Utah Tech Week is happening right now and I’m in the thick of it. Leading into this week I tried to plan accordingly to get ahead and keep my calendar relatively clear of conflict but that’s proven to be a tough task. Today I sat at my computer on calls ALL DAY. Some of those calls were extremely fruitful and great for my business - but that’s a tough day.
One of my calls today, with my friend and someone I’m helping build a business with, Raechel Lambert, touched on this exact problem. That computers and smartphones have created these vortexes of attention that can be impossible to get away from. This has been exacerbated by COVID and the work from home movement. Technology the last 15 or so years has been optimized to keep our attention on the screens. We’ve embraced a digital culture where everything can be done on a screen. I don’t think that’s a good way to live and optimize humans’ experience on this earth though.
In fact, we are putting on a little event on Friday morning as part of Utah Tech Week to talk about that exact subject. Rae and I will be joined on stage with 2 other expert community builders in Clint Betts (CEO of Silicon Slopes and CEO.com) and Kyle Spencer (COO of Utah Tech Week).
Sign Up Here for our Community Builder Breakfast Event
Thoughts / Ideas / Reflections
I’m actually starting to feel like my writing is improving. The realization has come in the moment while crafting my posts. It’s become more about crafting stories instead of just a stream of consciousness coming from my fingers. This is where the real craft comes into play and something I’m getting excited about. It’s FUN to play with words and phrasing and framing up HOW the story will be told.
Storytelling is such a fine art. There is so much depth and rigor that can go into it. When my 100 straight days of writing my posts ends my goals will shift to honing this art. On the days I don’t write I’ll focus on learning and crafting. Which means the posts will get exponentially better. I’m excited to get to that moment - just gotta stay focused and reach my next milestone.
Open to any suggested places to get learning material on crafting stories / storytelling if you all have recommendation??? Just reply to the email!
Stats
Percentage to goal: 58% of the way to my 100 day straight goal
ALF crossed the 50 subscriber threshold, which means nothing, but feels like a nice number and feat to celebrate. My friend Nadene Cherry says I should celebrate more small wins, so I’ll oblige.
Had a consistently good week in terms of total views, averaging 84 or so a day over the last 7 days. My next goal is to get to 100 avg views a day - then 1000 a day.
I continue to average 52+% open rate on emails, which I think is a good signal that people are reading and liking my posts. Bless 🙏
Biggest Learning
Somehow we’ve let our public equities markets become mostly non-public. What you’re looking at is a graph of total trading volume of US equity markets and the tread of what percentage of that trading volume is transacted on a “Lit” exchange. A Lit exchange is is a trading venue where all bids and offers for stocks are publicly displayed and visible to all market participants in real-time. The key characteristic of lit exchanges is their transparency - anyone can see the current best bid, best ask, and the depth of the order book, which enables open price discovery.
Contrary to a “lit” exchange is a “dark” exchange or dark pool. A dark pool is a private trading venue where financial instruments are traded without publicly displaying pre-trade pricing or order information. These venues primarily serve institutional investors who need to execute large trades without impacting market prices.
The whole point of public markets is that participants have the same transparent view of the market with no entity having a knowledge advantage and the order book and price discovery driving the prices. We should be appalled that this trend is continuing because it’s a disservice and large disadvantage to retail investors if only large institutions have access to dark pools/exchanges (and btw they have access to order flow as well) because then those institutions will front run retail investors and dump large trades before anyone else knows. VERY CONCERNING.
Biggest Win
I taught my son how to really use AI this weekend as we executed his science project. He did a bang up job (despite lots of teeth pulling to get him to focus for long enough to complete the tasks at hand) by utilizing ChatGPT voice mode to do his research. His curiosity took over and he used the AI very conversationally to extract a ton of info. He tooks notes by hand as he chatted with it and then we used those notes by feeding them back to ChatGPT and asking it to digitize them and compile them for the project. Brilliant.
I’m believing more and more in AI for learning - I think my son learned more about science and faster by using this method. Wild what the future holds for our kids with this level of interactive intelligence available.
Highest Level of Resonance This Week:
Nuff said! Create “How You” content, be authentic, and give your uniquely human POV and you will win.
With love and deep appreciation,
Andrew