Written by: John "JAYEL"

Happy New Year, everyone! Last year was a lot of things, and 2022 will be a lot of other things. In the macro, maybe the new year will be better and maybe it will be worse. However, we all have the choice to make it better for ourselves. Let's not focus too much on the macro of this world's craziness and focus more on the micro lives of ourselves, our families, our friends, and all of the loved ones within our networks. We can have a successful and happy year if we want to--lets do it!

This letter will be more focused on motivational and inspirational content that I've found for the new year. As we are all thinking about goals and plans for 2022, I thought it would be appropriate to unload some gems that I've come across. I hope some of them resonate with you and help you build some of your plans for the year! 😊

P.S. there is some actual web3 and crypto content towards the end of the letter.
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An optimistic mindset will enable you to see so many great opportunities in whatever is dealt to you.

- Orlando Bravo, Co-founder of Thoma Bravo Private Equity
- - Credit (Twitter)
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Tracking your net worth is clever, but tracking your health and relationships is brilliance.

- StripMallGuy, Real Estate Investor
- - Credit (Twitter)
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1. Imagine where you want to be in 5 years
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2. Think through what that requires you to get done this year
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3. Don't spend any time during the year on things that don't point you in that direction

- Brian Armstrong, CEO of Coinbase
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Reasons why brilliant people hit their head against the wall over and over again:

1. The "beginner mindset" required to get good at anything is paradoxical as you get better, you realize how little you actually know. [It's] easy for your confidence to decrease as your competence grows.
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2. "Working hard got me here so if I just work harder I'll get there". There are hundreds of millions of people in the world working incredibly hard at something that will never have an exponential payoff. A shift is required when the ceiling is hit.
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3. Environment. You don't know how good you are until you have enough information to make a comparison. Working in a 20 person organization vs a 2,000 person network [that's] organized around the things you're interested in. Talkers outnumber practitioners 10,000:1.
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4. Your model of time and money. Putting a dollar value on your time is an extremely restrictive thought pattern that often makes you approach tasks backwards, inflating time spent vs. value created. "At x per hour it's going to take me 55 hours to make rent".
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5. [The] Right place, right time. How many [people] are there in the world that are top 1% at something (or want to be) but assume they are not good enough vs. just not being exposed to the right information and/or networks? This is our collective mission.
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6. Tolerance for failure... to endure anything long term, you must separate your ability from the whims of the market at any given moment. We all know this but we ignore it daily.
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7. Permissionless mentality. Most of us who come from traditional working backgrounds, or didn't have entrepreneurs in our families think the world revolves around asking (and waiting for) permission. Wrong.
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8. Knowing all this in theory does not prevent you from experiencing crushing failure in reality.

- Jack Butcher, Founder of Visualize Value
- - Credit (Twitter)
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🍣 Farming for $SUSHI in Liquidity Pools

I started farming for $SUSHI in liquidity pools last week. If this sentence makes no sense to you, I will try to explain. In brief, a liquidity pool is something that allows people to exchange assets in a decentralized fashion.

If someone wants to take 1 ETH and exchange it for 0.08 BTC (the conversion rate as of January 2, 2022 at 10:20 AM EST), they could do so via swapping it through a liquidity pool. These pools function by holding assets (such as ETH and BTC) from contributors, in return for compensation. So, I, as a user, can contribute 5 of my ETH and 1 of my BTC to a liquidity pool and expect to earn interest for helping fund this pool so other users can make use of it. My crypto gets locked up and is put to work for people who want to swap on the exchange. You can think of this as a high interest savings account, but with actual functionality you are a part of. And, instead of receiving U.S. dollars as your interest, you are receiving another crypto token.

Now that the explanation is out of the way, I can give some more details on my experience with farming. I am farming $SOS and $WETH (The OpenDAO coin and Wrapped Ethereum) on SushiSwap. Therefore, I am helping transact for people who want to swap between these two cryptocurrencies. I earn some of the available rewards (kind of like mining) by providing this liquidity. The reward is SLP tokens (Sushi Liquidity Pool tokens), which can be turned in for $SUSHI (the token of the platform).

In one week, I have earned about 3.35% on my liquidity (in $SUSHI to USD conversion). I contributed about $330 worth of $SOS and the equivalent $330 of WETH (so ~$660 total).

The above numbers sound excellent, however, the gas fees to get my money into the liquidity pool were pretty ridiculous. I think I spent like $140 in gas fees alone. This obviously means I am nowhere near to making my money back... But, I really wanted to learn and I think this goes to show that if you are playing with bigger sums of money, this is a beautiful opportunity.

I am only one week into this and there is SO much to learn, but I will have more to say about this in the future. I find it fascinating. It's one of the biggest excitements with crypto and DeFi, for SURE.
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🎶 MUSICA

It wouldn't be a letter without a music banger. Vintage Culture is officially my favorite DJ right now. I've been playing this two hour set on repeat for the past week. House music on a boat party off the coast of Brazil. Enjoy ✌️⛵️🇧🇷 Vintage Culture at Fernando de Noronha, PE
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👋 ¡ciao!

I wish you all nothing but the best and a blessed 2022 year. I believe in you and you should believe in yourself!

Next week, I'm going to switch to video content (I think). In that video, I'm going to address some of the topics and questions my friends Brandon and Patrick have brought up in response to my letters. Wish me luck!

Cheers 🍻
Your friend,
JAYEL