Format

• Hey Friends

• Today’s Sponsor: Clarity Construction

• Thought of the Week: The Ask Project

• Mission: Training With An Athlete’s Mindset

• Life Design: Digital Products & Courses

• Commerce & Capital: My Case for TikTok

• Trending Now

  • 🎙 Podcasts, Music & Social Audio

  • 🌍 Social Media

  • 📚 Book Shelf

  • 📰 Articles

Hey Friends

Life constantly throws obstacles in our path to test our mettle.

In the past several weeks, I faced multiple challenges.

I have battled a blood disorder for most of my life, an anemia that is most common among people of African, Mediterranean and Middle Eastern descent. It can be triggered occasionally by dehydration and intense stress to the body.

This year, crazy time in the world and everything, I added martial arts and fight training to my usual powerlifting / strength training regimen.

Three weeks ago, I had to go to the hospital after a particularly strenuous training session to get intravenous fluids and painkillers. While there, I suspect I procured a virus that sapped a great deal of my energy, strength and cognitive faculties.

I’m feeling fortunate to be be better now and on the mend.

The illness was an upper respiratory issue - I had a raging fever for over a week that absolutely floored me. A couple of friends reached out and confessed they too had been battling some a mysterious flu that can linger for 2 to 6 weeks.

People have been jokingly dubbing it "Covid-24" though who knows what strain of virus this really is.

Every ounce of energy was drained from my body in a way I've never experienced before. Just getting out of bed felt like running a marathon. My respiratory system was under relentless assault. I'd wake up drenched in sweat, dizzy, chronically fatigued.

Not having the energy to do my writing, to meet with my coaching clients, to continue working on launching my video brand, to not be able to work on the SaaS platform, not being able to meet with the research team, not being able to hit "Publish" on this newsletter — has been very disheartening and humbling.

Only being able to focus narrowly on rest and recovery has been mentally challenging.

A week ago, while still deep in the throes of pain and fever, I had a panic attack.

The mental health aspects of facing sickness, recovery, even a sense of mortality are not talked about enough.

I used to believe that I was invincible in terms of mental health. I thought mental health issues were something that happened to other people. I thought I was too "mentally strong" and "logical" to ever suffer any mental health challenges.

The challenges of the last several weeks caused me to have no choice but to hit a giant PAUSE button, and rest, and reflect.

There's an old Yiddish saying that roughly translates to "When Man Plans, God Laughs."

Often, the universe has a mysterious order to the way it works.

• It forces us out of our comfort zone.

• It removes what's not serving us.

• It makes space for better things to come.

Challenges are not here to break us.

They're here to teach us.

When life gives you lemons, zoom out and realize you don’t just have to make lemonade.

You can plant lemon trees.

You can build a lemonade stand.

You can hire a team that can help you build a lemonade empire.

In other words: there are always several paths that can be taken.

Next time you face a health challenge or a serious life obstacle, reframe into thinking of it not only as an obstacle — but also as a redirection to a better path, an opportunity to slow down, regroup and remember what’s really important.

My very best,

Moshe Modeira

Editor-In-Chief

Commerce & Capital

Today’s Sponsor: Clarity Construction

_{Design and Build with confidence. Clarity Construction and their roster of top industry experts are with you — every step of the way.}

Thought of the Week: The Ask Project

Corey Gil-Shuster is a Canadian that basically dedicated his life to asking Israelis, Palestinians, Israeli Arabs and other Israeli ethnic groups about their opinions on the Israel-Palestinian conflict, their feelings about each other and the daily nuances of their lived experiences.

The Ask Project is thousands of hours of footage stretching back to 2011. Many people have never had the opportunity to explore this content. I highly recommend anyone and everyone watching to get a better understanding of the socio-cultural and political pain of this conflict, to get some scope of the work and bridge-building that lies ahead in the next 20-40 years. Gil-Shuster bookends many of his videos with an ask for help with continuation of the 13-year project in the form of donations — or even boarding a plane yourself and joining him on the ground in Israel and the West Bank.

I want to share thoughts about Israel, as a Jew who has lived there. These are the most emotionally heavy days I have ever experienced as someone who wishes for the State of Israel to see lasting peace.

Modern Israel is still a relatively young democracy, 9 million Jews, Muslims, Christians, Druze and a number of smaller religious groups, attempting to co-exist. The diversity of perspectives and experiences in Israel is vast and complex.

There are Brown, Black and White Israelis and Arabs. One will encounter Israelis and Arabs who express racist sentiments towards each other, as well as those desperately seeking peace and coexistence.

Some harbour old prejudices, with instances of Israeli Jews disliking Arabs due to past trauma, religious Israelis opposed to intermarriage with other ethnicities, and Muslims and Arabs professing dislike for Jews and Israelis. There are also Arab-Israeli and Jewish-Israeli friends and couples.

One will find the full spectrum - from hardcore nationalists who believe all non-Jews should leave, to liberal families working tirelessly for peace for all. Similarly, among Palestinians, there are those who consider Jews as brethren and desire peace, while others have sworn to a lifetime of resistance to anything Jewish.

When diverse peoples of different backgrounds, skin colours, languages, and economic statuses are brought together, as in most Western nations, a range of disparate opinions about each other emerges.

The path forward lies in rejecting all forms of supremacist thought and fostering a mindset where Jewish and Arab mothers see each other's children as their own.

This conflict, this war needs to end as soon as possible.

Hamas has been unrelenting, violent and intractable — and Netanyahu's government has been narrowly fixated on military solutions.

Peace talks are direly, critically required.

The hostages need to be returned. Many of them are already dead, repeatedly raped, maimed, dehumanized beyond recognition.

I'm old enough to remember the promise of possible peace that was in the air when Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated in 1995.

There seemed to be another window of potential for peace, in 2005, when I was a young volunteer with the Jewish Agency of Israel, helping with the Disengagement from Gaza, the removal of settler families that was an extremely emotional time in Israel's recent history, when the IDF faced off against Jewish settlers so that a new path towards peace could be possible.

I am saddened that this was not a catalyst for lasting peace.

Instead, weeks after the Disengagement, Hamas was elected as the official governing body of Gaza. They loudly reiterated that they would never accept peace with Israel.

The nineteen years since have seen countless terror attacks, kidnappings, blockades, military skirmishes and a further deepening of distrust between Israelis and Palestinians, between Jews and Muslims.

I am against military solutions as a bid for peace.

Conversely, Israel has no choice but to defend itself from terrorist attacks and missile strikes from neighbouring governments and militia groups.

The horror of 10/7 will be felt for a long, long time.

But we cannot allow it to calcify our hearts.

We can't take our eyes off the ultimate goal of peace.

The 2005 Disengagement and the attempted peace talks of the 1990s and 2000s seem like halcyon memories in comparison to the current backdrop.

In 2024 we are still selling and trading arms and weapons and missiles as if they are vegetables and livestock. This needs to come to an end in our lifetime.

I’m asking that everyone keep learning, and listening, and asking questions, and authentically seek solutions that can create lasting peace.

We need to continue to learn about each other's stories, to start to see each other as fellow humans, to embrace the values of peace and modernity, to always seek the truth, to speak up about violence and rape and murder.

They are not tools of resistance.

They have no place in modern civilization.

With all this attention, you would think Israel is a giant country. It’s actually tiny, approximately the size of Vancouver Island. It is roughly the size of the state of New Jersey. It’s a small plot of land that has seen far too much war and unrest.

Peace in the Middle East is the responsibility of Muslims, as the majority religion of the region, and also of Christians and Jews who reside there.

There are violent extremists on all sides.

Peace talks and discussions are never possible amongst extremists, and thats why we have war right now. While they are a minority, their voices and opinions always seem to be amplified the most.

The voices of the majority, good people who want to live in peace with each other, are being drowned out.

The national anthem of Israel, HaTikvah, literally translates to "The Hope" in English. I still retain hope that in Israel, as Jews and Muslims, as Israelis and Arabs, and everyone in between, that we can build a lasting peace with one another, and create a model of democracy that can be a shining light for the Middle East and the entire world.

A generation of Herculean efforts lies ahead, as I said in my last post.

A daunting process involving a sequence of returning to the truce-making table, genuine peace-building, demilitarization, deprogramming, re-education, reconciliation and integration looms in front of us.

But it's worth it to achieve lasting peace.

We need to collectively take responsibility for the fragile social contract that is civilization. We need to stop using religion as a pretext for militarism, barbarism, division, segregation and separation.

As Jews and Muslims and Christians in Israel and the Middle East — we desperately require authentic, responsible leaders that are vociferously working towards these goals, and not just paying them political lip service.

We are at a civilizational crossroads.

My tikvah, my hope, is that we collectively choose the right road to walk down in the coming decades. Israelis and Palestinians, Jews and Arabs urgently need to resume a path towards lasting peace.

This war needs to end, as soon as possible.

Mission: Training With An Athlete’s Mindset

As an entrepreneur, business coach and former personal trainer, I've come to realize the profound parallels between the worlds of business and fitness.

True mastery, whether in the boardroom or the gym, demands an unwavering commitment to a long-term vision, a willingness to endure discomfort and adversity in service of incremental growth and self-actualization.

A huge unstated aspect of the entrepreneur’s journey is cultivating self-mastery.

A requisite part of self-mastery is discipline.

Think of the years of discipline, hard work and dedication required to get to the level of being a professional athlete, the basketball, soccer, hockey, baseball and tennis players that we love to watch and admire.

The key is to not compartmentalize and think of physical discipline and athleticism as only being for professional athletes, impossible standards incapable of being achieved on your own.

A great exemplar of focus and discipline being possible at any age as long as you flick on that mental switch is my old friend Julian Brass.

Julian has been working doggedly for years as a media entrepreneur, author and mentor. Like many of us, he fell in and out of consistent health patterns over the years, until he made a promise to himself one day to start taking fitness as seriously as he does business.

Becoming a practicing yogi impacted his mindset greatly over the past decade. But in the past several years, Julian went into overdrive with his attention to detail, realizing once and for all that the athlete’s mindset is mission critical to successful body, mind and soul outcomes. He recently launched a fitness brand focused on guiding men over 40 towards the athlete’s mindset.

Julian exemplifies what I refer to when I say you must begin to think, train, eat and sleep like an athlete, and how that can come at any age, the moment you make it a priority.

For the entrepreneur, as for the athlete, half-measures yield merely half-results. True metamorphosis demands the patience and discipline to remain steadfast on the path, even when progress seems imperceptible. Just as an athlete must trust in the compounding effects of consistent training, an entrepreneur must remain faithful to their long-term vision, weathering setbacks and momentary stagnation with the belief that perseverance will ultimately yield the desired transformation.

In the eternal pursuit of self-mastery, there are no shortcuts, no quick fixes. Sculpting the body and fortifying the mind is a lifetime odyssey, a commitment to incremental progress and unwavering dedication. It’s a mindset that transcends the boundaries of fitness and business, permeating every aspect of one's existence with a reverence for the struggle, an embrace of the process of the journey versus the prize of the destination.

Your health being your only real wealth is a continuing theme of this newsletter. It’s a theme I will keep returning to because we still live in a society where fitness is an option, exercising, strength training, martial arts and cardiovascular activity often thought of as only the purview of teenagers and twenty-somethings.

Indeed, it is the fundamental cornerstone of living a successful life and giving yourself the opportunity to truly compete in the realm of business and entrepreneurship.

Life Design: Digital Products & Courses

Everyone I know is grappling with the onslaught of today's knowledge economy.

Almost daily, business professionals and entrepreneurs are switching careers, transitioning into leveraging their professional areas of expertise and interests into creating digital products and online courses that can help people struggling for answers along their own unique paths and journeys.

It’s an absolute Wild West out there with new platforms launching seemingly everyday. I want to cut through the noise and showcase 4 platforms that have broken away from the pack — the ones really worth your time investment.

PayHip, Gumroad, Kajabi, and Skool offer seamless solutions to package and monetize your intellectual property. PayHip and Gumroad excel at selling digital downloads, while Kajabi provides robust course creation and membership marketing tools. Skool's innovative approach emphasizes community engagement. With user-friendly interfaces, secure transactions and powerful analytics, these platforms empower creators to transform their knowledge into lucrative personal brands and passive income streams in 2024 and beyond.

PayHip: PayHip is a London-based platform launched in 2012. It allows creators to sell digital products, memberships, and online courses. It features a simple, uncluttered interface that allows you to set up a storefront and customize checkout pages. PayHip also integrates with popular marketing tools. The platform is known for its low transaction fees and flexibility in pricing options. It’s a very attractive choice for those looking to maximize their earnings from digital sales.

Gumroad: Gumroad is another popular platform for entrepreneurs, creators and educators selling digital products such as ebooks, online courses, SaaS software and more. Its streamlined, uncluttered interface makes it easy to create a professional-looking product page and start selling within minutes. Gumroad's strength lies in its simplicity and its focus on providing a seamless buying experience for customers. It also offers analytics and marketing tools to help creators grow their audience and boost sales.

Kajabi: Kajabi is perhaps the best known of these four platforms, a robust all-in-one platform founded in 2009. It’s designed specifically for creating, launching, marketing and selling online courses and membership sites. It provides a comprehensive suite of tools for course creation, website building, email marketing, and analytics. Kajabi's rich feature set and intuitive interface make it a popular choice among established course creators and those looking to build audience, membership and community around their expertise.

Skool: Skool is the newest player on the scene, the brainchild of entrepreneur Sam Ovens. Launched in 2019 and now gaining traction in the digital product selling space (a recent investment by Alex Hormozi has brought much needed publicity and capital), it is quickly gaining popularity among creators for its user-friendly UX/UI and membership/audience building features. It allows creators to sell online courses,, digital downloads, subscriptions, and even physical products. Skool's standout feature is its built-in community and social networking capabilities, enabling creators to foster engagement and build a loyal following around their products.

Commerce & Capital: My Case for TikTok

Trending Now

🎙 Podcasts, Music & Social Audio

How The Boomers Ruined America - Tim Dillon x Andrew Schultz: Comedian and social commentator Tim Dillon has been on an absolute tear lately, making the media rounds as he promotes his upcoming autobiography Death By Boomers. A tongue-in-cheek account of his own life growing up on Long Island, Dillon’s sharp, acerbic and incredibly incisive observations and criticisms of his Boomer-generation parents has added fodder to a wider cultural discussion being held about the ultimate legacy of the generation of people born between 1945 and 1965 — the cohort my parents belong to. What is so fascinating is that any critique of the Boomers necessitates a deep dive into critiques of subsequent generations, the Gen-Xers, the Millennials like myself who are the offspring of the Boomer generation — and also the sharp dividing line in consciousness / perception we are seeing in Gen-Z, the so-called Zoomer generation. Incredible societal insights are unpacked in these discussions. Dillon’s honest, unflinching analysis has really grown on me.

🌍 Social Media

Build a circle of 3-10 people whose goals are as big as yours - James Camp: Camp is an online business entrepreneur I have been following for years on Twitter and now X. He is a big proponent of evaluating and buying already-running online businesses, as opposed to focusing solely on startup and launches. He peppers his advice with sage points like the one below. We all become the average of the people we spend most of our time with, so choose wisely.

📚 Book Shelf

The Algebra of Wealth by Scott Galloway. NYU Business professor and author Scott Galloway has been very vocal lately, making the argument that economic desperation, societal disillusionment and a focus on “Get Rich Quick” that is the clarion call of the internet age is having deleterious impacts on millennials and zoomers ability to retain hope for the future and vision for successful entrepreneurial life design. Galloway’s longtime newsletter No Mercy / No Malice has been one of the market analysis and strategy publications I have subscribed to the longest.

The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt. Haidt has been a consistent critic of the social and technological forces over the past decade that have seemed to change the core behaviours and mental health patterns of younger generations. In this book, Haidt calls out the entire technology complex, pointing out that the encroachment of the mobile phone into every aspect of our waking lives has begun to fundamentally change how we relate to each other, and has negatively impacted the ability of today’s youth to function in an uncertain world that requires deep critical thinking and high-octane interpersonal skills.

Amusing Ourselves To Death by Neil Postman. Published in 1985, author Neil Postman delves into the rise of visual entertainment and media and its convergence with a dearth in measured research, analysis and introspection. The rise of television and cinema and the demand for everything - politics, religion, education and journalism to be “entertaining” has had a negative impact on our ability to deeply learn about the world around us, and understand how to navigate in our personal lives. In the age of the internet, with the rise of the creator economy and online media, Postman’s observations from thirty years ago have become ever more fundamental and necessary.

📰 Articles

The End of Social Media: An Interview With Jack Dorsey - Mike Solana, PirateWires: Media entrepreneur and billionaire Jack Dorsey discusses his recent exit from bluesky, his opinion on why Twitter lost it’s soul, his strategy for ending online censorship and his thoughts on death of social media and the new communications evolution we currently find ourselves mired in.

AI engineers report burnout and rushed rollouts as ‘rat race’ to stay competitive hits tech industry - Hayden Field, CNBC: An ICYMI from earlier this month, this is article is a very necessary read, deep-diving into the burnout being felt by many AI engineers working for major AI platforms. The pressure to develop AI tools quickly to compete with other companies is relentless, often leading to rushed projects and unfinished work. Workers are reporting feeling stressed and overworked, with almost all companies in the sector clearly prioritizing speed over quality or safety. Even the largest tech companies (Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Facebook) are struggling to keep up with the pace of innovation.

See y’all next week 🙏 Would love to hear your thoughts! Leave your comments below.

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