7 Biggest Lessons I Learned in 2021

What's up, everyone. This is Alex Lieberman, co-founder, and Executive Chairman of Morning Brew. Welcome back to Founder’s Journal, my personal audio diary, where I give you, the business builder, the tools you need to think better in order to build better, whether that's building a business, a team, or a new product. Today, I am reflecting on 2021 with seven of my biggest takeaways. Let's hop into it. 

#1 Expand my aperture of role models.

Number one: Expanding my aperture of role models is incredibly important. Here's what I mean. For the longest time, my role models were always business people: Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, other super successful entrepreneurs or CEOs of banks. And it kind of makes sense because for the longest time career has taken up such a big space in my mind, basically since high school, when I decided that I wanted to work on Wall Street, because that's what my family did. But it's becoming clear to me that career isn't the only thing that matters to me. I care about family. I care about being happy. I care about being a good, generous person. And when I think about it, my role models who are great people to follow for their entrepreneurial spirit or being incredible operators or having great business acumen, they aren't necessarily the best people to follow for these other needs that I have, like being a loving, kind person or caring a ton about family. And so this reflection has opened my eyes to the fact that I need to spend time moving forward building out a more holistic portfolio of role models in my life. Sure, I can have a few business people, but say I have 10 role models in my life, maybe only three of them are in the world of business and entrepreneurship. 

#2 Caring for your mental health is important.

Takeaway number two: Caring for your mental health is a proactive effort, just like physical health. For the longest time, basically since I started caring for my mental health, which was let's call it eight years ago, when I first started seeing a therapist, I treated taking care of my mental health as a reactive exercise, much like where you take Advil once you feel sore or in pain versus proactively, but I've just found that this isn't the right way to think about it. Mental health or mental fitness is just like physical fitness in the sense that you don't want to wait until there's something wrong, like having heart issues or high cholesterol, to go to the gym. You go to the gym proactively for decades before issues ever arise. Mental health is the same exact way and I see my therapist, you know, every few weeks now, even if nothing is wrong.

#3 Community is majorly important, but it can also burn you out.

Takeaway number three: Community is so incredibly important because the internet is such a big place and making it smaller makes it manageable. But community burnout is also a real thing, given it's so low-friction to join communities on the internet. Here's how I think about it: Communities on the internet is much like communities in college. So I went to the University of Michigan. It was a large state school. There were twenty-five thousand undergrads. And at times it felt very large and overwhelming. And the way that I personally made school feel more manageable and intimate was by finding extracurriculars and communities on campus that made it smaller. So I joined a fraternity. I joined a magazine on campus. I joined an investment club. And my relationship with the internet is the same exact thing. I actually spend the vast majority of my time on the internet in small communities of a hundred people all the way up to a thousand people. And generally it's in communities with people who share a similar interest to me. So this ranges from CPG or crypto packaged goods, which is a crypto and Web3 community that takes place on telegram. Then there's Twitter 1 million, which is a text group I'm in with a bunch of creators that are supporting each other to grow our Twitter audiences. Now, the big difference between communities on the internet and communities in the physical world is that internet communities are basically zero-friction to join. Unless it's a paid community, you can join any free Discord or Slack or Telegram group, which means that joining many communities is very easy and therefore feeling community burnout is a very real thing where you feel stretched thin across way too many communities where you don't feel like you've dedicated your time to any one anymore.

#4 Comparison is a very human thing.

Reflection number four: comparison is a very human thing. It serves a very clear purpose, but it is rarely positive long-term for our happiness. We all compare. We compare clothing, we compare jobs, we compare performance, we compare friends, we compare partners, and that tool of comparison has served us well over the course of history. Comparison has been a great shortcut that allowed us to survive thousands of years ago, and it's enabled us to fit in and be part of communities more recently, but there's a huge trade-off to social comparison. It's an external trigger that dictates our happiness and external things can always change. They're not things that we have control over and therefore we can lose control of our happiness. Speaking from my own experience, I believe I compare far too much and my attachment to social media, especially Twitter, doesn't do me any favors. When I feel at my best, at my happiest, I feel less comparison and a greater sense of self and self-motivation. It's not an easy skill to develop, but it is such a necessary one. 

#5 Reflect on who you spend the most time with. 

Reflection number five: Periodic reflection on the people you spend the most time with is so, so important. It has the biggest impact on who you become and people change over time. When I think about what has made me me, I think about the concept of nature-versus-nurture, my born traits and my acquired traits from my surroundings. And when we think about nurture, we think about the way in which our parents raised us and the environment that we grew up in. But we think about nurture as a past experience, something that ended with our childhood. Nothing could be further from the truth. When you actually think about it, we continue to evolve as individuals. And that is largely based on how we are nurtured, but no longer does that nurture come from our parents. Instead, it comes from the people that we decide to surround ourselves with. So basically what we're saying is that our people is what has the largest impact on who we become as an adult. And it is something that we have complete and utter control over, yet oftentimes we don't do anything about it. Cutting off friendships isn't a sign of lacking loyalty. In fact, it actually could be a sign of maturity for understanding who you want to become and what you're looking for in your closest people. 

#6 Learning to love yourself has the most outsized impact on your happiness. 

Reflection number six: Learning to love yourself has probably the most outsized impact on your happiness. Right after transitioning from the CEO to executive chairman role Morning Brew, I didn't love myself. I felt lost. I felt self-conscious. I felt a lack of worth. I felt like a failure. And you're hearing this and may be like, what are you talking about, Alex? You sold your company for a bunch of money and you're an executive chairman at 28. Stop complaining and get your shit together. But that just wasn't my honest experience. I felt like a failure for feeling like it was the right time to transition out of my role as CEO. Why did I feel that? Why couldn't I keep running the company forever? I felt like I didn't have the skills needed to build another business and I was just a one-trick pony that got lucky with Morning Brew. I felt a loss of identity and didn't know who Alex Lieberman was outside of Morning Brew. And so for three of the last six months, I spent a ton of time reading, thinking, and practicing gratitude to try and return a place where I love myself for all of the things that make me a beautiful person. By getting there,I found that the lens through which I viewed every experience in life from business to family completely changed. Self-love really is everything. And it sounds hokey. People think it's not worth spending time on it, and I can speak from experience. There's actually no better use of your time than to get yourself to love yourself. 

#7 Passion is an acquired taste rather than an innate trait. 

Reflection number seven, the last reflection of 2021: Passion is an acquired taste rather than an innate trait. This is another thing that I reflected on a lot after transitioning from my role as CEO. Basically, once I had time open up, as I moved out of the day-to-day of the business, I kept asking myself, what am I passionate about? And what do I want to spend this newly found time on? And this question was an attempt to take about eight different things that I thought I could be interested in from angel investing to crypto, to buying real estate, to painting, and narrow down to the one-to-two things that I wanted to dedicate myself to. But there's a fundamental problem with this question, and that's because I believe there are passionate people, but I don't believe most of us start out passionate about specific careers or activities. Passion is an outcome that happens from some amount of dedication and effort put into whatever the given thing is. And I wasn't passionate about Morning Brew on day one, but I did become passionate about it as we began hitting milestones, as I felt like I was learning a lot, which was important to me. And as I had the opportunity to be creative, which was also important to me. 

I’m grateful for you 

And so those are my seven reflections of 2021. Well, I guess there's one last reflection. And that reflection is feeling gratitude, feeling gratitude for this entire Founder's Journal community. This show, and this community has taken off like an absolute rocket ship in the last few months, growing to hundreds of thousands of listeners, and consistently being Top 25 on the podcast charts, there are a ton of you, but in my scrappy Morning Brew style, I want to get to know many of you. So if you haven't yet done so, please reach out to me. Shoot me an email to alex@morningbrew.com and tell me a little bit about yourself and why it is that you listen to Founder’s Journal. Also, if you haven't done so yet, pound the subscribe button on Apple, Spotify, or the podcast player of your choice. It's the number one way we grow the show and it's also how you find out about new content when it drops. Now, one last thing I expressed gratitude for all of you; I have to express gratitude for the amazing team that makes this show possible. Our show is produced and engineered by Dan Bouza. Our associate producer is Bella Hutchins. Brian Henry is our executive producer. Alan Haburchak is Morning Brew’s director of audio. Holly Van Leuven is our factchecker. Noah Friedman is our video producer and editor. And I'm your host, Alex Lieberman as always. Thank you so much for listening and I'll catch you next episode.