Happy Wednesday, Wise Owl Nation!

I've had an interesting week.

Since I last wrote to you all, the following has happened:

• Had a conversation with a CTO of a major health startup about creating "low-ego" teams
• Interviewed my favorite Audiobook narrator on my secret nerdy YouTube channel
• Placed 100th in a poker tournament with a field of 2400 people, earning 5x my buy-in

The shared theme of each of these events that stuck out in my mind is that - everything and everyone is a work in progress.

Who you are is a work in progress.

Your skills are a work in progress.

Your relationships are works in progress.

You are constantly reinventing yourself, whether you realize it or not.

That is what I briefly touch on this week.

Let's get into it.

You can find all past issues (including this one) here.

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🧠 Wisdom Focus Tips of The Week: Continuous Improvement

Last night my podcast co-host and I had a one-hour chat with Travis Baldree. If you don't know who he is, Travis is a successful game developer turned audiobook narrator extraordinaire. He’s given voice to some of my favorite characters in my favorite book series.

Travis designed and built the following games:

• Fate
• Torchlight
• Torchlight 2
• Rebel Galaxy
• Rebel Galaxy Outlaw

But somewhere along the way Travis became disillusioned by game design and started looking for a different path. During his creation of the Rebel Galaxy games, he built an Audio sound booth in his home to record some of the sound effects and voices of some of the characters.

He found that he liked it. So he created a few samples of his audio work and started shopping his skills to Authors in search of narrators.

Fast forward a few years and now Travis is a beloved audiobook narrator. He has garnered tens of thousands of 5-star reviews on Audible for his work on the Cradle series.

In the interview, I asked him about his thoughts on continuous improvement and he had some insightful thoughts.

To paraphrase what he told me, Travis said that his training as a software engineer has turned him into a serial optimizer. That principle of continuous improvement has pushed him to constantly evaluate his own skills and his place in the world.

So, when he was no longer happy creating video games, he problem solved by finding and mastering a skill set that enabled him to do something he loved.

This is the approach I am taking to several different areas of my life.

At the beginning of the year, I noted a serious goal I have is to win a tournament of over 800 entrants.

To have any decent chance of doing that I need to completely reinvent my ability to play poker. I've started studying courses, read books, and even found a "Game Theory Optimal" poker simulator where I can play against a computer and be told when I make non-optimal decisions.

Cool App I Found:

Normally I don't share cool apps I've found until I have found several, but this tool has won me over in the short time I've played with it.

Sleek Bio - It is one of those tools that lets you put a lot of your links in one place. This tool, however, was built by the same team that built Sendfox, the email software I use to send you all this email. The two tools integrate seamlessly, and allow someone to subscribe to your newsletter within the tool without having to click out to the newsletter landing page!

It also let me embed the interview I did with Travis right there. It is the best version of this kind of tool I have found so far.

You can check out my minimalist sleekbio profile here.

💲 Wealth/Crypto News of The Week: Major Players enter Crypto

Crypto has been a work in progress for 11-years now, ever since the first Bitcoin block was mined back in 2009.

I have told you how to get involved, and have shared with you the best assets in all of Crypto.

Now, three MAJOR players are getting much more heavily involved, and surprise, surprise, these major players are focused on Ethereum and Bitcoin.

** Crypto resources are, as always, at the end of the newsletter. **

The Visa Network now Settles Payments in USDC to Ethereum

What this means: Visa is the worldwide leader in credit/debit cards, and is now using the Ethereum Network to settle payments in USDC.

This means that Visa has to buy and hold a ton of ETH, and it means that Visa is going to be paying Ethereum gas fees. If you hold ETH, this is a good sign that your ETH will appreciate in value over time.

PayPal now offers the ability to pay with Crypto

This is pretty cool, even though I do not recommend anyone use PayPal to buy or sell crypto, it is cool to see them working to make it easier for customers and merchants to use and accept Cryptocurrency.

We will start to see a lot more of this happening in the next year or two. I expect to see a lot of merchants start to accept stablecoins like USDC, GUSD, or DAI.

Fidelity to launch bitcoin ETF as investment giant builds its digital asset business

What this means - Fidelity is looking to create a Bitcoin exchange-traded fund (ETF)

This will allow their customers to gain exposure to Bitcoin through a brokerage, and avoid buying, selling, or holding bitcoin themselves. While I am of the belief that everyone should learn to buy, sell, and hold crypto, this is still a major win for Crypto as a whole.

Anytime a customer buys into the Fidelity Bitcoin ETF, Fidelity has to make sure they have that amount of Bitcoin in their in-house trust. Basically, as long as Fidelity has customers buying their ETF, they have to keep buying Bitcoin.

Quote of the week:

Have a great week!

This concludes our issue this week, I hope it gave you some perspective or injected a little motivation into your life!

If it helped, let me know! I read every newsletter response I receive, and I absolutely love hearing from all of you. This newsletter is for you, so I need your help to make it as great as possible.

If you'd like to show me some love for writing all this free stuff, you can always buy me a coffee.

More Resources

I will be adding to this section over time as we find resources that will help you all.

• Check out the Wise Owl Store
• All Wise Healthy Wealthy Articles on Medium
• Start your own Sendfox Newsletter
• Free products to help you level up

Crypto Resources

The Bankless Podcast: This is a link to the bankless podcast on Spotify. Start from the very beginning and learn why I am so positive about the power of Crypto and Ethereum in particular. You can find the podcast easily on the internet, but I am linking to episode 1 on Spotify for your convenience.

Buy your first ETH or BTC:

• On Coinbase - this is the easiest starting place for the newest beginners
• On Gemini - Another great option founded by the Winklevoss brothers. They are based out of New York.
• On Kraken - Kraken has a bit of a harder user interface, but they already have ETH staking enabled with the push of a single button.

Earn interest on your crypto

• BlockFi - Currently, you can earn 6% interest on BTC, 5.25% interest on ETH, and a whopping 8.6% on stable coins like USDC. Use the referral code b09f24fd to support the newsletter.

Other tools:

• Argent Wallet - This is the best mobile wallet for Ethereum, Defi, and all things on the Ethereum network, including staking. They even have plans to implement Layer 2 to remove network fees.
• Ethhub - this is a weekly newsletter that lists out all the interesting news, articles, and tweets that have happened in Crypto that week. It's free and awesome.
• Ethdashboard - A simple dashboard to look at various metrics in the ethereum space. I mainly use this as a quick tool to check ETH gas fees.
• Cointracker - this is one of the better tools for tracking all of your various crypto across all of the various wallets, exchanges, etc. You can also use them to do your crypto taxes each year.
• Metamask - this is a crypto wallet that you can access from your browser and allows you to easily interact with blockchain apps online.