One of the most important journeys we need to embark on throughout our lives is the journey of self-discovery.

I truly believe that many people make big mistakes in their lives due to not having dedicated enough time to themselves and really understanding what makes them tick and what they need to be happy.

Enter Personality Tests

One of the best bang-for-your-buck investments in learning about yourself is to take personality tests. There are many free or cheap ones available online and they can bring out amazingly accurate descriptions of you and your skills.

Tip: Always show the results to someone who knows you well and ask them whether they feel it’s an accurate reflection of your personality. Sometimes we are completely blind to elements of our personality that are very obvious to others who are close to us.

My Results

Here are the tests I’ve tried out and the results.

My 5 major strengths according to the Strengths Finder test:

• Focus
• Futuristic
• Restorative
• Discipline
• Significance

My dominant tendency according to the Grethen Rubin Four Tendencies test: Questioner.

Another popular psychological test is the Myers-Briggs test. My result is INTJ, which stands for Introvert, iNtuitive, Thinking, Judging.

According to the Enneagram test I’m an Achiever.

According to 16Personalities, I am now classified as INTP-T (Logician), whereas a few years ago I had been classified as an ENTJ-T (Commander).

Another psychological test you might want to check out is the Big Five Traits test.

How Have Personality Tests Helped Me?

I have used personality tests in multiple ways.

Understanding Myself

Together with other self-discovery practices, like retreats and working with a psychotherapist, personality tests have helped me unearth my internal programming and understand what drives me. This has really helped me to understand what my close circle of friends should look like, as well as what I need to be doing on a daily basis to feel fulfilled.

There were also some behaviors that I saw in a negative light, but within the context of the results of the personality tests, I discovered they are actually strengths that I should potentialize rather than try to suppress, whether consciously or unconsciously.

Lessening Conflict within the Family

Unlike our spouses and close friends, we don’t get to choose our family members, and while typically we feel somewhat similar to our parents and siblings due to genetics and upbringing, there can also be some glaring differences between us.

Within my family, they have helped bring more understanding to certain behaviors that caused clashes between members. They have allowed us to know that there is no malicious intent when someone speaks or acts in a certain manner, but it’s simply a result of how they are internally wired.

On the other hand, once you understand why a certain behavior can be annoying to someone who is wired differently, you can adapt and be better equipped to avoid conflict.

Hiring People

I like to hire people primarily based on their character and not their skill set. I find it extremely hard to work with people who don’t share the same core values as me. Personality tests help achieve an initial understanding of candidates from a mindset perspective and help discover what their aptitudes might be.

Have personality tests helped you? Do you know of any other good tests? Let me know in the comments section below. 

Over the course of my adult life, I’ve come to realize that I really enjoy going on multi-year adventures where I dive in really deep into one topic and strive to become world-class at it.

I guess that in a way it’s similar to those journalists who decide to write a book about a specific niche or industry and spend months or even years getting to know the ins and outs of it, interviewing people etc. Authors like Michael Pollan come to mind as an example.

I spent the past year deeply engaged in the NFT world, and my involvement in that scene has really acted as a gateway drug to the art world. I’ve always been a very visual person, but discarded any interest in art early in my life as I felt that I couldn’t really draw, and art meant drawing in my head.

I’ve since discovered that the art world is so much broader than “drawing” or “painting” – there are many roles to play and art history is deeply fascinating in its own right. As I started to educate myself and dig into the history of art I learned that the art we create is a very sincere reflection of the collective thoughts, struggles and trends of each generation.

I became fully engrossed in learning as much as possible about the art world – the history and different art movements, famous artists, the financialization of art, art fairs etc.

I’ve also decided to teach myself how to draw, as I realized I had never given myself a real shot at it when I was young. Having a young son that is creating his first drawings provides me with the perfect opportunity to learn alongside him and spend quality time together.

However, the one niche that got me really excited about creating my own works is generative art. I started out by collecting a few generative art pieces as part of my NFT journey, then eventually had the pleasure of meeting some top generative artists whom I found to be really deep humans and supremely interesting in their way of thinking. The fact that generative art is created by code makes it much more accessible to me. In a nutshell, it’s something that I can see myself being able to create, since I’ve studied computer science and spent several years developing software products.

I do know that I am a very creative person, but so far my only real avenue of expression has been writing, and that has its limitations. An image can evoke an instant emotional impact and provide a visual sensorial pleasure that words cannot.

I’m therefore going to be giving art a second chance to make a big impact on my life. I’ll be focusing on the following in the coming year:

• Learning the history of art
• Understanding the main art movements to date
• Appreciating the biggest artists and their works
• Cultivating relationships with generative artists
• Experimenting with generative art

I’ve also started my own online community, and one of our subgroups is dedicated to art and NFT collecting, where I’ve gathered a nice group of collectors and artists. If you’re an artist or art collector and want to connect, I’d love to do so, just contact me.

What I’ve done so far

I’ve gone all in on art and am trying to learn as much as possible to get myself to a level of decent understanding. I had zero knowledge of art so far in my life, and I’m working hard to change that. That means reading books, attending conferences and fairs, speaking to artists and collectors, watching documentaries, and doing my own art experimentations.

Keep in mind that, as I mentioned, NFTs were what got me into art, so a lot of what I’ll be doing will probably be skewed towards this space and digital art.

NFTs solve many of the big problems present in the traditional art market. Authenticity, opaque pricing, difficulty in logistically acquiring art, and storing art problems are vastly improved with NFTs. While other NFT use cases are still experimental, the art use-case is the strongest, in my view.

In 2022 I attended my first big NFT events, the chief of which was NFT NYC, which was an amazing week. But one of my best highlights was a little-known conference taking place that week, Token Art, where I got to migle with the exact crowd I was craving: generative artists and early collectors.

I’ll continue to post any highlights of my journey here for accountability and tracking my progress, and also for the benefit of anyone looking to do the same thing.

• Visited London art museums:
  • The National Gallery
  • Tate Modern
• Visited New York art museums:
  • MOMA
  • Guggenheim
• Attended conferences:
  • Token Art (NYC)
  • NFT Show Europe (Valencia)

I’ve also been going through the following channels on YouTube:

• Antonio García Villarán – commentary on artists and styles (in Spanish)
• Art History School – – commentary on artists and styles (in English)
• The Coding Train – best free p5js tutorials

As for books, I’ve gone through the following:

• The story of art
• Steal like an artist
• The $12 million stuffed shark
• 7 days in the art world

I’m looking forward to being able to focus more and more on art as I re-align my life around this new aim. This is an exercise that is never easy, and there is typically a big through of self-doubt when the initial excitement wears off. Time will tell how far I can take this, but for now I’m enjoying the ride.

At the beginning of this year, I launched an online community focused on ideas that I’m passionate about. It’s a safe space for those who seek freedom and happiness through a perpetual search for truth. We talk about health, investing, travel, relationships and self-sovereign ideals, among other things.

In this article, I’ll give some background as to why I started the community and what motivates me to nurture it.

This is a big experiment for me and I expect this post to serve as a way of refining my thoughts on the subject – expect it to be updated frequently. For this reason, I’d love to get input from you either via the comments section below or by reaching out to me directly.

Here goes…

Why Start a Community?

It’s important to think about the trajectory that led to me starting a community, so I’ve spent some time thinking about how my experiences have shaped me and how they have generated this need to connect with others in a private, online community.

Over the past 15 years, I’ve been delving into the history of religions, civilizations, and politics, and it became really apparent to me that humans thrive when they are part of some type of tribe that they are passionate about. I saw how the internet had offered us the possibility of connecting with anyone globally, but at the same time, also resulted in humans becoming more isolated in their own online worlds. There had to be a new way of connecting and building tribes for the internet (metaverse?) age.

But let’s rewind a bit more and go through the timeline that brought me to the point of starting a community…

The Influence of Religion

I grew up in a very religious country, and I got exposed early on to the power of tribes that rallied behind a well-defined set of ideas and principles.

During my youth, I was pretty active in a couple of small communities under the umbrella of the local Church, and those groups were very beneficial to me in those formative years. I have many fond memories of the experiences I had and the relationships built during that period.

During my twenties, however, it became all too apparent to me that religious belief was no longer compatible with my worldview, and as I slowly exited all involvement with the Church, I also started thinking about how to recreate some of the best elements of religious life within the secular world.

The Digital Nomad and Expat Life

Apart from renouncing any notion of organized religion, I also left my country of birth (to which I had been very attached) and got married to a person that came from a pretty different culture from mine. Together we traveled extensively in a digital nomad fashion before that term was even a thing.

We eventually slowed down and decided to start building bases for the longer term, thus becoming expats. The experience of marrying into a different culture, and exposing ourselves to radically different ways of living forced me to become much more open to new ideas and experiences.

It instilled in me a deep desire to learn more about the world we live in, the people that have inhabited it over the ages, and the reasons for their behaviors. I must also mention that this period of growth and transition into becoming a citizen of the world was quite painful at times. It’s not easy to accept radically different behaviors, and you’re forced into expanding your tolerance threshold as well as reading up on various topics to try to make sense of those behaviors.

Bitcoin’s Impact on my Views

At some point, I went down the Bitcoin rabbit hole and quickly understood that it was much more than an online-native currency. Indeed this was the gateway to a new way of life. It was unsurprising to see people rally behind Bitcoin with such enthusiasm, displaying the kind of fervor commonly seen within religious communities.

Connecting with People Online

At the same time, I was writing more and more articles on this blog, especially around financial topics and social commentary, and was lucky to develop some very deep connections with people who resonated with my writing and reached out to me to talk further and even meet up.

Although I thoroughly enjoyed these conversations, it slowly became obvious that I couldn’t possibly sustain many 1-to-1 chats over the long term, and a better solution was needed. I also found myself connecting people to each other or wishing that we had some space to collectively think through certain ideas that arose in those 1-to-1 conversations.

NFTs & Web3

Fast forward a few years and I got hooked on NFTs. This was when it really became extremely obvious that people are really in need of joining communities and sharing their journey with others. While many people focus on the financial returns or losses related to NFTs, the biggest impact of NFTs on my life was the ability to connect with many like-minded people very rapidly, as well as being an onramp to the art world (I had always felt somewhat excluded from this mysterious but alluring world).

NFTs and Web3 also made me realize that we might be witnessing a shift in how products and services come to market. Rather than a startup founder having a stroke of genius or systematically reading trends in certain cultures and subsequently building products to address the perceived wants and needs, we can now start with building a community first.

Once the community is formed, we next form alliances and small teams within that community and build products and services that directly address the needs of that community. Chances are that those products and services will also be valuable to thousands or millions of people that are not yet part of that community. It’s just a different way of looking at things. The PROOF Collective community provides a good example of this approach.

The Network State

Ideas about online communities have been circulating and becoming more insistent and defined in the last few years, especially with the rise of NFTs, social tokens and DAOs.

But one of my favorite thinkers, Balaji Srinivasan, released an amazing book entitled The Network State in 2022 that takes things to the next level in my view. He proposes the idea that distributed states will rival the monopoly of nation-states in the future. This is a very Bitcoin-centric and libertarian view of things, but it aligns a lot with my worldview.

Here’s a short definition of the network state as Balaji envisions it:

A network state is a social network with a moral innovation, a sense of national consciousness, a recognised founder, a capacity for collective action, an in-person level of civility, an integrated cryptocurrency, an archipelago of crowdfunded physical territories, a virtual capital, and an on-chain census that proves a large enough population, income, and real-estate footprint to attain a measure of diplomatic recognition.

Of course, there are also intermediate community setups if one does not wish to establish a full-blown new state. A startup society is what the initial community can be described as, and successive iterations and growth will determine how far along the network state model it eventually lands at. Balaji’s thinking encapsulates most of my thinking on the subject and has given me extra motivation to continue building this community and exploring the possibilities that technology is now enabling.

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With the trajectory well-defined, let’s take a look at the framework I decided to build the community upon…

Who Should Join the Community?

In my view, the most important determinant of the success of a community is the people within, and I’ve adopted a different approach to what I’m seeing with most NFT-based communities.

Within the context of what I had in mind, I saw three problems with the typical NFT-based community:

1. Membership is open to everyone.
2. Members can be completely anonymous.
3. The financial value (floor price) of the NFT pass is a big concern to holders.

While I like the openness provided by Web3 and the crypto space in general, I wanted my group to be highly curated. Therefore I decided to start off by only allowing people who I have personally met and who have left their mark on me and my way of thinking. I also wanted to use my judgment to make sure that every new member is a good fit with the rest of the group. Therefore there is no token that people can buy and automatically gain access to the group; it is invite-only.

Secondly, I am limiting membership to people who are comfortable letting the rest of the group know their real names, professions, interests, locations etc. Again, while there is a time and place for anon accounts on the web, I wanted my group to be an intimate place where people can feel comfortable knowing who they are sharing their personal thoughts with. This has fostered a very open environment where people are not afraid to discuss sensitive topics or personal issues that others might help them with.

There is no financial cost to enter the group, thus the value you gain is directly related to how much you participate in the conversations. It has been my experience that the more you give, the more you get in return. I have no incentive to grow the group too rapidly either since there is no financial motive to do so.

Again, this approach is in line with the goals I had for my dream community, but it doesn’t mean that I dislike the NFT community models. They are different approaches with different end goals.

The Technology

The platform choice for building a community right now lies between two very successful applications: Telegram and Discord.

I use Discord heavily due to my involvement in many NFT projects, and while I like the way a server can be organized and divided into various channels, I am quite conscious that I tend to spend too much time on this app already, and trying to build a community within an app where I have all the distracting NFT project servers competing for my attention wouldn’t be a great idea.

Telegram, on the other hand, is more mainstream and simple. So I kept things simple and went with Telegram. At a certain point, since we realized that we were spending a lot of time talking about NFTs, a topic that did not interest all the community members, we split things into two Telegram groups. Going forward, the main group will serve as the main conversation hall where any topic can be brought up, and we will create new groups if we find that there is significant and long-lasting conversation around a specific topic, that would signal it meriting its own group.

I also hope to get a website built that would be token-gated through eth addresses. We don’t have NFTs as community access tokens since we’ve kept things simple to start off, but that’s something we could look into in the future.

IRL Meetups

I am a big believer that there is tremendous value in connecting with people in real life. I’m certainly not a fan of Zoom meetings with people that matter to me. Online meetings have their place and are a blessing in the work context, but I will always prefer meeting people face to face when I want to have a deeper experience with them. I also want to be able to share real-life experiences with my circle of friends, such as a good meal, a sunset, playing some sport, or enjoying time with our families and kids playing together.

For this reason, we will have several meetups during the year where we can get together and strengthen our bonds of friendship and have deeper conversations. The first weekend-long event is already planned with several families joining, which is something I’m really happy about. I hope that we can also use these occasions to travel to new places and explore the world, in so doing also broadening our consciousness and understanding of world culture.

A Fun Experiment

As I mentioned at the start of this article, this is one big fun experiment for me. I am keeping all options open and my ideas will most probably change over time, but I had to start with some sort of framework to get the thing off the ground. I really believe in the network state concept and want to be part of the movement towards such a future.

Many of the intermediate levels of worldwide interest and value-based communities are already a reality, and the technological developments we are seeing will continue to empower founders and builders of such communities. For example, while I spoke in opposition to having tradeable token passes for my community, the idea of soulbound tokens is very interesting and addresses the three issues I mentioned earlier since the tokens are not tradeable. This would also open up the doors to more experimentation with token-gated access to online platforms and real-life events.

There is also the route of charging for access in various ways, and I like the work that Hyper is doing in this respect.

For now, however, I am just enjoying building a free community of people I enjoy hanging out with on a daily basis.

Interested in joining the community or discussing the topic? Contact me.

Further reading

• The Network State
• Vitalik’s thoughts on network states
• CityDAO

It’s been more than ten years now since I left Malta (click here to read my original article about why I left), and in recent years I’ve preferred not to comment much on Malta, both because I had personally moved on from thinking about the country or following its news, and also from a sense of responsibility. Since I hadn’t been spending much time there, I thought I should let others do the talking since I couldn’t be sure whether things had stayed the same, worsened, or maybe improved since I left.

This year, however, I spent a month in Malta with my family. I thought it would be a good way for my young kids to experience the place where I grew up, or at least the good parts that remain of it. I consider myself very lucky to have been born and brought up in Malta. Some problems that led to me leaving have existed for many many years, way before I was even born, but my childhood and teenage years were certainly great, and Malta was, in my opinion, passing through some of its best times back then.

So what do I think of the current state of Malta after having again spent some time there?

Well, I’m afraid the situation doesn’t look pretty to me.

In short, I would describe the country as an anarchic construction site, and certainly, as a third-world country masquerading as a modern and flourishing European nation.

The Locals’ Views are Changing

There’s one thing that has really stood out to me. When I wrote my article on why I left Malta, and especially when I had actually left a few years before, the feeling was that the problem was mine, and nobody else really felt there was any problem with Malta. This feeling of being the odd one out was probably one of the reasons that drove me to leave and try out other places to see if I was the insane one or not, now that I think of it.

However, that has changed over the years. In my recent trip and even other shorter trips before that, I’ve actually had to resort to imploring friends and even people I met for the first time to talk about something else rather than complaining about the state of the country and how they’d leave if they could. There is a shared sense of pessimism that definitely wasn’t there 5 or 10 years ago. This feeling of mine is mirrored in recent surveys done on Malta’s younger generations. Most of them want to leave and think that the future of Malta isn’t bright.

What Laws?

I describe Malta as being in a state of anarchy because even though there are laws and regulations just like anywhere else, people seem to completely ignore them in the most in-your-face manner imaginable. Of course, some people manage to flaunt the law more than others, after all this is a country that has become known for its corruption at the highest levels, as its greylisting indicates. While corruption and nepotism has always existed on this island, the current Labour party has taken things to another level.

One Big Construction Site

As for the construction site part, you just need to spend a few hours driving around Malta to understand why I describe it that way. There’s dust everywhere (forget dust control measures in Malta, nobody cares), and everywhere you look are cranes and bulldozers destroying traditional terraced houses and erecting the next ugly block of flats. Not to mention the building in what was previously green areas, again thank the unscrupulous political parties for that.

No wonder the cases of asthma and other respiratory diseases have gone through the roof. Oh, and I forgot to mention the lax safety standards in place when demolition and construction takes place. A few people died due to their houses collapsing while works were being done on the adjacent buildings, but this is Malta, and the people responsible get to continue living their lives while the victims suffer on.

The country has always been very limiting geographically; as a resident or native Maltese, you pretty much get to know every part of the islands by heart, meet the same people, go to the same restaurants etc. On the other hand, in bigger countries, you always have the sense that you can do something new, and that was also one reason why I left. With the destruction of Malta’s natural environment, the increase in population, and corresponding traffic and pollution, it has become downright suffocating.

Greed and Selfishness – A Way to Cope?

The greed and selfishness in the acts of people in Malta are unlike anything I’ve seen anywhere else. The interesting thing is that for the most part, these people are not even aware that they are doing something that might be an inconvenience or harm others. In fact, if you talk to some of these people in the street, they might come across as very friendly. That’s one of the paradoxes that really drives me crazy on this island.

I have a theory about this. There is only so much abuse one can watch and suffer on a daily basis before instinctively they will act in a similar way. In this way, people begin to justify small misdeeds, perhaps with a typical Malta “u ijwa” or “mhux xorta?” (meaning “it doesn’t really matter” or “it’s ok”). It’s ultimately a way to cope and normalize life in the conditions that Malta is in right now.

But the Foreigners are Coming in Droves!

Touching on the population increase, today 20% of the Maltese population was not born there. While some try to promote this fact by saying that many expats are moving to Malta because it is so great, the reality is somewhat different. Most foreigners are laborers and occupy low-skill jobs that the Maltese no longer want to do. They move here just because it’s slightly better than the previous place they were based in and struggle to make ends meet. I have made respect for many of these immigrants who not only work hard to earn a living, but actually support the rest of their families thousands of kilometers away in countries like the Philippines, India and Pakistan, as well as many African nations.

So let’s be honest, they didn’t move to Malta because of all the supposed virtues that are trumpeted in the glossy tourist ads, they are there for the money, and will move to another place when things change. A much smaller percentage of expats move to Malta for the weather, and more importantly for tax reasons. Given the destruction of Malta’s environment and climate change making the weather even hotter than it was before, I suspect the weather will become less of a factor, while the Maltese tax system has long been in the EU’s crosshairs and might very well become less attractive if they decide to apply more pressure on Malta to change the fiscal incentives.

Quo Vadis Malta?

Malta the island remains a gem, despite all the harm that has been done to it over the years. There remain a few pockets of beauty but it is getting harder and harder to find them and enjoy them without being disturbed by the actions of other irresponsible people.

As for the local people, I want to stress that there are many extremely friendly, honest, and genuinely great Maltese people, and I have the honor of counting on some of them as friends and family. I admire them for their tenacity in trying to do good things and even change the status quo, despite the adversities. However, the tragedy of the commons is all too apparent in Malta, and the growing number of bad apples ruins the overall pie.

While it’s sad for me to say it, Malta, when all things are considered, is on a steep decline and there’s not much that gives me hope for the islands.

Malta’s two main economic drivers are tourism and the financial industry. These two currently fuel and support the construction frenzy we are seeing, but all this construction is making Malta less attractive for tourists, while the financial industry is heavily dependent on Malta being able to retain its tax incentives. So in my view, both tourism and the financial industry are on shaky territory, and when one or two of those are affected, you can expect a huge construction bubble to pop.

Now that I have kids, the most important question for me has changed from being where I feel the best living, to where I want my children to grow up. And if I was quite confident with my answer to the first question, the second one I can answer even more unequivocally – I can’t ever imagine my kids growing up in Malta.

Many people, including myself, like to unwind in the evenings by watching something or even reading.

A lot of these people default to streaming services such as Netflix, and for a while, I also did the same. However, I realized that is not the best use of my time, so I did some research and thinking and came up with these alternatives, which I now use depending on my mood on the day.

1. Reading – this is the ideal thing to do since it doesn’t mess with your sleep and is the best bang for your buck. Reading good books has been the biggest factor on my success in life, so it is very important for me to be constantly reading several books.
2. Take an online course – you can use Linkedin Learning, Saylor Academy, Udemy or Coursera. There are other platforms available either for free or at very low prices. I also use Wondrium a lot. Brilliant is another top choice.
3. Watch documentaries – many documentaries are available for free on YouTube. You can use TopDocumentaryFilms or OpenCulture. Alternatively, there are premium services such as Curiositystream that will give you access to hundreds of documentaries for a cheap price per year. Nebula gives you access to top documentary channels on YouTube without the ads and sometimes featuring extra content. It’s worth it just to escape from YouTube’s suggestion engine alone.
4. Watch sports – I personally like to watch padel matches, which are thankfully streamed and available on-demand for free on YouTube. I play padel so it’s always nice to see the pros perform and learn a thing or two. At other times I just watch padel tutorial videos by some of the best coaches, and that also helps my game. This is more fun than work, let’s be clear, but I see no harm in it as long as I’m not watching sports every day. For example, I quit my addiction to football a long time and no longer feel compelled to watch my favorite team play. Every now and then I watch the highlights and that’s it.

Netflix remains a great service and I’m even an investor in the company, but I wouldn’t suggest defaulting to it when you feel like watching something on TV or chilling out in the evening. Better to go and have a nice dinner and chat with a friend, read, take a course, or practice any kind of hobby (I like building Lego kits, for example, and find it highly relaxing).