For 95% of a marathon, no one's cheering

Happy Tuesday fam,

Welcome back to Stay Curious — a newsletter I write once per week on a few things keeping me curious (regardless of how much my legs feel like jello)

On deck today, we have:

• why no one’s cheering for 95% of your marathon

• invite to a Zoom call with Garry Tan, YC’s CEO

• how to leverage music for your creativity

• responding well vs responding quickly

Let’s dive in.

1) No one’s cheering for 95% of your marathon: I ran my 2nd marathon this last Sunday with 20,000 others and something hit me — no it wasn’t a car thankfully — it was a thought.  

For 95% of the 42.2 KM race, no one is cheering. And that’s okay, but it catches people off guard on the last stint when it’s the hardest time to push through and finish strong.

In my specific course (The BMO Marathon) other than —

• 🏁 the hype start line announcer (400 meters),

• 🎺 a few corners w/ over caffinated marching bands (600 meters)

• 🎊 and the last stint where everyone and their dog is waiting for you (1000 meters)

95% of the race (40KM of the 42.2KM) it’s just you, your mental game, blistered feet and AirPods at 35% battery level.

The TLDR? whatever your big goal is (building a family, launching a startup, running a race etc) don’t build it around a need for public affirmation or you’ll never stick with it.

2) Wanna meet the CEO of Y Combinator?

If you’re a startup nerd like me, you’ll know the name YC, or Garry Tan its CEO. If you don’t, here’s why they’re famous in every founder’s mind —

• they have incubated/invested in 1,900 companies

• 93 are valued at $100 million or more

• 19 are valued at $1 billion or more (like Airbnb, Stripe, Doordash, Reddit)

The cool part? A friend of mine named Daniel is hosting a private fireside chat with Garry the CEO of Ycombinator May 16th @ 9am PST.

Since he’s a nice Canadian, he said I could share the word with a few friends. Since you’re on the newsletter, you get back-door access

Just hit reply and I’ll send you the zoom link to join

3) Leveraging music for creative writing

Bless his heart, but something Pim Schon my English 12 professor never told me was how to tap into music for good writing.

He’d scoff at me if he was reading this, but something I’ve found my slightly ADHD-charged brain likes, neh, needs — is good music when I’m writing something that could benefit from a creative tone

You see, there’s a reason so many essays sound boring as hell. It’s because they’re written by young people locekd in a high school room with no food, dark walls and a requirement to hit 1,000 words on a page by 230pm.

Something I’ve loved leveraging for my own writing is picking a music playlist that gets my foot tapping and my head boppin’

It makes me feel more in flow than Steph Curry with a basketball at the 3 pointer line in a Game 7 showdown

Here’s the playlist I’m listening to this right now as I write this

Don’t judge. It gets me out of my head and into my body.

And maybe music could do the same for you

4) responding well vs responding quickly: when you get an angry email/text, over-index on responding “well” vs responding quickly.

It prevents emotion from bleeding into your reply. And the more time you allocate, usually the wiser your reply evolves.

Food is my #1 love language, feedback is my 2nd.

If you liked today’s ted talk, drop me a note or forward it to a friend.

Stay curious,

Joel

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