Welcome to the 1,265 newly Not Boring individuals who have joined us since last Monday! Today’s Not Boring is delivered to you by… In March, I wrote that Excel Never Dies. I could have spoken too soon. Rows very much wants Excel to die. It has a shot: Rows is one of the vital “Holy shit ????” new product experiences I’ve had in a long time. Rows is a spreadsheet powered by APIs, with constructed-in integrations that let you enrich mailing lists, be taught what’s in a company’s tech stack, discover firm knowledge via Crunchbase, and much more, right within the spreadsheet. They even made me a template to monitor trending tweets on subjects I’m writing about. Plus, the spreadsheets are all the time ready to share: past simply collaborating with others, anybody can rework their spreadsheets into interactive web apps in a single-click. Anyone can construct varieties, fashions, and inside instruments out of a spreadsheet with out having to code.

Everything in Rows is system-based. It’s sort of like if Excel, Airtable, and Zapier had a baby, plus access to databases that normally dwell behind paywalls. It’s really unbelievable already, and it’s nonetheless in beta. Rows wants Not Boring readers — people who love finance & tech — to be among the early adopters. Happy belated Mother’s Day to all of the not boring mothers! More often than not at Not Boring, I write about corporations, with details and figures and histories and graphs. Occasionally, I’ll write about ideas and business fashions, like the Metaverse, DAOs, or APIs. Sometimes, I’ll let you into my mind to see what’s happening in there before an concept is fully baked, when its just a bunch of wisps starting to form a braid. Today is one of those items. It’s shorter. It’s meant to be interactive. A lot of the fun will occur when you’re taking the idea and check out to apply it to your individual work or life.

To be clear, much of today’s essay is predicated on my own private experience. I fully understand that not everybody has the luxury of getting a roof over their head, food on the desk, and an web connection. Many people can’t afford the time to play the game. But when you are taking the hours it takes to read Not Boring, you’re in all probability already playing the good Online Game to a point. You learn this because you need to know the way the web economy works, and how you can play it better. But you can’t play to win unless you know you’re enjoying. Let’s get to it. This didn’t begin as a piece about video games. I set out to reply this query: why are tech progress stocks sagging while crypto moons and worth roars back? Crypto is simply extra fun. But crypto itself will not be the sport. It’s just the in-sport foreign money for a a lot larger game, played across the web, that involves CEOs, influencers, artists, researchers, investors, and regular folks, such as you and me.

That’s a much more fun subject to explore than which asset class is outperforming which. That is bigger, more everlasting than day-to-day market fluctuations. We’re all enjoying a terrific Online Game. How nicely we play determines the rewards we get, online and offline. The great Online Game is played concurrently by billions of people, on-line, as themselves, with real-world penalties. Your financial and psychological wellbeing is at stake, however the draw back is restricted. The upside, on the other hand, is infinite. Social media is the clearest manifestation of this meta-recreation. Beginner-level Twitter feels weird, like a bunch of people exposing their private thoughts to the world. Medium-degree Twitter is Threads and engagement hacks. Twitter Mastery is indistinguishable from an ongoing sport. This can be true for Reddit, Discord, Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, and different social networks. But social media is only one piece of an interconnected recreation that spans online and offline areas. The way you play in one area unlocks opportunities in others.

Sharing concepts on Twitter might get you invited to a Discord, your participation in that Discord would possibly get you invited to work on a brand new mission, and that new project might make you wealthy. Or it might carry you more followers on Twitter and more Discord invitations and extra challenge alternatives and new ideas that you want to explore which could kick off any number of recent paths. We now dwell in a world during which, by typing things into your telephone or your keyboard, or saying issues into a microphone, or snapping footage or videos, you may marshall assets, help, and opportunities. Crypto has the potential to take it up a notch by baking recreation mechanics — factors, rewards, skins, groups, and more — proper into the whole internet. The nice Online Game is free to play, and it starts simply: by realizing that you’re enjoying a recreation. Every tweet is a free lottery ticket. That’s a big unlock. Anyone can play. You can select how one can play given your resources and abilities at the present second.