November: A Setup for More
Joao's Monthly Newsletter: November in Review
November was a month of adjustment, learning & development - it’s been great. I’m Joao Nina Matos, a 17 year old entrepreneur, developer & student, based in Singapore, and this is my newsletter.
Quick summary of this month’s newsletter:
🪅 A November Overview
🗽 New York City: A Stepping Stone
⛓ Web3 & NFTs Deep Dive
💎 Reframing Around Milestones
👀 Looking Forward
💻 Product of the Month
Principle for the coming month:
”Emotion or progress. Choose one because you can’t have both” -Vusi Thembekwayo
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🪅 The November Overview
I’ve also been far more intentional about being grateful for where I live and the opportunities I have, and complaining a lot less - it’s made a tangible difference in my happiness and shifted my thinking around things I don’t enjoy. One of the many things I’ve learnt this month is the huge extent to which we spin stories about the world - we subconsciously choose how we frame things a lot more than we often acknowledge. Realising that, and reframing how you see things, is really powerful.
🗽 New York City: A Stepping Stone
Words fail communicate just how powerful and moving New York was for me. The experiences were crazy, every day was a different movie, and for me it represented so much more beyond just a trip to the states.
👉 Unravelled the world of web3 so much more
👉 Revealed the size of the ecosystem to me
👉 Showed me I can actually get to these events - those I’ve only dreamt of going to.
It has made me really excited about my work & projects, and was hugely refreshing.
⛓ Web3, NFTs & DAOs Deep Dive
Partly as a result of NYC, I have gotten so much deeper into web3 this month, and immersed myself in the huge world of DAOs & smart contracts. I’ve spent hours between twitter & various discord servers connecting and participating in the community, and it’s been great fun. It’s one of the most engaging communities I’ve been a part of, and I’m excited to do more work in the space. It’s also highlighted to me the powerful trajectory of the space - web3 is coming.
👉 Developed & deployed my first smart contract!
👉 Working on a little NFT project of mine
👉 Hoping to go to ETHDenver in February, sponsored by PadawanDAO!
PadawanDAO is a DAO helping fund kids like me to more trips like NFT NYC - definitely consider donating! It’s really exciting because it could open more doors to continue funding trips for young creators in the space like me. As of writing, the fund has around $350,000 USD 🥳
💎 Reframing Around Milestones
I’ve taken a new approach to my week by week organisation, looking at upcoming milestones and counting down weeks until I hit those. For example, when I started this initiative there were 25 weeks until my last high school exam, and at the time of writing this, it’s week 2 of 25. As a result, I’m able to be far more intentional about what I want to get done in my last 25 weeks of high school, and am pushing to be as intentional as I can with every week.
Might put out a blog post on this because this reframing has really made a huge difference!
👀 Looking Forward
In the coming months, I’m set up to be extremely busy, but really excited about moving things forward
This coming month, I’m working on a new blockchain project 🤫 - more about that soon
Working with a partner in Canada to setup a platform teaching kids ML - more about that soon too!
Excited about ETHDenver and more opportunities to involve myself in web3
This month has been the setup for more projects & initiatives, and I’m excited to see those come to fruition!
💻 Product of the Month
This month I have to recommend Hypernotes (by zenkit). It’s a note-taking software designed to help you create and maintain a ‘second brain’ of sorts, and leverages some simple yet really powerful features. If you’re into productivity and knowledge management like me, this is a super interesting product to check out. They’ve based it on the Zettelkasten note-taking system (go google it) and my favourite feature is the bidirectional linking.
You can link pages to one another, and quickly form links between different ideas and create a relatively coherent digital knowledge base of your own. This can help you come up with content ideas quickly too. Check out what my knowledge graph looks like below:
It’s also worth giving them a shout out for having great response times on twitter and some super clean UI/UX.
That’s November wrapped up! I look forward to talking about the projects once they’ve gotten off the ground in the next month’s newsletter! If you’ve got any awesome products worth a try, or know interesting people in web3, definitely let me know, I’d love to meet/try them!
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Incredible, Joao! Keep rocking :)
MY MAN MAKING MOVES