Goals Without the Grind and More

Happy Sunday!

This week, we announced a  new column and a new upcoming course from Napkin Math. Plus, we’ve got a new episode of Ordinary Astronauts, and essays on achieving your goals, everything you need to know about assets, and a peek behind the curtain here at Every. 

Let’s dig in! 

Achieve Your Goals with Less Grinding

Michael Ashcroft / Expanding Awareness

In case you missed it, we’re incredibly excited that Michael Ashcroft recently joined Every to write a monthly column called Expanding Awareness, all about unlocking a sense of agency, ease, and aliveness by learning to explore and control your awareness.

In this inaugural issue of the column, Michael explores the question: does achieving your goals always have to be so… hard? The answer, as you can probably tell from the title, is no. There are three things you need to move unencumbered toward your goals: a clear sense of where you are, a clear sense of where you want to be, and for there to be no conflicting goals. 

Read.

What Is an Asset? 

Evan Armstrong / Napkin Math

In a lot of ways, the basic atomic unit of business is the asset. The bet that a founder makes when they start a business is that they can leverage capital from an investor to acquire assets, combine those assets in a unique way, and then extract more value than those assets could produce on their own. 

Despite this fact, the concept of the asset isn’t all that well understood. So this week on Napkin Math, Evan is going in to bring some much needed clarity to the conversation, covering: what an asset is, why it matters, and how to think about technology businesses in terms of assets. 

Read.

BONUS: A New Course from Napkin Math

Can’t get enough of ARR, revenue, and the CAC/LTV ratio? You’re in luck! In October, Evan will be kicking off a new workshop with a group of 30 builders that will dive deep into the wonderful world of finance. The goal is to equip you with all the tools you need to evaluate a business and know how to communicate the value of your work. 

Interested? Click the link below to get more information! 

How Every Executes: Two tweaks that generated ~54% more paid subscribers

Nathan Baschez / Divinations

Last week, Nathan wrote about why execution is so important—how “marginal improvements to each step in a process (like raising money, launching products, onboarding users, recruiting, etc) can compound into exponentially better outcomes.” This week, he’s following up with a specific example from inside Every itself. 

Last year, we made two improvements to our funnel that compound together to generate 54% more paid subscribers for the same volume of traffic. In this post, Nathan takes you through those improvements: what they were, why we made them, and why it worked. 

Read.

Why You Keep Doing Productivity Systems That Don’t Work

Dan Shipper / Superorganizers

We all have them: Productivity White Whales—systems that we try, again and again, to make work for us, but that somehow never quite work. You stick with it for a month, maybe two at a time and then it all falls apart, and you start over again from the beginning. 

Productivity White Whales suck, but as Dan argues in this week’s Superorganizers, they can actually teach you something useful: how your brain interprets and tells stories that cause you to do things that don’t work, and what you need to let go of in order to be more productive. 

Read.

Ordinary Astronauts: The New Clubhouse

This week on OA Dan and Nathan discuss: 

• The new Clubhouse. It's been a couple years since Clubhouse came out and attracted astronomical hype (which Nathan was a part of) and since then things seem to have died down a bit. But Clubhouse is releasing a new version of the app that seems pretty interesting. 
• Arguing to Think. Dan noticed he doesn't know what he thinks unless someone is arguing with him. At first he didn't like that about himself, but now he's learned to harness it. 
• Conquering Fear / OCD with Exposure Therapy. Dan talks about his experience with OCD and how exposure therapy helped him. 

Listen.

A Few More Recommendations

A Life-Changing Philosophy of Games | The Ezra Klein Show

Games are all around us—not just on our phone and computer screens, but in our media, our workplaces, even our relationships. And as philosopher C. Thi Nguyen argues, we’re not just playing these games—they’re playing us right back, shaping our desires, motivations, and behaviors in ways we aren’t always aware of.

Creative aliveness: Turning life into a creative adventure | Ness Labs

“Creative aliveness consists in reclaiming a larger creative canvas woven into the fabric of our lives. It starts by asking yourself: what makes you come alive creatively? And how can you inject more creativity into your daily life?”

Startupy

From Dan Shipper: One of the things I'm nerdiest about is knowledge organization, and Startupy is one of the coolest projects tackling this problem I've ever seen. It's a community of smart people curating and organizing the best of the internet—topics, companies, articles and people—in a bottoms-up distributed way. If you're looking to go down a knowledge rabbit hole I highly recommend checking them out. 

The Average Joe

Investors, brace yourselves: We may be nearing a market bottom and here’s how you can catch it. Our friends at The Average Joe offer a free 4x-weekly newsletter read by 30,000+ investors, delivering unique market insights, trends and ideas. Try the free newsletter here. 

That's all for this week!