zabreneva

@TheEcho13 My husband never forgave me for asking for this - and went on to fail to provide. We are divorced and I raise his three children because he left them to live 5 hours away with his new wife and her kids.

A man’s dream of becoming a father is usually paid for in a woman’s body, her health, her time, her career, and her independence. But when a woman says she wants stability, support, and a life that feels good to live inside, she gets called materialistic. If you can want legacy, she can want security. If you can ask for sacrifice, she can ask for provision.

@skumWgmi Our values are misplaced and corrupt.

My kid's school asked me to donate supplies. Paper. Pencils. Hand sanitizer. Tissues. I pay property taxes. My state has a $4 billion surplus. The federal education budget is $238 billion. And the teacher is buying pencils out of her own paycheck. And I'm sending in Ziploc bags. We fund stadiums for billionaires with public money. We fund schools with bake sales. And then blame teachers when test scores drop.

Don’t pass on what was never yours to carry

Gen X! I learned why we are always ignored and it's the truth 👇🏼 #GenX

How many Ladies can honestly say this: I still have my real nails, real eyebrows, real eyelashes.... I'll wait.

That water clarity is an engineering decision, and the math behind it is wilder than the video. Roman aqueducts ran on gravity alone. No pumps, no pressure systems. Engineers carved channels with a gradient so shallow it borders on absurd. The Pont du Gard in southern France drops 2.5 centimeters over 275 meters. That's roughly the thickness of a coin over the length of three football fields. They surveyed that accuracy with plumb lines and wooden leveling instruments. The clarity you're seeing is a direct product of flow velocity. Too steep and the water erodes the channel walls, picks up sediment, turns brown. Too flat and it stagnates. Roman engineers targeted a slope of about 20 centimeters per kilometer, which kept the water moving fast enough to stay fresh but slow enough to stay clear. Before the water reached the city, it passed through multi-chamber settling tanks where velocity dropped near zero. Suspended particles sank. Clean water flowed out the top into the next chamber. Repeat three or four times. Pliny specified the minimum slope in writing. Vitruvius published the exact mortar ratio for hydraulic cement: one part lime to two parts volcanic ash for underwater work. The pozzolana from Pozzuoli reacted with water to form a calcium-aluminum-silicate compound that actually gets stronger the longer it sits submerged. Modern concrete degrades in water. Roman concrete bonds with it. Scale the whole system and it gets harder to process. Eleven aqueducts fed Rome at its peak. Combined output: roughly 1 million cubic meters of water per day. That works out to about 250 gallons per person for a city of one million. Modern New York delivers about 125 gallons per person per day. Ancient Rome had access to double the per capita water supply of the largest city in the United States, running entirely on slope and stone. The Trevi Fountain in Rome is still fed by one of them. Two thousand years, same source, same gravity, same water.

@adamshuaib It me

The founders worth betting on were often terrible employees. Many clashed with previous managers, didn’t follow instructions and quickly realised they were more effective than their boss. In the wrong environment these people are marginalised or ignored. It’s also why previous employer references for a founder don’t always show their true ability. This kind of mindset doesn’t tend to show up well on a CV. It looks like job-hopping or not being a team player. But in practice it signals someone who can handle the unstructured, highly uncertain nature of running a startup. Our data on 15,000 companies showed that founders who scored highly on emotional stability (not charisma or likability) were far more likely to build bigger companies.

@adamshuaib Started being entrepreneurial at 45. As a single mom of 3. Now running two point five companies. I see my peers that are in their 20s and wondering if I’m too old to be doing this.

One unexpected pattern when studying the lives of generational talents: many were completely unremarkable in their 20s. The breakthrough came much later. Edison was 32 before the phonograph. Curie was 36 when she isolated radium. Franklin was 40 before he turned to work on electricity. Darwin was 50 when he published On the Origin of Species, after two decades of barnacle taxonomy. The average age of a unicorn founder in the US at incorporation is… 42. By the standards of contemporary “30 under 30” culture, a huge number of these late bloomer would have been written off long before they did the thing that mattered. The unremarkable years waiting for the breakthrough weren't wasted time. They were the loading phase accumulating obsessions, technical fluency and pattern recognition from years of mundane groundwork. The world rewards the breakthroughs and forgets the loading phase. There is no shortcut through it. You can't compress the painful ordinary years that are required to birth genius.

@adamshuaib I was logging onto online systems helping build communities around authors. I wrote fan fiction with these friends and by myself starting at 12. I started a fan club and mailed out home brewed physical newsletters at 14 for my favorite author to 100s of her fans.

The most overlooked predictor of extraordinary work is a person's capacity to completely vanish when a problem requires it. When Cambridge closed for the plague in 1665, Newton went home to a Lincolnshire farmhouse and saw no one for 18 months. In that single stretch of isolation he developed calculus, the theory of colour and the foundations of gravity. Andrew Wiles disappeared into his attic for seven years to prove Fermat's Last Theorem, telling only his wife. Bill Gates still does two “Think Weeks” a year, alone in a cabin in the Pacific Northwest with no visitors. These individuals will have stretches of normal life with meetings attended, emails answered and commitments kept. Then a hard problem appears and the person becomes unreachable. Calls unreturned for 10 days, colleagues vaguely informed with no further detail. They reappear with something nobody could have produced through availability. Breakthroughs need a level of immersion that only happens when nothing else is allowed in. Most workplaces are now engineered to make this impossible: Slack, shared calendars, the expectation that you'll respond by EoD. People who do truly original work sit at the edges of organisations and accept the social cost of going dark. The hardest thing to negotiate in a career is the right to vanish.

@adamshuaib Is this why traditional venture continues to pass on me while also telling me that I am perfect founder material? Gritty, resourceful, capable, etc? Still waiting for the big yes that unlocks the billions I’m building for.

After 15 years of investing, we realised that truly exceptional founders have something impossible to fake: deeply unconventional lives. We analysed 15,000 founders using five binary signals to measure this: odd hobbies, early signs of exceptionalism, extreme life choices, unusual geographies, non-linear careers. These sum to give a 0-5 score per founder. Whether someone started coding at 10, speaks five languages, climbed Everest or quit a safe job to live in Chile, the signal was deviation from the mean. Rather than focusing on IQ or EQ, we call this metric the Outlier Quotient, or “OQ”. When forecasting founder success, it turns out that OQ was the single most predictive variable in our entire classification model, trained on ~70 different factors. Our OQ score had zero correlation with having worked at a top-tier company or attending an elite university. The signals most VCs rely on aren’t just noisy, they’re blinding. The best founders don’t signal like everyone else, they don’t think like everyone else, and they certainly don’t build like everyone else. If you want to spot breakout talent before the rest of the market, stop screening for conformity. Back the founders the system was built to filter out.

@Tozzeb Damarcus is one of the greatest

Damarcus' Amalur-art is 🔥

@_katetolo @bryan_johnson Thank you for making this post. Consent made visible. Rock on.

@bryan_johnson Yes I consented to this post. I love that Bryan’s so supportive and involved with my health ❤️

Examining Kate’s 1% She has suspected endometriosis. This affects at least 1 in 10 women, likely more. Here she’s getting an ultrasound. Historically you needed surgery just to diagnose it (incisions are made in the abdomen). We're doing a non-invasive route. Typically women live with endometriosis for 7-10 years before being diagnosed. It’s the leading reason women aged 30 to 34 get hysterectomies (permanent surgery to entirely remove the uterus). This condition is where endometrial-like tissue starts growing outside the uterus, in ovaries, bowel, bladder, even the diaphragm. This tissue inflames, scars, and glues organs together. Our first step is to find out if @_katetolo has it. Initial measurements we’re doing: + trans vaginal ultrasound + pelvic MRI w and w/o contrast + hormonal labs All during the early part of her cycle to get the clearest picture. During her ultrasound, a slim probe, about the width of two fingers, 10-12 inches long (although only a small portion is inserted) is covered with a protective sheath and lubricant and gently inserted into the vagina (patient has to empty their bladder first). This creates real-time images of the uterus, ovaries, and surrounding pelvic structures. While inserted, the probe is turned 90 degrees to evaluate all the various structures, angles and views. There is no radiation exposure. The technician is looking for scarring, ovarian cysts, adhesions, and for organs that are fused together with tissue. This ultrasound can confirm endometriosis but it cannot rule it out. What endo does to the body: + 90% report pelvic pain + 50% report severe fatigue + 26% report infertility. However many sources cite 30 to 50 percent. + 50% experience pain during sex. + Many have pain with ovulation, bowel movements, and urination + Severe bloating called “endo belly” where the abdomen visibly distends There are a handful of theories about why endometriosis develops but the honest answer is no one is quite sure. We’ll keep you posted on her results.

We women are all watching and supporting this journey and your interest in it. So much of health science has been male oriented, your lens on this makes us all feel seen. I am 48. Likely endometriosis. Suffering but went through a terrifying journey to diagnose it. I have a close 14 year old possibly struggling with it. Many more have similar and worse stories. Thank you.

A service blueprint as a company blueprint. Genius.

@DudespostingWs Why dudes?

Dude activity: watch Lord of the Rings on a giant screen while a live orchestra performs the entire score in sync with the movie

Over 40 years ago… He saved his universe. He inspired a generation. Now, He-Man returns. Watch the final theatrical trailer for Masters Of The Universe - only in theaters June 5. Get tickets now.

😍😍😍

The TCL Chinese Theatre has been transformed into Castle Grayskull for the ‘MASTERS OF THE UNIVERSE’ world premiere.

@Tozzeb My UI 😭😭

Badger, badger, badger... MUSHROOM, MUSHROOM 🍄 Jonti Picking's flash animation - and earworm - set the world alight in 2003, becoming one of the internet's most iconic memes. Now preserved in the BFI National Archive.