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BlackBird's Bullets #15: book chapter II, Meaningful work, Clubhouse, bitcoin ...

Peter Kos

Feb 17, 2021 — 5 min read

We can smell the spring here in Slovenia as we came closer to the 15°C weather, the winter stroke again, and brought us this super-cold -10°C weather combined with clear and sunny skies. I love running early in the mornings, soaking up the sun and the positivity that's felt all over as we're slowly exiting the lockdown. The gyms are re-opening too, which brings some more strength-workout consistency. We're secretly hoping to be able to escape somewhere for the May 1st holidays. #wanderlust

Title photo: Plaza del Triunfo, Seville, Spain. Shot during the early morning run in June 2018.

Here are this week's five bullet points:

I published a draft of the second chapter of my next book. This isn't my best writing, nor do I consider it especially good. Might not even make it into the book. But I promised to share the raw drafts, so you can see that writing a book is a dirty job — until it's not. As Seth Godin says, it's about The Practice. I'm just warming up here, digging with an excavator, and at some point, I'll move to the shovel, then to trowel, and in the end to dusting off the finishing touches with a brush. But I need to keep my weekly cadence, producing a lot of scrap material as a base for the final work. The truth is, I enjoy this bare writing, it's kind of fun and stressless, and it's a nice disconnect from daily reality. The part of book writing I don't enjoy at all is editing. Having to re-read and correct my own BS isn't fun, but it's inevitable to make it to that final stage of actually putting the book together. From the first one, I remember how much joy I felt when I uploaded the manuscript into the Kindle Create tool and saw my actual book’s preview. That's a book writer's festive season — and holding the paperback in hand is Christmas. But to get there, you have to be a good boy and write. And write. And write some more.

What makes work meaningful or meaningless. I love it because large parts of it are how we interpret our own work — thus within our control.

Ben Thompson, the grandfather of subscription-based newsletters, offers continuously excellent insights at the intersection of business and technology. This time about Clubhouse's Inevitability.

I may or may not have doubled my money with bitcoin twice. Sold and realized gains. If I haven't cashed-out my double-baggers, I'd have a ten-bagger by now. Both times it was a bet with the amount of cash I was ready to lose.
These days I'm turning into a HODLer, as I firmly believe that bitcoin should be part of everyone's diversified portfolio. Corporate CFOs are investing large amounts of their cash holdings into it, and with companies like Visa and Paypal entering the space, it's getting institutionalized. The Hustle offers An Illustrated Guide to bitcoin mining and the blockchain.

The gyms reopened. I'll be using my kettlebell a lot less now, but here's a lovely commercial for it. WARNING: you might cry.

See you next week.
Stay Hungry; Stay Foolish.
Peter K.

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