Lessons learned or lessons earned?
Edition #078
Hey friends, happy Sunday!
I skipped last weeks newsletter to take some time not staring at a screen and honestly, it felt great!
This week I spent a couple days in London attending an event + meeting clients IRL. Meeting people in person is so much better than online, if you know of any interesting events coming up let me know!
Alrighty, let's get into the Filter!
One Lesson
Lessons learned or lessons earned?
At 18 I tried to build a blog. I had no idea what to talk about so I just started by taking ideas from the content I was consuming and making them my own.
After a couple months I'd barely made any progress. Each post would get 10 page views (and I was half of them).
So I decided that the issue must be the medium.
Maybe I wasn't meant to be a writer but instead my calling was to be on camera? This lead me to making videos for YouTube and Instagram.
I'd spend days recording, editing and stressing about each video for it to be viewed by 12 people.
The videos were bad (like seriously bad). I think I must have been caught up in that Gary Vee hype because I was so preachy and barely even knew what I was talking about 😅
After sticking at it for a few months I realised that I was making a crucial mistake.
I was trying to make content without having anything to say.
At 18 I didn't know who I was. I hadn't built a business or really experienced much, yet I was trying to make content about building a business 🧐.
I was sharing lessons I'd learned in theory, but never earned.
See, I like to categorise learning into two core buckets:
Lessons earned: something you've learned from taking action and experiencing it yourself.
Lessons learned: something you've learned in theory from someone else.
The problem with only having lessons learned is that you have no concept of how that information applies to the real world.
When you only learn the theory you become that over-confident student who thinks they know better than the expert.
To have things worth saying you need to earn some lessons.
After coming to this realisation I decided it was time to earn some lessons, I quit wasting time trying to create content with nothing to say and focused on gaining experiences through building a business.
Whenever people say that everyone should create I'm always a little hesitant, because for me not creating helped me earn lessons worth sharing, something which would have been much slower if I spent a large chunk of my time trying to create those videos.
Two Ideas
I.
When everything is important, nothing gets done.
II.
Feeling lost is necessary to finding clarity.
Things always become clear after uncertainty.
Three Favourite Finds
Thomas Frank on overthinking YouTube: This thread shares some great lessons about people overthinking YouTube which apply to entrepreneurship as a whole.
There's this tempting thing in entrepreneurship that I call 'optimising the unimportant' — where it's much more appealing to spend hours trying to build the 'perfect' solution when instead you should opt for good enough and keep moving forward.
Rejecting Specialization: As a freelancer/ agency the concensus is that you should specialise.... "I am an X that helps Y company achieve Z"
But Tom Critchlow argues that maybe we should reject specialization and instead focus on developing strong opinions and a distinctive vibe. When you build a business in this way you're much less likely to burn out because you don't box yourself in and people are more likely to view you as an expert because you have your defined way of doing things.
How to cold DM people: Cold DMing people can feel awkward and overly formal but doing it well can unlock doors and build lifelong friendships.
This thread shares a great framework for sending out cold DMs. Ultimately all you need to do is reach out to people you're genuinely interested in, take an interest in what they are doing and keep things light.
End note
The Sunday Filter relies on word of mouth to reach more people, if you’re enjoying the newsletter I’d really appreciate you sending it to a friend or sharing on Twitter.
Have a fantastic week!
- Stephen
p.s yum