Ponzis, Peer Coaching, & Software is Eating Individuals

Happy Sunday!

First thing’s first: some news! We’re excited to announce the addition of a new member to the Every writer collective. 

Keep an eye out for Sofia’s debut post, coming to an inbox near you in 2042. 

Now, on to this week’s posts! 

Software is Eating the Individual 

Evan Armstrong / Napkin Math

In 2011, Marc Andreessen published what has gone on to be a seminal essay of the Internet, “Software is Eating the World.” In it, he argued that software would consume every industry “from movies to agriculture to national defense.”  

What Andreessen spent less time exploring is how the software-ification of everything would affect the humans that use that software. That’s what Evan is contemplating this week: what happens when everything in your life—from your work to your friendships to the selection of your significant other—is mediated by software? 

Read.

Is It a Ponzi? 

 Nat Eliason / Almanack

This week, Nat is going straight at one of the most persistent questions facing web3: Has crypto actually built anything useful? Or is it just Ponzi schemes all the way down?

Answer: no, not everything in crypto is a Ponzi scheme. But that’s not the same as saying all crypto projects are good. What we need is a more nuanced framework for evaluating the different types of crypto projects that are out there—and that’s what Nat offers in this post.

Read.

The Complete Guide to Peer Coaching 

Dan Shipper & Casey Rosengren / Superorganizers

Every week, Dan and his friend Casey get together and talk about their feelings. Okay, so there’s a bit more to it than that. Over the past eighteen months or so, Dan and Casey have accidentally invented a peer coaching practice that both of them have found incredibly useful, and that they think might be helpful to other people looking for a little extra challenge or change in their life. 

In this post, Dan goes over everything you need to know to try their peer coaching methodology for yourself, including: how to pick a peer coach; how to ask open, honest questions; and the importance of learning how to listen. 

Read.

How to Take Creative Action

If you’ve ever done or tried to do creative work—whether that’s writing a song or building software —you probably know what it feels like to be creatively stuck. Herbert Lui’s been there, too. And it drove him so crazy, he wrote an entire book about it. 

The title of that book, Creative Doing, comes from a simple idea: the secret to creative thinking is creative doing. In this excerpt, Herbert takes us through eight prompts designed to help you overcome that creative block and start creatively doing. Among his tips: know your stage, identify your bottleneck, and create a quality rubric. 

Read.

How to Earn Passive Income in DeFi

Nat Eliason / Almanack

In this second Almanack post for the week, Nat is tackling another of the most-asked questions in crypto: What about this passive income I’ve heard so much about? Well, as Nat explains, passive income isn’t really a thing in DeFi. What is a thing is yield: returns on your assets that you then put to work in the DeFi ecosystem.

In this post, Nat lays out some of the safer ways you can earn passive yield on crypto assets, whether it’s worth it, and where some of the hidden risks are. 

Read.

A Few More Recommendations

Productivity addiction: When we become obsessed with productivity | Ness Labs

Is there such a thing as too much productivity? Turns out, the answer may be yes. Just like you can become addicted to exercise or TikTok, you can become addicted to productivity. In fact, it might be more common than you think. In this article from Ness Labs, Anne-Laure Le Cunff lays out the science of productivity addiction, how to tell if you’re addicted to productivity, and what to do about it. 

Be a Better Creator | The Curious Creator

The Curious Creator is for creatives wanting to become entrepreneurs.To ‘be a better creator’, requires navigating through the everyday complexities of making a living from your craft. We curate a newsletter to over 100,000 monthly sharing the lived experience, challenges and successes of peers and creative minds. Subscribe & learn. 

Hot Money | Financial Times / Pushkin 

When Patricia Nilsson and Alex Barker, two reporters at The Financial Times, started digging into the tech and business side of porn, they made a startling discovery. While the adult entertainment industry relies on performers to literally bare it all, information about the people and businesses behind the cameras is kept like a state secret. 

On Hot Money, a new podcast from The Financial Times and Pushkin Industries, Nilsson and Barker uncover who really pulls the strings, revealing a story that goes way beyond a single person–a story that includes billionaires, tech geniuses and the most powerful finance companies in the world. Listen now wherever you get your podcasts. 

That’s all for this week!