Hey there,

Kung Hei Fat Choi! May this Year of the Tiger bring you much health and happiness. Today's essay asks a simple (yet very controversial) question: Should you die with zero?​

This Wednesday at 4 PM EST I'll be chatting with my friend Paul Millerd about The Pathless Path. Paul left management consulting and we'll talk about bucking societal expectations, designing weird career paths and some sobering truths about solopreneurship. It's totally free and we'll answer audience questions, sign up here.

Should you die with Zero?

I read this email with great enthusiasm. And trepidation.

It was a semi-private surf spot.

Lots of perfect waves.

Not that many surfers.

I was salivating at the mouth.

I kept reading.

Damn. This sounded delicious. But with 2 young kids and a growing business, it felt indulgent.

Unnecessary. And to be honest, impossible.

I kept reading.

Yikes. Thankfully I'm in my "early forties."

Phew.

But was the window on these adventures closing faster than I thought?

Here are this week's top reads:

// one

How to say no

2 minutes | StarterStory
​

RadReaders across the board really (I mean really) struggle with saying no. Maybe it's our people-pleasing tendencies. Or it's our fear that opportunities are scarce. Or maybe it's just good ol' FOMO. Here's a simple set of pre-canned "NO" responses for all types of scenarios.

→ Read the post​

// two

The advantages of being a generalist

4 minutes | Twitter
​

Being a generalist is not as easy as it sounds - maybe the more accurate term is “mini-experts”. Want to know what disciplines to sharpen to become a better "mini-expert?" Copy writing, sales, psychology, and design, to name a few. (I think about the generalist-specialist continuum as a martini glass.)

→ Read the tweetstorm​

// three

Therapists ARE talking about Bruno

5 minutes | CNN

​
Encanto is more than a sappy Disney movie, and therapists are buzzing about it for good reason. It tells the beautiful, and often complex, story of existing in and relating to family and to ourselves. It asks us to reckon with the crushing pressure we put on ourselves, and confront difficult and deep-seated trauma in favor of healing.

→ Read the article​

// four

You can redraw work boundaries this year—and make them stick

9 minutes | The Wall Street Journal
​

Over the past two years, we’ve developed some crazy expectations around work. Boundaries have been totally demolished by new, unspoken norms that tell us we need to get back to emails ASAP or else we’re behind. How can we remedy this? Talk to your team about your expectations for email response time, set a timer for when meetings should end and stick to it, and learn to distinguish between someone else’s urgency and an actual emergency. Be respectful, but resolute. Boundaries.

→ Read the article​

// five

The promise of DAOs, the latest craze in crypto

6 minutes | The New Yorker
​

When it comes to crypto, the first challenge is to keep track of all the acronyms flying around. There's gm and WAGMI and recently, you can’t scroll far without reading about DAOs. This article is a solid primer on the purpose and mission of Distributed Autonomous Organzations. While don’t have a RadReads DAO (yet), we’re definitely curious and trying to figure out whether they can play a role in our future. (I'm also currently working my way through this very popular video on NFTs.)
​
→ Read the article​

// from our community

​

My friend Amanda Natividad is a bad-*ss marketer with a track record for creating content that helps businesses grow. But her approach to content isn't rooted in SEO and other hacky gimmicks — she uses content in a way that is authentic and relatable. I've learned a ton from her and now you can too with her upcoming course Content Marketing 201.

Below the fold

ICYMI

• ​Khe Hy makes the best Skinny Margarita (The Menu YouTube Channel)
• ​Rethinking productivity with Robert Glazer (The Elevate Podcast)
• ​Aligning your passions with your business (The Michigan State Wealth Management Podcast)

​

LAST WEEK'S MOST READ

• ​The 20-minute productivity plan (RadReads, 1,675 clicks)
• ​Your work is not your god: welcome to the age of the burnout epidemic (The Guardian, 225 clicks)

​

And finally, what navigating Discord feels like for a 42 year old.

Warmly,

Khe

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