Media – Page 34

Scott Adams (the Dilbert guy) on how to be successful

Dilbert: Follow Your Passion

Scott shares a very honest and modest story of his own success over at the WSJ.

1. Don’t “follow your passion”

When I was a commercial loan officer for a large bank, my boss taught us that you should never make a loan to someone who is following his passion. For example, you don’t want to give money to a sports enthusiast who is starting a sports store to pursue his passion for all things sporty. That guy is a bad bet, passion and all. He’s in business for the wrong reason.

Cal Newport explains why the phrase is a modern phenomenon.

2. Success drives passion, not the other way around

Dilbert started out as just one of many get-rich schemes I was willing to try. When it started to look as if it might be a success, my passion for cartooning increased because I realized it could be my golden ticket. In hindsight, it looks as if the projects that I was most passionate about were also the ones that worked. But objectively, my passion level moved with my success. Success caused passion more than passion caused success.

3. Systems are more powerful than goals

If you achieve your goal, you celebrate and feel terrific, but only until you realize that you just lost the thing that gave you purpose and direction. Your options are to feel empty and useless, perhaps enjoying the spoils of your success until they bore you, or to set new goals and re-enter the cycle of permanent presuccess failure.

4. Failed? Don’t just get stronger…get smarter

I do want my failures to make me stronger, of course, but I also want to become smarter, more talented, better networked, healthier and more energized. If I find a cow turd on my front steps, I’m not satisfied knowing that I’ll be mentally prepared to find some future cow turd. I want to shovel that turd onto my garden and hope the cow returns every week so I never have to buy fertilizer again. Failure is a resource that can be managed.

Scott ends by sharing anecdotes of his own failures, including a big investment in Webvan, which he subsequently increased just a few weeks before it declared bankruptcy. What did he learn? Diversify your investments. And never listen to company management.

Wonderful article. Please read it. See my linkblog for a stream of articles that I’m reading.

10 great articles – Kevin Kelly’s The Third Culture, Mark Manson on India, Jesse Plemons and more

Check out my new linkblog. It includes every article I’ve read in November, with highlights. It’s a neat conversion of my public Evernote notebook, and I’ll be using it to share what I’m reading.

The Evan Williams formula for getting rich online

From a Wired review of an Evan Williams speech.

The main point: Stop creating things cause they’re new and cool. Instead, find something everyone OBVIOUSLY wants, see how they’re currently getting it, and make it easier, faster and cheaper.

…the internet is “a giant machine designed to give people what they want.”

Williams created Blogger and Twitter and will be a billionaire soon…so he knows how to give people what they want.

“We often think of the internet enables you to do new things,” Williams said. “But people just want to do the same things they’ve always done.”

The Internet will become a digital representation of the real world. If you carry that thinking far enough, we may cease to exist as physical organisms (see Tron).

Increasingly, everything that happens and everything we do, everyplace you go and check in, every thought you have and share, and every person who liked that thought… is all connected… and it keeps multiplying relentlessly.”

The Internet is about convenience, and convenience is speed and “cognitive ease”.

In other words, people don’t want to wait, and they don’t want to think — and the internet should respond to that.

See Google (finding things), Amazon (buying things), Apple (communicating things), and Facebook (also communicating things?).

The key to making a fortune online […] is to remove extra steps from common activities as he did with Blogger.

See also Uber (getting somewhere). Chris Sacca calls it closing the loop.

The Internet is not utopia. It’s more like…modern agriculture:

“[Agriculture] made life better. It not only got people fed, it freed them up to do many more things — to create art and invent things.”

Modern agriculture has downsides (eg, animal abuse, overeating, environmental damage) and so does the Internet (eg, mental health, media addiction).

A Dave McClure quote sums it up:

“Great companies do 1+ of 3 things: Get you LAID (= sex). Get you PAID (= money). Get you MADE (= power)”

1-Read-A-Day: what I learned running a newsletter, October edition

Every month, I share what I’ve learned running the 1-Read-A-Day newsletter. Here’s the first month.

How well is it doing?

Subscribers: 230 (only 10 new subs since September)
Open rate: 22.6%
Click rate: 2.5%
Most opened email: Lesson 5, Making Yourself a CEO by Ben Horowitz
Most clicked email: Lesson 39, How Mint beat Wesabe by Noah Kagan

What did I learn in October?

Readers were quiet this month. Several commented that they enjoyed the 10-question quiz after Lesson 50
I recorded three short audio summaries for Lessons 1, 2, and 3. Just experimentin’. They’re around a minute each. You can hear them by clicking the big blue button near the top
I published another 101, Startup Mistakes and Failures. 27 great links featuring Max Skibinsky, Siqi Chen, Derek Sivers, and more
I wish there was an easy, effective way to convert emails into blog posts. There are plugins that convert RSS feeds into emails, but I can’t find a good plugin to do the opposite. With email newsletters growing in popularity, I hope this problem is solved soon
I wish Mailchimp allowed me to better manage autoresponder emails in bulk. Right now, if I make a design change to one Lesson, I need to manually repeat that change more than 50 times!

What’s coming up

More 101s: Hiring, Product, and Stories
Once I hit 100 lessons, I’ll create a draft Startup Textbook (a well-designed PDF file featuring the 101s and the summaries). Hope we’ll be there by December
I haven’t marketed the newsletter (beyond blog posts and tweets), but subscribers are not growing (5% since September). I’ve been unwilling to make a big push, and I’m not sure why (perhaps I don’t think it’s good enough?)

Thanks to all subscribers for your feedback. It’s been a pleasure to do this. Here’s to showing up and getting to work. Cheers!

PS. If you run an email newsletter, I’d love to hear what you’re doing and what you’ve learned

Pixar’s 22 Rules of Storytelling

A wonderful list from former Pixar storyboard artist Emma Coates (whose blog is wonderful too).

She tweeted them in 2011, and a fan created this set of matching graphics in 2013.

I wanted a simple text list for reference, so here it is. The lessons are timeless.

1. You admire a character for trying more than for their successes.

2. You gotta keep in mind what’s interesting to you as an audience, not what’s fun to do as a writer. They can be v. different.

3. Trying for theme is important, but you won’t see what the story is actually about til you’re at the end of it. Now rewrite.

4. Once upon a time there was _____. Every day, _____. One day _____. Because of that, _____. Because of that, _____. Until finally _____.

(I love #4)

5. Simply. Focus. Combine characters. Hop over detours. You’ll feel like you’re losing valuable stuff but it sets you free.

6. What is your character good at, comfortable with? Throw the polar opposite at them. Challenge them. How do they deal?

7. Come up with your ending before you figure out your middle. Seriously. Endings are hard, get yours working up front.

8. Finish your story, let go even if it’s not perfect. In an ideal world you have both, but move on. Do better next time.

9. When you’re stuck, make a list of what WOULDN’T happen next. Lots of times the material to get you unstuck will show up.

10. Pull apart the stories you like. What you like in them is a part of you; you’ve got to recognize it before you can use it.

11. Putting it on paper lets you start fixing it. If it stays in your head, a perfect idea, you’ll never share it with anyone.

12. Discount the 1st thing that comes to mind. And the 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th – get the obvious out of the way. Surprise yourself.

13. Give your characters opinions. Passive/malleable might seem likable to you as you write, but it’s poison to the audience.

14. Why must you tell THIS story? What’s the belief burning within you that your story feeds off of? That’s the heart of it.

15. If you were your character, in this situation, how would you feel? Honesty lends credibility to unbelievable situations.

16. What are the stakes? Give us reason to root for the character. What happens if they don’t succeed? Stack the odds against.

17. No work is ever wasted. If it’s not working, let go and move on – it’ll come back around to be useful later.

18. You have to know yourself: the difference between doing your best & fussing. Story is testing, not refining.

19. Coincidences to get characters into trouble are great; coincidences to get them out of it are cheating.

20. Exercise: take the building blocks of a movie you dislike. How d’you rearrange them into what you DO like?

21. You gotta identify with your situation/characters, can’t just write ‘cool’. What would make YOU act that way?

22. What’s the essence of your story? Most economical telling of it? If you know that, you can build out from there.