KAIZEN CH. 83 - Don't invest in $GME or Bitcoin (invest in this instead)

Thoughts on belief capital, mental fitness, self-talk and Ikigai

Feb 03, 2021

Hey friend 👋,

Welcome to the 83rd edition of the Kaizen Newsletter ⛩, a weekly newsletter where I share my thoughts, new ideas I learn and make weird connections between self-improvement, productivity, product, tech, sports, anime.

(if you got referred to this page by a friend or are simply visiting you can subscribe here👇)

Today marks my last day of Ship30for30, where for 30 days straight, I wrote a ~250-word essay. Here’s a thread of how I was able to do it and lessons learned from writing every day for 30 days. And if you want to see all my essays, you can check out this thread.

If ever you wanted to start writing but felt like it was too hard to do, then Ship30 is honestly the best way for you to jump-start your writing. You can sign up here (it’s an affiliate link, but you get 20$ off). If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to send me questions by replying to the email or by DM on Twitter.

Now, on to the newsletter.

Everyone is investing in $GME, $AMC, Dogecoin or Bitcoin.

But you know what's an even better investment?

Belief capital.

The reason why you want to invest in belief capital is that it has infinite upside for you, with little investment.

So what exactly is belief capital?

In his essay, my friend KP describes it as the first investment that goes into an idea.

When you first start out as a creator, it could be daunting to share your ideas out in the public. Sometimes you're unsure if people resonate with what you're saying and that's when self-doubt comes in.

A belief capitalist is someone who can talk to you in pursuing what you're working on because they believe in you and in your ideas.

In other words, a belief capitalist is when a person decides to be an early fan of a creator and tells them that they enjoy what the creator is working on. You invest in them because you believe they have the potential to blow up in the future.

Some of my belief capitalists? KP, Cullin, Dickie, Danny, Salman and Stew Fortier.

And knowing that all of these amazing people believed in me even when I had almost no following helps me keep my head high when I feel down.

This means through just a tweet or a DM, you could potentially change someone’s life (and yours as well).

Don't underestimate belief capital and how it can impact a creator.

So stop wasting time and money in $GME and start investing in $BELIEF.

Trust me, your returns will be way higher this way ;).

🤔 Thoughts

🧠🏋️‍♂️ Thoughts on Mental Fitness

For the longest time, I thought that my interests were all over the place. I love psychology, philosophy, neuroscience, grit, self-awareness and having fun.

But the problem was that I thought I had TOO many interests compare to others that are dedicated to like ONE thing like design, coding, marketing, crypto, etc.

You can maybe group these into self-development, but I feel that’s too broad as a category.

But thanks to this article, I finally found a “nicher” category that creates an umbrella for all of these different interests of mine.

Dr. Emily Anhalt, co-founder of COA, came to the conclusion that emotional fitness is defined by the following 7 traits: self-awareness, empathy, mindfulness, curiosity, resilience, communication, and play.

And although some terms aren't directly cited in the 7 traits above, they are closely related.

Basically, as some people are interested in the fitness of the body (anything that relates to exercise, eating, sleeping), I'm more interested in the fitness of the brain, or how I would call it - mental fitness.

🗣 Thoughts on Self-Talk

The more I dive into personal development, the more I believe that fixing your self-talk (the way that you talk to yourself) is the key to success.

Dr. Jim Loehr, who's worked with plenty of Olympic athletes, says that the key is to talk to yourself as you would speak to someone you deeply cared about. You want to be proud of the message that you tell yourself.

Self-talk becomes even more important in individual sports because you don't have teammates to boost your morale. So you need to learn how to talk to yourself to succeed. And you can see it when Federer or Nadal or Djokovic are not doing well, they're most likely not going to seem angry or start banging their tennis rackets on the floor. That's what makes them really great.

So how do you become a better self-talker? Dr. Loehr recommends journaling. He says that based on his studies, journaling is the best way to rewrite and reignite your brain in the way that you want by scripting the way you want to speak to yourself and reading it over and over again.

They journal off how they want to speak to themselves in situations that have given them trouble. They literally script it out. They write it out. So these are the situations that have given me trouble. If you double fault for the fifth time in a row, how do you want to speak to yourself? And you write that out and you read it. - Dr. Jim Loehr

And eventually, you just become in tune with using language that is helpful to you instead of being destructive.

Listen Here

🎨 Thoughts on Ikigai

I always had a gripe with the western definition of Ikigai.

Ikigai, as shown by this picture, has been popularized as a framework to find your "reason for being."

As suggested by this blog, you are suggested to find something that is at the intersection of "what you love", "what you're good at", "what the world needs" and "what you can be paid for".

To me, it didn't make sense because it's so freaking hard to find something that combines all 4 at the same time.

Like what if the world doesn't need it? Or if I can't be paid for it? Does that mean I haven't found my "true" reason for being?

Well, in his YouTube video, my friend James demystifies the real meaning of Ikigai.
Ken Mogi, author of "The Little Book of Ikigai" says that western interpretation of Ikigai didn't strike him as authentic.

Actually, Ikigai is not the intersection of the four pillars from the Venn diagram above. Ikigai comes from the combination of all of these together.