Go Flip Yourself.

I spent a whole week in Lisbon, Portugal last month. I was with Mathilde and both our kids -we celebrated their 5 and 3 year-old birthdays over there- they were psyched. We stayed with very close friends who live in Lisbon for many, many years. We have a special connection with the city. We visited for the first time in 2016 and fell in love right away. We then decided to move permanently and settled during the summer of 2018. We finally left a bit more than 3 years later, at the end of 2021. Both our kids are born in the city. Our oldest used to go to a local kindergarten, his first words were in portuguese. We came back to Lisbon during the summer of 2022 and both our kids went to this kindergarten for 2 months. We enjoyed a unique relationship with our neighbours -local teachers and actors- and got lucky enough to call our neighborhood -Penha de França- home for a little while.

I've been a vocal advocate for Lisbon for a while. I remember enthusiastically attracting many people to the city. Unfortunately I grew disappointed. What I saw last month confirmed my fears. So in the spirit of my post following my latest US trip, below are a few observations in no particular order. Needless to add: all of the below is heavily biased, non-complete and subjective.

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👯 Some tenets of the ‘friendship theory of everything’ Ava highlighted really resonated:

1. You accept that in choosing who you spend time with you choose who you are.

2. Almost everyone who’s unhappy is unhappy because they feel isolated. The best cure for isolation is a strong friend group. So much of happiness is having someone you can get a last-minute dinner with on a Monday night, or ask to water your plants while you’re gone for a week. The opposite of loneliness, as it were.

🍪 I got lucky enough to get a sneak preview on the draft of this post. Itay went through points truly close to my heart. It made me remember an old debate at home when I was a kid: if we should get an ‘all-in-one’ TV-VHS combo or not -we decided we shouldn’t. Designing for a single purpose.

I read The Post-Individual essay yesterday; written by the writer and entrepreneur Yancey Strickler -today behind Metalabel, before that behind Kickstarter. I highly recommend it. It goes back in history and the creation of the individualism. Here are the first 3 paragraphs:

On the internet we can be whoever we want to be. We can choose from any number of qualities, real or imagined, and express ourselves and live our lives from that point of view online.

To go online is to become re-individualized — an individual in a whole new way and place. You still exist in the physical world, but you gain a new social existence that floats over-top of, around, inside of, and as a force within almost all other areas of life.

Because of the internet we don’t need to define our identity based on where we physically live, who we’re born to, or what we look like, as has been the case in human history until now.

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🇪🇺 Andreas post is a kinda perfect follow up for my US observations above: Dear Europe, please wake up – eu/acc. I share his feeling below:

Europe is special to me as I consider myself a proud European, but damn we need to talk.

I am equally extremely bull-ish on Europe and equally extremely bear-ish.

🚴 like Taylor, I bike everyday, under any weather -kids included- so taking this as an example for his comfort ≠ happiness made me smile: Any sacrifice for comfort is a waste.

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I spent 2 weeks in the US last month -first in NYC and then in SF. I've been surprised by a few things. In no particular order:

🌎 immigrants are everywhere. Like somewhere else you can meet them in low-status jobs but unlike somewhere else you also meet them at every other layer of the society -all the way to the top; and whatever that 'top' would mean exactly, you'll meet immigrants there. This is so empowering. I remember the story of a brown couple living in Paris for 15 years, they loved the city and their lives over there but when their kids were teenagers they realised that the only examples for them of people with the same color skin were in the kebab restaurants so they left. They now live in Boston. Their kids can still meet people with the same color skin in local restaurants of course, but also as researchers, big company manager, startup CEO, politicians, journalists, you name it.

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When do I feel the happiest? I'm actually not sure 'happy' is the right word here. Maybe it's closer to 'feeling at peace', 'feeling complete', 'whole', a deep sense of 'calm and serenity'. I still choose 'happy' because there is a layer of joy, adrenaline sometimes, a genuine feeling of fulfillment.

Going back to the question itself, well, the straight-forward and instinctive answer is: playing with my kids, alone time with Mathilde, deep discussions with people -sometimes animated but not necessarily, building stuff -which might imply deep and animated talks with my co-founders, exploring outside, skateboarding, boxing, distraction-free reading -good coffee not optional. I could go on for hours. Typical example being: I hate running -the activity itself- but I would 100% put 'running with Mathilde' up there in the list of moments where I feel the happiest. I don't golf but again, I would 100% put all the mornings I spent with my grand-father 20 years ago on a golf court up there in the list. I'm not a foodie but again, well, you get the point.

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⭐️ the title itself stopped me in my tracks: “getting too good at the wrong thing”. Nat is highlighting one of the big traps of modern lives. The opening sentence says it plainly:

I worry that some of the best writers of our generation are stuck making tweets and newsletters.

I worry of the same thing in entrepreneurship.

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Many great interviews last week 👇

🪴 between Brian -from Frontier- and David and Sarah from Terremoto, the Los Angeles– and San Francisco–based landscape design firm. “A garden or landscape is a process, not a product.”

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As far as I remember, I've always loved Jean-Michel Basquiat's work. Something from his world touched me deeply. The apparent chaos, the multiple layers of reading, the proliferation of messages, the raw material of the streets as his canvas -- all of these resonated deeply with me from a very young age. As a skateborder, all of this looked like my environment. I got his crown tattooed on my front arm. 

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👧👦 the title says it all and Mariana is delivering an extremely important read. It’s not for parents only. Why children need risk, fear, and excitement in play.

What kids are dying from today are mainly car crashes and suicides, not playing outside unsupervised with friends. Parents are worrying about the wrong causes of injuries and harm. In fact, the very strategies that parents use to try to keep their children safe – driving them around, maximizing supervision, and minimizing freedom – are unintentionally increasing the likelihood of injuries and even death.

The solutions are both simple and hard. We know what children need to thrive. The three key ingredients necessary for thriving play environments are Time, Space, and Freedom.

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