Good bye, for now 🍪✌️
Good bye, for now 🍪✌️
3.30 | "Some of us think holding on makes us strong, but sometimes it is letting go." – Hermann Hesse
Farewell note:
It’s with a heavy heart and great difficulty, that we have decided to discontinue our newsletter for the time being.
For over three and a half years, we’ve enjoyed the privilege of being able to share our thoughts with those of you around the world.
Since the beginning of the COVID lockdown and global pandemic, we’ve witnessed many significant global events together, and explored many personal lessons along the way. In that time, we went from students in university, with little financial security and limited knowledge of the world, to having successful careers. In this process, each of us has learned and grown so much by carving time weekly to write about business, investing, science, technology, and personal development.
We love this brand and have grown so attached to it, given everything it stands for and has helped us achieve. Even as we write this, we feel great reluctance to publish this and let go of a three and a half year streak. With that in mind, the time has come for us to take a step back, reflect, reevaluate, and reallocate our energy.
As we each venture further into our respective careers and personal lives, we find that the time and energy required to maintain the Weekly Edible newsletter at the quality and consistency you deserve is no longer feasible.
We want to extend our deepest gratitude to every one of you – our readers, supporters, friends, and family – who have journeyed with us through these incredible years. Your engagement, feedback, and support have been the lifeblood of this newsletter and a source of constant motivation.
While this chapter closes, a new one inevitably begins. We encourage you to continue seeking knowledge, exploring new perspectives, honing your skills, and nurturing your passions, just as we set out to do when we started this newsletter.
We hope to cross paths with many of you again in the future. Until then, we wish you all the best.
With love, gratitude, and best wishes,
Weekly Edible Fam 🍪✌️
Final Note from Vlad
Thank you all so much for the continued support. This newsletter has enabled me to pour out my weekly thoughts into somewhat of a financial almanac. It’s interesting to look back and see what the past 3 years of market movements were like. Overall, I’m happy we got to take it this far and it’s allowed me to build a successful career in the web3 space. I cannot recommend it enough - if you want to immerse yourself in a space, start a newsletter, make it weekly and you are going to be forced to learn about the most intricate aspects of that space.
One thing I won’t stop doing, even as we take an indefinite hiatus from the newsletter, is learning. If there is one thing I would like all my readers to take away from this project, it’s that you should always seek to learn more. If you stop learning, you stop growing, and the world doesn’t stop advancing just because you did. So pick up a book, watch a lecture, learn a new skill. Never stop that. Over the past year I have read over 25 books, learned how to audit and break smart contracts, picked up 2 coding languages, all of that as a finance guy who already has his degree. There is always more to learn, new skills to acquire. If you ever find yourself stuck, just google “high paying tech skills” and you can start to learn one from the comfort of your home - generally all you need is an internet connection and maybe a few bucks to spare for some Udemy courses.
Most people are scared to take on new things, maybe partly because of impostor syndrome, but often due to a lack of motivation. But if you wait for the “right time” to come, it’ll never come. Start learning, and see what happens.
Final Note from Keyann
Thank you for your support throughout this journey! Your support has been the fuel that has driven this newsletter. I've really enjoyed writing for you, learning about technology and startups, and keeping my writing skills and knowledge honed.
I’ve grown a lot through writing. It organizes your thoughts, allows you to observe them in a more objective way. I don’t really believe in law of attraction but it would seem that Vlad and I attracted or manifested the web3 life by writing about it so much.
When we started this, covid had just hit. I wasn’t doing much with my life. There was so much I didn’t know, whether it was investing, web3, software development, technology, or startups. On top of all that, I was terrible at being disciplined with my time. I knew I should be spending more time learning and practicing instead of going out on weekends.
Fast forward to today: I'm now a software engineer at a web3 startup, far more disciplined and knowledgable than in 2020. For which, I’m incredibly grateful.
But with that requires lots of a work and sacrifice. I spend almost all my waking time in front of a screen. My daily routine is a cycle of coding, cooking, exercising (on alternate days), and more coding. To me, every break only delays my goal, so I organize and allocate as much time as I can towards it. That may sound unappealing, but I love the life I’ve cultivated. It’s what I wished for, and I don’t see any despair in that.
With that said - I love writing, but after almost 4 years of articles, it’s too much to continue as a hobby, which is why I've decided to step back from it. On the rare days I do something like go skiing with my friends, or i’m stuck on some bug, I don’t want to be distracted by having to write my edible. I want to reallocate the time to relationships, being present, or my work goals.
Below, i’ve summarized some more lessons from what I didn’t consider when starting.
Learning from my mistakes:
Newsletters don’t just take off and stick, you have to actively maintain it, market it, and keep momentum. You have to love editing and making content, and using Canva, cause that’s what we were doing most of the time. At our peak, when we were growing quickly, we were spending hours every day to make content. It became much more stressful than enjoyable.
Newsletters are cool, but if you have technical skills, like coding, then it’s better to prioritize and leverage that.
In hindsight, it would have been better to be more generic, such as a newsletter that’s oriented to just finance and tech news, or just coding, or just web3 news, or just headspace. Otherwise it’s hard to deliver content that satisfied people when it’s based on what you think they want. You’ll never do that better than platforms with AI-powered recommendation algorithms that learn peoples preferences and feed them that. It’s easier to deliver a better, more consistent service with a narrower brand because the expectation is much more specific and easier to provide. So the best is to find one thing novel and put it out, but, again, you need to love and be ok with doing that for a long time.
Anyways, I hope that throughout this journey, we were able to impart some knowledge or inspiration to you, and that, through this, you’ve also achieved growth.
I sincerely wish you all the best in the future, and that you (continue to) achieve the potential and growth to which you aspire!
Final Note from Roman
I joined the Weekly Edible crew by writing the “Habits of the Month” section. I enjoyed that because I’d research and share my findings on a habit that if implemented would improve our lives such as prioritizing sleep, tracking spending, staying hydrated, wearing sunscreen, waking up early, being in nature, working out in some form every day, etc.
Next, as I was running out of habits, we pivoted and my section became “Newsflash” where I’d cover world, business, government, science, and sports news from the past week.
Finally, as we felt that our audience was already quite informed, we pivoted and my section became “Paradigm Shift” where I’d write a perspective piece about a topic I could spin or had an unconventional view on.
I enjoyed contributing to the Weekly Edible because it allowed me to refine my writing skills, develop my thoughts, and learn new things.
Along the way, this weekly passion project brought me closer to my friends from high school: Vlad and Keyann. This is invaluable.
Thank you to everyone for reading!
TLDR: Work hard, play smart, and get after it!
Written by: Vlad Estoup, Keyann Al-Kheder, and Roman Kuittinen-Dhaoui