WIP – will update over time
this is a video I made fairly quickly off the cuff after a conversation with someone, and several people have told me that it’s some of my best work.
chapter notes:
people have ideas but don’t want responsibility
many people are happy + eager to be silent or silent-ish helpers to someone who’s willing to be more public/visible
Beyonce is a team effort
Be a strategic player – see: LessUnstrategic
How to get lucky
Optimize for survival
Evaluate your body of work
Teach people to appreciate your work
text from previous thread/blogpost:
^ this is a very real and underestimated phenomenon. If you make twitter threads, people start contributing to them, allowing you to do more than you can personally conceive. If there is a clear vector, people like to contribute to it. Few people like (or are good at) creating and sustaining vectors for other people to contribute to.
I’ve met a lot of people who feel overwhelmed by the prospect of doing big things. But actually just do small things as much as you can and the market will pull the good stuff out of you, help you along the way. Some of my bestselling t-shirts at @jibabom were suggested by customers.
I repeat… if you’re moderately good at articulating something, just enough to strike a nerve, people with relevant experiences and ideas etc will start telling you their stories and dramatically level up your understanding + ability to articulate it even better.
This, by the way, is why top-tier storytellers, performers, artists, authors etc seem to be so much stratospherically better than beginners, amateurs & enthusiasts. They have entire support teams not only helping them but leveling them up. Sparring with the mega-mind.
Of course, people will also beat the shit out of you. It’s not all sunshine. And nice people tend to hesitate while assholes do not, so you do have to put in effort to encourage the support you want.
What I’ve been doing on Twitter over time is carefully tending to the 1-2% of my best reply folks for a decade. If my mentions seem like a rather wholesome and nourishing space, this is a significant part of why. Encourage weirdos, discourage assholes.
If you collect something in public, people will start contributing to your collection: