Sleep training
Tippets by Taps #165: Three steps to the future, on-ramps to crypto, kindness, and more. Enjoy!
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Not a lot of preamble this week, a result of pure mental exhaustion thanks to re-sleep training our 3-year-old over the last two weeks.
Our once a famously good sleeper has, since June, been employing a parent-sleep-destroying one-two punch:
Requiring us to sit with him as he falls asleep; and
Coming to our room at some point in the middle of the night when we’re too tired even to consider taking him back to his room, resulting in us co-sleeping
Between sleep training our daughter earlier this year and acting as a human body pillow/middle-of-the-night-kicking-post for the last five months, sleep has been at a premium this year.
Fingers crossed, everyone in the Taparia household gets some more regular and consistent sleep in the coming weeks, and we get back to regularly scheduled Tippets programming soon!
Thanks for reading, and have a great week ahead!
Tippets from Around the Web:
Three Steps to the Future
Ben Evans puts together a presentation outlining major macro themes and trends across technology every year. This year’s presentation is a 94-slide deck that outlines the opportunity in Web3 and the Metaverse, digs into what’s happening now, and finishes with how we got here. Some of the most enlightening data start at slide 35, looking at just how early we are in the ‘digital transformation’ of the enterprise. For example, despite the seeming prevalence of cloud-based technology in our daily lives, only 10-15% of total IT spend to date is in the cloud. There is a bunch of meaningful data like that in the presentation across cloud adoption, video and music streaming, retail, and more—worth a read for anyone looking for good tech trend analysis.
She Was D.C.’s Top Crypto Cop. Now She’s Silicon Valley’s Top Crypto Investor.
An interview with Katie Haun, a federal prosecutor, turned crypto investor who currently co-leads Andreessen Horowitz's $2.2B crypto fund. She digs in to several topics in and around crypto in a refreshingly approachable and easily digestible manner—a good read for anyone spending time hanging around the Web3 rabbit hole.
Hollywood is definitely a place where I’ve been spending a lot of time because there’s so much mainstream interest right now in crypto. If I had to characterize this year, it was the year crypto went consumer…It’s not that they’re asking to become educated about crypto; they know about it already and they want to know more…They want to understand how this is going to change consumer expectations. How is this going to change the way that I might interact with my fan base? A lot of these folks have large followings on social media. What does that look like? Also, a lot of people are really interested in this new model of content creation.
What crypto unlocks is basically property rights for digital on the internet. Why is that? Until now, the internet was one ginormous copy-and-paste machine, right? With digital scarcity, it’s a big change in what it means to really create and to own on the internet…Increasingly, people are buying digital goods and spending a lot of money on digital goods, but they don’t actually own them. Why don’t they own them? Because they’re not digitally scarce. They rely on a central gatekeeper. The platform owns it and they set the rules of the road for what you can do with it in quite a different way than when you buy a good in the physical world.
Back when I was a teenager, certain people wanted Air Jordans or a poster and they could display those to their friend groups. But today’s friend circles have expanded. People are connected online, and so young people are comfortable buying things digitally that sometimes at first flush seems odd to different generations. It’s a new form of digital expression. We call it digital flex. It’s almost like a new status symbol.
P.S. If you’re interested in an on-ramp to Web3/Crytpo, I recommend checking out Invisible College, a learning collective focused on Web3-curious builders and creators. Started by a few folks including my friend Nick deWilde, it’s whole purpose is to help get people familiarized with all the change taking place in the crypto space through courses, community, office hours, and events.
The Power of Kindness
Albert Wenger does a tremendous job framing kindness and how to develop it as an attitude. The TL;DR - just start being kind.
Kindness is the sincere and voluntary use of one’s time, talent, and resources to better the lives of others, one’s own life, and the world through genuine acts of love, compassion, generosity, and service.
While kindness is fundamentally an attitude, it can also be practiced much like a skill. The best analogy I have been able to come up with is waking up from sleep. You could try to will yourself awake or you could simply start to get going with your day and let your mind catch up. Kindness works much the same way. Just start with some kind acts, even you don’t feel compelled by kindness towards them, and you may find – much like I did – that over time kindness grows inside of you.
List of fish
A wonderfully short yet insightful paragraph by Nick Parker that articulates, in wonderful fashion, a question I ask often of myself as I write. I have included it in full.
In the Preface to his book about his life and magic, Tricks of the Mind, Derren Brown describes a visit to the London Aquarium. After a while looking at the various creatures floating silently in their tanks, he realises that the little name plaques beside each exhibit are also printed in braille.
Which gets him musing about how in the silent, odourless, aquarium, where each fish floats behind an identical smooth glass panel, that if you’re visually impaired, your experience of visiting the aquarium would largely be of reading a list of fish.
Brown’s hope is that Tricks of the Mind is insightful, useful and thought-provoking. ‘I would hate to leave you with just a list of fish,’ he says.
I think of this often. I commend it as the ultimate sense-check: ask yourself, am I giving people something worthwhile here?
Or have I just written a list of fish?
Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata like you’ve never seen
I came across the Rousseau Musique YouTube channel this week. Through some awesome graphics that create a piano version of Dance Dance Revolution. Being able to visually experience the difficulty level of these pieces gave me an entirely new appreciation for the music, and left me picking my jaw off the floor more than a few times.
A fun tweet to end
All of you 90s kids will appreciate this one.
Quote I’m thinking about: “Once a man is possessed by an idea, there is no doing anything with him." - George Saunders
Please share what you’re reading! If you have insight on anything mentioned above or have any interesting links/papers/books that you think would be worth sharing in future issues of Tippets, please reach out! Click here, reply to this email, or DM me on Twitter at @taps.
How did you like this week’s Tippets? Your feedback helps me make this better every issue.
thanks for the Invisible College shout-out, Rishi!