Week 50 - Don't read this newsletter 🤯

Hey my friend, this week, in the lastest edition of Sahil Bloom’s newsletter, he shared this:

“If a person were to consume 20% of the content I share, how knowledgeable would they be about the topics I care about? If that same person were to now consume 80% of the content I share, would they be more knowledgeable or less knowledgeable?”

And it struck me deep into my heart because of what’s been recently going on with me: I started to have a feeling that it’s too much noise out there, and I just can’t concentrate on what’s really valuable to me.

I’ve noticed that the more information I consume, I’m not becoming smarter or taking more actions; on the contrary, I’m feeling lost and overwhelmed, and the worst part—it prevents me from having meaningful conversations with amazing humans I already know 😲 The more noise I have in my mind, the more I feel like I’m doing something wrong, or losing time, and it’s a very bad place to grow relationships from because when your battery is low, how can you charge someone else’s battery? 🤷‍♂️

For example, Tim Ferriss, in his “The 4-Hour Workweek”, wrote that he doesn’t read the news; he asks people to share with him what’s happening in the world, so he gets the same info, and invests in human connections.

So, I unfollowed the DOAC podcast (they keep talking about the same things over and over again anyway), and unsubscribed from 2 newsletters that I felt obliged to read—I kinda wanted to read them, but not really, and kept piling them up in my inbox.

Instead, I sent 10 extra messages to people I like, but with whom we’ve lost connection at some point, 5 of them answered, and keeping those dialogues made me feel good, energized us both, and strengthened our connections 💪🤗

Look, I feel the same here! I really want you to build stronger and more meaningful human connections with amazing people, and improve your professional and personal life, and if you don’t feel like this newsletter makes it happen, please go down and unsubscribe right away—go send a few personal messages to some people you know instead 😉

tl;dr We have limited bandwidth, and when we are overwhelmed with external noise, it’s harder to make meaningful connections. So free up your mind from extra content, and go talk to real humans!

On another note, one of the amazing humans I’ve recently met told me, “You are very unusual. The 'can-do' mentality is very rare here. Positive… let’s go, let’s do it!”, and it reminded me of the words of Eminem’s song, The Last One Standing:

I make it look easy
Like I made it overnight
I make it look easy
But you don't see the dark side 

It was not the first time I’ve heard this from different people, and I noticed that people have enough problems, so they need more positivity and energy in their lives. And it doesn’t mean that you have to make them laugh (I mean, stand-up comedy is also good 😁), it’s more about making things look easy and doable, because such an approach is very contagious, and connects people with you.

Another person told me this:

Of course, it’s flattering, and my inner people-pleaser was happy to read these words, still, what stood out for me is that you must be visible for others, and the way you do it makes people want or not to continue building relationships with you.

Also, very important to be the same online as you are in real life. I bet you’ve had an experience when you saw an absolutely pleasant person online, but they acted like an asshol in real life, or vice versa. Still, those are extremes, and if you are who you are online and offline, you help people understand faster if you are a friend or a foe to them, and whether they should spend their time talking to you at all (remember, there are 8 billion other humans out there 😏).

One of the best pieces of feedback I’ve heard was when a person told me, “You’re exactly the same in real life as you are online”, so don’t copy others and pretend to be someone, because as Oscar Wilde said: “Be yourself; everyone else is already taken." 😉

And yes, it might be hard, as Tre Balchowsky told me during our Humans of Business podcast episode:

I have a really hard time talking about my success. I have an easy time talking about story like to ask me questions about stories. I'm here all day, ask me questions about my client's successes—here all day.

This is something that is so deeply uncomfortable for me, and that's a real cultural thing where I was raised, how I was raised, we didn't really talk about our successes a lot. We talked about team wins. We talked about how someone else was doing an amazing job. We didn't really celebrate ourselves, and not in a way where we were punished for celebrating ourselves. It just wasn't part of our. Ethos.

We didn't brag; bragging was looked down on. And often I feel like when I am talking about my own successes, that I'm bragging, and I have like a little demon that sits on my shoulder that's like, ‘Don't brag, Tre mom says not to do it. What would Grandma think?’”

Still, when you change the narrative in your mind from “I’m bragging” to “I’m sharing my thoughts, beliefs, and wins so that we can grow together with other amazing humans”—it changes everything, and that’s exactly how you start bringing more awesome people into your life 🤗

tl;dr Be positive, be a doer, show up online and offline the same, and remember to share your beliefs and success stories with the world!

So yeah, that’s it for this week, and if you have any questions, thoughts, ideas, or personal examples of how to build better human connections, please answer this email, or connect with me on LinkedIn, and let’s talk 🤗🤓

💡 What influenced me this week 💡

Thoughts of the week:

• “If you want to increase your success rate, double your failure rate.” - Thomas J. Watson, daily quotes from The Economist

• “We see our friends' situations with perfect clarity, but our own through a fog of emotion, ego, and fear.” - Sahil Bloom’s newsletter

• “You already have the answers. You just haven't asked the right questions yet.” - Sahil Bloom’s newsletter

• “Many of the most meaningful things in life look inefficient when viewed through the wrong lens. But that doesn't make them wasteful. It makes them human.” - Sahil Bloom’s newsletter

• “If we’ve done something hard, we feel we deserve a treat.” - Nudge podcast

• “If a person were to consume 20% of the content I share, how knowledgeable would they be about the topics I care about? If that same person were to now consume 80% of the content I share, would they be more knowledgeable or less knowledgeable?” - Sahil Bloom’s newsletter

• “The goal isn't to know everything. It's to know enough—and then act.” - Sahil Bloom’s newsletter

Song of the week:

Book and quotes of the week:

Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI - Yuval Noah Harari

“The clearest pattern we observe in the long-term history of humanity isn’t the constancy of conflict, but rather the increasing scale of cooperation.”

“Every old thing was once new. The only constant of history is change.”

“The present-day equivalents of Bishop Athanasius are the engineers who write the initial code for AI, and who choose the dataset on which the baby AI is trained. As AI grows in power and authority, and perhaps becomes a self-interpreting holy book, so the decisions made by present-day engineers could reverberate down the ages.”

Tools that I use with referrals:

• Descript - for anything around podcasting and video editing

• Beehiiv - for a newsletter (that’s what you receive 😅)

• Text Blaze - to access message templates with shortcuts (like “/ty”)

• Exali - promo “FROMYURII” - indemnity insurance for independent experts in Europe

• Scripe - to write better posts on LinkedIn

• Manus - for building complex systems and projects

Daily actions:

• tell 1 person what I’m thankful to them for

• read a self-development book/listen to a professional podcast for 15 minutes

• make a valuable post/comment on LinkedIn

• tag 15 people in my connections database

• connect with 30 interesting people on LinkedIn

• invite 5 people to join the 👋Friendworking newsletter

Weekly actions:

• transcribe one new episode of the Creator Spotlight and Personal IPO (bi-weekly) podcasts, learn something from them, and connect with guests on LinkedIn

• connect 2 people who I believe need to be connected

• invite 30 people to follow the Community ROI podcast (and ask for some feedback).

If you have any thoughts, ideas, or questions, please 👇

And if you’d like to have more 👋 Friendworking in your life 👇

See you next week! 👋