedding text that you’ve sweated and labored over. Being sufficiently humble that you are willing to convey ideas into the heads of your readers at the expense of demonstrating your sill with words—that is the challenge...Writing is for the reader, after all.
Nic Carter
Good writing is understandable, actionable, and ultimately valuable to those who spend time reading it.
With more practice, I hope I can do an increasingly better job of not just introducing you to new ideas but also making them useful to you as well.
Some worthwhile reads about writing
On Writing (Medium Post) by Nic Carter
Storyworthy by Matthew Dicks
Words that Work by Frank Luntz
Decision-making principles
Make your own choices before the world decides for you
(Not sure…probably someone smart)
There’s nothing quite like a “black swan”, life-altering pandemic to make you feel completely powerless to the forces of nature.
Even as we gradually returned to some semblance of normalcy, I felt an insatiable need to take back some control in my life. I got tired of just rolling with the punches, feeling like I wasn’t making any real, decisive decisions in my life.
Rather than just continuing to "go with the flow", I decided that I wanted to be more intentional about the choices I was making every day.
I ended up reading a lot about how different people and businesses applied decision-making principles. How do they think about risk? How do they cope with fear and loss-aversion? How do they act decisively when there’s no way to know what’s going to happen?
For the sake of brevity (and to keep content for future blogposts), I'll quickly summarize some valuable lessons with an impactful quote from something I've read this past year.
1. "Busy" = Out of Control
If I'm "busy," it is because I've made choices that put me in that position, so I've forbidden myself to reply to "How are you?" with "Busy." I have no right to complain.
Instead, if I'm too busy, it's a cue to reexamine my systems and rules.
Tim Ferris in Tools of Titans
2. The Single Decision framework
If the commitment is to a long-term goal and not to a series of smaller intermediate goals, then only one decision needs to be made and adhered to. Clear, simple, straightforward. Much easier to maintain than having to make small decision after small decision to stay the course when dealing with each step along the way. This provides far too many opportunities to inadvertently drift from your chosen goal.
Christopher Sommer
3. Write down your fears
What doubt, fears, and "what-ifs" pop up as you consider the big changes you can--or need to—make? Envision them in painstaking detail...Are these things really permanent? How likely do you think it is that they would actually happen? What steps could you take to repair the damage or get things back on the upswing even if temporarily? Chances are, it's easier than you imagine.
Tim Ferris in Tools of Titans
4. Being slow can be worse than being wrong
Some decisions are consequential and irreversible or nearly irreversible – one-way doors – and these decisions must be made methodically, carefully, slowly, with great deliberation and consultation.
But most decisions aren’t like that – they are changeable, reversible – they’re two-way doors
As organizations get larger, there seems to be a tendency to use the heavy-weight decision-making process on most decisions…The end result of this is slowness, unthoughtful risk aversion, failure to experiment sufficiently, and consequently diminished invention.
You need to be good at quickly recognizing and correcting bad decisions. If you’re good at course correcting, being wrong may be less costly than you think, whereas being slow is going to be expensive for sure.
Jeff Bezos
Some worthwhile reads about decision-making
Tools of Titans - Tim Ferris
Superforecasting - Phil Tetlock
Think Like a Rocket Scientist - Ozan Varol
My relationship with money
Frugality, quite simply, is about choosing the things you love enough to spend extravagantly on—and then cutting costs mercilessly on the things you don’t love.
Ramit Sethi
Like many children of blue-collared immigrants, I've been taught the virtues of being thrifty since day one.
I don’t spend frivolously. I save aggressively. And I spend an unreasonable amount of time finding the best deals.
But I also think years of being hyperconscious about spending has led to a somewhat unhealthy relationship with money.
I've always felt guilty spending money on myself, often converting the sticker price in my head into units of “hours my parents would have to work to afford this.”
I had inherited the same scarcity mindset my parents had their whole lives, except I actually had the privilege to not worry about where my next meal would come from.
I felt like I needed to save as much as I can or else...I don’t know...something bad happens?
Financial independence started feeling like this corrupted game of musical chairs where I needed to procure all the chairs before the music stops playing.
I honestly didn't even realize I was perpetuating this mindset until I listened to a podcast featuring best-selling author and personal finance guru, Ramit Sethi.
Anyone can be rich – it’s just a question of what “rich” means to you. A rich life is about more than money.
Ramit Sethi
Everyone’s “rich life” is different. Someone on the show defined there’s as “wanting to shop at Whole Foods without checking the price tag”. Another said, “I want to be able to travel twice a year, pick any seat on the airplane, and stay at any hotel without I want without price being the main factor.”
I’m still working through the specifics of my "rich life" but—at a high-level—I want to use my money (generously) to improve my relationships, my health, and my ability to learn.
This doesn’t mean that I completely abandon my spending/saving habits. Instead, defining my “rich life” helped me realize that money isn’t about avoiding suffering or running up a hypothetical scoreboard.
Money is a tool and we should be cognizant about what we’re trying to accomplish with it.
Some worthwhile listens about personal finance (and my favorite budgeting app!)
How to Live Your Rich Life with Ramit Sethi (All the Hacks Podcast)
The Psychology of Money with Morgan Housel (All the Hacks Podcast)
You Need a Budget (YNAB) - This budgeting app has actually been life changing. @YNAB if you stumble on this post please sponsor me! In the meantime, use my referral link to get a free trial!
Economic policy
I’ll remember 2021 as the year where words like “quantitative easing” and “transitory inflation” started popping up in almost every news article I read.
Naturally, I decided I needed a better understanding of our financial system. This led to me Googling things like:
What actually happens when the Fed “prints” money?
Why do interest rates impact the stock market?
What is a eurodollar?
Despite hours of reading, listening to podcasts, and watching YouTube, I’m no closer to having a high-conviction point of view of what 2022 has in store. To be fair, even our brightest economic minds disagree on most core issues and always seem wildly off on their predictions.
But I did gain a much deeper appreciation appreciation for how complex our financial system is.
It’s clear to me that the complexity and uncertainty will only increase as real.
Irreversible structural changes are already starting to take place in our economy brought on by this concerted shock of COVID, immigration, and demographics.
Let’s take a look at our labor market as an illustrative example:
Our birthrate has been steadily declining since 1993, meaning there will be fewer 20-somethings entering the US labor force year after year for the foreseeable future
We’re also seeing a roughly ~600K decrease in net immigration since 2017
COVID resulted in 3 million early retirements from the labor force
COVID created a new class of work-from-home job alternatives for people who might have been in different jobs pre-COVID
COVID caused lifestyle changes in the number of workers per household and prompted many households to shift locations or even leave the workforce all together
Regardless of how dire you think our current economic situation is, one thing seems irrefutable to me: There’s no going back to our halcyon pre-covid days. The ground is shifting underneath us and it’d be reckless to assume things will operate the same way.
Millions of people leaving the work force means we’ll need a healthy dose of both good policy and technological innovation to increase our productivity and sustain our standard of living—all the while managing externalities like climate change, income inequality, and a growing distrust of traditional institutions (more on that later).
I don’t mean for this to be all doom and gloom though. The present day always seems more difficult and the past certainly wasn’t as problem-free as we tend to remember it.
Every generation faces their fair share of challenges and I’m optimistic the people today can step up to the plate.
Some worthwhile reads about the economy
Good Economics for Hard Times by Abhijit V. Banerjee
The Transcript (Newslettter)
Tangled (Newsletter)
Stuff I Thought About Last Week (SITALWeek) Newsletter
The Winds Have Changed (Investor memo) - Howard Marks
Crypto
Speaking of irreversible, structural changes...let's talk crypto!
You've already made it this far, please don't label me as just another #Techbro and tune me out!
The 2021 headlines painted a pretty crazy picture.
Crypto currencies hit all-time high valuations, exorbitant amounts of money were shelled out for JPEGs, and Crypto.com replaced Staples as the official stadium sponsor of my beloved Los Angeles Lakers.
Crypto is probably one of the hottest topics in tech right now so I will concede that there is a bit of cool-aid drinking and bandwagon riding here.
Even if all this is just pure market hysteria, there has to be something interesting happening here right?
My journey into the crypto rabbit hole
These stories piqued my interest and led me on this all-consuming journey unearthing some really incredible things happening in the crypto community.
My journey started modestly. I bought my first Bitcoin...then Ethereum...then Solana.
I then decided to learn more about the fundamentals behind these new assets, brushing up on basic concepts like proof-of-work vs. proof-of-stake and consensus protocols.
Before you knew it, I was reading newsletters about Zero-Knowledge proofs, collateralization models for stablecoins, and whether Layer 2 modularization is the future to scaling Ethereum performance.
Okay. I’m finished jargon flexing.
But seriously...the Crypto/Blockchain/Web3.0/Meta rabbit hole is crazy deep once you look past the surface-level headlines. This community is chock full of not only deep technical topics but lots of great thinking about the economic, political, and policy implications.
Let’s briefly cover a few.
What to watch in 2022
While most of the exuberance right now is driven by speculation, another powerful tailwind is a growing distrust in our traditional institutions.
There's a desire to take back ownership of what we create, to preserve personal privacy, and to truly democratize access to tools that weren't available to every day people. We're seeing this already with crypto ownership skewing heavily towards underrepresented groups.
As an outsider turned crypto-evangelist, 2021 seemed like the year where Web 3.0 descended from its 30,000-foot, utopian (anarchist?) point of view and started laying the foundation for real-world use-cases.
To be fair, much of this work was happening well before the 2020-2021 hype cycle. But a lot of it is just now starting to make real-world impact and, as a result, enter the public consciousness.
I'm convinced that crypto is past the stage of solely being an investment asset.
To prove my point, here's a random smattering of a few key developments I'm keeping a close eye on:
Crypto mining as a way to subsidize and stabilize green energy generation (whitepaper) - Ted Cruz of all people is getting behind this!
Blockchains allowing retail investors to invest in alternative assets (e.g. digital art, startups, the Constitution?) while also making the process simpler and much more transparent
The role of various stablecoins either cementing or displacing the US Dollar as the world's reserve currency (article)
I even caught myself outlining these topics to my dad over dinner!
Imagine trying to explain why crypto adoption is a matter of US national security to someone who just bought their first stock a few months ago.
I bought Ford stock because they make good cars
Papa Ou. Mechanic and freshly minted investment adviser
He wasn't convinced... I had a hard time translating "USD-denominated stablecoin" in Cantonese.
Taking my personal exuberance aside, I’ll admit that the future of crypto won't be all sunshine and rainbows. Besides the inevitable market correction, I'd be remiss to not also highlight some very real challenges I foresee in the year(s) ahead:
Lack of regulatory clarity or just downright hostility could push crypto activity outside the US (Biden's infrastructure bill has some concerning provisions)
There's still systemic risk in needing traditional institutions like banks and governments "on ramp" to real dollars
There's always a chance crypto remains just a niche area—never breaking out towards mass adoption due to lack of trust, an inability for the technology to scale, or government regulation.
Paradigm shifts don't come easily and they'll likely present unforeseen, second-order consequences when they do happen.
But boy…what an exciting time to watch all this unfold!
Some worthwhile reads about crypto
Crypto Theses 2022 by Messari
Not Boring (Newsletter) by Packy McCormick
Bankless (Podcast)
The Bitcoin Standard by Saifedean Ammous
Anything involving Balaji Srinivasan (this man is either the smartest, most prescient person on earth or an absolute lunatic)
Parting Thoughts
And there you have it folks! Another year around the sun!
I hope you all enjoyed this post and are having an amazing time with friends and family this holiday season.
It’s feels good to put thoughts in writing again and I'm excited to carve out more time this to explore these ideas further...so stay tuned!