👤 The Profile: The futurist putting pig hearts in humans & the matchmaker helping you find lasting love

This edition of The Profile features Martine Rothblatt, François-Henri Pinault, and more.

Good morning, friends!

The last month has been exhausting. Between kids, work, travel, and some unexpected situations that life has thrown my way, I’ve found myself spending a lot of time in my head.

And when I have a lot of time to spend in my head, I spend it doing something unproductive: I worry. I worry about things that haven’t happened, things that could happen, and things that may or may not happen.

In other words, I worry about everything. It’s a magnificent waste of time. And if you’re not careful, worry can become a habit, and well-ingrained habits are really hard to break.

My friend recently sent me the following text, which nicely summarizes exactly what I need to do:

Logically, it makes perfect sense. But how do you explain that to the emotional, anxiety-prone part of your brain?

I came across this article by James Clear that explains the evolution of worry. He explains that for hundreds of thousands of years humans have lived in an immediate-return environment, in which your choices delivered an immediate return. (Example: “A lion appears across the plain > you feel stressed > you run away > your stress is relieved;” or “A storm rumbles in the distance > you worry about finding shelter > you find shelter > your anxiety is relieved.”)

But in the last 500 years or so, Clear writes, our society has shifted to a predominantly delayed-return environment. This means that many of the choices you make today will not deliver immediate returns. In many instances, you’ll have to wait to reap the rewards years — if not decades — in the future.

Clear writes:

This is true of our problems as well. While a giraffe is worried about immediate problems like avoiding lions and seeking shelter from a storm, many of the problems humans worry about are problems of the future.

For example, while bouncing around the savanna in your Jeep, you might think, “This safari has been a lot of fun. It would be cool to work as a park ranger and see giraffes every day. Speaking of work, is it time for a career change? Am I really doing the work I was meant to do? Should I change jobs?”

Unfortunately, living in a Delayed Return Environment tends to lead to chronic stress and anxiety for humans. Why? Because your brain wasn’t designed to solve the problems of a Delayed Return Environment.

So how do you alleviate worry? Clear says one potential solution is to focus on measuring something small that would bring you immediate returns. He writes, “You can’t know for certain how much money you will have in retirement, but you can remove some uncertainty from the situation by measuring how much you save each month. You can’t predict when you find love, but you can pay attention to how many times you introduce yourself to someone new.”

Focusing on taking action and measuring that action disrupts the harmful loop of worry.

Which brings me to this week’s profiles. The highly-recommended feature on entrepreneur Martine Rothblatt below is the ultimate example of taking unproductive worry and making it productive.

Rothblatt, whose extraordinary life and career I’ve written about at length, had an event in her life that could unleash an avalanche of worry. Her daughter Jenesis was having trouble walking up the stairs when doctors diagnosed her with a rare disease called pulmonary arterial hypertension. The Rothblatts were told it was a terminal lung condition.

So Rothblatt, who has been called “a perpetual inventor” decided that she would find a cure for her daughter. While Jenesis was in the hospital, Rothblatt went to the hospital library and began reading everything she could find on pulmonary arterial hypertension. She progressed from reading biology textbooks to college-level textbooks to medical textbooks to medical journals. “Eventually, I knew enough to think that it might be possible that somebody could find a cure,” she says.

Ultimately, she founded United Therapeutics, a cutting-edge biotech company that develops life-extending technologies for patients in the areas of lung disease and organ manufacturing.

The company she founded created the drug that saved the life of her daughter (and the lives of many others) suffering from pulmonary hypertension.

We can’t all turn our worry into a life-saving drug company, but I give you this extreme example to remind you (and myself) that we can choose action over worry time and time again.

— Polina

PROFILES.

— The futurist putting pig hearts in humans [**HIGHLY RECOMMEND**]
— The billionaire reinventing Gucci
— America’s Olympic track star
— The matchmaker helping you find lasting love
— Yelp’s most prolific reviewer

PEOPLE TO KNOW.

The futurist putting pig hearts in humans: You may remember Martine Rothblatt when I wrote a deep-dive on her in 2022. She’s the world’s newest billionaire thanks to the fact that shares in her company United Therapeutics are up 54 times its price at its 1999 IPO. Rothblatt, who was born male and formerly known as “Martin,” co-founded Sirius Satellite Radio and then went on to launch her own biotech firm with the goal of finding a cure for her daughter’s deadly disease. (She was successful, and her daughter is now in her 30s). Today, Rothblatt is instrumental in helping manufacture pig organs to transplant into humans with end-stage renal and cardiac diseases. (Forbes; For more, check out my Profile Dossier on Rothblatt here.)

“Instead of my daughter having no chance of getting an organ, there will be enough organs for everybody.”

The billionaire reinventing Gucci: After years of ceding substantial power to brand chiefs, French billionaire François-Henri Pinault is asserting more control over the operations of the myriad fashion houses (including Gucci) that make up his family’s conglomerate, called Kering. The plan seeks to move the brands closer to luxury stalwarts like Hermès and Chanel, whose products don’t tend to go out of fashion. Since March 2020, shares of LVMH have more than doubled while those of Hermès have more than tripled. Kering, on the other hand, has lost about a quarter of its value. Can Pinault save his empire? (Wall Street Journal; if you can’t access this article, try this link.)

“You’re disappointed, you’re frustrated. Me too. I’m the first, be sure of that.”

America’s Olympic track star: Noah Lyles is the 27-year-old face of track and field in the United States. Lyles has spent the last eight years becoming one of the fastest humans in history, and he’s now headed to the Paris Olympics to show what he’s got. Ever since he was in high school, Lyle’s ultimate ambition was not just to run fast, but to transcend track-and-field stardom and achieve mainstream fame. His ubiquity during Olympics broadcasts both in his competitions and ad campaigns is a testament to how successfully he has done both. (GQ)

“To be honest, I feel that if you watch me, you'll see a show every time.”

The matchmaker helping you find lasting love: It might seem odd that Melissa Hobley is a real-life matchmaker who is working with 50 to 100 singles around the globe at any given time. She has, after all, spent much of the last decade working for dating apps whose goal, presumably, is for singles to connect through their phones. She is the CMO of Tinder, a position she’s held since August 2022. Before that she worked for OkCupid for over five years. Here’s why she thinks there’s still room to find love the “old-fashioned way.”

“Not everyone can be on dating apps, and there are many ways to find love out there. I want to be involved in all of them.”

Yelp’s most prolific reviewer: Robert Siu was Yelp’s second most prolific reviewer in 2023. Siu, a self-described “discerning epicurean traveler,” has been an Elite Yelper since 2010. Last year, Siu estimates he wrote about 1,200 reviews — “that’s like four reviews a day” — for everything from Canada’s Border Service Agency (“Very quick and very efficient”) to Cafeteria Cavana in Spain (where he was attended to by a “very energetic and attentive server”). Here’s what it’s like to write over a thousand reviews in a year. (Eater)

“Yelp has said to all of us, as long as there’s an address, you can review it.”

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