Good morning you lovely lovely people.

Howard here….

I finally ordered an eightsleep mattress (the cover). I had the founder Matteo on my podcast last year. My partners Tom and Gary swear by it so it was time to get with it.

Yesterday I did my first professional bike fitting. I have trusted a mirror, my eyes and feel for way too long and getting my bike sized by a professional with machines and software and video was an eye opening experience. My measurements have been off by about 20 percent.

Onwards…

I spend a lot of time searching for and listening to ‘smart’ people and to get to them or find them I have to spend a lot of time reading and networking and curating.

After doing this very intensely along with face to face for the last 35 years and with the help of the ‘social web’ the last 16, I have this incredible ‘peloton’ of people to accelerate everything I choose to focus on. It is a miracle.

People always ask me how I keep this up and I always say…it’s a habit and I enjoy it. I never planned on doing this almost daily for 17 years. Being authentic and mostly nice is a terrible way to scale.

A good friend of mine Tadas just had his 17th year blogiversary and he lays it out perfectly for those that both are thinking about blogging and sharing and those that are doing it now and going forward…

Authenticity can’t be faked indefinitely. You can fool people for for a little while, but ultimately you will be found out. If you love what you are doing, it will seem natural and easy. That is why most creative endeavors, whether they be a blog, podcast, etc., end with a whimper and not a bang.

Don’t kid yourself that being authentic online is easy. The sad fact is that outrageous behavior garners attention, likes, retweets and the like. The algorithms that increasingly drive content consumption eat that stuff up. That attention can be seductive, but it is not sustainable.

It’s not always to recognize authenticity at first. Sometimes we mistake effort for authenticity. Putting together a twenty tweet thread isn’t easy. But if it looks like you are trying too hard, you are going to turn readers off.

If you are in the content game for more than just a quick dopamine hit, authenticity pays off over the long run. We don’t want to be influenced. We ultimately want to trust the people we interact with online. That connection isn’t easy to create or maintain, but it is the only path forward.

Congrats Tadas.

A community is not made up of just creators …a community is everyone else, the readers, the amplifiers, the superfans.

People like Tadas and I get to be more authentic and consistent knowing we have a group of people/community that appreciates hearing positive growth stories mixed with some pain and truthiness.

Authentic people/brands/companies have been doomed to sub scale which has been a curse in a world that paid for speed, growth, scale. That is changing fast as the bear market continues, interest rates rise and profitability matters sooner and faster. I think subscale is the new scale and web 3, or whatever we end up calling it, is offering the subscale companies/people/brands a way to get profitable fast and not be as beholden to Apple, Google, Microsoft and Amazon.

The circle of authenticity is at hand.