Hey 👋🏽,

My perception of time has changed this year.

When I worked at Apple I thought about time hourly, receiving paychecks based on hours worked, monitoring my time and everyone else’s in 15-60 minute increments. At my last company when I split my time between product management and customer success I reported on progress through daily standups, on the treadmill of what I did yesterday, what I planned to do today and what I was blocked on. In the last year and a half I’ve created a weekly rhythm with work updates, co-parenting a week at a time, my newsletter and cycling on Sundays. But recently my best work has been longitudinal, projects committed to and chipped away at over a month or a quarter. Each hour feels longer but the weeks feel shorter somehow.

I’ve been writing this newsletter for the last month and I think a monthly cadence suits the me I want to be, less rushed, more thoughtful, making time to consume, practice and refine vs. performing all the time. What I’m envisioning is:

a recap of the month
a quick look ahead
a blog post on a topic that I’ve focused on over the last month

Given the change in format you may want to find an exit door (unsubscribe at the bottom of the email) but I hope you’ll stick around.

July Updates

I joined the 3rd cohort of Hustle Fund VC’s Angel Squad with the goal of learning investing frameworks from a team that sees 700 deals a month alongside an incredible network of founders, investors and operators. It’s been awesome learning from the whole team, especially Eric Bahn and Elizabeth Yin.
I wrote up some thoughts on the Great Resignation (below).
I made 3 angel investments and added a list of all with details on why to my homepage.
- Leda Health
- Peachy
- Farmstead
I’ve paused on daily yoga, shifting to a less performative, more organic habit.
I spent a week at the beach on a cloud with 6yo, my parents and my brother who flew in from the UK and SF respectively.

August Goals

Host Reading Flow Clubs 3x/week to connect more with our team and our customers
Work on a business dashboard for Animalz
Learn more about the history of black venture capital

The Great Resignation

I’ve quietly watched the Great Resignation unfold. The Society for Human Resources Management tried to dub this the Turnover Tsunami which sounds clickbait-y but may be more accurate considering the waves behind and ahead of us.

Resignations declined in 2020 for the first time in 10 years to 2010 post-recession levels, down 13.8% YoY according to U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics as turnover spiked at the beginning of the pandemic in March 2020.

13 months after a record high for unemployment, a record 4 million people quit their jobs in April. Another 3.8 million people quit their jobs in May. I can’t fathom these numbers but feel them watching coworkers, friends and even family members go through the decision making process, should I stay or should I go.

It reminds me of a feeling I pursued when I left Apple 6 years ago now, believing in myself enough to ask for more and take a leap of faith. In general I believe that you if you’re running towards a new opportunity (and you’ve done the math) you should go for it, but if you’re running away from something there’s a force to confront that will chase you if you don’t face it, fix it: fear, probably.

Even if fear is close in pursuit, I think most people are running away from it in pursuit of happiness. The 2021 World Happiness Report unsurprisingly showed that worry and sadness increased in 2020 while laughter and enjoyment remained unchanged relative to 2017-2019. Businesses like JobStep are helping people make life and happiness changing career transitions.

Diana Markosian’s “Santa Barbara” current exhibit at the SF MoMa explores escape, following the journey of a mail order bride and her two children from post-Soviet Russia to the states. It put me face to face with the decisions I’ve made to start over in pursuit of happiness, becoming a single mother, leaving jobs, breaking bad habits.

Our GM at Animalz came down to visit in June and told me that she tries to optimize her life for happiness, to squeeze as much joy as she can out of every day. I realized that I’m less intentional about happiness. Instead, I’ve tried to optimize for efficiency but that isn’t very much fun. I picked up What I Talk About When I Talk About Running on a whim a couple of weeks ago and just a couple of chapters in Haruki Murakami’s words jumped off the page at me:

“I don’t think we should judge our lives by how efficient they are.”

Murakami sent me back to something a friend who shared an article about creating slack time said a couple of months ago:

“I’ve really enjoyed this idea of "inviting ease" into my life — at the risk of overly romanticizing the world or sounding woo, I'll share a sight I saw on a hike today: two birds floating effortlessly in the air, surveying the land. Sure they flapped once or twice, but the wind was doing 99% of the work to keep them afloat. I love the idea of finding the wind in life that makes whatever you do easeful.”

I noticed ease when I was randomly delighted comparing a grape freeze pop from early July to a few scoops of creamy honey vanilla ice cream last week. The freeze pop felt good going down but gave me a high fructose corn syrup hangover, whereas the ice cream tasted like summertime at Crescent Ridge Farm in my hometown, Sharon, MA, eating it with extra jimmies before I knew the origin of the word in the open trunk of our wood paneled Jeep in the parking lot of the creamery.

Comparing these budmares, a word my mom has finally admitted to making up to describe a taste bud memory, to a cotton candy flavored Philadelphia water ice on the beach at Cape May this weekend brought me joy.

My newsletter has largely focused on these moments of joy found through pause, noticing the flight pattern of a butterfly or the scatter radius of dandelion buds and slowing down for long enough to see meaning in those moments. The return of summertime and the possibility of reconnecting with the people that make life full made me crave ease again. Slow.

6yo and little bro at Sunset Beach, Cape May

I had another water ice on the drive back from the beach while thinking about the essay Joy by Zadie Smith:

All day long I can look forward to a popsicle. The persistent anxiety that fills the rest of my life is calmed for as long as I have the flavor of something good in my mouth. And though it’s true that when the flavor is finished the anxiety returns, we do not have so many reliable sources of pleasure in this life as to turn our nose up at one that is so readily available, especially here in America. A pineapple popsicle. Even the great anxiety of writing can be stilled for the eight minutes it takes to eat a pineapple popsicle.

Pleasure and Joy, Zadie Smith - Esra Roise

These are the moments of ease I’ve been missing. We all have, really. It’s firebug time of summer and that’s brought me a lot of happiness as of late. I see them when I’m walking Duke before bed, putting my phone down to watch little flickers of lightning dance in the grass and the trees. I probably googled “are fireflies the same thing as lightning bugs” 10x on those evening walks a month ago but by the time time I hit the SERP my mind would be elsewhere. But in July I stuck around for long enough to know that people in the NE/Western US call them fireflies while they’re known as lightning bugs everywhere else.

Murakami talks about running a 68 mile ultra marathon around Lake Saroma, Hokkaido and pushing through exhaustion and breakdown to get to the end. Throughout the race he repeated to himself:

I’m not a human. I’m a piece of machinery. I don’t need to feel a thing. Just forge on ahead.

It sounds similar to a sentiment shared by many people working through a pandemic that stretched on endlessly. I remember my own mid 2020 revelation “I’m a human, not a robot.” He describes his muscles as being “as hard as week old cafeteria bread.” But he forges on, never walking. Around mile 47 his breaks through exhaustion and he runs on auto-pilot. He finishes without thinking much about the finish line, acknowledging it as nothing more than a temporary marker. He reflects:

After this ultramarathon I lost the enthusiasm I’d always had for the act of running itself. Fatigue was a factor, but that wasn’t the only reason. The desire to run wasn’t as clear as before. I don’t know why, but it was undeniable: something had happened to me…my lifestyle gradually changed, and I no longer considered running the point of life. A mental gap began to develop between me and running. Just like when you lose the initial crazy feeling you have when you fall in love.

We’ve all been running for a year and a half. The medal on the other side of this ultramarathon is clarity. We’re seeing the waves of The Great Resignation come as people get tired of working like it’s all that matters/their lives depend on it and begin to confront big questions as the world begins to graduate from fear:

What is your purpose? What is your mission? For what did you come?

The recurring question in my mind for the last month has been, what time is it? What is the most important thing I can do right now? Last year I enjoyed reading about the work required to have an opinion and have along this 18 month run formed a strong opinion about work. Finding myself craving a slower pace, I know that I want more time to connect the dots, to sit with things for long enough to separate signal from noise. I like silence and I like space, neither of which are particularly conducive to running an agency or a startup but we are creating the future of work right now so it’s time to change that. I suspect that many others feel the same.

In Zen Mind Beginner’s Mind, Shunryu Suzuki says:

“When your mind is wandering about elsewhere you have no chance to express yourself. But if you limit your activity to what you can do just now, in this moment, you can express fully your true nature.”

Like Suzuki, Murakami knew that great work requires deep thought but according to Microsoft the pandemic has increased time in meetings 2.5x and chats are up 45%. I’ve relied heavily on Flow Club for deep work, attending 250+ sessions in the last 4 months to train myself to work smarter and focus on one thing at a time. The happiness I feel in flow state make the 5x productivity an almost tertiary benefit.

Flow Club is structured to help members find flow state, a phenomenon Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi researched for over three decades. The Pursuit of Happiness Project features his work:

The main thesis of Csikszentmihalyi’s most popular book, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience (1990), is that happiness is not a fixed state but can be developed as we learn to achieve flow in our lives.

I often say, it’s not a race, it’s an infinite game. As more and more people optimize for happiness and optimize for flow, the rules of the game are changing. And they should. That’s the thing about infinite games; “the rules must change during game play.”