Hey friend,

I'm a day late for the first time since I started this newsletter. My excuse? A confluence of working away from home, the disappointing Superbowl, and an anxiety ridden week of negotiations. I felt bad for breaking the promise I made with myself and you, but I am going to bounce back with some better content for y'all! I apologize for the formatting, emailoctopus' text-editor is being very buggy in whichever browser I use.

🔥 Highlights

As part of my mastermind group, I automated via IFTT a notion doc link to be sent to our telegram group every week. I also created a simple Telegram bot that will respond to a slash command with a rotating list of the order for our group's discussion. This made me re-realize how much I love coding because 2.5 hours went by like 25 minutes. We all need some pointless projects just for our sake every now and then.
The second part of my interview with Jakob Greenfeld for his Product Ideas show was released here
We spoke through another 5 ideas, none of which I'm actively pursuing now so go figure.
I reconnected with Alok Jain, someone I met on YC's startupschool.org weekly meeting almost 2 years ago. This time we met via their new cofounder matchmaking program, and he has pivoted to an Instagram specially made for Interior designers. I helped him brainstorm, if you ever want to chat startup ideas just hit reply or book here https://calendly.com/akinhwan

💔 Lowlights

I had trouble sleeping the night before a big meeting, and brief but silent anxiety attacks where my heart was beating extremely fast. It felt like I was being chased by a blood-thirsty lion, except I was safe & sound indoors. The lion was in fact a negotiation about the proper equity split between my teammates for a government challenge we won. I will be writing a longer form essay about this episode so look forward to that.
I'm not digging email octopus' email text editor at all. The font-sizes, text alignment, bold, all are very buggy. I may switch over to ConvertKit very soon. Which sucks because I spent a lot of time building my own template here. This won't change anything for you readers however.

🎯 Goals

Write and publish a long-form essay on my blog about my push-up habit. I've only now started seeing and feeling real results from doing 100 a day. I hope that what I learn will carry over into other habits I start.
I bought way too many books on Amazon, 3 by Scott McCloud about comics, 7 about devotionals/aphorisms, and 2 by Scott Adams ('Dilbert' fame). My goal is to claw through them and apply my learnings to my current side project which is very early still. I'm rekindling my love of drawing from 8 years ago, but this time with an eye towards something that is both peaceful to me, inspiring/moving for others, and could be commercially viable at the same time (classic Ikigai).

🔗 Link
Myth-busting the best-practices of best-selling nonfiction with April Dunford

🎵 Song
Menahan Street Band - "Midnight morning"

🎙️ Podcast
I've been binge listening to the "big ideas" podcast by Erick Torenberg and Patrick Blumenthal. It's mainly interviews with leading philosophers, academics, and economists.

📖 Book
The Lessons of History - Will & Ariel Durant
A much shorter read than I originally thought (I never look at the dimensions or total page numbers of books I add via Amazon). Each chapter is about some major field (Economics, Government, Religion, etc.) paired with History.

This week's question I'm asking to the readers is, how do you handle anxiety attacks? What are your tactics for not worrying about a near future event? I tried counting downwards, taking deep breaths, and long walks. All of which mitigated but never fully solved it until I took action on the matter of concern.