Hi everyone,

Last week I did something I never thought I'd work up the courage to do. Nuke my inbox. Well, it wasn't technically a full nuke, but I archived 24,597 emails. 

Why did I do that? I felt like I was swimming in endless mountains of unopened, unimportant and unanswered emails and it was causing me a big deal of stress.

After reading Steph Smith's Doing Time Right & installing Breef to deal with my inbox, I decided that it was time. Felt really good. I'm aiming to get to Inbox Zero every week now.

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Over the past week, the horrifying news headlines left me wide awake at night. In a world like this, it's often easy to sink into despair. But I'm hopeful that there's still a case for optimism. 

This week we'll dive into the case for optimism, how to conduct investment research and an intriguing tale of a man lost at sea.

With gratitude,
Janel

The Case For Optimism
Kevin Kelly makes a compelling case for why we should adopt the stance of optimism whenever we can:

• Pre-visualize success: is extremely difficult to create a desirable future without first envisioning it. To imagine is really the first step in creating anything.
• Healthy resilience: Optimism equips people a greater ability to deal with hardship, and less stress in their lives. Optimism can be learned, especially by children.
• Long-termism: Optimism enables us to reach good and great things beyond the capability of a single generation.

Lost at sea: the man who vanished for 14 months
In November 2012, Salvador Alvarenga went fishing off the coast of Mexico. A storm hit and he sent out a desperate SOS. It was the last anyone heard from him – for 438 days, until he washed up onto an atoll in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. 

No Regrets: Living a Life Looking Forward
"Living without regrets is freeing. Rather than spending your time looking back, you can spend your time moving forward. Rather than obsessing about what could have been, you can take that energy and create what you want for the future. Rather than allowing something negative to define you, you can choose to reframe it into a springboard to achieve your dreams."

The Intangible Skills You Can't Interview For
There are some skills that are crazy valuable, but so hard to sniff out in an interview. Here's a selection:
-  Cut through on crappy tasks (hitting 80-90% of their peak on work that they despise)
-  Giving (and receiving) diagonal feedback

Tip from me: Giving potential hires take home assignments in the interview process simulating a part of what they might need to do in their role helps you get a little more insight into this.

How To Conduct Investment Research
Adam Keesling has done research on dozens of companies. He breaks down how to conduct investment research into 5 buckets, with actionable tips & resources in each of them.

• Idea Generation
• Where to Research
• What to Look For
• Note Taking & Organization
• Pulling it Together

You might not know this because I don't often write/tweet about investing, but I love investing and will spend hours building my conviction in stocks before purchasing them. You can borrow ideas, but you can never borrow conviction. This kind of research helps build conviction in your picks. I wish I had this blueprint when I started my research. 

12 Frameworks for Finding Startup Ideas — Advice for Future Founders

Useful frameworks to help you discover / generate ideas, then evaluate whether those ideas have legs.

Remember Anything
The magic of spaced repetition helps you to remember things that you've learned. 

Kinopio - A space for you to map out hard problems and decisions, so that you can tackle them in a visual manner. Get your thoughts out and visually connect them together.

Playbook - Playbook makes cloud storage look beautiful again. It declutters, auto-tags, and intelligently organizes your creative work to enable you to collaborate with others. Saw it launch on Product Hunt, signed up and grabbed 4TB of storage as an early adopter. Not sure if that offer still stands, but it's definitely worth a try!

Breef - Take control of your mailbox by using Breef. It's a Chrome Extension that's an add-on to Gmail / GSuite that enables you to breeze through emails quickly, focus on each email and clearing your inbox quickly. It's in early access mode now. Andy, the founder, who is a longtime member of the BrainPint community is allowing you to skip the waitlist and get a free 3-month free trial through that link.

Sketchplanations - Fun weekly sketches that explain the world

CryptoHack - A fun platform for learning modern cryptography. Not crypto.

P.S. In case you missed it, check out the BrainPint job board! I've personally curated the best jobs in the creator economy x no-code space in companies that I love.