Raad Ahmed
December 1, 2021

💌 6 Things Thursday #42

Hello friends,

Here's another microdose of my quality of life improvements--made by me, Raad—CEO of Lawtrades and creator of Spacecult.

1/ An article I read

Crony beliefs

How to become smarter in ~10 mins. Knowledge can’t exist with criticism. If we want to be more right over the long term, we have to embrace wrong often in the short term and detach ourselves for those questionable beliefs that model our world poorly.

pragmatic_vs_social_value

2/ A text message I read

Casey Neistat’s advice to creatives: “expressing creativity using the most basic, accessible methods is the hardest thing to do and the purest.”

3/ A free lecture I’m taking

Stanford CS193p: Developing applications for iOS

The next evolution of Lawtrades will be moving everything we've built on the web in the last 4 years to a stripped down iOS version. This won't be easy. We process thousands of hours of legal work every month and pay out millions of dollars every year to knowledge workers across the world. While we have a team of engineers, I want to learn more about the Xcode development environment and the basics of SwiftUI’s approach compared to building on the web so I can give smarter feedback.

4/ A milestone we achieved

Finally surpassed $300,000 in monthly revenue (profitably) and without raising another venture round. It. Feels. Great. Even making a $100k/yr business was unfathomable to me in college--my first business idea was selling a bottled alcoholic cocktail beverage and the second was a video production company. If you listen to your inner voice closely enough, it’ll eventually lead you to the right path. Anyways, this puts us up 109% compared to this time last year.I'll post up the full Q3 investor update to paid subscribers later this month. The biggest gamechanger was re-reading the book Scaling up. I was too dumb to understand it when I first read it in 2016. But I re-read earlier this year and everything just clicked. Will tweetstorm about my learnings next week.

5/ A shot I’m taking

Magic Mind

Dubbed a "productivity drink"-- it's a shot you take with your morning coffee to boost cognition, stress, energy and even sleep. Beware: it tastes like shit but they just released a new version with honey that makes it slightly easier to throw back. You'll feel it within minutes and it's helped me reduce my coffee intake from 3 cups to 1 cup per day.

6/ A thought I’m pondering

90% of thoughts are fear based, while the other 10% are desires.

When you recognize a fear, embrace it—it’ll go away without even trying.

With some distance, time, and space from previous events, you'll resolve anything.

Separation is liberation.

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