Happy Thursday everyone. It’s been a tough week. I usually use this opening paragraph to give a quick personal thought on something that happened this week, but I’d rather get right into things. The main column this week is something I poured a lot into. It’s deeply personal, so I hope you can grab something from it. After the main column, I have an announcement about an art collection from a supremely talented digital artist who reached out to me after recent events. You can check that out down below. Let’s get into it…

Contents:

1️⃣ Latest Twitter Thread

2️⃣ SPONSORED: Sliced NFT

3️⃣ A Short-Term Mindset Will Kill You

4️⃣ IKORMA x NFT GOD Open Edition

5️⃣ Favorite Replies

Interested in sponsoring a newsletter and getting your project in front of 17,000+ self-improvement, technology, finance, and Web 3 enthusiasts? Reach out to [email protected].

Latest Twitter Thread:

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A Short-Term Mindset Will Kill You

“The road less traveled is the road of delayed gratification. If you’re willing to wait for the rewards, you’ll face less competition and often get a bigger payoff. As the saying goes, the last mile is always the least crowded.” -James Clear

It’s so easy. It’s so easy to get that quick high. To face some stress and grab the bottle. To sit on the couch and doom scroll when the going gets tough. Damn, does that dopamine hit feel good. It’s so easy to royally fuck up and want to throw in the towel. Shut it down for the week. That’s enough challenges for me this week, I’ll see you next. For 99% of people this is the thought process. We live in a world of instant gratification and short-term vision.

This week I lost $100,000 in a computer hack. Over the course of a couple hours a sophisticated hack was performed on my computer, hijacking my social media accounts and emptying out my digital currency wallets. A short-term mindset would have killed me. Period. I would NOT have had the strength to keep working toward my mission. A long-term mindset though, that makes this just a bump in the road.

Long-term vision is the courage to tweet 5 times a day for a year with no acknowledgement before people notice you. It’s the courage to write a newsletter to a subscriber list of 5 every single week for 6 months before you hit double digits. A long-term mindset is creating content that comes from your soul instead of a carbon copy of whatever is hot at the moment. Your competition has a three day time horizon. Have a 30 year time horizon and you have no competition.

A long-term mindset is the willingness to aggressively fail in front of thousands, knowing that failure will only make you stronger and move your goals closer. It’s the strength to look those emotions in the eye and know they serve you no purpose.

When I got hacked this week, I had two options. Sit around and mope because I no longer have the cash to buy materialistic bullshit, or put the blinders on and keep going because a little bit of money doesn’t impact my larger mission.

So how do you build a long-term mindset? 2 habits got me through this week: Saying no and letting go.

Saying no: You need to be able to say no to short-term gratification. You need to be able to say no to getting drunk when you know it’ll make it harder to complete your life’s purpose the next day. Or when you know that bottle is just numbing your feelings, only setting you up for a more powerful low when the liquor wears off.

It’s saying no to giving in to every impulse that pulls you away from your current task. Damn was it tempting for me to pull out my phone and see what people were saying about me this week. Something about the pain of listening to the trolls kick me while I was down was gratifying. A disgustingly unhealthy impulse I had to drop.

Say no to the temptations that take you away from your life’s purpose.

Letting go: Equally as challenging as saying no. You need to constantly be letting go. Every emotion, positive and negative. They serve no purpose to you whatsoever.

Holding onto negative emotions keep you in the past. They have you searching for quick fixes to numb the pain. Holding onto positive emotions doesn’t help you either. You’ll get blinded by the euphoria, losing awareness and setting yourself up for a debilitating crash.

The faster you can let go, the quicker you can move forward and refocus on your life’s purpose.

I’m going to be honest, I couldn’t let go the first couple days after the hack. For the first time in years, I didn’t do anything that got me ‘1% Better’. I sat there picking up the pieces. And you know what? That’s fine. You don’t need to be perfect every day. But the faster you can let go, the faster you can get back to the mission. My mission is simple. Build something bigger than myself that will lift up everyone around me.

With that being said, one last note before I totally let go of this week, and then I promise you won’t be hearing about this hacking ever again:

Dear scumbag hackers who tried to destroy everything I have,

Thank you. You won the short term battle. You got your quick pay day and sent out a link to 17,000 people that had a 0% click through rate (maybe you want to work on your email marketing). Props to you. Unfortunately you lost the long term battle. While you wait in your compound while authorities invariably get closer and closer before finally ending your pathetic existence, I’ll be here building something way bigger than that quick payday you stole. Something that will outlive myself and my future kids. While you play the 1 year game I’m playing the 200 year game.

Now let’s keep it moving.

-Alex

IKORMA x NFT GOD Open Edition

A few days ago a digital artist I'm a big fan of named IKORMA (https://twitter.com/ikorma) reached out and offered to do an open edition for me in support of the recent events. He officially just put it live.

Listen, I'm hesitant to advertise this. I don't believe I deserve money for getting hacked. I should deal with the consequences of my actions. But if you'd like to pick up a cool piece of art and get future utility, feel free to check out the open edition below. In order to add a little utility to it I'll be airdropping a 1% Club Rewards NFT once a month to a holder of this project. In the future I'll also make it the white list for anything else I do.

Again, completely optional. I don't believe I'm owed anything for my losses. But if you'd like to pick up some cool art and potential future utility, check out the release here: https://app.manifold.xyz/c/nftgod

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