Too much testosterone (Ricky Weekly #3)
This is an experiment where I share 3 things every week with my friends and potentially anyone interested. I’ll share 1 thing on my mind, 1 piece of content I recommend, and 1 picture from my life. I’ll try to do this for the next two months on Sundays. Feedback is encouraged.
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A picture from my life:
I was recently introduced to a place called Papas & Beer in Ensenada, Mexico. It’s a bar that makes money by turning their customers into entertainment for other customers, which is exactly what bars sell if you think about it.
Thing on my mind:
Not much. I just spent three days on a cruise to Ensenada with 17 other dudes for a bachelor party. I’m just hoping there’s no permanent damage to my health.
The bachelor’s friends came from his childhood, basketball teams, fraternity, and startups, which actually maps pretty well to my male friendships. Every single guy I met was a standup guy. They were all gentle souls. Many were engaged or married. At least two were already fathers. Yet when we were together, we all defaulted back to “boys will be boys,” which I thought was a beautiful thing and I wonder what the girl version of this is like.
I haven’t had to think about fitting in for a while, but I definitely did on this trip. I’m an extroverted introvert and most people are surprised to learn that, but it becomes more obvious when there’s a higher-than-average testosterone level in the room. I end up taking more of a backseat to let the alphas lead. I wonder if having brothers close to you in age growing up helps you adapt to these high-octane, super bro-y environments.
Piece of content I recommend:
“How To Be ‘Carefree’ Even Though You Care—A Lot” by Jeff Greenwald (h/t Paul Gassée)
The article honestly doesn’t say anything super surprising, but just calling this idea out was good enough for me to recommend. After playing basketball probably thousands of times, I realized that I need to stop getting in my own way. I know I’m at my best when I play carefree, which I can easily do when I’m playing against scrubs, but not when I’m competing against better people. The way I’ve tried to overcome this is by reminding myself that at the end of the day, I’m lucky to just be able to play, and then force myself to smile and crack a few jokes with teammates to lighten up the mood before starting. I hope to get better at this not only in basketball but in business and in life.
Reader comment from last week:
Last week I casually mentioned this:
Are people less likely to explore ideas now because they know their ideas won’t be original? Maybe originality is overrated.
A reader of Ricky Weekly responded with this fun story:
Richard Feynman talks about his scientific career in this regard. He used to really like math and "discovered" all of these things that turned out to have already been discovered and named by someone else in history. His perspective on this was amazing - instead of feeling let down that his discovery was already made by someone before him, he viewed it as catching up in time. At age 10, he solved a problem from the 1700s. At 15, he was solving problems of the 1900s. Eventually the problems became more recent until he finally caught up with present time. At that point he went in search of problems that have not yet been solved. That's when his solutions were labeled 'original' by society's perspective, but everything was original to him the whole time.
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Earlier this week I published a post called “The next Silicon Valley is already online” If you find that clickbait-y enough, take a read!
As always, you can find out what I’m thinking in more real-time on Twitter and my blog posts are on my website.