Hey Team,

I skipped last week.

Sometimes writing this newsletter is as easy as harvesting oranges in the streets of Valencia.

But not last week.

Energy Depleters

I have been working 6.5 days a week since January, if you include writing. I’ve enjoyed it and never felt a lack of energy. But recently, I ran out of gas.

I faced two classic energy depleters.

The first was an unexpected high-stakes business disagreement.

Both sides felt frustrated. It’s the kind that creeps into your brain all day. You know the feeling whether it’s business, school, or personal. If you could charge rent for the time it occupies your mind, you’d be rich.

The second energy depleter was the best kind: creating something new and wanting it to go well. Let me explain.

Personal Monopolies

Last September I enrolled in my first online cohort-based course. There were 300 students from dozens of countries.

The course is called Write of Passage and was started by online writer David Perell. I had followed him for years on Twitter.

The promise of the course is to teach you how to write online. It delivers that and more.

Many students, including myself, take the course to learn more about building one’s personal monopoly, a term David coined.

The basic formula is write online and use Twitter or other platform to attract an audience. As the audience grows, you can monetize the writing by creating a course, self-publishing, or other path. This is a subset of the growing creator economy.

By the time the course ended in October, I had spent many hours talking to people about their personal monopolies. That number grew by the end of the year. I had these conversations for fun and to be helpful. It turns out that I am also pretty good at it.

The motions involved are similar to what I have done for 20 years with complex software products. Figuring out the value and best go-to-market strategy for software and people requires similar steps.

The 8th running of the course just started and I’ve returned to run a weekly mentor session on Sundays. It's focused on shortcutting students towards their personal monopoly.

I have more content to cover than time, so I predict that I will be writing about this topic beyond the five week course.

Ukraine

I find myself in a regular pattern when consuming news about Ukraine.

When I open Twitter, I visit accounts that document the Russian losses.

The Cold War teen in me wants to keep score like a board game. This is not the Russian army I imagined in the 1980s. But within minutes I feel the shallowness of viewing the war thru this lens. I move to accounts that document the humanitarian losses.

But I can only read and watch for a few minutes.

When I start to rant to myself, I know it’s time to look away. If I don’t, it will hijack my mood, to no one’s benefit.

Eventually, I go to the accounts trying to explain the past and predict the future. These fellow analytical voices calm me. While I feel guilty looking away from the pain, I rationalize that trying to understand is more productive.

I've been tempted to create a running web page of notes to share what I am seeing, but suspect everyone has more than enough content to consume.

IceKiting

My happy place is kitesurfing, kitefoiling, and snowkiting. I even wrote about it as the second essay topic during Write of Passage.

But I've never been icekiting. Here’s a view from Toronto.

I am not sure which hurts more: falling on hard ice without pads or kitefoiling and hitting a shark.

I hope everyone has a great weekend.

-Michael

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