Let's have a better, smarter year this year
#AlwaysBeLearning
Sree’s newsletter is produced w/ Zach Peterson (@zachprague). Image by Bitmoji.
It’s new year’s resolutions time, so I wanted to share mine:
Slow down, be more deliberate/careful/thoughtful in everything I do.
Go to the gym every day that I can.
Give up dessert - except for special occasions (my sweet tooth makes this toughest of all).
Since it’s only 7 am on Jan. 3, I can proudly say I am 100% successful so far.
I know many of you will focus on learning new things this year - whether you are in school or not. My motto of #AlwaysBeLearning got me through the pandemic, as I picked up new skills and got to try new things from the comfort of my home (unlike all who had to work in person).
To help inspire anyone who might think it’s late to learn new things, I’ll share two stories.
One is in this Twitter thread (you can read all 15+ tweets by clicking through even if you’re not on Twitter) about someone who, in a second career, became one of the world’s most famous men (most Americans, though, haven’t heard of him).
The other story is about a guy who thought he understood tech and tried out a new social platform and failed miserably. In fact, eight months after joining, he was bumbling about the platform, as you can see from the tweets below.
Yes, that’s me, thinking that posting randomly from museums in Philadelphia would result in people saying hello in person. I didn’t understand the role of followers, of @ mentions, of hashtags. But eventually I did learn, thanks to help from a lot of smart people, including Arik Hesseldahl (@ahess247), Franz Strasser-Galvis (@askfranz), Jennifer Preston (@jenniferpreston), Adam Glenn (@aadamglenn), Soraya Darabi (@sorayadarabi) and so many others.
I am proof that anyone, at any age, can learn tech if they make the time for it. Everything that’s happened in my life since those 2008 tweets - becoming Chief Digital Officer of Columbia University, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the City of New York; co-founding Digimentors; even going to Oslo for last month’s Nobel Peace Prize ceremony - happened because I learned to use Twitter.
Social media is tantalizingly easy to get started on, but frustratingly hard to master. And I’m still working on it.
So, what is your Twitter? ie, something that you can learn this year that will help you in your career, your personal life? It is a tool? Is it a platform? Something else? Whatever it is, am here to encourage you to try it out. You never know where it could lead.
One final thought, from David Frum’s (@David Frum) interview with Brian Stelter (@BrianStelter), about starting off the year on a positive note.
Instead of “A Word From Our Sponsors”…
…This is a word TO our sponsors. Usually in this space our main sponsor, Armory Square Ventures, shares some of the exciting work they’re doing. This week, we wanted to thank them for supporting us with a year-long partnership. Managing Partner Somak Chattopadhyay (@somakc), Partner Pia Sawhney (@pia_sawhney) and their team are funding startups in places overlooked by others. As we rebuild from the pandemic, one of the many things the US needs is more opportunities in more places. Check out their work (and the 210 job openings across their portfolio companies!): http://armorysv.com
Some Things to Think About
The last two years have really put America’s lack of a social safety net front and center. Unsurprisingly, more robust unemployment benefits, stimulus payments, and more work-from-home flexibility for a large portion of the workforce, made a lot us sit up and take notice. Look at this chart:
We need to do better by our fellow Americans, and that goes for citizens and non-citizens alike. Compared to every other western democracy, the U.S. spends essentially nothing on society. The perfect example of this is our out-of-whack healthcare system.
I would wager that every person reading this right now can relate personally to what happened to Monica Smith:
Our for-profit healthcare system is not sustainable and it’s killing people. One huge impediment is the elected officials we rely on to address these kind of broad societal malaises — they have a profit motive as well, and it’s personal.
Dave Levinthal and the team at Business Insider went big on an investigation into congressional investment portfolios, and…yikes. The fact is that winning an election for federal office requires a small personal fortune. That’s not exactly “of the people, for the people” to me.
#WorthyThread
The rot in Republican politics runs from top to bottom, and, as I’ve discussed many times in this space, we need to pay attention to local elections and the campaigns being run at that level. There’s a strange, scary movement on the right that is mainly white, male, and performatively masculine. This whole thread is a great collection of some really terrible videos, but this one really strikes me as the perfect microcosm of what so-called conservative politics has become.
Subscribe to Something
My friend Robert Anthony (@newyorkbob) has been covering the tech world for decades — and you’ve no doubt seen his weekly Tech Tips column here every week. Now, he’s launched a newsletter of his own, The Paper PC, and Bob is already breaking news — this time about CES 2022. Read, subscribe and share here (don’t worry, his tech tips will appear in my newsletter each week).
Thank You
We’ve been doing this newsletter for 3.5 years now, and we’ve always been lucky to enjoy a solid, dedicated readership. Over the past two months, we’ve seen major increases in readership that have us very optimistic for 2022 and beyond.
I want to say thank you for giving me your time and letting me float into your inbox (usually) every Sunday.
Before I go, here are two videos that show what we’ve been up to at Digimentors, produced by Neil Parekh, VP of Events. Please contact me if you know anyone interested in social media/digital consulting or virtual/hybrid events production: sree@digimentors.group.
👀 Do you have an idea for anything we’re up to? Let’s collaborate! sree@sree.net and please connect w/ me: Twitter | Instagram | LinkedIn | YouTube / Cameo.