21 Days to Discover, Productize, and Power my Purpose.
First you build the better mousetrap.
Then you build the better memetrap.
Slyk is the better mousetrap — easy e-commerce for hustlers looking to take the next step on their entrepreneurial journey.
Slykigai is the better memetrap — productizing your purpose online with Slyk so you can get paid for doing what you love, what you’re good at, and what the world needs from you.
Slykday 1
Meditation: I find it easiest to meditate by focusing on my breath to drop into a peaceful state. I thought of all the people I’m grateful for, even those who I no longer have a relationship with — estranged family members, ex-girlfriends, old friends. My goal is to achieve a deep and true feeling of gratitude even for those who have betrayed my trust, because even they represent the gift of experience, learning, and wisdom.
Discover Purpose Exercise (Gratitude): The three people to whom I’m most grateful are my mother, my father, and the mother of my sons.
My mother encouraged me to develop my skills and follow my passions. She grew up working class in Brooklyn and is the reason I love cultivating gardens She taught me by example the importance of offering help to people in need. I’m grateful to her for teaching me the importance of doing what you love and contributing to the community.
My father taught me the importance of having a bias toward action and to hold myself to high standards. He was an immigrant from Iran, a tireless worker, rising before we kids woke to drive to his research job at a hospital, returning home after we’d gone to bed. One the weekends he too showed the importance of following your passion, indulging his love of landscape architecture and DIY construction. For the 18 years that I knew him, our home was constantly expanding, stone walls rising, new rooms appearing.
The mother of my sons gestated and co-created the two souls that inspire me to take all my talents, passions, and drive to be the best possible example as a man, and to express my values in everything I do so they have a clear example to follow. My sons inspire me every day to create the world I want them to live in and to include them in every aspect of my journey as an entrepreneur (we launched a startup on Slyk: Vival.
Purpose Diagram: I didn’t use Mural or Notion (found them tricky to edit), but rather edited a google slide, which you can find here if you want to copy and edit it for yourself.
Thanks to my mom and dad, I’ve always pushed myself to excel at multiple vectors simultaneously, monetizing different talents and contributing to the world in different ways. I studied biology in college but also committed to becoming a famous writer. I went to the Peace Corps for adventure and giving something back to the world, but also knew that the solitude would be ideal to develop my writing chops. I went to Law School, but also became a widely-published writer of provocative essays, gonzo journalism, and humorous short stories. I move to Mexico City to work for one of Mexico’s greatest entrepreneurs, Ricardo Salinas-Pliego, but along with internet, telcom, and media startups, I continued to write for newspapers and magazines, as well as making short films.
Podcast: Eckhart Tolle’s book A New Earth: Awakening to your Life’s Purpose had a powerful impact on me when I first read it twenty years ago. I probably never would have heard about the book if it hadn’t been popularized by Oprah, but I felt a Franzen-like chagrin about that endorsement and so I covered her logo with a sticker. The Oprah/Eckhart podcast collaboration (a pod for each chapter of the book) has been a profoundly enjoyable companion while doing my Cadoo step challenges.
The part that resonated the most for me was how important it is to have presence in your activities, because without it, you are likely to bring negativity, drama, and pain into the world, even as you pursue a worthy goal. I have certainly been guilty of this especially while building startups — a sense of urgency often begets an anxious impatience and anger at the less urgent output and disposition of others.
I especially enjoyed being reminded of Eckhart’s definition of enthusiasm.
The Slykgai-or-Die challenge is a work in progress, but I’m glad we didn’t wait to refine or perfect it before sharing it with the world. We find our path by walking it, and in startups (probably in most of life) it’s best to have a bias for action. Then you can learn, reassess, iterate.
Like Naval says — it’s not the 10,000 hours of practice that make a master, but rather the 10,000 experiments and iterations.
