I was reading Make Something Wonderful last night.
In the chapter “Interview with Terry Gross”, Terry quizzed Steve on his predictions for the future of the internet and what new things to expect. The interview took place in 1996, just a year before Steve went back to Apple.
Here’s an excerpt from the conversation that defines the oeuvre of this piece —
TG: Some Mac users are afraid that the Mac operating system is in danger of becoming obsolete in the way that Beta video became obsolete because it was outdone by VHS. What do you think?
SJ: I think with the appropriate leadership at Apple, that’s not going to happen, but I think we have to wait and see.
TG: Do you care? How still involved, invested, do you feel in the future of Apple, the company you co-created?
SJ: I’m happy every time a Mac gets shipped. I still have people sending me emails, telling me how much they love their Macs. It’s sort of … how do you explain it? It’s like the first person you were ever in love with. You know? It’s like your first love, and there will never be another one like it. In my case, we were together for ten years, and that’s a long time. But if you move on in your life, you can’t always stay in love with your first girlfriend. Right?
Quite similar to Steve’s response, I feel we need to kill the old for the new to be born.
We have to move on, just so that we can give ourselves a fair chance at reinventing ourselves.
The journey has been beautiful.
We started Stoa Daily in late March 2022. With it, we aimed to build on the success of 100 Days of MBA, a 100-day series of posts we did on my LinkedIn across 2021.
There were a lot of doubts when we started, the chief one being:
“Will we be able to publish one well-crafted essay daily?”
But the way the team took on this challenge was enviable and inspiring. Right since the very first issue, the team approached the writing with phenomenal clarity of purpose:
“Can we leave our readers with something interesting to think about? Can we make them go, ‘Wow, I've never thought about it that way’? Can we help them think better by thinking out loud in a cogent manner ourselves?”
Through these past 1.5 years, we have received more love and appreciation in our inboxes and on social media than we could have expected. There was something about the writing that inspired other people to pick up the metaphorical pen and start penning down their thoughts, even if they were in service of expressing their gratitude.
And largely, what made us different was the way we derived meaning from the work. It was never about one essay. It was always about,
“Can we bring about a perspective and mindset shift in how our readers are used to thinking about certain things?”
It was never,
“This essay is going to change the world.”
Rather, it was,
“Can we consistently write in a manner that exudes an overarching philosophy of business and careers and a set of ways to think about them? Can we create an environment that naturally helps people start thinking in more nuanced ways? Can we establish a kind of digital osmosis with words?”
You see, positively changing the trajectory of your life or career doesn't require a truckload of trivia. It doesn't require reading 100 books a year. It only requires a few key insights, ideas, and principles that you have understood and internalized to a point where they start changing how you think and behave in meaningful, life-altering ways.
That is all you need. And this is all we aimed to do with the 400+ editions of the Stoa Daily that have gone out in the last 18 months.
After everything, even if you have absorbed one idea, one frame, one principle... just one... that has actually changed the way you see things and do things, we will consider it a job well done. That's all we ever asked for, and the possibility of such a thing happening was the spirit that infused this journey and imbued it with meaning.
We were in it for the influence. And I think we definitely had some success at it, if not a lot.
But for now, we are hitting pause.
For now, we have realized that we need to take a step back, go back to the drawing board, and analyze how we can magnify whatever impact we've had by at least 10x. For everything that we offered with Stoa Daily, there are a few key things lacking still — a few of which I can put a finger on, and a few of which I can't identify, yet.
Hoping to see you all in another avatar, soon.
Till then, we will keep sharing the best of Stoa Daily with you. If you're a recent subscriber, trust me, there are real treasures to be mined in our archives. You should go through them. I promise that it will be worth your time.
Thank you for all your love and support! We wish you good health and a good life.
Keep learning, keep doing.
