On Not Following your Passion, Teaching Everything you Know & Becoming a Better Writer
Hey friends, happy Sunday!
This week has largely been taken up by a couple freelance projects but I am close to launching a couple things next week.
The first being MakerFlow, a blog / youtube channel for me to teach what I know and get into the nitty-gritty details of building high performing websites and businesses. The idea behind MakerFlow is to teach people the hard skills needed to build profitable online businesses [the none scammy/bullshit way]. More on this next week.
Second is the personal Youtube channel. I've been putting this off for a while because I will suck in the beginning and it's scary to do. But I want to create more and build this into part of my business. I have a lot of ideas for content and my goal is to get 1% better with every video. On my personal channel I will be covering a broader range of topics I find interesting from solopreneurship & freelancing to self development & productivity. Next week I will hopefully have a video to share with you.
Let's get into the Filter!
On Not Following your Passion
People always tell you to follow your passion, but that's bad advice. This post from Ryan Holiday "Don’t Follow Your Passion, It’s What’s Holding You Back" really resonated with me on that topic.
Passion is something I've struggled with in the past. A narrative that is often pushed is that everyone has a "passion" and that is what they must do with their lives. But as Ryan points out passion is just ego.
Passion typically masks a weakness. Its breathlessness and impetuousness and franticness are poor substitutes for discipline, for mastery, for strength and purpose and perseverance. You need to be able to spot this in others and in yourself, because while the origins of passion may be earnest and good, its effects are comical and then monstrous. Passion is seen in those who can tell you in great detail who they intend to become and what their success will be like—they might even be able to tell you specifically when they intend to achieve it or describe to you legitimate and sincere worries they have about the burdens of such accomplishments. They can tell you all the things they’re going to do, or have even begun, but they cannot show you their progress. Because there rarely is any.
To build a self fulfilling life you don't need to "find your passion" you instead need to build discipline, mastery and perseverance. Over time you will start to see and feel your purpose but this only comes through building skills that set you up to find your purpose.
How can someone be busy and not accomplish anything? Well, that’s the passion paradox. If the definition of insanity is trying the same thing over and over and expecting different results, then passion is a form of mental retardation—deliberately blunting our most critical cognitive functions. The waste is often appalling in retrospect; the best years of our life burned out like a pair of spinning tires against the asphalt.
If you're looking for another great resource on breaking the passion hypothesis you should check out So Good They Can't Ignore You by Cal Newport.
On Teaching Everything you Know
This week I re-read this great post from Nathan Barry called How Teaching Everything I Know Grew My Audience. In the post he outlines the framework for doing great creative work.
It's as simple as sharing what you know...
once you’ve got your core focus, all you need to do it start writing about it. Every time you learn something new, put it in a blog post. Every time you figure out a new way to get a project done, put it in a blog post. No matter how big or how small the lesson, put it in a blog post.
Now there’s a lot of promotion and so much more that needs to go into, but at it’s core, if you teach what you know and do it consistently, the attention will come. The audience will build, and you can eventually turn that into product sales or a great business.
This concept is something I will revisit often over the coming months as I transition into creating on MakerFlow and on my personal blog/youtube channel.
here’s two easy steps to teach what you know:
Pick a core focus.
For Chris it was teaching CSS. For Jason it was online business and design. Once you have that figured out, focusing on your niche gives you the flexibility to write on whatever you want and can expand from there.
Write and share everything you learn consistently.
When I was writing my first design books, I was just learning marketing, but I wanted to pay it forward and help out other people as I had been by posts that shared details. So, I wrote launch posts after every book launch talking about every little detail – how much they made, what emails I sent, and what I did building up to the launch.
And you know what? People were actually more interested in those posts than the original design content!
On Becoming a Better Writer
Being able to write well will set you apart in any industry. Whether your a designer, developer or marketer being able to clearly and concisely communicate will set you apart. Being able to write clearly requires the ability to think clearly.
This short post from Scott Adams is one of the best I have read on writing: The Day You Became a Better Writer
I’ve almost highlighted the whole post but here are my 3 favourite excerpts:
Business writing is about clarity and persuasion. The main technique is keeping things simple. Simple writing is persuasive. A good argument in five sentences will sway more people than a brilliant argument in a hundred sentences. Don’t fight it.
Simple means getting rid of extra words. Don’t write, “He was very happy” when you can write “He was happy.” You think the word “very” adds something. It doesn’t. Prune your sentences.
Learn how brains organize ideas. Readers comprehend “the boy hit the ball” quicker than “the ball was hit by the boy.” Both sentences mean the same, but it’s easier to imagine the object (the boy) before the action (the hitting). All brains work that way. (Notice I didn’t say, “That is the way all brains work”?)
Tweet of the Week
Favourite Quote of the Week
"Burn yourself on a stove and you might persuade yourself to never go nowhere near a stove. Grow up in a home with low expectations and it's possible you'll begin to believe them. The story we tell ourselves leads to the action we take." - Seth Godin [The Practice]
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.
Have a great Sunday,
- Stephen
P.S Here's the election count in a well-functioning democracy.