Hey guys and gals,

This is more personal than usual. Mostly because I have writer's block (well kinda but we'll get to the why).

Ok so bear with me for a minute...

I graduated from Yale in May 2021 at the weirdest time. I had been stuck in my parents' basement for over a year. Instead of the college petri dish, I was isolated. And in hindsight, it was one of the best things that ever happened to me.

• I read a book for 365+ straight days (lessons I learned here)
• I interned for Shaan Puri (what I learned about writing and life here)
• I started a Twitter account with 190,000+ followers
• I interviewed some dope founders and investors like Emmett Shear (CEO of Twitch), Michael Seibel (CEO of Y Combinator), and Kevin Ryan (founder of MongoDB and Business Insider)
• I got crazy close with my fam

blah, blah, blah this isn't a stupid brag fest. I promise there is a point.

The point: Isolation made it easy to focus.

And all I focused on was building habits around reading, writing, lifting, and zooming with cool strangers on the internet.

I built the muscle of monotonous consistency. Day after day, week after week, I compounded my writing, my reading, and my learning.

Did I go out with friends? Go to parties? Explore new places?

No. COVID made that decision easy for me.

COVID made good habits the default. I had no distractions.

So fast forward to July 2021. I move to New York City!

I start my first ever job at Goldman Sachs in investment banking.

And promptly work 80+ hour weeks for months as the equity and debt markets rip.

Goldman taught me how to grind and deliver under pressure. No one cares if you're tired or short on time. They care about results. So shut up and deliver.

So all I did was work, work, sleep, work, and see my now ex-girlfriend.

Life was simple. And there was still no distractions. I spent Friday nights writing twitter threads and Saturdays with the girlfriend.

My habits were still humming.

Then the markets got worse, we hired a bunch of new people and the girlfriend and I break up.

I have more free time. And I wake up from a 3 year hiatus forced to make new friends and meet new people.

And I turn back into a college freshman.

Hitting the bars until 3 AM, waking up hungover, and being incredibly unproductive all weekend.

And I rationalize it.

"Look, I'm 23. It's so fun. I got my whole life ahead of me..."

yadah yadah yadah.

You get the point.

But I completely lost what worked. The habits. The reading. The writing.

And to top it off, Goldman let me know that I was not allowed to write about any businesses or people related to businesses.

Welp, there goes 75% of my ideas.

And welcome to writer's block.

Weekend writing now felt like I was heading into war with my hands tied behind my back. And my opponents were the Tik Tok and Twitter algorithms filled with juicy hooks and killer creators.

So of course I hit a wall on Twitter. But honestly I lost sight of how to write with personality.

I turned into a boring, fortune cookie tweeter that was less interesting than watching trees grow.

And it all culminated with me sitting in a coffee shop at 11:33 AM last Saturday. I was hungover. I was tired. It was 96 degrees outside. And I had absolutely no clue what to write about to post the next day.

So I sat there for an hour staring at my incredibly overpriced $6.50 iced coffee (with oat milk of course).

And I gave up.

So I text my friend Dickie Bush that I was lost. I had spent 2 years building a 200,000 person audience on twitter of which no one cared about my writing. Because I lost the soul.

And who the hell wants to read boring, soul-less content?

He sent me a 3 minute video that made me want to run through a wall.

And it is exactly what I needed.

Don't get me wrong, the past 3 months have been the most fun of my life.

But I completely lost all routine. I lost any semblance of the habits and consistency that gave me any smidge of success.

Do I regret it?

Hell, No.

You're only 23 years old living in the greatest city in the world once.

But am I ready to get back to basics?

Hell, Yes.

And have fun doing it (with some late nights in NYC within reason)

If you made it here, welcome to a front row seat on the journey.

All I can promise is that you'll get a bullshit-less version of me filled with frameworks for thinking and spicy business stories along the way.

Let's get back to the basics,

Chris Hlad

p.s. if this didn't suck, reply "yes". Or I will safely assume that you were more bored than 16 year old me learning about cosine in high school geometry class

p.p.s. if you're new here, click that juicy red button below and put your email in to join the crew:

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