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- ADAPT #9 - What If You Said YES During A Whole Month?
ADAPT #9 - What If You Said YES During A Whole Month?
Gus Balbontin
October 27, 2023
By Gus Balbontin
Yew!
I promise to provoke you in less than 5 min once a week :-)
Stay adaptable and on top of your game!
Let´s go!
Today:
Awe: squeezy hugs for the nurses
Deal Flow: how to stop 16% of global annual emissions
Action: orchestra, jazz or rap?
Personal: the Yes month
Travel: meet The Four Amigos
Read time: 4 min 16 sec
BEFORE WE START: the question of the week!
Thanks for sharing your questions :)
Please send me topics, problems, challenges you are facing at work (startup or corporate), opportunities you think we all need to think about and I will weave them into my newsletters.
Simply reply to this email! And check in next Friday to see if yours was chosen to be featured!
This week we selected one from Sebastian:
Sebastian:
Hi! What’s your recommendation for someone in their 40s, moving cities, trying to figure out what’s next?
Gus:
So first and foremost remember that to pivot you need one foot firmly on the ground.
So ideally, if you are moving cities and on top of it you want to see what’s next in your career… make sure you cover your basics straight away. Get a role or ensure you have savings to sort out Maslow’s basics.
Then once you have that under control, it’s a matter of networking, trying and playing with as much as possible to discard what’s not for you and keep the stuff that is working. Call it side hustles, call it volunteering, call it exploration coffees but get moving, it won’t happen to you, you will have to happen to it.
Thanks Sebastian!
Now let’s dive into today’s newsletter 🤘
AWE
In the last month, I presented to both the Australian Nursing & Midwifery Association and the Nurse Practitioners Association.
You may not know this, but my Pretty Wife is a nurse, so I have been an intimate witness to what it means to be a nurse.
I think we must all remember how lucky we are that there are people in the world who decide to become a nurse.
These are the humans who take care of our dignity in the most precarious and vulnerable of situations and get unfairly rewarded for it.
If you know a nurse or come across one in the coming weeks, here is what you have to say (but say it exactly like this don’t forget it!):
“On behalf of all humans I would like to thank you for the profound impact you have in our societies. Know that you are important and we appreciate it”.
And then give them a squeezy hug 🤗
DEAL FLOW
Can air turn into fuel?
Fuel for planes, ships, cars, trains?
This startup I’ve looked at seems crazy!
Prometheus promises to effectively grab CO2 from the air and make it into a fuel that will work in a normal combustion engine.
So this will not sequester the carbon we released into the atmosphere over the last few hundred years, but it will stop the transport industry from adding more.
Let me explain that in super simple terms: it took nature 300m years to capture and sequester CO2 in the ground, and we dug it out and burnt it in a few decades.
Nature simply couldn’t and can’t keep up with us.
So say the entire transport (cars, ships, trucks, planes, trains) started using this fuel, 16% of global annual emissions will stop (if you use Bill Gates's number of 52b tons per year that’s 8b tons that we will capture from the air and release back to the air when we burn it).
As I said, It won’t help us crawl back from the mistake, but it will stop us from making it worse so we can then give ourselves the time to remedy some of the fuck up.
Check it out: prometheusfuels.com
Super neat website as well and amazing pitch!
And they want to build Metaforges - curious now?
ACTION
My band is playing in a few weeks and I am already filled with anticipation and excitement!
I bought a new snare and a new pedal for my kit (last gig my pedal broke right at the start of Rain (listen to it: Rain by BodyJar).
Anyway, here is the action for this week:
Go and watch live music.
Or at the very least book the tickets to go and see some live music!
If you do it all the time, then go and watch a band or style you never do.
If you have never done it… what are you waiting for???
Maybe an orchestra or symphony?
Maybe jazz if you have never been?
Or a rap artist?
Anyway - off you go.
PERSONAL
This week I tried really hard to accept every request my kids made to play, listen or do something.
It didn’t matter what I was doing, if they said, “Dad wanna play basketball?” the answer was, “Yes”.
So here is a challenge for you - what would happen if for a month, every time your kids said, “I want to play” or every time a friend or partner said “wanna go out or do x” you just said “Yes” and prioritised it above work and other life commitments?
Do it and let me know how you go!
TRAVEL
The last time we went to Argentina (Jan23) we brought pretty wife’s parents with us.
We’ve been talking about them coming to Argentina for 25 years (since I arrived in Australia) and finally we made it happen.
While we were in Argentina, we headed over to Rio de Janeiro for a couple of weeks to chill, and my parents and my pretty wife parents - aka The Four Amigos - went on a road trip along the Andes on their own.
My parents don’t speak English, pretty wife’s parents don’t speak Spanish.
But with Google Translate and a lot of mannerism, facial expressions and attitude, they managed to communicate and have an amazing time.
So amazing in fact, that we promised to get them together again.
A couple of weeks ago, only 8 months after their Andes expedition, my parents arrived in Australia just as my two childhood mates left and The Four Amigos set off on another trip of their lifetime.
With caravans and 4WDs they headed to Uluṟu via Mildura and Coober Peddy.
Right now they are in Alice Springs.
And I’ll be honest, I have no idea when they are actually going to get back or if they will at all!
Haha - I may need to change their return flights!
It’s been amazing watching our parents in their 70s travel and build a friendship despite the language barrier.
More on parents and being able to give back as a child in the next newsletter!
The Four Amigos at Uluṟu
My recommendations:
I’m still sharing with you the amazing crew at neu21.com who will help you make work not suck!
So if you need help in your organisation ping me, ping them!
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