Back from never having been gone 🤷🏼‍♂️

Let me quickly catch you up on the last two years.

The last couple of years have been a wild ride. About six months after launching the Impact Billionaires in 2020, I realized I wasn’t on a path to becoming one building the agency I was building at the time. The impact you can have with an agency scales linearly, and to get to a billion+ people impacted, I need the potential for exponentially growing impact.

I decided to leave the agency behind & join Entrepreneur First in London to explore the venture-backed (VC) route. What followed was an incredibly intense two years of uncertainty, personal growth & punches in the face, if we’re calling it what it is. But also, I’m now certain I’m on the right track in learning the foundational lessons of massive worldwide impact & the truth is I’ve never felt this fulfilled & excited to be working on what I’m working on.

Right now, I’m in the US, building our startup Eden, at this founder residency organized by what I can only describe as the best (pre)-seed investors on the planet - brickyard.

It’s pretty obvious, that when it comes to the billion+ people impacted, I’ve got quite a ways to go. That being said, there are a TON of lessons that I’m learning on this path, and since they say that to “teach is to learn twice”, quite selfishly, I want to create this forcing function of sharing all the lessons I’m learning.

The fact that you’ve signed up to read them excites me - so please don’t be shy to make this a dialogue - reply if there’s shit that you’re resonating with or thinking of yourself. I want us to be friends who can learn from each other. xx

Introducing notes-to-self as a thing.

Why am I reviving this thing now? The problem I had/have is time. My days for the past two years have been up by 5, at my desk by 6 - until 8 pm & in bed by 9 to do it all again the next day. I tried keeping the podcasts going and thinking of a better, more manageable newsletter format. Still, all these things took too much time & effort to keep consistently doing & they just weren’t priority.

That’s until I realized I built too little reflection: we spent long days doing many things that, frankly, looking back, didn’t move the needle. I started recording three pieces of advice I would give myself from a year ago as a reflection forcing function. I found the “notes-to-self” prompt to be super helpful as it synthesizes the past & repackages it for the future.

Since they’re already recorded, I might as well share them.

So, without further ado, here are 10 minutes worth of notes-to-self:

If you don’t have the time to watch a 10min video, here are this week’s lessons distilled into their one-liners:

1. Sales before anything.

2. Trust your future self.

3. Treat energy & emotion like waves when you go surfing.

4. Trust your intuition no matter what.

5. Spend time to learn what to be dogmatic about & then be dogmatic about it.

6. Design the game so you can keep playing it because there are no shortcuts - only lucky breaks.

7. Getting past the first minute is everything.

8. State your needs.

9. Don’t play all your cards at once.

10. When having difficult convos don’t speak for the other.

Catch u next week xx