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NC CNN Feature, Mental Health Curriculum, & The Side-Hustle Fellowship

Community action and learning adventures on Network Capital

Dear readers, 

This past week has been all about COVID response, resilience, and community learning. Before we dive into the details, here is a quick overview for you - 

COVID Response 🇮🇳

It has been a hard week for all of us. The only glimmer of hope as been the resilience of doctors and the kindness of volunteers working on the ground. 1000s of Network Capital community members have been working around-the-clock to verify resources and provide support.

Our work was featured in CNN, you can find the details of the COVID resources here.

Fellowships

Weekend projects and side hustles make us better thinkers by sparking lateral thinking. We are able to develop a broader perspective on the way the world works and what our unique role is in shaping it. Essentially we are able to connect dots better.

The joy of discovery is indescribable. Weekend projects propel practical innovation, stuff that actually moves the needle. In addition, they add color to our coronavirus fatigued stay-at-home existence.Gumroad, a company we invested in, was built over a weekend. Patreon, that recently raised $155 Million at $4 Billion valuation was set up in a few weeks of hacking. The first version of YouTube was ready within days as three former PayPal employees decided to act on their frustration of struggling with sharing videos online. The YouTube of today is far more sophisticated but its origin can be traced to a few weekends of trial and error.You may or may not build the gazillion dollar company over a weekend project or a side hustle but indulging your curiosity in a failsafe fashion has no downside. We hope you consider it.

This week we had our first guest lecture for the Writing Fellowship, Dr. Anamika. She is a Sahitya Akademi award winning poet and long-time mentor to Network Capital. Her session was a literary exploration of the process of transforming idea(s) to words.

As a part of their assignment, our fellowships published their newsletters this week. We’ll be sharing a few of them in the coming day!

Masterclasses

Suhani Jalota, from Mumbai, India, is pursuing a PhD in health policy at Stanford School of Medicine and an MBA at Stanford Graduate School of Business.

She aspires to become a social health entrepreneur, creating self-sustaining health-related organizations managed entirely by the low income communities for which they exist. As an entrepreneur, she is the founder and CEO of the Myna Mahila Foundation in Mumbai, which produces affordable menstrual hygiene products. She received the Queen’s Young Leader award from Queen Elizabeth II, was selected as the grand prize winner of Glamour magazine’s College Women of the Year, and won a Woman Center Global Impact Award. Suhani was also named to Forbes’ list of the top social entrepreneurs in the world under the age of 30.

Jed is a venture builder who has launched new tech businesses around the world. He's built and run the world's largest API Marketplace in partnership with A16Z-backed RapidAPI. He has been an angel investor and leads syndicate for 4 years. He recently launched Angel-School.co: A hands-on, fully-remote fellowship program to help emerging Angels invest via their own syndicates. He holds an MBA from INSEAD.

Mental health and emergency response must be essential elements of school curriculums. We will be discussing this idea on May 7, 2021 in an open session for students and parents.

Living in a state of flux isn’t conducive to our mental health. How might we teach students to become stronger and more sensitive when things are uncertain? How should they process emotions when the world around them seems to crumble down? 

One thing is certain that we should not wait till they are “old enough”. Emotional literacy is a critical 21st century skill and we should teach it as seriously as we teach grammar and math. 

We have included a module titled â€śPain + Reflection = Progress” in our summer school to ensure that our students have the tools, techniques and mental models to deal with personal and community trauma. With our module, we hope to initiate a serious conversation around mental health in schools around the world.

Newsletter

The Unbearable Lightness of Being is a dark and brilliant novel by Milan Kundera. This is how Amazon describes it. 

In a world where lives are shaped by irrevocable choices and fortuitous events, and everything occurs but once, existence seems to lose its substance and weight - and we feel 'the unbearable lightness of being'

There are parallels between Kundera’s imagery of Prague and the current state of affairs in India but instead of feeling light, we are witnesses to an indescribable darkness that bears heavily on our chest. What did we do? How did we get here?

As we think and rethink, let’s carve out some time in our distracted, stressful days to read through some interesting content that got published this week.

Almost all of us are undergoing personal and collective trauma relating to the horrors of the pandemic. It is taking dangerous turns in the form of anxiety, self-doubt, depression and desperation. Perhaps we have lost a loved one or a job we cherished? Perhaps both…

How we deal with this depends upon how we talk to ourselves. Often we are better at giving advice to others than to ourselves. Why? Because we are able to create some distance, process information and then come to a conclusion. 

Distanced self-talk is a psychological hack that can help us deal with the current state of crisis.

How do you/will you explain the pandemic to your children? Where would you begin? To explain, you need to understand all interconnected forces. That doesn’t seem to be easy, is it? There are so many conspiracy theories, so many social media posts and so much dis(information) to negotiate with. 

You might want to start with Charlie Mungerand his latticework of mental models.

⚡️If you are new to Network Capital, start by going through our most popular - masterclass (Career Principles with Nobel Laureate Robert Shiller); newsletter(Writing Fast and Slow); and podcast (The art of writing with Dr. Shashi Tharoor)

đź’ť Connect and network with other Network Capital members here. You can sign up for a networking session and our serendipity tool here.

đź’ž If you need an invite to Clubhouse or Lunchclub, let [email protected] know. You can also reach out to them for feedback, suggestions, doubts and any help navigating the Network Capital ecosystem.