Stoa Digest #35: Cultivating taste
A thing of practice and patience.
Every single Stoan we expect knows this, but if you’re willing to learn, the resources exist out there on the internet for you to find and make use of.
It is the curation of the things that you find most necessary, and the cultivation to ask the right questions, to understand any subject.
Our Discord server is a perfect example of this - we have subjects ranging almost any nook on the internet, even though nestled into slightly wider topics.
The best way to learn to slot information, both mentally and physically, is to practice it where available - aka our server.
Speaking of, today we launched a small change to our Discord server, and nestled all our “Interest” channels under “The Quad” on Discord.
What is “The Quad” you might ask - well in Western college culture, a quad is the central common courtyard shared by all the buildings of a college’s different classes.
It’s where all our fellows gather and talk about their interests to their heart’s content.
For now this is what you can use the channels for, incase it gets confusing.
🙇🏻| 📺| tv-movies-yt: Sharing shows, videos & movies you enjoyed watching with the Community
🙇🏻| music-discovery: Come here to share all your favourite music
🙇🏻| 🤾🏻| sports: Where all sports banter comes to life. Football, Cricket, Basketball, UFC, you name it, the fans exist.
🙇🏻|🥘| food-brew: Cooking up a storm is greatly encouraged on this channel.
🙇🏻|📚| good-reads: Posting all your best reads - blogs, articles, magazine editorials, newsletters, books is more than appreciated by this channel.
🙇🏻| 🏦| finance-econ: Tell us how you handle money, tips, tricks & hacks about finances & Econ in general, here.
🙇🏻| 🐕 | crypto: Web 3 is picking up, and so are the advocates of it at Stoa. find the best resources, project drops and news about the crypto world, and learn more about it here.
🙇🏻| 💻 | no-code: Find out about tools, get help, learn more about navigating one or more no-code tools on this channel.
In the next few weeks, we’ll be launching more of these changes, to help you derive all the best quality interaction from what is our online campus.
If you read, consume, find something phenomenal to share with the rest of the community, now you know where you can tell us about it.
The more you cultivate your appetite for content, the more you cultivate your taste as you grow with this community.
Looking forward to it!
📣Announcements 📣
We’re launching a new Discord event this coming Friday.
Our first ever: ”Looking Beyond the Lyrics” Radio Show.
We’ll start off small, and be hosting these every Friday night, and our hosts will introduce you to some of their favourite music, while also telling you the stories behind what made the songs what they were.
Ofcourse to start off with, we’re going with two of Stoa’s top music fiends: Mr. Serenade himself, Vikrant Mehra, and Hot Chipper, Pranav Manie.
For context: on a free day, you’ll probably find Vikrant noodling around on his guitar, singing his heart away; and Pranav voraciously devouring his favourite artists’ music to uncover more about their music.
Join us on Friday from 9-10pm on the “Stoa Radio” on Discord!
On Tuesday, Divya Haritwal is running a Kaksha on Building Communities.
If you, like us, have been seeing the importance of Community as a part of businesses and brands pick up recently, this is going to be one to attend.On Thursday, we’re hosting a networking night, but it’ll be slightly different from our regular Gup-Shup sessions, drop-by and meet some new fellows!
📣Also, If you have any channel suggestions for our Discord redesign, do hit up Nicaia with them!
We’ll see what we can do! 📣
🥳 🎂Birthday Parttaaayy! 🥳 🎂
15th Feb - Shubham Prakash
16th Feb - Sshreya Yajnakumara, Kunal Singh
17th Feb - Smita Verma
18th Feb - Nidhin Abraham, Pranav Agarwal
20th Feb - Rishav Saha
🔦Fellow Spotlight 🔦
What did you want to study in school, and how different did life turn out?
“I mean I took the fairly easy route to be honest.
Even though I was a nerd, I'd only nerd out about things I enjoyed, and not everything under the sun.
So I remember really enjoying Physics in school, but I never really pursued it, mostly because when we were younger( & even now) it was also a question of, ‘What can you make a living doing?’ And Physics didnt seem like it was going to be the thing that I’d end up making a living off of.
Mostly cause I’d never met anyone who had studied physics, and was doing something regular, it was a highly niche’d interest to have, so I took the next best thing. Science. Given I didnt enjoy studying, my options were fairly narrowed down that way - and so Engineering sort of just made it’s own appearance, and I went with it.”
Was there anything you thought of when Engineering was popping up, as something you wanted to do instead?
“Oh. I mean the dream was actually to go to DU, but we were the generation that was plagued with the most insane cutoffs for colleges, so that got laid to rest pretty quickly, to be honest.”
Did you enjoy college?
“Well, it was the first time I was that free. It’s peak everything - teenage, ambition, freedom, aspirations, energy - all of it combined, given that I was on a college campus like BITS in Goa - I’d say it worked out pretty damn well for me. College was that time in my life where I was allowed to indulge all my interests, and there was no-one to stop me, so I took up all my favourite hobbies as things and had a ball of a time - I was sleep deprived, but I wouldn’t do it any other way, really.”
What hobbies did you end up picking up?
“Photography and Football. Both of which I still adore, but football trumps Photography 99% of the times.”
So after taking the pretty straightforward route in life, why Stoa?
“A thought that I had while I was joining Stoa, was that I was not joining for the hype or the education, because I knew fully well if I was going to go down a rabbit hole, I could very well do it myself.
But I wanted to put myself in an uncomfortable situation for the first time in my life, like take a risk, having to put myself out there, interact with people, something I didnt really do at work, or in general in life.
I remember thinking, ‘I’m just going to go all in & be who I am. And then people would’ve either liked me or disliked me, and that’s not on me’ “.
Did Stoa make you change your approach to how you came to conclusions at all?
“I meaaaan, I’m pretty solid in my conclusions of things - like I make arguments, and I back them up with facts, otherwise it stands nullified for me. So that makes me a fairly hard person to deal with, in life.
I remember when we had one of our first few Case Weekends, I was so hell-bent on having everyone in the team participate, I kept going to Sanjana for all our pointers, because she was the quiet one - even if it was just to say, ‘Yeah, I dont have anything to add’’.
One other fellow cohort-mate has definitely told me this before, where ‘It’s okay to let things go, and allow people to have their beliefs, and come to their own realisations’ so yeah - I guess Stoa allowed me to indulge me in practicing me allowing other people to have differing opinions, I guess.”
What’s something Stoans are unlikely to know about you?
“I think sustainability is one of those things where people tend to not know about it, especially cause it’s in my Twitter bio and stuff, but at the same time it just comes as a surprise.
Usually it comes as a very interesting conversation as well. Mostly because I think all of us are constantly thinking about it, but it's just one of those things where we don't know how to kind of go about it, or what are the things that we can do.”
Have you had a dream you’ve just never pursued?
“Oh, I’ve just wanted to have a D2C brand forever. I dont know what for, or anything about it, but it’s sort of the field I’ve always wanted to operate in.
Only reason being - I’d want to go into the Food & Beverage industry most likely, but you need significant capital to take bets like that - and I’m not sure I'm there at the moment.”
What’s something you’v been working on the side?
“There was this really cool moment that happened where I had started a thread and we were all talking about a certain topic, and it sort of blossomed into an idea that 3 of us want to pursue.
It’s been on hold for a bit now, but I hope we do pursue it, it was a pretty fun idea, if I may say so myself.”
You’ll find Karan here: On LinkedIn / On Twitter
🐝 Community Buzz 🐝
Meetups
Note: Apologies we couldn’t get everyone in L-R, maybe next time we’ll be able to recognise you from the photos you sent us vs the faces we see on our Zoom screens. ☠️
Twitter Gang! 💬
We think Saxena Saheb might have to host a Kaksha on writing Twitter threads for us again soon. His content does not miss.
Another thread maker and founder belting it out in his niche. Here comes Utpal with Tenacity.
Linking-In 🖇
Content 💻
Utpal’s headed out on his #WritingInPublic journey, and we’ve been told a few others are too - keep an eye out!
This week on Discord: Best Discord Messages This Week
For Stoans by Stoans ✍🏼📚⏯
Books 📚
Watchtime 🎥
Weekend Binges 🍿🥤
Blogs & Resources 🤓
Key bits to constructing a mind that is satisfied with life.
Why making friends is so hard, and why you have it easy being a Stoan.
Meme Wars 🥲
This week’s shiny new winner of Best Meme goes to …………
🥁🥁🥁🥁🥁🥁🥁🥁🥁🥁🥁🥁🥁🥁🥁🥁🥁🥁🥁🥁🥁🥁🥁🥁🥁🥁🥁🥁
Mr. Abhishek Pandey - the rest of you need to bring the meme game back, Abhishek’s sweeping you under the carpet!
