The Elevator is a resource for Entrepreneurs sharing experiments, experiences, books and tools that elevate your lifestyle.
Cafe:
I spent last week at Permissionless in SLC learning more about the current state of the Crypto x Energy x AI market.
There are some great emerging hedge fund managers I’m interested in following and one day investing with. One is Lumida and the other is Lekker.
I found Casey Caruso’s panel very interesting and she’s a good follow on the subject. Ditto for
Separately I met with Phil Rice from x10 Ventures who helps entrepreneurs accelerate the acquisition process for companies.
Let’s Connect:
Founder Mindset: Decisiveness = Freedom
Listen to this here: Decisiveness = Freedom
Let’s talk about the freedom that comes from being decisive.
Maybe you’re struggling to make decisions because it feels like when you make a decision or commitment, you’re giving up your freedom.
But what if I told you that freedom lies on the other side of commitment? That freedom actually comes from making decisions and committing to something?
Life and business are both about decision-making.
You don’t have to get everything right, but you do need to decide.
Even not deciding is a type of decision.
And the reason decision-making feels so difficult sometimes is because we crave optionality.
But being stuck is actually being in indecision. It’s about not committing.
There’s a quote from Jocko Willink that says, “Discipline equals freedom.” And I want to share a twist on that—
“Decisiveness equals freedom.”
One practical for you to start making decisions today is by framing decisions as do or don’t.
Make a do list and a don’t list. You can do this for yourself, your team, your company. It’s a way to create structure and clarity. It gives you guidelines and something to follow.
Example: Let’s say you’re running a remote team and trying to build culture. What are the do’s and don’ts of that culture?
Do arrive on time for meetings. But don’t start right away—take a few minutes to personally connect.
Do record every session and make it cloud accessible. But don’t book more than three meetings per day, per employee.
Do contribute to a weekly all-hands roundup email, sharing wins and challenges. But don’t use a negative or aggressive tone in Slack—that’s a conversation for offline.
This is just a quick example, but you can see how defining these do’s and don’ts creates structure. It gives clarity to your team or yourself. When we lack structure, we lack commitment, and we lack follow-through.
Where can you create a do or don’t list to make decisions that create structure?
Where can you make decisions that have been hanging around and holding you back?
If there’s a decision you haven’t made—if it’s hanging there, feeling fuzzy—that’s stuckness.
Make the decision now to clear out that fuzziness and find freedom in your present and your future.
Hope this helps.
I. Are Podcasts Junk Food? I’ve started reading them instead…
Link: Descript
Instead of just listening to podcasts, for the really good ones, I will listen to them, then I will head over to Descript and paste in the link from Youtube to create a transcript.
Then i’ll label the speakers, possibly have AI remove the interviewer, and then paste the text into another doc or PDF.
Funny enough, I’m even thinking about printing them.
What I’ve found is that first listening primes me better for actually understanding what I’m listening to. Then, from there, reading it a second time helps me take notes and actually digest the materials.
Dwarkesh Patel: Okay. Let me ask a meta question. What do you think podcasts are for? What is happening?
Tyler Cowen: To anaesthetize people? To feel they're learning something? To put them to sleep. So they can exercise and not feel like idiots. Occasionally to learn something. To keep themselves entertained while doing busy work of some kind.
From this post from if you want to read more on the subject:
II. Triple Tap to Turn Your iPhone Screen Red
Link: How to Turn Your iPhone Screen Red
I’ve gotten to be more and more a freak about my light environment and “light diet.” That means I don’t want to beam ultra-bright blue light right into my eyes as I’m trying to go to bed.
I’ve found one of the best hacks to be setting the “triple tap” adjustment on my phone –
Basically if I tap the lock button on my iPhone three times, it auto-turns my screen to a dim-red.
Not only is this perfect for reading Kindle on my phone at night, it also acts as a good reason to not pick up my phone too frequently during the day.
The benefit is the ease. I don’t have to go into settings anymore and I find I use it much more often now because of that.
The instructions are in the post linked above.
III. My Experiment Without Email
Next week I’m going to test out an experiment and remove myself from my inbox for the week. I’ve come to the conclusion that email is basically used for 4 things:
Scheduling
Sharing documents
Newsletters
Meeting/new-connections.
Looking at email that way…
Scheduling and sending documents can be done by my VA.
Newsletters are something that I can batch read (say once a week on weekends).
That just leaves meeting new people. I’m happy to send *new* emails or old reconnection emails to people in my life. But the aim of that is to move to scheduling.
My plan is to set up an auto-responder that tells people I am checking email ~1-2x per week. Then I’ll have my VA check my email ~daily to help with the above tasks. And I’ll batch read any newsletters on weekends.
I’ll also write in a note any text for an email I want to send or respond to to pass to my VA to send for me. Still my writing, just not via my inbox.
I’m sure there will be some unexpected things that pop up while testing this out that I don’t have a process for.
My goal? What does my day look like when I don’t have email as an option to check directly?
Let’s see how it goes.
IV. Book I’m Liking: Kaizen
Link: Kaizen
Much of the tech world is about thinking big.
Being “world-changing” and disrupting an industry.
The book Kaizen is about thinking about the tiniest possible step. What if by thinking small, you make your way to creating big changes in your life?
This book has helped me think about the tiniest possible action or change I can make – starting new habits today rather than putting them off.
Here’s why this trick works – Any time we make a change our brains freak out because they want to keep us comfortable and keep us safe.
When you take the smallest possible step… you get past your brains radar that you’re making a change.
“Eating just one small portion of salad with Dinner?” “Hey, i’m still not a vegetarian.”
“Just buying a new pair of boots? Certaintly I can do that, and I’m in no way living out my dream of becoming a cowboy?”
“I can’t film a 10-min fully edited youtube video, but a 10 second clip to post to my Story? Easy!”
One of the easiest ways to get yourself to act is to make the step you take easier and easier until it becomes trivial or fun or simple enough to just do it!
V. Substack to read: Oldster Magazine
I want my life to keep getting better until I start this rollercoaster ride again.
That means the best years are ahead of me, not behind me.
In fact, sometimes I think I won’t hit my work stride until my 50’s or 60’s or who knows even later?
Wisdom comes from experience and perspective – you can attain this young, however it’s more likely to develop just given the natural course of life and time.
Oldster Magazine interviews “Oldsters” living their best/realest lives.
“Oldster Magazine is about people (of all genders) getting older. (I’m using the term “oldster” subversively, because I want to question who we consider to be “old” as we move through life.) Oldster Magazine applies a magnifying lens on the milestones we celebrate, then grieve as we move past them, beginning in childhood and extending to old age and death. It reconsiders life’s many shifts from phase to phase, and what those shifts mean to us as we transition through and past them.”
Via
Ok that’s it for today.
Thanks so much for reading and see you again soon,
xx
The Elevator: Kaizen, Decisiveness, Quitting Email, Wisdom from Aging