Ideas

If you spend enough time on the internet, you will hear the exact same advice on loop: “Don’t trade your time for money.”

It’s terrible advice if you’re just starting out.

Trading your time isn’t stupid when your time has zero market value. You have to sell your time to build the skills that actually make your time valuable. Get a job. Start an agency. Freelance. Do things that require zero upfront capital and purely rely on your sweat.

First, increase the value of your time. Then stop selling it.

Once your time is actually worth something, you move up the ladder. You go from one-to-one (freelance) to one-to-many (software, digital products, YouTube).

As Naval Ravikant says, you decouple your time from your output by using leverage: Labor, Capital, Code, and Media.

But you can’t start at the top of the ladder. Start with what you have, sell your time, get good, and move up.

One of the easiest & most recommended first steps if you want to get good at anything.

Copywork is where you copy a piece of work of which you want to become better at (creative name, I know).

Let’s say you want to get really good at design, specifically web design. Instead of forcing yourself to create a masterpiece out of thin air by yourself, find great web designs and just copy them. Understand how they did it, what font they used, how the layouts differ, everything.

Copyhour: do the copywork for an hour (or 15/30 minutes) daily in whatever you want to become good at.

If you go to learn music, you always do this. You try to recreate famous songs, understand them, play them a thousand times to sound as close as possible, then tinker and change it a bit here and there… and soon you’ll make your own.

Same in cooking. I’m currently doing this for my copywriting.

We should start having Joy of missing out (JOMO) rather than Fear of missing out (FOMO).

Have you seen? Have you heard? What’s your take on? Can you believe? OMG that tweet. Read that story yet? Seen that video? Finish the second season yet? So much FOMO. We’d rather celebrate JOMO: The Joy of Missing Out. Life’s better when you’re missing the stuff that doesn’t matter anyway.

One of the easiest ways is to say “Fuck you” to the news.

Original & for more: 37signals (One of my fav founders/philosophers maybe??)

“great taste” isn’t something one just born with. It’s a skill. & like any other, we can get better at.

I recently read about this specially for YouTube, but it applies to literally anything:

“Start a private playlist on YouTube, and save video ideas that catch your eye… Then every weekend go through that playlist, and write down why you think that video performed. It helps train your ’taste’ for ideas…”

TL;DR: Build a swipe file. Save great hooks if you want to get better at writing. Screenshot websites if you want to get better at design.

Once a week, ask: Why tf did this work? What did they do differently?

Build this ritual, & build your taste.

remember: Almost anything can be trained (even being funny or going viral), so choose what matters & spend your time on it.

(also to build a skill, spend time on copyhour ).

If you’re working at a company right now, spend your time noticing people. Ask yourself: “If I left today and started my own company, who would I hire?”

For example, maybe there’s a sales guy who is massively underrated. Make a mental (or physical) note: If I ever need someone in sales, he’s the first one I reach out to.

Then, when the day comes and you actually need a sales guy, you reach out to him and say:

“I have no idea if you’re available right now, but a while ago I made a list of the 5 people I’d like to work with someday, and you were on it. That day is here. What are you up to now?”

The goal is to spot the heavy hitters early.

That way, when you finally start your next thing, finding great talent won’t be your limiting factor.

If you want to make more money, you simply have to give people the ability to pay you in multiple different ways.

Aka: “put more buy buttons on the internet.”

It can be selling your time, consulting, building multiple micro SaaS, DWY (Done With You), DFY (Done For You), digital products, courses, whatever.

It’s not a one-day process, and not everything will work. But over time, things compound.

You know that feeling when you discover someone interesting and immediately binge everything they’ve ever made?

We need to build that for ourselves.

When you’re just starting out, it’s hard to find the motivation to create. It feels like no one is watching anyway. But you aren’t creating for today. You are building a Binge Bank.

You are stocking the shelves so that when someone finally does discover you, they have a deep rabbit hole to fall into. Videos, articles, podcasts, whatever. Build the backlog now. When they arrive, make sure they have plenty to binge.

You see the world a certain way currently. as if like there’s a border (aka frame) around it. Everything you know about the world fits inside that border.

Then, you hear a story or learn something new that sits outside the frame, Then It breaks “the frame”. As the frame has to expand to your new information.

I love these moments, It’s like collecting Pokémon cards. I want to collect as many frame-breaking ideas as possible.

Take the story of the elephant: chained to a small peg when it’s young & weak. As it grows into a massive adult, it could easily snap the chain, but it doesn’t even try. Its frame was set when it was young, and it never realized the frame could be broken.

But you don’t want to be that.