Disclaimer: As you might already realize, this newsletter will take you a bit longer to read than our traditional posts. But, if you set aside 5-10 minutes to go on a deep dive with us into our vision for 2023, it will clarify our purpose and the direct impact it will have on you - enjoy!
To the Readers of Bread Crumbs,
Great public company CEOs publish Annual Letters to Shareholders. These letters summarize the past year's performance, explain the Company’s operating philosophy, and outline the goals of the firm. At Bread Crumbs, we have an obligation to you (our loyal readers) to do the same. You entrust us with an object more valuable than money, time. Our success is measured by the return on the time you get from reading our stuff. We aim to provide you with exceptional returns. Period.
So, without further ado…The Letter.
2022 was an important year for Bread Crumbs; we were born. What started as an Instagram post, in May of 2021, on my experience with anxiety/depression snowballed into a website, then a newsletter, and now a vibrant community. A community of 455 ambitious professionals and students who reject two adages:
(1) “To achieve excellence in your chosen field, you must sacrifice your well-being.”
(2) “You can achieve success without any sacrifice.”
But this is Day 1 for the Wellness Renaissance. Much like the European Renaissance, wellness will influence art, architecture, politics, science, literature, and business. Today, wellness is viewed as a fringe movement for privileged white women, old hippies, and Buddhists who eat kale. Tomorrow, through advances in wearables, behavioral science, and computing, wellness will be commonplace. It will help doctors, families, and individuals measure and improve their fitness, work, and life.
Bread Crumbs takes the ever-expanding wellness literature and distills it into actionable insights, habits, and systems that help readers work, think, and socialize better in this digital age. We believe Bread Crumbs provides real value to readers and by doing so will create a loyal and enduring community of smart, ambitious, and healthy professionals and students.
Our goal is to strengthen the quality, depth, and usefulness of our newsletter while we begin to lay the foundation for creating local, in-person Bread Crumbs communities - The YM^2 Academy. The Academy will serve as the physical manifestation of the YM^2 ideology. It draws inspiration from the Platonic Academy of ancient Greece. Its purpose is to provide a space for discussion, learning, and thinking while honoring the principles of intellectual honesty, humility, and courage. We see substantial opportunity in building these local, in-person academies. Today’s society is too polarized, specialized, and selfish. As a result, intellectuals, or “thirsty minds” as we like to say, have no place to test, research, and discuss their ideas and opinions. The country has lost what once made it great, valuing the pursuit of knowledge and truth as its highest virtues. We intend to bring that ethos back. We know it will be hard. But the most worthwhile pursuits in life are rarely easy.
It’s Bigger Than Us
As noted earlier, we measure our success based on the return on time “RoT” our community members get over the long term. Excellent returns will be a direct result of our ability to deeply understand you, the challenges you face today, and those you will face tomorrow. Once understood, we must work with a dogged focus to research these challenges, find the knowledge required to solve them, and distill this knowledge into actionable insights, habits, ideas, frameworks, lectures, and discussions. Our aim is not to teach you what to think but how to think.
Because of our focus on the long-term RoT you receive, we may make decisions and weigh tradeoffs differently than some organizations. Accordingly, we want to share with you our operating principles so that you, our community members, may confirm that they are consistent with your values:
• We do not intend to please everyone. We intend to please those who respect the principles of intellectual honesty, humility, and courage.
• We believe everyone deserves access to mental, physical, financial, emotional, and spiritual wellness resources. Society is only as healthy as its sickest citizen.
• We believe improving the wellness of our population will improve the country’s GDP. Declining wellness will erode the GDP output of the country.
• We believe all humans have inherent value.
• We will continue to create content that is evergreen, not content that is optimized for clicks, likes, or division.
• We will write about topics we are deeply interested in.
• We believe dissenting opinions and respectful disagreement, however uncomfortable, are healthy for civic dialogue and human progress.
• We value in-person dialogue above all other forms of communication.
• We will align our interests and financial gain with our community members. If a product, newsletter, or event is not valuable to the community, we will return the funds paid.
• We are in the business of creating a readership base who views themselves as long-term owners, not short-term renters. Many newsletters’ readers are renters. Reading for a month and if they are lucky, a year. We aim to create content that lasts decades and if we are lucky, generations.
• We aim to write newsletters, build products, and host discussions that our grandchildren will be proud of.
• We believe a fixed mindset destroys progress and a growth mindset advances it.
• We will balance our focus on growing the readership base with an emphasis on long-term value creation for each reader. Currently, we are focused on growth because we believe a larger and more diverse community improves dialogue.
• We will share our strategic thought process, new (and failed) ventures, and goals with you so we can incorporate the feedback of our most important advisor, you.
We aren’t so arrogant as to claim this is the right “operating philosophy” but it is ours, and we are committed to it. With this foundation set, we would like to turn to a review of our competitive advantage, team, and outlook for the future.
Distillation
We believe the principle “knowledge is power” is as undeniable as gravity. Since the 1950s, our definition of knowledge has gotten warped. Society confuses information with knowledge. With advances in computing, telecommunications, and manufacturing, you can access more information on an iPhone than the entire U.S. government could in 1950. As a result, people are obsessed with gaining an “information advantage”. Information is powerful but alone is not enough. Information turned into knowledge is the advantage.
Converting information to knowledge requires work - distillation. Information today is plentiful but impure. It is full of red herrings, inaccuracies, and biases. The best thinkers take this information and separate the good stuff from the junk. The good stuff drives decision-making and action.
Bread Crumbs’ competitive advantage is twofold - (1) We provide pure, twice-distilled knowledge and (2) help you do the same. We have no interest in selling you “information barley”. That is a commodity on the internet. We are in the business of providing the highest quality, twice-distilled “knowledge whiskey” the internet has ever seen.
We made substantial progress in 2022: launching the weekly Bread Crumbs newsletter, shipping our first product, hosting our first meet-up, and gathering reader feedback. But our brand of knowledge and instruction has a long way to go. We will continue to improve our operations to create the purest knowledge you’ve ever seen and teach you to do the same.
Wisdom
In addition to helping you distill information into knowledge, we hope to make you wiser. Wisdom is valuable at inflection points in our careers and life. An inflection point could be going to college, starting your first job, or moving to a new city. Inflection points are disorienting. This feeling is totally normal. But because it is novel and we are human, it can breed fear, doubt, and anxiety. Wisdom is the learned skill of maintaining good judgment in these difficult situations. The best place to find wisdom is in the experience of others; Another human who experienced that inflection point and came out the other side, stronger. We aim to connect you to these people. That is what the YM^2 Academy is for. Think of it like a group of “career upperclassmen” mentoring “career freshmen”. Plus, The Academy will provide a physical space for career freshmen and upperclassmen to discuss best practices with their peers.
During 2022, we created the blueprint for The Academy. In 2023, we will begin to lay the foundation.
Our Team
The past year's success is the product of a curious, talented, and hard-working group of two. I take pride in making up 50% of this duo. Luke’s relentless focus on authenticity, quality, and usefulness sets the bar high for the content we publish. Going forward, Luke will be moving into an advisory role. He will still write and edit from time to time but is focused on a few other ventures. Luke taking a step back is an opportunity to maintain the high standard he set.
Setting the bar high has been, and will continue to be, the single most important element of Bread Crumbs’ success. It hasn’t been (and won’t be) easy to research, filter, and convey complex ideas in simple ways. But we are working to build something important, something that matters to our readers, and something we can tell our grandchildren about. Such undertakings, by nature, cannot be easy. But that does not mean they can’t also be fun and fulfilling.
Lucky for us, we’ve found a third, talented team member - Lauren Kavathas! Lauren is a fellow Bread Crumbs reader and all around awesome person. She is a graduate student at UofI pursuing a Master of Engineering in Mechanical Engineering. So yeah, she’s smarter than me! She also has a deep commitment to improving the mental health of college students. Her tool of choice is hosting in-person discussions. She is focused on helping students navigate the stress that comes from studying challenging fields at a top university.
Lauren will be the “Head of Community” for The YM^2 Academy. She is beginning to facilitate small, in-person Wellness Discussions in Champaign. I will be taking her learnings from Champaign and hosting similar Wellness Discussions in Chicago. These discussions will span topics covering studying, working, reading, writing, experimenting, thinking, leading, decision-making, communicating, listening, exercising, investing, researching, meditating, teaching, analyzing, presenting, marketing, negotiating, traveling, and so much more!
All of the topics will be geared to improve your mental, physical, financial, emotional, and spiritual well-being.
Goals for 2023
We are still in the white belt phase of learning how to deliver value to our readers through newsletters, products, and in-person events. Our goal remains to grow the size of the Bread Crumbs community while still delivering an excellent RoT to our members. We have no interest in growing the fastest. We aim to maximize the duration of growth. We value endurance over pace.
To do this, we must turn mindful focus and attention to our community members. It’s simple but not easy. We will continue to learn about the challenges our members face and the solutions they desire. We cannot predict the future. We can, however, adapt to the evolving needs of our members while staying true to the guiding principle of providing them with an exceptional RoT. We will acquire the necessary skills and knowledge to experiment, test, and adapt our value proposition. Fixed mindsets will not be tolerated. If they are, Bread Crumbs will die.
Breads Crumbs’ survival and growth will not crowd out other players. The wellness industry should prove to be a very large market. Players are more likely to expand the ecosystem and opportunity set for others as they grow. We feel good about what we've done, and even more excited about what we want to do.
2022 was the beginning. The beginning of a story we hope will span generations. We are grateful to our loyal readers for their trust, our family for their support, and the visionaries of yesteryear for leaving us the breadcrumbs for creating something of lasting value for humanity.
Much Love,
Paul
RoT....not a concept I’m familiar with but looking forward to learning more about it. Welcome Lauren!