My Memories Writing Explainers for the last 6 months
It's been 6 months of Professional Curiosity Explainers. Here's the origin story and my highlights!
TL;DR: The origin story behind this newsletter and the highlights reel.
Hello to all 222 subscribers + friends of Professional Curiosity!
This is my mid-year check-in with you all regarding this newsletter, and the Wednesday Explainer content. I’ve been writing for 6 months now, and it’s been quite the learning experience.
Enjoy the piece.
Btw I bought an NFT. Well, I minted an NFT. I have no idea when to use “bought” vs “mint”. I haven’t “gotten” the final thing yet.
Uh.
Cheers!
p.s. What do you want me to explain next? I’m fresh out.
In Case You Missed It
The last section is an entire section of “In Case You Missed It”. ;)
Sections You Can Skim To
How did it all start?
What are Your Highlights?
How did it all start?
TL;DR: How Professional Curiosity Began - I got mad at how technical Crypto was explained everywhere.
The Ignition to Professional Curiosity
I was caught in a laziness trap of having to explain Cryptomining to people, even to myself. I thought, perhaps I can find an article online and send that around.
Spoiler alert: I couldn’t.
At least not one that I thought was succinct and Allen-friendly enough for me to pass around. In my attempt to find the one article that would explain something for me, I found myself frustrated that so much Crypto-specific content was:
Very Technical or Jargon Heavy
On websites that were noisy, flashy, or otherwise, scammy
Nothing that delved into the generalist and business individual that I am
So I made my own.
I followed Peter Yang’s Creator Economy Substack, and taking inspiration from what he was doing and even the platform, made this newsletter on the very same Substack platform.
It took a while for me to come up with a name, but settled on a marriage between Ted Lasso’s “Be Curious” quotation, and the auditor in me reminding me to practice “Professional Skepticism”.
Thus, Professional Curiosity was minted.
I made the announcement on LinkedIn on January 12, 2022. At the time, I had no idea what the content structure would be.
Two days later I published the outline of the first piece on January 14, 2022, and decided to use “WTF” and 100/101 a lot.
The first Professional Curiousity post published January 19, 2022, with Cryptomining at the forefront. Partly to justify a $1500 graphics card expenditure.
I’m grateful that 222 have joined and stayed. I’m very grateful to the 71 of you who supported me before I even published my first piece.
Thank you all for being part of it!
What are Your Highlights?
TL;DR: 8 pieces with my short reaction to each one.
My Memories Writing Explainers for the last 6 months
This excludes the Friday Flights pieces, which do not yet cover Web3 or Crypto.
The Most Absurdly Difficult Story: DeFi Yield Farming 100 is single handedly the hardest thing I’ve ever tried to both learn, and write about (Thanks Peter K. at Co-Founder of Polymer Labs for the topic recommendation). It was my 3rd piece I ever published, having just started writing two weeks before. But having researched and wrote it, I felt like I finally had a grasp of the impossible.
The “I lost my brain cells” Story: I loved writing about the NFT LA experience through “I went to NFT LA and lost many brain cells”. It was basically comic-con without the comic, so a giant con, and when I started to write my experience, I realized I couldn’t not take a comedic position on it. I got to see and interact with cash grabbers who had no idea what they were talking about, with some music artists who have no business being in the space trying to shill a project. Thanks to Andy from EY for giving me his pass to attend in person.
The “I didn’t expect to write about it but here we are” story: Writing about Luna Coin’s demise back in May through the Algorithm-Backed Stablecoin gets wrecked by Panic Speculation piece was one of my quickest and accurate-enough stories I had written yet that provided an explanation to a “Lehman Brother’s Event (aka market manipulation and tanking). I’m proud of my ability to sift so much garbage replies on Twitter to figure it out. This one came as a joking suggestion from Brennan W., Co-Founder of GoCharlie.Ai, and when I tried to explain it in Slack, it ended up becoming a full on piece.
The “Fun With Numbers” Story: I loved writing Goodbye Cryptomining o7, where I illustrated losses and forecast of my own investment into cryptomining. It was an economic story, and for a hot second, I felt like some Yahoo Finance writer or something. There’s even an excel workbook you can see the predictions on.
The “I don’t want to walk you through it anymore so here’s my process documentation” Story: I wrote the incredibly long Cryptomining 200 Piece as a way to defend my own time from explaining how something works. It’s basically and end-to-end walk-through of getting started, with screenshots and annotations from me. It is basically a process document, but for me it was a way to see both the “front” and the “back” of Cryptomining, and show you it too.
The “This is Why I’m in Love with Crypto” story: I had way too much fun observing an implosion of a DeFi community through my How One Wallet Could Take Out a Network. Basically I watched a Solana Lending Protocol community descend into anarchy, and took notes and ate popcorn on the way. I was sifting through Twitter feeds and governance documents.
The “I Can’t Believe This Got Me a Job” Story: Writing about Crypto Business Income and quite literally reading everything available from the Big 4 (EY, PwC, Deloitte, and KPMG) on Crypto just to illustrate the point of how screwed up financials are in the Crypto space, unexpectedly catapulted me into working in Crypto and the Web3 world. I can also tell you I was out of ideas I was interested then, so me doing this unexpectedly brought life back into the game for me.
The “Accountants Should Talk About This More But They Aren’t” Story: Triple Entry Accounting is here, and it will finally answer a few financial assertions off the bat around occurrence/existence, ownership, and accuracy. This one was a self-indulgence on such a niche aspect about blockchain technology.
Bonus: The “How Many Memes Can I Insert” Explainer: I had some fun breaking my own design principles by inserting memes into the “WTF is a Rug Pull” Explainer. Crypto is hilariously funny, and shouldn’t be taken with such life-saving demeanor.
Have something you particularly enjoy, or it riled you up? Let me know.
Thanks for being part of the Mid-Year Check-In!
So much more to learn and so little time.