Welcome to International Generalist, Dominik's new newsletter!
“When you can’t stop thinking about doing something, at some point, you need to exorcise the demons - by just doing it.”
We all know this feeling: the one thing that you always wanted to do, always tried to do, but never quite stuck with - and yet, you cannot kill it. It doesn’t go away.
For me, that’s always been writing. Every time I sit down to write, staring at a blank document, it feels impossible to get started. But once you start typing, the ideas start to flow - and writing is one of the few things where I get peak “Flow” experiences.
I’ve always written, thanks also due to the encouragement of my parents who write newspaper articles and research papers respectively for a living. My first “writing job” was for the elementary school newspaper. I then got a lot of practice, racking up >3.000 posts in Germany’s most active Magic: the Gathering forum. This led to my first job, writing articles about Magic for MagicUniverse for approx. 25 € per article (which - unfortunately - was shut down, so it’s impossible to recover them). During my high school year in the US, I wrote a weekly newsletter about my experiences (highly entertaining to read nowadays).
I then launched a blog about my experiences building a social business in Brazil, before starting to write on Medium. Recently though, my fun in writing has waned - mostly due to the fact that the Medium algorithm for distribution has gotten worse (at least for me) so basically no one gets to see my articles, and I have zero control about who reads them or not.
So let’s go back to basics: newsletters. It worked well back in 2009, it works well in my current job, where I write a weekly internal newsletter to my team(s) and everybody else that wants to read it. From what I’ve found, it’s the best medium:
You control your distribution, not some intransparent algorithm like on Medium or LinkedIn
Email still is the most effective communications medium for long-form content
It’s easy to opt out - if you don’t like what you’re reading, just unsubscribe
Here’s what to expect:
(1) A bi-weekly update of things I’ve written, read or otherwise learned
I commit to sending you an email every two weeks that contains a few bullet points about things I’ve learned, articles or books I’ve read, podcasts I’ve listened to or ideas that I’d like to share or bounce around. Inspiration for this are Tim Ferriss’ 5-Bullet-Friday and Matt Clifford’s Thoughts in Between.
I also value people who adhere to what they commit to. Knowing that life might very well throw a wrench into this plan, I will only commit to writing 9 editions for now. I’ll re-evaluate afterwards - and hopefully continue writing.
Here’s a teaser of what such a bullet could look like:
#5 - Should everybody learn English?
Last year, I stumbled upon an article from one my favorite bloggers, Tomas Pueyo of Uncharted Territories. It argues that everybody should learn English, as English is the only language that allows us for „interoperability“ with the rest of the world. Languages are networks (just like WhatsApp, Airlines and Airbnb) and thus benefit from network effects. (Refresher: positive network effects exists, when the addition of one unit increase the network’s value by more than one unit, e.g. a social network becomes more valuable the more people use it, and exponentially so).
Therefore, now that the vast majority of the internet is in English, it is almost inevitable that English will become the „lingua franca“ of the world (oh, the irony). And thus, if you don’t speak English yet (which likely isn’t the case if you read this haha), you should definitely learn it.
You can read the article here, and I encourage you to also read a few more. They’re all incredibly well written.
(2) An email whenever I publish a new blog post
Newsletters aren’t meant for writing long-form - which I also enjoy. So when I publish a post (which may or may not happen often), you’ll receive that right in your inbox as well. These will be more irregular, but here are a few examples of what such a post might look like:
And that’s it. No less, no more.
If you’re excited to receive more emails, please whitelist this email address (here’s how to). Or - much easier - simply send me a quick reply. That will get the spam filters too. In your reply, you could also include a topic that you’d like to learn more about. I might write about it in the future.
Stay tuned. First edition hitting inboxes in the first week of 2023.
Good article Dominik; this explains and gives a good example to others why they would read and write from a young age.