Perseverance
10 Things Newsletter #2
Who am I? I’m Inês Santos Silva. I'm the Operations Lead at AthenaDAO. I’m a passionate and accomplished advocate for diversity and inclusion in entrepreneurship, technology, health, and policy. Now and then, I send a newsletter about life, work, and random things.
I recently realized that I miss daydreaming. I used to spend hours thinking about and dreaming about the future. But, for some reason, I lost (a lot of) that. Maybe it's because I no longer have boring moments (too many great podcasts to listen to). Maybe it’s a consequence of getting older. Maybe I’m in the worrying phase of life. But I miss dreaming about futures that could be. Am I the only one?
Play games you can win. I have been thinking about which games I should and shouldn’t play and which ones I can win. This is more complex than I initially thought. There are games that I don’t even understand. There are games I don’t have the skillset or even mindset to play. Some games are so long-term that you start to question your timeline. The problem is that most games are hard to understand from the outside. Only when you are in the “arena”, you see what you are up against. It's worth spending time thinking more about them.
I’m taking a class on Pharma and Biotech, and in a recent discussion, my colleagues mentioned that big companies struggle to innovate. I’m sure they do. But look at Microsoft! Look at Nvidia! Look at Novo Nordisk! Look at Amazon!
We are living in a new era of innovation. One where data is king and one that requires a lot of computational power to make use of it. Barriers of entrance are as big as they get (and increasing). Are we prepared for this new world?
If you ask me why I started working on entrepreneurship and innovation in 2010/2011, I don’t have a good answer. If you ask me what got me interested in Diversity and Inclusion in Tech back in 2009/2010 I can’t tell you. If you ask why I started exploring women’s health in 2020/2021 I don’t really know. Alignment of the forces of the universe? Chance? Probably Intuition! I think that’s how lots of things start. Listen to it!
How to take over the world is one of my favorite podcasts. Last week, on a long drive, I listened to one episode on the rise of Napoleon. I highly recommend it. One thing it’s clear is how much luck was involved in his rise. So many things could have gone wrong (he was almost killed several times before the age of 25). But he persevered. Another clear thing is his decisiveness. He took action, and early in his career, that made a huge difference. He was a leader with a deep understanding of all aspects of war (strategical, tactical, and operational). And he had this HUGE belief in himself. The key word of this rise is Destiny. He truly believed he was destined to do great things.
On that same podcast, I listened to an interview with MrBeast (I’m not a fan of the videos but a huge fan of the personality). His perseverance after 8 years of failure, the fact that he is all-in in a way that very few people are, and his belief in what he can do is inspiring.
It is true. Talking with a founder/business angel, he confirmed that women get more challenging questions than men when pitching. He saw it happen to AthenaDAO.
For the third time, I’m experimenting with a continuous glucose monitor and using Veri to track and make sense of the data. I’m learning a lot about how food impacts my glucose levels. But I’m also learning a lot about how people react to a CGM. Most people who saw me wearing one thought I was crazy to do so. Prevention is still hard for most people to value and understand.
Last month, at AthenaDAO, we launched the second edition of our book club. This time, the focus is on biotech, and I just finished reading the first book - HER2. This book focuses on the discovery of the HER2 gene and its impact on breast cancer treatment. This is another great story of perseverance and luck and shows how the human factor still plays a big role in decision-making, even in high-stakes decisions.
I love to see trends of Action/Reaction. You see that across different generations, company cultures, new tech movements, and trends in general. When we see a new wave of something, most likely, it’s a reaction against the previous wave. It's not always clear from the get-go, but you can see it play out with time.
If you enjoyed reading this issue, you can also “like” this newsletter by clicking the ❤️ below, which helps me get visibility on Substack. Or, forward this along to a friend.
Until the next one.
Inês
Very cool ideas, specially recommendations for podcasts