Weekly I/O #23
Celebrate Fucked Up, Burn Out, Apology and Compliment, Cheapest Therapy, No Desperate Need
Hi friends,
Greetings from New York City!
Weekly I/O is an experimental project where I share my learning Input/Output with you. Every Sunday, I write an email newsletter with five things I discovered and found worth sharing along with stuff I published that week. Hope you enjoy it :)
Output
Here’s what I’ve published in the past 7 days.
1. Plaza
Plaza is the project I've been mainly working on for the past few months with some of the best people at Cornell Tech. We are going to build a layer on top of existing experiences to enable flawless conversations. Right now, we have a Chrome Extension that enables people to comment on every single website they want.
Please let me know if you are interested in what we're building and I can send you the link for the extension!
2. Weekly I/O #22
Last week's Weekly I/O about Root of All Human Motivation, Virtual and Real, Feel, Justified Success, Confirming Belief.
Input
Here's a list of what I'm exploring and pondering this week.
1. Whenever you are completely fucked up, you celebrate rapturously. You know a little bit more about yourself. That’s the best thing.
Thought
I was totally fucked up at something this week. Whenever I know I mess up, this is what I say to myself. It is always almost therapeutic to write down how and why you are fucked up and what you know more about yourself after being fucked up. Sorry that this paragraph contains too much explicit language.
I posted this on social media the other day and thanks to the mighty Internet, according to my friend, "it was quite heart-warming to find out people that are also fucked up at the same time."
2. You don’t get burnt out from working hundred hours a week. You get burnt out from things that don’t work out.
Thought
This is originally from Weekly I/O #17, but I think it may be better to phrase it this way. Also, thanks to my friend Bharat Gandhi for adding that "The mind gets burnt out because it thinks that results are linear".
3. It’s not an apology if it comes with an excuse. It is not a compliment if it comes with a request.
Kevin Kelly, the founding executive editor of Wired magazine and the author of the famous article 1,000 True Fans, writes some bits of unsolicited advice every birthday. Last year, he wrote 68 Bits of Unsolicited Advice on his 68th birthday. And this year he wrote 99 of them. He's writing like he's running out of time.
There are many interesting points in these 99 + 68 bits of advice, and I will probably list some of them throughout the following Weeks' I/O.
4. Writing down one thing you are grateful for each day is the cheapest possible therapy ever.
Adding on this, I always think that writing a diary is the easiest way to experience each day again.
5. If you can’t tell what you desperately need, it’s probably sleep.
That's it. Thanks for reading. If you find anything fun here, I'd really appreciate it if you can share this email using the yellow Share button at the bottom of the email or share the project using the link https://chengweihu.com/newsletter with friends or anyone that may also find it interesting!
If you want to support me, you can buy any aforementioned book that you are interested in through the link in the email. Some of the links are affiliate links that I may get a kickback from.
As always, feel free to send me what you found the most interesting here or any other interesting idea you came across recently! You can either reply directly to this email or reach out to me on Twitter or Facebook.
Looking forward to learning from you.
Best,
Cheng-Wei