investor update #01
I just read this tweet from
. I found it brilliant and decided to write one.What you're about to read is a public self-diagnosis. It's an open letter of highlights and lowlights of my 2023 with brutal transparency and my most genuine thoughts.
TL;DR
Highlights
Benchmarking greatness and its side benefits;
Intentional laser-focused thinking driving higher impact in life and at work;
Sharing thoughts as leverage to build connections with people I admire;
Lowlights
Poor health and self-care;
Lack of consistency in delusional self-belief;
Many evidences away from my life's work;
Worsen my response time on Whatsapp.
Ask for help session
Highlights
Benchmarking greatness
Spotting greatness and rarity is a superpower. Generational VCs get rich because they have a superior detector for greatness/rarity. Generational entrepreneurs change the world by detecting “great/rare” problems (a problem that checks many boxes) and spotting great people to work with them.
Recognizing these patterns for greatness and rarity when young is hard. It's hard because we don't have benchmarks to guide our judgement. “Is this person ok, great or rare? Is this problem ok, great or rare?” I don't know. I've never seen ok, great and rare to come to a conclusion. It's “easy” to miss opportunities for lack of good judgement.
This year I see two pillars that gave me solid benchmarks for what greatness and rarity looks like. These pillars leveled up my standards of leadership, ambition, first-principle thinking, speed:
Gen Mafia. It's crazy to be one message away from so many young, ambitious, brilliant people. The group pushed me to questioning if I'm thinking big enough or moving fast enough.
Fer and Santiago. You see how rare people are when someone mentions there is a way of doing/thinking before and after meeting them. Fer and Santiago are these kind of people. They inspired me to dream bigger, be untolerant to nothing but excellence, be hungry and break conventional wisdom.
Benchmarking greatness have life-changing consequences. One is a higher bar for yourself and for others. Two is a sharper judgement of people and opportunities.
Reduced the amount of things I think about. What's the most important thing right now? This is the only thing to think about.
I made sure I allocated time only thinking and working on meaningful, high-impact stuff. I reduced the amount of things I think about and work to become the expert of the one thing that matters the most right now.
In my personal life, the most important thing right now is to maintain a healthy relationship with my parents. I've been living away from them 3 years now. If there is one thing I can't fail is to keep nurturing my relationship with them. Everything else matters less than this. Therefore, I won't think for more than 5 minutes in anything else. Clear Thinking. Reduced noise.
At work, what's the one thing that matters the most right now? Is it increasing client base, improving the product, increasing retention, reducing churn? What will generate the most value right now? This clarity of what matters boosts intentionality and prevents dumb progress.
There're clear trade-offs. But, I believe that the fewer the things you think about and work on, the higher the intensity you can put in. If you have a good judgement and pick the right ones to work on, then you have superior intensity to allocate. There are few things that truly matter, sticking to them was very important for 2023.
Putting my thoughts out to the world with consistency became a personal leverage
Views on Substack: 6.7k in 2023 vs 680 in 2022
Posts: 30 in 2023 (2.5 per month) vs 7 in 2022
Podcast: 1.5k views in 2023
Consistency in sharing my thoughts was a huge win this year. It's a privilege for someone young like me to meet all these rare, experienced, genuine people I've met this year because of this newsletter.
Through this newsletter, I've met
who introduced me to Will who is the co-founder of the startup I currently work at. I've met who introduced me to Lameiras whom I consider to be one of my mentors, and the list goes on.There's something special about putting your thoughts out. Gratitude all the way!
Lowlights
Poor health and self-care
I don't like to banalize the word burnout, but I honestly feel I was close to one this year.
I had my eyelid shaking every 5 minutes for a month, literally. High level of stress, poor sleep, barely practiced physical activity, attended the doctor 1x this year. I'm not a “work-life balance activist” especially for people my age. But still, I let work cross a critical line in my life. This is not noble, this is dumb.
Health is always a second or third-tier priority for me. After this year I saw how it must change.
No consistent and predictable delusional self-belief
“Self-belief is immensely powerful. The most successful people I know believe in themselves almost to the point of delusion.
Cultivate this early. As you get more data points that your judgment is good and you can consistently deliver results, trust yourself more.
If you don’t believe in yourself, it’s hard to let yourself have contrarian ideas about the future. But this is where most value gets created.”
Not predictable delusional self-belief. I feel this hasn't become the foundation of my thinking yet. I like how Sam Altman describes the power of being willing to be misunderstood for long periods without any external reinforcement.
This requires steady delusional self-belief. However, throughout 2023 I had many ups and downs. In some moments I had crystal clear my superpowers and was willing to bet on them. Other moments, though, I feared average challenging things and let delusional self-belief disappear.
Lack of consistency in self-belief has destructive hidden costs. As we get more tolerant of questioning ourselves, it compounds and little by little we get used to believing moderately in ourselves.
For accountability and transparency reasons, in Jan/2023 I wrote the essay: “Why you should doubt yourself?” sharing how I used to doubt myself and why I believed it was positive.
Guess what? I changed my mind. I met people who are crazy self-believers this year which made me conclude this is a superpower that compounds over time. You can't build something meaningful without it.
For 2024 I want to be brutally intolerant to moderate self-belief and raise the bar when it comes to consistent delusional self-belief.
Few evidences of what's my life's work
It's amazing to see people building their life's work. I told Fer, (Alinea's CEO) in a lunch with him that he raised my bar of what should be considered life's work. He can talk about the health sector, why this is broken, misalignment of incentives, how this affects the Brazilian population for hours non-stop. Detail: with grit in his eyes.
I'll be turning 22 in two months. I still have few evidences of what's my life's work. I know I'll be building something in tech, kind of problems I like, kind of problems I don't like and that's it. But, I want address a problem I deeply care about. Something that makes my eyes shine and I can talk non-stop about it. The speed of accumulating evidences is important and I'm failing at this.
This “too young” bullshiit puts me in a comfort zone leading me to miss important evidences of what's my life work. To counter it I intend to intentionally pay attention to what curiosity leads me to and double down on those instead of being ok with not having clarity of my life's work.
Terrible response time on WhatsApp
Self-explanatory. My response time on WhatsApp got even worse this year.
Ask for help
I'm looking for people who have been reading the newsletter for +3 months and are willing to give feedback. Book a time.
If you're building a startup or are a VC and your portfolio companies need young talent, I have brilliant friends I'd love to introduce.
If you're building something in the health sector, I'd like to meet you. Book a time.