Welcome to the Manifest 👋🏼👽

What’s up friendos! It’s ya boy, Alex. If you’re receiving this email, you’re either my lover or we are homies that have crossed paths on our earthly journeys and remain connected through our shared values for living a life full of health, wealth, and love (and I snagged your email somehow 😏). Many of you know that I work full-time as a software engineer at a tech company and that I also enjoy a healthy smattering of hobbies ranging from kickboxing and calisthenics to dog training and that historically, I tend to get pretty deep into learning them.

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So what about it?

What some of you may not know is what these activities represent to me - they are acts of expression that resonate with that thing at my core I call “self” and make me feel tingly and alive. I noticed that as I learned and practiced these different disciplines (ie. writing, boxing, skateboarding, coding), there has always been a level of mastery in each skill that when unlocked, I really have fun and begin to express a personal style in said discipline. Even more awesome is the observation that oftentimes the learnings from these disciplines cross-pollinate and create valuable synergies across my life. My “main life quest” has always been, in some form, to express this “higher self” in my chosen actions.

The aim? Being useful and connecting ya'll creative powerhouses ;)

On this “quest”, I have met and resonated with many of you who are on your own journeys lived out through your unique “avatars” - a Nak Muay software engineer, a product-managing rapper, a music-producing live-streamer, a bodybuilder doing solar-power, a 패션-nista VC director of growth 🙄.

The point being...ya’ll are doing unique versions of expressing your own “higher self”, and I hope to empower and amplify that through

1. Socializing curated and distilled information from my information consumption around productivity, health & wellness, and personal knowledge management (specifically through the lens of my chosen disciplines),

2. Building a diverse community of multi-disciplinary peoples with shared values around freedom, expression, and creativity. This email list is a baby step towards these goals.

What to expect

So given my particular lens, what can you expect from being on this email list? To answer that, here’s a smorgasbord of future content shares sourced from a recent brainstorm:

• How I Get Away with Making Content On Company Time
• Re-learning How to Learn: Feynman and Beyond
• Feynman’s Alien Tang’s 12 Questions
• Astro Mutts, Lost in Space? This Biz Podcast Had Me Re-Thinking E-Commerce
• How Engineering Makes Me A Better Fighter
• How Fighting Makes Me a Better Engineer - How Breathwork Has Helped Everything
• Training An LLM to Write Like Me

I'm hoping these spark your interest, because with all the cool expertise we already have in this email list, some of these could potentially be the most ambitious crossover ideas since Marvel’s Avengers: Infinity War 👀.

Here's some value:

Anyway, for this first installment, I will leave you with this quote from the book, “Building a Second Brain” (BASB) by Tiago Forte:

For a very long time, I felt like I had all this knowledge accumulated from years of intentional living, but when the time came to extract value from these gathered resources, they were nowhere to be found, and/or the input energy required to surface this information and make it useful was almost always enough to discourage next steps.
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BASB teaches a framework (creative process) for managing personal knowledge that addressed two of my major pain points: procrastination and content creation. In fact, this very email newsletter and its content will be a continued practice of the concepts taught in the book.
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As promised, here’s a link to the book summary I synthesized using GPT-4 and a personally curated list of resonating direct quotations: GPT-4 Summary: Building a Second Brain By Tiago Forte.
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Lots of you here in this initial email list are some form of knowledge worker doing something with information, so I hope there’s value here for you! Thanks for being here, and until next week, keep manifesting ✨