Ideas, Personal Monopoly’s and Finding Time
Hey friends, happy Sunday!
This week I wrote my personal user manual along with a few new book notes + summaries. I have a lot going on at the minute but I'm enjoying work and looking forward to sharing things once they're ready.
Anyway, let's get onto the Filter!
On Ideas
I really enjoyed this piece on why "Ideas Aren't Cheap" by Justin Jackson. In it Justin talks about how people often overemphasize execution, deluding themselves into thinking that by working hard enough you can make any idea successful when that's not the case.
For me, this post shows why most people's first step into "Entrepreneurship" should be freelancing/building an agency. If you start by providing a service you know people are willing to pay for then you can start to work your way up as you build skills, validate and develop your ideas.
I'm going to write a post on a framework for "Stairstepping your way to Entrepreneurship" soon building off of Nathan Barry's "Ladders of Wealth Creation"
On building a Personal Monopoly
I've been reading "The Almanack of Naval Ravikant" by Eric Jorgenson this week and I can't shake the idea of building specific knowledge.
I'm currently working towards building my own "specific knowledge" or as David Perell calls it a "Personal Monopoly"
"Arm yourself with specific knowledge, accountability, and leverage.
Specific knowledge is knowledge you cannot be trained for. If society can train you, it can train somone else and replace you.
Specific knowledge is found by pursuing your genuine curiosity and passion rather than whatever is hot right now.
Building specific knowledge will feel like play to you but will look like work to others." - Naval
I'd highly recommend checking out the book, it's completely free and incredibly insight dense.
On Finding Time
Finally I just want to share this short article from Derek Sivers on finding time to be creative.
"When you experience someone else’s genius work, a little part of you feels, “That’s what I could have, would have, and should have done!”
Someone else did it. You didn’t.
They fought the resistance. You gave in to distractions.
They made it top priority. You said you’d get to it some day.
They took the time. You meant to.
When this happens, you can take it two ways:
You could let that part of you give up. “Oh well. Now I don’t need to make that anymore.”
Or you could do something about that jealous pain. Shut off your phone, kill the distractions, make it top priority, and spend the time.
It takes many hours to make what you want to make. The hours don’t suddenly appear. You have to steal them from comfort. Whatever you were doing before was comfortable. This is not. This will be really uncomfortable.
The few times in my life I’ve made a real change like this, it felt awful on the surface. I wasn’t shallow-happy about it. I wasn’t smiling. I was annoyed and fighting it inside, but on the outside I did the work. And in the end, got the deeper satisfaction of finishing.
If you haven't already I'd highly recommend checking out Derek's writing.
Tweet of the Week
Quote of the Week
"Coding, writing books, recording podcasts, tweeting, YouTubing - these kinds of things are permissionless. You don't need anyone's permission to do them, and that's why they are very egalitarian.
They're the great equalizers of leverage. Every great software developer, for example, now has an army of robots working for him at nighttime while he or she sleeps, after they've written the code, and it's cranking away.
You're never going to get rich renting out your time.
Whenever you can in life, optimize for independence rather than pay. If you have independence and you're accountable on your output, as opposed to your input - that's the dream." - Naval
Final Notes
If you enjoyed this edition of the Sunday Filter then I'd love it if you share it with a few friends. You can send them over here to sign up.
Hopefully, I will have a few announcements to share with you next week.
Have a great Sunday,
- Stephen