ongoing thread of my favorite 3rd spaces or "community living rooms" in the East Bay aka Berkeley/Oakland 🛋️

Berkeley's my hometown so esp excited to share these gems 😄

📍Hidden Cafe, Berkeley - overlooking a small park, the cafe supports local artists & culinary artisans. 📍@BerkeleyAlembic - third space that hosts workshops & events in meditation, neuroscience, psychedelic integration, movement, & creativity. Started by @OortCloudAtlas @kathryndevaney

starting an ongoing thread of my favorite 3rd spaces or "community living rooms" in NYC 🛋️ (that you probably haven't heard about)

📍Land to Sea - a brooklyn multi-use creative space & coffee shop with the goal to uplift and support local creators of color 📍Head Hi - a bookshop espresso bar dedicated to art, design, publications and coffee located in Fort Greene. It's a space for exploration and interaction that hosts talks, book launches, art shows, music performances and other events.

starting an ongoing thread of my favorite 3rd spaces or "community living rooms" in San Francisco 🛋️

📍Arcana - a bar x plant shop in the mission that hosts a line-up of local musicians. 📍Page Street Writers - a 24/7 co-working space for writers. The space also hosts writing jams, pubilc readings, and classes to hone your craft.

just went from 0 meditation habit in 2020 to completing my 300th meditation session of 2021🧘‍♀️

actionable tips on starting a meditation habit👇 1) Here's the gear I used: a comfy surface to sit.

that's it.

no chakra crystals, $200 meditation cushion, or expensive meditation retreat.

(btw, dog is optional)

I started doing side projects during the start of the pandemic to channel my antsy energy productively💆🏻‍♀️

Its been 1 year since I started creating online, so I thought i'd pause to share some reflections.

reflections on 12 side projects over 12 months 👇 1) The side projects I did fell into 1 of 4 buckets:

50% friendship, I like who i'm working with
30% self-expression
10% something I want to learn
10% tool I want to use

0% of these projects were for other people or because I *should* do something. Rather, I *must* do it.

it's time to build more 3rd spaces:

homes outside of home 🏠

Places of refuge, where people can eat, relax, and commune in order to develop a sense of belonging to a place

Gathering places where community is most alive and people are most themselves

🧵of cozy 3rd spaces 👇 1) 📚☕️ Bookstore-café’s in Asia.

A combo of 2 traditional places—a bookstore and a café shop. Many studies have pointed out that the Chinese version of the bookstore-café is one of the most important recreational sites for the youth in China’s urban communities.

ideas/rabbit holes that stretched my mind in April 🧠

• demiurgical businesses
• types of curators
• reverse diaspora
• neuroaesthetics
• Japanese morning routines
• the part-time creator manifesto
• "world building" as a skill

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👇 1) The 2021 Early-Retirement Update - after 5 years of living financially independent (FIRE), the author reflects on what he’s learned.

Tl;DR: “I thought I’d be fine forever after I quit. And I wasn’t.” it’s not about the money.

livingafi.com/2021/03/17/the…

🚀 Just dropped: our 1st Product Teardown on @theChinaSpec is on Douyin, aka @tiktok_us.

1/ Deep dive on:

- origin story & technical stack
- Douyin vs. @tiktok_us differences across: content, livestreaming, gamification, search, & monetization.

thechinaspec.com/douyin 2/ Why are we doing this?

In the last 10 years, China’s incredibly dynamic tech ecosystem has given birth to some of the most valuable companies in the world.

More and more, Chinese PMs & entrepreneurs are no longer copying from the West but innovating in their own way.

my take on 10 trends in wellness & intimacy tech:

1. Peloton for the 🧠
2. Group therapy
3. Serendipitous relationships
4. Audio = Intimacy
5. Mindful productivity
6. Sleep Tech
7. D2C Psychiatry
8. Psychedelics
9. Closed social networks:
10. Children & elderly m-health

👇🧵 1) Peloton for the 🧠

Application of EEG brain activity sensors & HRV to mental health will become more rampant.

Because mental improvement is hard to see, devices that close this loop through bio-feedback will make mental wellness as measurable as physical fitness.

Did you know?

91% of us will not meet our New Year resolutions

- But 9% of us will (according to studies) 💪🏻
- It takes 21 days for a new habit to form.
- 66 days for that behavior to become automatic

1) & one mental model to help you get through it 👇 2) 1st Stop: Discipline > Motivation

- Motivation: (n) The general desire to do.
- Discipline: (v) To train by instruction and exercise.

Motivation only exists as a noun. But discipline is a verb.

In other words, discipline is something you do, motivation comes and goes.

My favs from @lesswrong's 100 tips for a better life:

1) Success 💫

• The best advice is personal/comes from somebody who knows you well

• How you spend your days is how you spend your life

• Discipline > motivation. The former can be trained, the latter is fleeting 2) Cooking 🍵

• Steeping minutes: Green at 3, black at 4, herbal at 5.

• When googling a recipe, precede it with ‘best’. You’ll find better recipes.

• Food taste can be made much more exciting through simple seasoning.

1) Today @calm raised a series C at a $2B valuation.

Although I only recently joined the company as a PM, I've been a Calm meditator since 2016 🧘🏻‍♀️

These are the reasons I've chosen Calm over any other meditation/wellness app from the POV of a user 👇 2) Back when I worked on DoorDash's growth team, we used @Amplitude_HQ for product analytics.

Calm was always referenced on customer calls as the gold standard implementation. Their exps were always featured in presos.

They've built a data/user-driven culture from day 1.

Adam Smith’s is most known for the Invisible Hand - how self-interest in a free-market leads to economic well-being.

However, many don't know his 1st major work actually was on ethics, charity, and being virtuous.

1/ In 1759, he wrote the Theory of Moral Sentiments 👇 2/ Within it, Smith argues a simple yet subtle tenant:

Being loved and being lovely are two completely separate concepts.

1/ I took a week off to ponder my ever-evolving definition of success:

Could the success I thought I wanted.. actually prevent me from doing the thing I actually wanted to do?

a thread 🧵on the downsides of wealth and fame, and upsides of autonomy and creative expression 👇 2/ We all aspire to be rich and successful. But what we don’t realize is that with it come limitations.

Napoleon once wrote: “Today, I’m sort of a mannequin figure that’s lost its liberty and happiness. Grandeur is all very well, but only in retrospect and in the imagination.”

🧵ongoing thread to locate the futurists and philosophers of the Internet who are pursuing deep learning and thinking.

Below are fascinating Internet niche communities (that aren't reddit) and long-form publications I've come across: 1) Antilibraries is a community for celebrating books unread, and exploring more broadly the idea of learning from the unknown. We're all about the voracious pursuit of knowledge, creative potential, and shared discovery as a community catalyst.

antilibrari.es

1) I've been ruminating on this thought: how can we take better digital mental poops?

Before you grimace uncomfortably, hear me out.

I recently dived into a DEEP rabbit hole: the world of indie hacker personal wikis.

"Idea sex" and "digital gardens" was what I uncovered. 👇 2) @robinsloan coined the concept of stock and flow in 2010:

🌊 Flow is the feed It’s the stream of daily and sub-daily updates that reminds people you exist.

💪 Stock is the durable stuff. The content you produce that’s as interesting in 2 months (or 2 years) as it is today.

🧠"consciousness-expanding" content > tweets & TV

my public personal accountability challenge:

1) read 160 long-form philosophy essays over next 6 months. Essays here: bit.ly/2OTuCDo

2) summarize it in 1 sentence on this thread

join me? #mindexpansionchallenge 1) How to do what you love by Paul Graham

"Just do what you like, and let prestige take care of itself."

2) Travel Is No Cure for the Mind by Lawrence Yeo

"Who we are inside a venue matters far more than the venue itself."

Since COVID, my main coping mechanism has been to curate resources to help others help themselves 💪

Spanning topics like minority mental health, personal development, allyship, jobs, newsletters, and soon.. matcha recipes 🍵

Here's a meta mega THREAD curating my curations 👇 1/ 👩🏻‍💻 Job Resources: remote, full-time, internship job boards: bit.ly/3b5x9na

THREAD / the best digital syllabus' i've come across🧠

Web content is pervasive. Curation isn't.

Been thinking abt best of class syllabus' that guide users across existing open materials on the web (podcasts, articles, vids) to quickly get smart on a topic!

🙏add yours! 1/ The College Product Management Guide by @anquetil
notion.so/The-College-Pr…