Hi, I'm Tim

My parents moved to a larger property in rural Virginia last year. During the peak of Covid, I stayed there and helped the family with the vegetable garden, maintaining the pastures, and completing some bigger projects. As suburbanites, we were all learning a lot.

Being completely isolated, I began creating daily farm videos, dubbed "Farmer Tim", which turned out to be not only a fun little side project, but a lesson in creating and expertise.

A few lessons:

There are a three themes that stand out to me.

1. Intention - My first few videos were mostly jokes about being on a farm and living in a rural area. Only later did I create more educational topics on growing micro-greens, planting tomatoes, and creating compost piles. Create first, niche down later.

2. Expertise - My friends began asking me questions about how to grow their indoor and outdoor plants. Now I'm the expert! It's a reminder that expertise is relative. I only knew barely more than them on some topics and likely less on others. But they tagged me as "plant" person and it stuck.

3. Fun - I encourage others to have a creative outlet. It is easiest when it is fun doing and you feel energized after having done it. Shooting quick videos not much different than what I do regularly, which is lot's of quips. Writing, on the other hand, is a lot more difficult.

I ended up not continuing with the farm content because I eventually went back to New York and traveled with friends. But I may return to shooting quick videos that require a little effort and just flex my creative muscles.

I am consistently two minutes late to meetings. When in new places or surroundings I lose possessions easily. I get tired late afternoon, but am high energy late morning and late evening. After time with friends, I need to be alone to recharge.

My behavior is predictable. This predictability can be used to my advantage. So instead of using willpower alone to being more effective, I can use hacks to work with and around them.

Phone keys wallet

I’ve heard this thousands of times. Before leaving the house, my family would shout out “phone, keys, wallet”, because they knew I’d forget them, waltz right out the door, and have to turn the car around. What they were doing is understanding my weakness, and trying to hack my thought process through this repetitive line.

Hacking (or delegating)

Awareness come first, creativity second. Once you understand your problem, try to generate ideas without solving it with sheer willpower. For example, I used to lose my wallet often. But I never lost my phone. I always had my phone on me. Like many others who are addicted, I didn’t go long without fiddling with it.

So I bought a phone case with a wallet in it. To my friends horror, they figured I’d lose both all the time! Yet, since then I’ve never lost my wallet.

I used used this method to saving my wallet rather than my willpower to change this bad habit.

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I've noticed that the top performers in an organization are not necessarily the most talented. It is not even the ones who work extremely hard and take on greater projects. It's the ones that do the simple things well and almost never slip up. Even if they don't rise to the top of a business, they get quite far.

The simple things

Yes, it's important to develop skills. And yes, it's important to network and share your craft and focus on your job trajectory. You cannot go too far without continuing to develop skills for the role ahead of you. Yet what I've noticed is most people don't even get to this point. They cannot even execute on the very simple things that separate good performers from poor performers.

Below are some example of simple things you can do to separate yourself from others. Skip these things at your own peril.

Meetings

I'm very surprised by the percentage of people who do not follow meeting etiquette or take the time to prepare for a most productive meeting. What is interesting is that customer facing teams will complete all of the meeting best practices for customers, but do none of them internally.

This means: 

• Defining a purpose for the meeting
• Setting an agenda
• Ending the meeting on time
• Setting action-items that come from the meeting
• Following-up with all attendees with a short summary of next steps

Do this and you will immediately stand out amongst your peers.

Follow-up

If you tell others you'll deliver on something, deliver on it. If you are going to be late, inform them you'll be late and when you'll expect it to be complete. That's it.

‍Sharing work

A consistent theme I've seen amongst top performers is their willingness to share their work. They consistently share what they are working on, learnings, or even struggling with. If they have wins with customers, they share it. If they notice the good work of others, they share it. This can be in slack, email, or even team meetings. They eventually are seen as idea generators and a person who is capable of contributing. More simply, they are more visible across the org.

Being helpful

When someone asks you for help, especially for which you are somewhat responsible, you should politely smile (in-person or with emojis) and thank them for allowing you to contribute within your role. The sentiment of some to often complain, or show mild annoyance, for assisting with anything remotely beyond their specific duties confuses me and is very shortsighted. Be helpful and others will seek you out as someone resourceful.

Emails

You probably spend much of your day either reading emails or writing emails. How you write is how you will be perceived. So learn how to be an effective email writer. My friend recently wrote a short article with tips to get started.

What ifs?

People don't get promotions by executing against processes assigned to them. Doing this does not prove they can improve processes, build new things, and innovate. Generating and contributing new ideas and then making them reality is how you grow. A theme we speak about on my team is the 'what if?' philosophy. Always be asking, "what if..." we did this, or that. It's simply a mindset change.

I could probably come up with 5 or so more examples of very simple yet effective habits that make up top performers in any organization. Notice, I did not share anything about become an expert, mastering a craft, or becoming world class. There are truly talented individuals that will rise very quickly in organizations. But what is more common is doing the simple things consistently well over time. They are easy to do. But they do take discipline and require a mindset shift.

If you are reading this and you are my friend you are not surprised. Over the past year I have been telling all my friends to pay attention to Bitcoin. It's become a running joke at this point. When will Tim bring up Bitcoin? So in an effort to explain myself, I'll attempt to define Bitcoin and why I think it's so important.

What is B‍itcoin?

Bitcoin is a digital currency built on a new technology, the blockchain. Blockchain technology uses a distributed ledger system to ensure all transactions (say purchases, trades, or any transactional event) are stored on a network of computers or "nodes". Imagine your bank balance being distributed to 10 of your friends' computers. Each time you make a purchase, it is saved on each computer. If you tried to go back into it and 'edit' a transaction, all of your friends would know because their ledgers would differ from yours. They would come to a consensus on what the true ledger should be, and they'll determine you are wrong, and your ledger will be updated. This is called consensus mechanism.

This applies to Bitcoin. The code that determines the functionality of Bitcoin is what makes it so special. This code is focused on creating scarcity, or a fixed amount of units of Bitcoin. This is extremely unique to the world. Nothing has ever existed like it before.

Scarcity

The Bitcoin code ensures only a limited quantity of Bitcoin can ever be created. This has before been impossible with digital goods. Think about any digital asset you've ever used: emails, images, mp3s, google docs, videos - all of these can be copy and pasted. Any of these types of files can be pirated and replicated an infinite number of times. And that's what makes these so valuable, the ease of replication and distribution.

However, this ease of replication is the exact opposite feature you want in money. You do not want anyone to copy & paste a $100 bill. You do not want your money to be easily created, because the more money you create the less valuable it is.

With Bitcoin, it's nearly impossible to create a new copy. The reason why is because in order to "create" a new copy, you must solve a very complex cryptography puzzle. Only when this puzzle is solved do new copies get created.

This is when people ask, well can't I "copy" one? This comes back to the ledger. As soon as a new bitcoin is created, it is immediately stored on the blockchain, the distributed ledger. This ledger contains millions of "nodes" or individual computers. Once it is stored in the ledger, it cannot be altered or changed. If you attempted to change your code locally to reflect having 2 bitcoin instead of 1, all the nodes will simply compare their ledgers, see yours is false versus the consensus, and they'll confirm you just have 1.

So blockchain + cryptography technology + bitcoin code = Bitcoin

Money

By now, if you've made it this far, you might be wondering, "so what?" We have digital play money on the internet? In the real world we use dollars, euros, and yuans - these are accepted worldwide and backed by federal banks and governments.

But this puts the cart before the horse...

Money is a concept. It is a mechanism for exchanging value, that is it. It is created to solve a problem that occurs when trading goods. How do you assign a standard value to goods and services? As communities grow and become more complex, it becomes harder to trade unlike goods: how many apples for oxen? How many barrels of oil for grain? Money solves this problem.

In addition to exchanging value, it can also store value.

When I harvest my grain, I can sell it at the market. But what if I didn't need to exchange it all at once? What if I had no use for more oil, apples, or butter? One option is to store your grain in your barn until you're ready. But grain eventually begins to go bad. It has a shelf life. This is where money helps. Instead of storing your grain directly, you can sell your grain at the market in exchange for money, then store that money. This money won't rot, won't disappear, and will hold it's value. When you are ready to buy other goods, you can be confident you use your stored grain, in the form of money.

The most modern and most widely accepted currency has been Gold.

Unlike other competing materials (rocks, gems, stones, etc.), gold never rots (its extremely stable), it's easy to divide into little pieces (to aid in setting prices and units), it's very scarce (it's very hard to mine), and it can be moved or carried around. Gold might not be the most scarce, the easiest to divide, the lightest -- but its combination of qualities made it the best option versus others.

This is why Gold became the standard money accepted in the world. In 1880, you could sell goods for gold in New York, sail around the world to China, and purchase some other good with that gold. That is because gold was widely accepted as a safe exchange of value. Everyone everywhere knew gold can't be recreated, no matter how hard people tried.

Gold vs. Bitcoin

Gold is still used as a store of value today. In fact, until 1971, you could exchange paper dollars at a fixed ratio of gold. Gold was still used to back the paper money supply created by governments. It was very hard for a government to spend more than it made (even if it printed dollars), because debtors had a claim on their gold. And they couldn't print more gold.

In comes Bitcoin...

Bitcoin can be seen as digital "gold". However, when you compare the qualities that make a good currency: scarcity, portability, divisibility, uniformity, acceptability, Bitcoin beats gold.

• Scarcity: While gold can be mined at ~2% a year, Bitcoin will only ever have 21 million units
• Portability: You can transfer Bitcoin in minutes to anywhere in the world. Gold is extremely heavy. It is costly to ship gold and because it is valuable, it's costly to protect it.
• Divisibility: Gold can be molded into standard gold bars and coins. But coins can only get so small. Bitcoin can be divided 100,000 times. You can own very, very small units of Bitcoins.
• Durability: Bitcoin is as durable as the hardware that holds it. Gold, while stable, it is a soft metal and can be chipped away and damaged.

Survival of the fittest

Money is a market. Just like goods and services, there is a competition for the 'best' money. Holders of stored value (goods, dollars, gold) want to use the money that has the highest quality. They want to be sure it will keep its value and be widely accepted. Gold became standard because it was the greatest asset we had at the time. Paper money was used because it was backed by gold.

In 1971 the US government ended the gold standard. You can't exchange dollars for gold. Too many dollars were printed for too little gold, and there was a risk of a gold run should too many debtors claim their gold. Today the value of a paper (fiat) currency is the productive capacity of the government issuing it. This is why the US dollar continues to be in extremely high demand and is used in market globally.

However, the purchasing power of the US dollar and all other currencies continues to decline due to more money supply inflation. Even less stable currencies, such as the Venezuelan dollar and have fared even worse.

While I don't think we'll see the complete collapse of paper currencies tomorrow, we will see a continued flight of capital into assets that perform well in inflationary environments: gold, real estate, stock markets, and now... Bitcoin.

Bitcoin is now positioned to gain an immense amount of value due to first, it's new competitiveness verse alternatives, and second, how small the market is today. It's still so extremely early for Bitcoin. It's market cap is ~200 Billion versus Gold's ~9 Trillion. This setup could see Bitcoin outperform by multiples more than gold, real estate and equities.

Two friends debated recently… Do facts matter?

One argued that facts are meaningless. She argued that facts only support one’s biases and that facts can be manipulated to support any argument. The other argued that there exists an absolute truth and facts are a path to that truth.

Upon reflection, I wasn’t convinced of either side. If facts are truth and we have the facts, shouldn’t we have consensus on contentious topics? Alternatively, doesn’t the very definition of a ‘fact’ mean there’s evidence to support its truth?

Yet it’s not so clear. Let’s see what the common search is what trying “are facts”. Below are the most commons searches:

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So we aren’t the only ones confused… Aren't facts truth?

Let's take an obvious example: Flat-earthers. We have incontrovertible evidence that the Earth is round. It's proven. It's a fact. But what is interesting is that when I asked my friends to prove it, they couldn't. They couldn't through direct observation prove it to me. In this moment, we had to trust the overwhelming consensus of the scientific community to confirm what is truth.

But what about not such obvious examples, such as politics? 

‍Trust‍

Where I believe the aforementioned argument stemmed from was not a belief in facts, but it was a trust in our institutions. 30 years ago there were a handful of newspapers and media outlets providing news. There were limited sources of knowledge. There were gatekeepers. Today, anyone can publish their thoughts and share their beliefs. Today is more difficult to trust the sources on which we receive our news and idea. Our institutions - government, media, celebrity - has fallen. As a result, we must cling dearly onto what feels right and familiar.‍

‍Philosophy‍

Yet even if we did trust completely in the gatekeepers of knowledge, it still doesn’t answer the question. Are the facts they are presenting absolute truth? It gets very tough as the topics become more complex.

Adam Gopnik, discussing the relationship the French had with facts:
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I wrote a lecture and I said that the three biggest differences between France and America were: attitudes towards youth and age, attitudes as your role as producer and consumer, and finally the weight you give empirical evidence in everyday argument and conversation….It’s very hard to produce counter-evidence for an argument in France. You just make up another argument. I give the example in the book of fact-checking. No one I ever spoke to in Paris could understand what the point was of having a fact checker call to check the facts. The lovely thing about it is the tendency to always look for a way around it all.

So while Americans weigh more heavily the importance of facts in our arguments, the French believe it plays a small role. ‍

‍Conclusion‍

Facts supporting simple arguments are more easily accepted. But facts supporting more complex arguments, such as climate change, the economy, or foreign policy, become less important and require more faith. And even for facts that are backed by empirical evidence, such as a round Earth, or a warming climate, are even difficult for some to grasp given their existing biases.

Overall, I must say that while there is an absolute truth out there, facts alone either don’t support it fully or are unable to completely convince others. It takes a leap of faith, a convincing argument, or an appeal to another’s sentiment to fully convince. While I don’t believe facts don’t matter, I do believe facts matter less than we care to think.

I started playing golf this year. There were limited activities available during COVID, and with my friends playing pretty often, it was finally the time to start playing. I’ve played around 8 rounds this year, more than my entire life. I’ve even begun to have fun.

But what I’ve found after these rounds was interesting. There were a lot of lessons in the game. New lessons that team sports don’t offer. I began to see a lot of parallels between the game and life.

In writing this down, I did a quick google search of “golf and life”. It returned 1.4M results...

What I was observing while playing was what others seems to be experiencing. Here are some of the main takeaways during these first 8 rounds.

Golf is a personal game

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"Success in this game depends less on strength of body than strength of mind and character.” -Arnold Palmer

Golf is a test of character, patience, perseverance, and attitude. It’s a game played against yourself. It’s infuriating when things go bad because you know there’s nobody else to blame. This is obvious, but it’s a foreign feeling for someone who’s played solely team sports. But in a sport with no defense, it becomes apparent very quickly how alone you are with your results. ‍

Attitude is everything‍

Your triple bogey on hole 6 is just that.. your bogey. Yet why do people curse the course, slams their irons, and throw their clubs? What is the object of their anger? Who exactly are they throwing their clubs at? Playing golf made it clearer to me how prone I was to these swells of anger when things go wrong. I wondered how this related to things in my life - do I respond like this when things don’t go my way?

Your attitude is so important in golf. It is in life too. It’s important to develop a winning attitude. It’s how you respond when things go badly, not just when you are shooting well.

Playing golf makes is clear just how important it is to develop a winning attitude. It’s how you respond

All of life is learning

How you treat a round of golf is a parallel to how you treat your life. If you are angry and competitive, your rounds become a grind. They become something to overcome and dominate. If you are feeling relaxed, your round can become lighthearted and fun; another sort of backyard game.

What is true is that each stroke is not a chance to dominate and win. It is an opportunity to learn. There's no ultimate test. There's no real end goal - you don't shoot ten under par and beat the game. You just continue playing. I found that being relaxed and finding the lesson in each shot was a more rewarding mindset and how we should live our lives.

As I played I contemplated what my mindset was off the course. Do I only play games in which I can win? Do I only see mistakes and failures rather than opportunities to grow and improve? These are the lessons in golf.

I have decided to publish an article every weekday for the rest of the year. Today is Saturday, October 24th. This equates to 49 days of consecutive publishing on this site.

I want to do this for a few reasons...

First, I want to get into the habit of thinking.‍

The act of writing requires the act of idea generation. Without a process for creating new ideas, it’s impossible to continue writing. Idea generation can be done in isolation, such as sitting down and generating lists. But the best ideas come from conversations, daily observation, and reading. Yet during my normal day-to-day, I’ve found I can easily get into the habit of passive observation - I'm a lazy thinker. Yet I’ve found that when I push myself and concentrate, my daily life becomes more interesting and energizing. For example, this is common during vacation. You can take a trip to Paris and be surrounded by an immense amount of history, culture, and art. But how easy is it to passively observe, walk around, and wait for the next wine and baguette. Knowing I need to write daily, I will be challenged and reminded to actively observe, create and mix ideas, and contemplate on what is in front of me.

Secondly, I want creation momentum. ‍

During the writing process, I’ve found I not just improve my thinking but I generate even more ideas. The act of consistent creation acts as a foundation for better ideas, greater capacity to create, leading to greater projects and outcomes. And even without creating new businesses or side projects, having a greater capacity to generate and clarify new ideas can only lead to a more fulfilling and rewarding career and life.

There are many more reason to consistently write - or even create. The daily discipline, the create vs. consumer mindset, the unlocking of new ideas and fresh insights. But I hope these to benefits - creating a habit of active thought and creation momentum - can come together to benefit other areas of my life.