On Saving 🤑Youtube vs Netflix 🥊Making good art ✏️
Edition #044
Hey friends,
Greetings from Manchester, I hope you're having a great Sunday!
This week I've been toying with a couple of ideas that I will share in article form next week. I've also been using Twitter a lot more to improve my writing and share ideas, you can follow me here.
Over the next couple of weeks, I'm starting to focus heavily on making YouTube videos - if anyone knows any great video editors please send them my way :)
Here's what I want to share with you this week:
How Tim Ferriss built his audience based empire: After hearing a question asking "Who has the most fun doing what they are doing?" I immediately thought about Tim Ferriss. So I decided to break down how he built an audience based business that allows him to optimise for fun.
Ulysses Pact, how a 2700+ year old technique can help you to build better habits: You might have heard of setting Ulysses Pacts - little contracts you make with yourself to keep good habits even when you're not feeling it. In this thread, I break down where that term comes from and how we can use Ulysses pacts to form better habits.
Here are this weeks finds:
I.
🤑 On saving young
(Article)
💸 This post from Nick Maggiulli changed my mind about the benefits of investing young. For a while, I believed that investing in yourself (building skills and gaining experience) was more important in your early 20s than maximising your savings.
But in the post Nick shows how if you take two people:
- Person A - invests $10k per year for 10 years then they just let their money compound for another 30 years.
Net investment: $100k
- Person B - Doesn't invest for 10 years then invests $10k per year for the following 30 years.
Net investment: $300k
Person A, who invested early has more money after 40 years than the person who started later and invested 3x as much.
Going big while young can actually be more lucrative than investing more later in life.
There is however an opportunity cost here.
Young people typically don't earn much money, so investing a lot of money at this age can seriously impact your quality of life and future earning potential.
If you fixate on saving every last penny, neglecting your own development you'll live a life without much fun and without many opportunities to build real wealth.
Personally, I now take a hybrid approach to this, over the next 10 years (21-31) I will focus on investing as much as possible with a few guidelines:
- I'd rather focus on experience, building skills, and building my own assets than earning more in the short term (to increase long-term earning potential).
- Saving should not mean limiting experiences.
This is a fascinating read to help set yourself up for the future, I'm curious what your take is on saving/investing?
II.
🍿 On Youtube vs Netflix
(Data)
🎬 YouTube and Netflix have a lot of similarities. They both provide video content, have become synonymous with daily life and they both made over $7 billion dollars in the last quarter.
But YouTube has one crucial edge over Netflix. Its content is user generated.
Netflix has to spend millions of dollars producing their own content, acquiring the rights to shows and selling subscriptions.
Youtube on the other hand lets their users do the work. They just provide the platform to enable them, then monetise that attention through ads.
Two similar companies with extremely different business models.
III.
✏️ On making good art
(Speech)
📝 This speech from Neil Gaiman on leading a creative life is incredible!
If you're a freelancer, creator or entrepreneur the lessons he distills here will save you years of mistakes and second-guessing yourself.
His view on putting out a lot of work before you can expect anything in return is something that I wish I'd taken on board sooner.
"A freelance life, a life in the arts, is sometimes like putting messages in bottles, on a desert island, and hoping that someone will find one of your bottles and open it and read it, and put something in a bottle that will wash its way back to you: appreciation, or a commission, or money, or love. And you have to accept that you may put out a hundred things for every bottle that winds up coming back."
A couple other notable lines from the speech:
"Often you will discover that the harder you work, and the more wisely you work, the luckier you get."
"The old rules are crumbling and nobody knows what the new rules are.
So make up your own rules."
Read the transcript → or Watch the video →
One interesting idea
"Your business is a means rather than an end, a vehicle to enrich your life rather than one that drains the life you have." - Michael Gerber
End note
If you enjoyed this edition of the Sunday Filter then I’d love it if you could share it with a few friends. You can send them over here to sign up or share on Twitter.
Have a great week!
- Stephen
p.s what’s that guys problem?