Trying to be more deliberate about consolidating all the things I’ve (attempted to) learn or get better at over the first half of the year.
The context behind the knowledge repository is that I needed a single place to consolidate links that I read from various places on a daily basis. Been trying a bunch of systems (OneNote consolidation, Google Sheets, Notion clipper), but none of them are low friction enough.
Thus, the Telegram group with many topics was born!
- I tried maintaining one channel for each topic that mattered to me
- Realised that the list of things that I thought about kept growing and growing, and a group with topics made more sense than many channels
Unfortunately, it comes with a real downside - a whole bunch of links are read once and they then disappear into the black hole.
Figured, therefore, that the best way to counteract this “black hole” effect is to spend a day every 6 months to take stock of what’s going on in each category, and to highlight some key learnings 😊
What have I been reading in H1 2024
Here’s what I’ve been hoarding reading this first half of the year!
Quick surprises and un-surprises
The Unsurprising:
- Product, tech and design being top is not a surprise at all, given that it’s my profession 😄
- Bunch of entrepreneurship, career navigation and org culture in there as well, given that I’ve found myself in small moldable teams where I’ve had some degree of influence in the culture.
- Even though I run a tele channel on sustainability x innovation, a bunch of private readings on climate related stuff still puts the topic at #4 (given my broad concern about the environment
The Surprising
- I really expected to have read much more Fintech related things - AgriG8 was ultimately an agri-fintech, and compared to digital health (and area I’ve left behind professionally quite some time ago), I’ve not been keeping up with Fintech 😖
- I’m not in AgriG8 fulltime anymore though, and it does feel like there’s a saturation of Fintech PMs out there, so I’m not sure how much time I’ll dedicate from here on
- Put in quite a bit of reading time into metacognition and productivity, while neglecting other human skills. Is this a sign of confidence in my interactions with others while not being confident in learning? 🤔
- Then again, it is pinned to the top, which indicates how much I worry about my unrefined learning and productivity methods. Should reflect and adjust.
- Leadership and community building being really low is surprising too - these are topics that I think about regularly. Perhaps it’s a season of application of internal knowledge as opposed to seeking new perspectives. Either that, or I should be lumping management into Leadership rather than Human Skills? Doesn’t feel right - probably won’t do that.
Why these categories?
While there’s a whole bunch of topics (more than I honestly should be keeping track of), the way some topics are lumped together was a result of a compromise between granularity and not multiplying the number of topics.
In lieu of going into key learnings, for the first iteration of this half-yearly review, I’ll go into the thought process behind the inclusion of each category - starting with the separation between Markets and Functions.
Markets
There are 3 markets that I’m looking at in this season of life: Fintech, Digital Health/Longevity, and Climate Tech (Climate, Environment and Degrowth). Likely (definitely) a result of my academic and professional experiences, and more (as you will see)!
Fintech
I only created the Fintech topic in March, after stumbling upon a map of Taiwan’s insurance roadmap (which was first published in 2022).
It’s unlikely that I would lose interest in Fintech; money flows define societies, and understanding its dynamics feels crucial to know from a general knowledge perspective since it will have implication on basically every other industry (including Health and Climate, where understanding the movement of money would allow one to understand how sustained impact can be driven).
Digital Health & Longevity
In addition to being a biomedical engineering major way back in 2013-2017, the broad interest in understanding how to stay alive feels…pretty fundamental as a human being who would like to be alive and healthy. But beyond wanting to stay alive, digital health systems and the cutting edge of understanding longevity on a biological and systemic level is cool!
That and I was applying to Neko Health earlier this year, and the process of understanding longevity from their perspective was eye opening and a perspective I wish to keep with me.
The biggest resource that I got out of this is a podcast called Big Picture Medicine - bunch of doctors break down medtech startups around the world. Would like to do something similar for environmental startups (see next section!).
Climate Tech (Climate, Environment, Degrowth)
The Climate Tech topic is a good example of a few related but distinct topics being lumped together in a way that is not super ideal. You might also notice that there’s no mention of tech within the brackets, and that two of the words represent things to be managed/protected, and Degrowth is a potential mechanism to slow our emissions down.
The idea of leaning on Climate Tech versus building a post-growth economy is a tension where most folks have decided to take a definitive stance on one side or another - and that’s completely reasonable.
- The effective implementation of Climate Tech requires a keen understanding of different facets of science, engineering, geography, computing, economics, international and domestic politics, finance, and surely many many more topics, that it’s totally understandable that people pursuing Climate Tech would not give Degrowth the time of day
- At the same time, I cannot deny that an economy predicated on endless growth will burn this world.
This topic means the most to me because there are tensions outlined above that I need to untangle in my own head. I really feel like I won’t be at peace unless it’s done, and it is a goal of mine to start this disentanglement through writing about it more, and hopefully publishing it as a podcast within this month. It WILL happen - this has been pushed back again and again for 2 years and my heart is reaching its boiling point.
Functions
Some sections will group together similar topics, and explain why they have been separated in the group. Broadly, Functions describes the things that people do at work (or in other organization settings) that enable Getting Things Done™️. I’m far from being a master in any of them, but I see immense value in spending my lifetime improving in all these areas. Slow and steady does it.
Metacognition and Productivity | Workshopping and Curriculum Design
As described earlier, I do feel that my learning ability is stunted, and has been stunted basically all my life. It feels like my successes have been in spite of my scattered brain and poor study techniques rather than because of it. I continue to feel this way, but I will say that discovering Justin Sung has given me a lot of hope that I will be able to learn better than I’ve ever learned before 😄
I suppose that Workshopping and Curriculum Design are topics of interest to me due to my current work at Hatch, but also, after taking part in Product Tonic Lab back in 2022, I realised that a product manager’s superpower is their ability to conduct workshops to help to align teams and open their eyes! And I do have some innate ability there which would be good to sharpen 😎
Systems Thinking, Futures Thought, and Human Dynamics | Impact, Leverage, and Public Policy
After lumping these topics together, it feels like the distinction between the two has become a lot clearer compared to when I came up with these topics (and added more stuff over time):
- Systems Thinking, Futures Thought, and Human Dynamics seems to be my attempt at trying to provide some ordered thinking to either unknowable, unpredictable, or incredibly complex situations
- Impact, Leverage, and Public Policy seems to be my attempt at trying to unpack potentially causal relationships between interventions and outcomes down the line
As someone who’s been around in the climate and social enterprise space, whose driving force in life is to make things Better For Others™️, these topics will forever be close to my heart. One day, I may accept that it is not possible to know all of these, but the pursuit of being able to navigate complex topics and find effective ways to introduce and scale positive impact is something that feels like a very worthy lifelong pursuit.
Product, Tech, Design | Coding and Data
This is very likely to piss a bunch of tech folks off - why lump all of these together???
The fact of the matter is that I’ve accepted my place as not being a specialist, and as a product professional, while I can (and will) develop specific skills to be able to get better, the ability to be a jack of all trades and master of some is paramount to success. And perhaps I’ve not doubled down on the things to be a master of just yet.
Go To Market: BD, Sales, Marketing & Growth | Entrepreneurship | Strategy & Tactics
My official role at Hatch is Head of Growth (let’s put aside my degrowth pursuit for a moment). At the core of it, business (or honestly running any organization) is the process of creating and capturing more value than you are spending. A big part of ensuring that happens is being able to understand how to communicate value, how to convince people to purchase or invest, how to build a business (or new organization), and how to strategize based on both micro and macro conditions
The articles below are a sample of some of these ideas:
Human Skills (Mgmt, Communication, Nego, Culture) | Career Navigation & Org Culture | Leadership | Community Building
If selling is such a human process and strategy and tactics are a description of how to navigate your organization to success, why not lump that with human skills, org culture etc.? And what’s so important about community building anyway?
Honestly, it’s really a matter of what’s the focus - is it on the selling? The navigating of the ship? Or is it about how we work with one another, and find better ships, or inspire others on the ship. And how do we find ships to sail together (this metaphor is starting to fall apart a little).
More specifically:
- Human Skills: I’ve been a student of negotiation for many years, and a coach for a few. I’ve also obsessed for a time on being able to communicate effectively, and understand how to manage people.
- Perhaps culture should be removed here, since we cover it in the next topic.
- Some key readings:
- Career Navigation and Org Culture: Finding job hard, getting promoted hard, finding new job hard, advancing career hard. Building an organization that is fair and provides opportunities for all this also hard. Therefore, need to read and understand more - for myself, and for any future orgs I’m a part of (or that I start).
- Some key readings:
- I’ve also documented how to navigate the climate space in 2 decks, and I feel quite close to creating a much better guide. Probably either late this year or early next year.
- Leadership: I think what separates leadership as a topic is that it’s really not just management - it’s about operating in hard environments, and inspiring others to be their best in these scenarios. Clearly the number of articles I’ve posted so far doesn’t indicate that it’s something that’s super important to me right now, but I feel being able to find good leaders to lead me and one day become a great leader is something that 1000% will come up.
- Community Building: The last topic in the more people centric category. I do this on a personal level already, and generally my philosophy is to keep things as simple and friction-free as possible. Community falls outside of the human dynamics category because I see the importance of separating topics that sharpen my ability to be a practitioner of bringing people together, and helping others do the same 😇
Philosophy and Meaning | Excellence
I included these topics as a way to document what great looks like, and also what matters most. I do have a separate group for my personal thoughts that goes into much more detail on these though ;)
In conclusion
It was a nice feeling being able to look back at the things I’ve read. The tangible path forward is to put them into practice and implement a learning loop. Fingers crossed.
That’s all y’all - see you in December 2024!
Inspired somewhat by swyx’s Learn In Public and Useful Friction’s How to be More Agentic. If you’ve made it this far and would be keen to be in the repository, you can come on by at this link!