Hello and welcome to the North Star. I'm your host David Burrell. And this is the North Star podcast in each episode. We explore the intersection between different ideas cultures and life philosophies. The guests are diverse, but they share profound similarities. They're Guided by Purpose Driven by curiosity and see the world with a unique lens and in each episode we get to dive into their hard-earned wisdom and apply it to our lives.
What I'm not recording podcasts I write essays on my website for al.com send a weekly email newsletter called Monday musings and run an online writing school called rite of passage. I hope you enjoy the show. My guest today is Tiago Forte. He runs an online course called building a second brain, which I took in August of 2017 and I can tell you it absolutely changed my life. I went for being overwhelmed by information to being in control of it. My writer's block.
Heared my productivity skyrocketed see Thiago changed the way I thought about work and my relationship with information and fast forward to today and Tiago and I are business partners in sane. He helped me create my online writing course rite of passage and together were building the infrastructure required to scale an online education business. Tiago is now one of my closest friends and the person who shaped my career more than anybody else and in what's becoming a tradition Thiago and I used
this podcast to reflect on our work together. So first we talked about what we've learned about email marketing and then we moved on to ideas like leadership what it means to work in small packets and personal growth. So, please enjoy this window into our work and friendship.
Tiago so what is now a tradition? This is our chance to have a really long conversation and reflect on all the work that we're doing building an online school learning about what it means to do business online. And ultimately I think this term that we've developed called being a citizen of the internet and that the internet is a place and in the same way that you emigrate to another
Country you immigrate to doing business online. And right now there isn't really this roadmap for how to do that. And a lot of our relationship is trying to figure that out and I want to spend the next couple hours reflecting on what we've learned and sharing with as much openness as we can. Let's do it. So for you, what do you think the big learnings have been? I mean, why don't we just start with email? I think email has been in the last
Six months our number one Focus really focused on segmentation really focused on building relationships with audiences and back when I was using sub stack which allowed us to build our first email list. You were using MailChimp what we found was we couldn't give different experiences to different people. So it's an example of that basically people who were on our list, but weren't ready to take one of our courses we weren't able to give people who wanted to take
Courses specific emails and so what we found was we needed to actually change how we thought about email. What is that meant to you? Yeah. It's a good starting point emails everything. We did a training. I let a training last Friday for our team on how to use the basic functions the basic features of convertkit during our weekly team call. And the reason we did that is we realized our email service.
Eider resp has at least three major roles at the first level. It's a Communications Hub. So we're sending not just Communications like General broadcasts like our Weekly Newsletter like launches like announcements, but down to the tiniest, you know, reminding people of individual calls. They have signed up for a reminding them of office hours or following up on they said they were interested in this course, and now it's available for sale. Like there's so many different kinds of
Keishon, and that's our Communications Hub. But that's just the first that's just stage one. Well, I think we're starting to look at now is the second stage which is using our email marketing platform as a CRM really as a as a database as a an intelligence engine to help us understand our customers, you know, we have an integration between convertkit which is the the email platform we use in teachable, which is the online teaching platform.
And we can so basically when someone purchases a course or enrolls in a course, they get tagged. So we sort of woke up one day and realize wait a minute. We can ask questions of convertkit that we could never asked before things like show me everyone who has bought. This course is interested in that course and has opened the last three newsletters these kind of deep sort of filters and and segmentations and still using quite the basic features of convertkit just basically tags.
Segments, but now I think there's a third level that we're just beginning to Glimpse which is business automation. I mean communication is everything in an online business, right? You're not there to you're not there in person to do it. The only way you have of interacting is communication. And so we're looking at really Advanced things like putting people into certain funnels or sending them a certain like a like a free email course or giving them kind of customize offers based on what they've said, they're interested in and based on their behavior.
Cure all of this in one single platform that we pay one or two hundred bucks a month for it's kind of insane. Yeah. I think that what's continually surprising is how much leverage we can get with software where there's basically an army of robots that is going to work for us and they don't look like traditional robots. They are just sitting in data centers. It's that great line from Duvall ravikant and what it allows us to do is you just had more than
hundred building a second brain students
and there were basically three people working on that class. There was you the teacher will Menon who is our course manager for both of our courses and I want to talk a little bit about what Will is contributed and then Bethany so what we're saying as this structure for this company is instructors then strategic decision makers and then hiring assistance and so it's those three levels coming together and what we're finding
Is that you could almost say that the new point of Pride for a lot of these software companies is a million dollars a year in Revenue per employee. Like that is almost the gold standard now. It depends on what kind of Revenue that is. So with subscription Revenue because each dollars worth more than you can have less weird. If you have a one-time Revenue like ours, then you're going to need more to sort of hit that threshold but what we can do by using teachable by using convert
kit is we don't have to hire nearly as many people which has been good in the sense that we don't have this huge team, but I'll be honest. I think that what's been difficult for me is knowing how systemic things need to be. So you're good at thinking systematically in a way that I'm not and you are so organized and you cross your t's you dot your I's and so what you've taught me the most is how to
We basically have this implicit principle that whenever you do something that is going to be repeated you turn it into a system. So you figure stuff out and that's what strategic people do but then you write it down so it can be repeated and that kind of thinking of never do something twice and a third time that you're not writing down is a big new shift in terms of how to think about running a company.
And now you're doing that from the second you leave College you're doing that from the second that you enter one of these companies. Whereas it used to be you would only do this. If you were at the c-suite of a company exactly. Yeah. So many things you mentioned there think it's a real mindset shift, you know, it's funny. The there's always sort of a I mean status signals, right? There's always a signals people look for to determine if someone is making
King it or if someone is successful or how successful they are and it's funny that that it's gone through different an evolution of different things in the past. It was your office. Oh you have an office as a secretary there. There's a you know, a big name on the side of the office. Those were the signals then it became head count the years that I lived in Silicon Valley. That was the the subtle way of telling people quite directly how big your company was. Oh, yeah, you know, we got 30 people just and you'd always say very casually I were just hanging out.
You know just like making some online courses or whatever but there's such a clear correlation between or there was between headcount and cost that you could sort of figure out you know, how much money they were making and how big they were but now that's reversed. And now it's the small companies, you know, there was that the the book that came out recently about 1 million 1 person 1 million dollar per year one person business has a whole book of profiles, right? And that that is just absolutely
Unprecedented. It's an it wasn't even physically possible. There was no way for one human being to get away with that. Right? You needed a team. You needed all these this this infrastructure and now you can just use infrastructure, right? So, I think it's a big sea change but it does require a different way of thinking thinking systematically thinking strategically intentionally like when you do something you think how can I never do this again? How can this be the first and last time or
Least one of the only times that I do this thing which again is reversal. Usually you do something and you sort of feel a sense of Pride like yeah. I really I got it done. I crushed it. I really did this heroic act and in this new way of thinking you have to think how can I not have to do that? Give me an example of that.
Something as simple as you know, okay. Here's a good example. So during the launch of a course, we have to send a lot of emails right people opt-in. So they say we want to hear these emails. So suddenly, you know, we have we have sort of license. We have an invitation to send them, you know as the the end of the launch approaches daily sometimes more than one email a day and it always in the past. That's me sitting down every day or every couple days and composing that email right which
Heels and it is a high leverage thing to do, you know to sit down and write an email to thousands and thousands of people is a very high leverage thing to do but there's a big difference between High leverage and not having to do it at all. So what we're starting to look at now is how can we look at that sequence of emails not just as a bunch of emails, I wrote to people but as a funnel as a sequence in convertkit, they're called sequences and just reuse them, you know, like have them saved either within convertkit or copy them to somewhere like
Doc's are notion and just duplicate the sequence that we now know Works change the details change the dates change the price whatever and then that for then freeze, this is the true significance is that frees us up to do things that are novel, you know to work with Partners to create new content to record a new season of the podcast all these kinds of things. Yeah. That was for me. One of the things that I've realized with rite of passage is also as you get more and more systematic
You can get more and more detail oriented. So actually second brains an even better example where we have had a system for editing videos after every lecture and then we came in and after we brought on will will wrote tons of show notes where basically after every live session that we did. We have 16 and rite of passage will would write out all the main takeaways and then you could go on and you could re-watch the video and then what happened was
we said well just because it's one session that's actually an all these different chunks. And so then what we did is we you broke down each live session into five to eight different components. So then you have these four to six minute videos and there's this great quote by Alfred Whitehead that is civilization expands by the number of tasks. You can perform without thinking about them and I think it's an amazing idea.
Where things get basically automated at some level or there's custom and there's precedent and how you do something. Then you move up the Maslow's hierarchy of needs but have difficulty in task and then you get up into more creative tasks and you can do things because lower levels of the system are automated and then you're just always climbing this ladder of than helping our students. Yeah, that's what it is.
That's what it is these processes. They go through an evolution. This was this was a big turning point for me actually in thinking this way. I met with the the former I think head of operations at Mindvalley, which is one of the the biggest online schools on the planet and he just was talking through some of these challenges with me and he kind of noticed. I was conflating two things and he said,
you know, there's a difference between a
What was it between a training and an sop a standard operating procedure? And I was like, what do you mean he's like a training. So so basically what was happening is every time I wanted to create an sop this is the word that we generally use. I think it's the perfect word. I thought I had to create a training. I thought I had to have a video with every step explained at this very high level of quality because that's what I create for my customers. But then when when did I ever have energy for that every time I would have a few hours a day?
Wait a minute. Am I going to create a training just internally for like two people or why don't I use that time instead to create something for my for my students in my customers so it would never get done but there's a key difference training is a very is very like late stage of evolution right by the time, you know how to explain it. You have metaphors you have Frameworks you have lenses through which to view it like it's fully legible. Basically, that's that's quite evolved in the beginning. You just have bullet points. You have a checklist you have you have just a few little
all notes that still actually require a lot of human thought and only later on does it get to be something that you can really just complete kind of mindlessly, you know, this gets me thinking into one of the big learnings that we had as a business. Like if I were to go back to 6 months ago David and Tiago one of the things that we have underestimated and it's not because people told us not to do this. I think that there's a certain amount of lessons that you just need to learn the hard way and one of them was hiring a
Hence, so I'll speak for myself here. What I tried to do was hire an assistant who would work for me 10 hours a week and I did the classic conventional wisdom thing find an assistant not because they're really competent. But because they're inexpensive. Oh your assistance going to be doing all the things you don't want to be doing. Therefore. You should pay them very cheap did that and it never worked because they weren't working for me long enough to develop.
Philip a relationship and beyond that they weren't opting into an experience that required a certain level of competence and everyone was like, oh go hire people in the Philippines all this sort of stuff and then you your credit said I'm going to do the exact opposite and work with a company called great assistant and it's not only going to be
Pensive when you have the assistant but you're going to have to pay thousands of dollars to find the assistant in the first place crazy idea and I didn't do it and then you started working with yours and it's started making things better. It was obvious that there were a lot of things that you were no longer doing and then I went ahead and I hired an assistant named Becca who's just been phenomenal and what I've found is because I pay her very well she is in America. It's
So contrarian to how everybody thinks about it and even when I announced it to my email list that I had done this I got all these responses. What are you doing man? You're wasting away your money and I have found that she now is part of the the tribe one of us and in a way that people don't usually talk about assistance. And so what we've done is we've gone from having assistance be cheap to having assistance be expensive from having assistance be a throwaway to having weekly meetings with our assistance.
Single week to having assistance being all the way on the other side of the country to having them be in America and being people who speak our language who know our culture and whenever we do live calls there right there with us. Yeah. It's been a huge shift and it really does require such a mindset shift.
I mean you you mentioned your mindset shift. I think a big one for me is
I think previously my attitude towards assistance was like that. They needed to save me time immediately. I didn't see them as Investments. I thought this is like a SAS. You should just be able to put in your credit card and have whatever problem that you had just disappear instantly. And so what kept happening and I had two or three assistance before the current one that's been working. Well is I would not include them in decisions. They wouldn't be part of the loop, which is a completely self-reinforcing.
Because it's a not part of the loop. Then you don't want to spend the extra time to bring them into the loop. But then because they're not in the loop then it's like this this completely self-reinforcing thing. So I think you know paying a recruiting service. Basically, it's fun. It's funny you think of like recruiting Services being for executives. We use the recruiting service for our personal assistants, but if you think about the leverage that that person gives you it's as if you're hiring an executive, you know in our in our business with just a handful of people are assistance have a huge amount of responsibility. So it makes sense to find the best person.
Sun' and so, you know, and it was still hard the first two months maybe three months. I was spending more time than I was saving like any investment right you pay money now so that later you can have a return and it was tough. We had you know, one or two meetings a week and have to explain everything really slowly really patiently, but now she's so in the loot in some ways more in the loop than I am. I think that's a key turning point where it's like she can now open
An end closed Loops completely on her own. That's the magic moment because then neither of you are waiting on each other. She's never stopping what she's doing to get a decision from you. She has all the context she needs and she this is another important part. She knows my principles. She knows my values. She knows my priorities. She knows my schedule, right? So if she if someone has all those things they can almost stand in for you. They can make a surprisingly large range of decisions just to be clear. We wrote all these things out. So what
We did was we wrote company values and we wrote Our decision-making guidelines. And one of the ones that I wrote that I got from you that I think is something that we now do as a company has been the theme of even this conversation so far is what I call build once benefit forever where the transition I've made when I started my career really Scrappy just get it done get it done get it done get it done cross off the toilet the to-do list now my question is, how do I get?
This
thing not only done off my to-do list, but how do I make sure it never shows up on my to do list again? And if we do that, then we can get things to a point where we actually have that leverage. And so what we're doing is we're just you and I are going out and we're looking at undefined unsolved problems and we are basically wrangling in the chaos and making it Concrete in some way then we are passing.
NG it through the company and making it more and more and more distilled and concrete very clear what needs to be done and ultimately to have a software product run it and then we get to a place where like you were saying we can be doing a lot of Revenue per employee which gives us what we ultimately want which is to focus on the work to be able to spend a lot of time doing creative work is really it.
And to not be dragged down and Chaos. You know what I love about working with you is there we haven't had a fire ever, you know, like we don't ever have to put out fires. We don't ever have there is there are moments of intensity like during a launch but the most that ever gets his like this ambient stressful nastas, but there's never like I need to run and pick something up to make sure it's okay and
And that's why because we value that so much. We have always chosen the path of sustainable and enjoyable growth for the business rather than trying to grow as fast as we possibly can exactly.
Yeah, it's such a it's such a counterintuitive and kind of countercultural thing where you're supposed to if you want to grow a business, if you successful at this you have to yeah always take on more load more responsibility more way take on bigger challenges take on bigger risks. We think the opposite as we as we grow. We're like, we actually have more free time. We have more freedom. We have more creative projects. It's it's almost like I think
technology and the internet have given us more degrees of freedom than we realize I was reading this recently. I can't remember where we're so much of Technology. We didn't cash out some blogger was talking about we didn't cash out technology and freedom and less stress, you know, like emails for an example now it takes you, you know 100th the time to fire off an email versus write a letter put it in the envelope addressed to go to the post office, but that hundred
Sufficiency we didn't cash out in. Oh now I have all this free time. We just sent way more emails like more than a hundred times more emails, right? So we're constantly getting the the capabilities that the technology is giving us and then just running faster or lifting more weight or trying to do more rather than letting the technology work and that's what technology does so well it works day and night in the background on so many different parallel tracks, you know, there's probably if we
We look at our convertkit. There's probably an email being sent like every few minutes. It's like a brain. It's like a giant, you know, external brain that is coordinating far. It would take 30 people to coordinate all the different sequences and and Lead magnets and automatically triggered emails all that's happening just in the background, which is so much more reliable to I always joke, so let's go back to the 17th century and the big dream is you have a machine this would be in
Edible what if you had a machine that you would just set the machine one time so you would plug in and you plug in all these buttons and maybe you have to spend 2 hours setting up the machine. But then after you set it up the machine would just make things automatically and it would be very low energy and it would just work over and over and over again 24 hours a day 7 days a week and it is as close as you could get to a
Perpetual motion machine and it's free to operate every single time. It spins. It costs you $0.00 people be like, whoa, that would be amazing and I literally just describe software. That's what software is. It is the machine that you do once and it goes over and over again and so for me what's fascinating is we run a software company and I don't know the first thing about code. I got a d-minus.
My
college computer science class. I actually failed the class like totally but the professor I went to his office hours all the time and I tried like I tried and got a d-minus and that's hard that's hard. And so he he gave me the the d-minuses at thank you for trying hard and my point is just that we now live in an age where you can you
use that perpetual motion machine that people from the 17th century imagined without getting into the details of code. You can plug in these different tools and have the perpetual motion machine work for you and it's funny because we just take it for granted but people would have said what three hundred years ago, even a hundred years ago 50 years ago and it's here now it is it exists I know is the whole no code movement, right? No.
Code leverage the capabilities capabilities of Technology without having to code and it's funny because that's the no code labels used for certain software programs like notion webflow, but that is actually a much more pervasive kind of ideology. It's a pervasive mindset shift because every platform is getting more user-friendly write ux design is no longer this crazy far out thing. Every single company knows about ux design and is doing it we have much more
Modular much more user-friendly software interfaces. We have Integrations. We have drag-and-drop Builders. This is this is I mean the the true revolution in software where you no longer need to be a specialist in the actual medium to be able to take advantage of it. What if we learned about running courses, it's very hard to describe it, but this has become our single greatest.
Core competency is running these experiences. And one of the things I've noticed is how courses have become a show and an event. So one of the most surprising things because I've been working on read a passage summer camp for 9 to 11 year olds. And so I'm working with on a rig and she comes from a teaching background. And even when I talk to actual teachers they say oh, you know, it's just an online course, but
what?
Actual teaching is a very small percentage of what running an online education program is and this is the thing that when teachers will try to transition into online education. It's where they will continually trip and fall online education is a marketing business. It's an entertainment business. And with that our courses have become such an extravaganza. So for example think of Cirque du Soleil,
Say here's what happens. The Cirque du Soleil is coming into town. There's all these advertisements around the city. There's a Billboards. There's in the newspaper. Then it starts. They build the tent. They rent out space the tent comes up all these people come you sing The Star Spangled Banner at the beginning. There's might be an intermission or something and then at the end there's like a thank you and you leave and you get to go with friends and stuff like that. Where's before? We thought of our courses as
Just like Sunday morning church, like just come and then leave and that's been a big change for us. It has it has
gosh, there's so many parts of that I think.
Part of it is the Natural Evolution of the sort of the industry where it does so different kinds of values come to the Forefront in the early years. It was just get the instruction good enough just have decent enough of a teacher with decent enough of just lessons just things to say, but I feel like we reached that threshold pretty fast, right? So then the the sort of the plain of competition moves to other things.
Like Community like are you actually meeting people you like are you actually making friends and moves to entertainment? Are you actually stimulated engaged cap, you know entertainment has this kind of dirty feel to it is I don't know what where that comes from. It's sort of this. Oh like it's less worthy. It's less important education has to be dry. Yes, boring. Otherwise, you're not learning anything. It's got to be hammered into your head isn't isn't that interesting though. We entertainment and education those words.
Have opposite connotations. Oh, is this entertainment or are you being educated was that educational or is it just entertaining think how fundamental these these polarities are to our language? But you know if you talk to people about their most effective educational experiences, it was far more than just this delivery mechanism, you know did did did the knowledge the knowledge units efficiently find their way into your neurons. Like that's that's not the way of thinking of it. Were you let's like, let's unpack the word education.
Asian it's been captivated. It's caring right it's being inspired to care is one definition. I have for entertainment, right it is it's being moved its being inspired. It's being motivated. It's being intrinsically driven, right? That's that's the I think maybe the one of the key features of entertainment. There's no for what why are you watching that amazing concert that you that you love? No reason?
Yeah, I like it. All right, there's no there's no like instrumental and to it. And so I think we're moving towards that and and that's so that is a complex move because it's not just okay find the latest instructional design textbook find the academic study that shows how to maximize learning transfer entertainment is far more subtle. It's more complex. It's subjective. It is about Trends in the culture. It's about
Just all these things that that are more much more art than science and I would almost I feel like summarize what I've learned about education over the last few years as that that I now think both teaching and learning are more art than science and we still treat it like a science. Yeah. The thing that I always focus on is how the rite of passage curriculum sure people will learn stuff but there's a and that is
Is obviously very important but there's a certain bottom up. We want our students to realize things for themselves and watch our students come together. That is very important to us. So very practically speaking we have spent so many months trying to figure out how to create student bonds and engagement digitally and that's been one of our hardest challenges man because you and I
A blind spot in that we're not big Forum people and we really like deep creative work and we're not really people who just sort of sit back and browse the internet and we really value deep friendships in the ability to spend hours on end with people and so what we have wanted is everyone within the online education sphere has said build a discourse Forum build.
A circle Forum whatever it is and allow for all that to happen. But at least for me I have had this stubborn attachment to allowing people and actually encouraging people to make lifelong friendships through our courses and people still tell me it's just impossible but it is very important to what we're doing. And so my struggle has been I don't know how to build that forum and every time I've tried to build it it has
Worked out. Well, I think you can talk a little bit about what we found with a new platform called Circle. But what I've wanted to use is I think of rite of passage at least a lot like CrossFit where you go to CrossFit for the first five weeks or so and you learn how to deadlift you learn how to bench press you learn how to squat but you learn the Motions but no one gets ripped knowing how to deadlift no one gets ripped by doing 40 bench presses.
Has for every day for five weeks you get ripped by doing rep after rep after rep, but reps are really hard. So what you need is a whole community of people who keep you engaged to keep you active who bring you back so that you show up at 6 a.m. On Monday Wednesday Friday and continue to go and that is why the CrossFit relationships are so strong. That is the kind of relationship that I want to be building and what's both
Challenging and intoxicating about building this business is that that is the vision and there's not a lot of Precedence for doing it. So I just don't even know if it's possible but it's a vision, you know. Yeah, if you like from what you just said, I realized that I think we we have one of these beliefs that not many other people agree with
I think I do I'd be interested to hear your thoughts. But it's that one of the very basic assumptions of the internet maybe of the world is that people are lazy people are fundamentally lazy. They don't like to do anything hard. You always just have to make thing remove all friction remove all barriers remove all difficulties. And and so it's interesting because that that's our self-reinforcing message because you go on a website when everything is designed for ease.
That's a pretty strong signal that this is a place for he's this is a place for low standards. Low expectations. Just do what you feel like do the minimum do whatever feels natural and then people come into our courses and we're like you're here to create something extraordinary like one of the things you're going to be most proud of in your entire life and people are so shocked by that it takes it takes a couple weeks in the beginning for them to really realize what we're asking of them, but I feel like
we've we believe that because we've discovered it that if you design the environment design the experience for that high barrier to entry high price Pierce who all have high expectations for each other models and case studies of people who have seriously levelled up their performance in whatever it is. We're teaching all these things come together to really bring out the best in people and call something like call something out of them that I think is is so
Antithetical to everything else you see online, which is all about being frictionless. Yeah. That's such a good point. I feel like standards are so countercultural. There's this new book by rust off at called the age of decadence where he talks about how we've stagnated in society and how we are resting on our Laurels and Reinventing the past. So Hollywood is a good example. It used to be that great Hollywood movies had these new original plots new stories, and now we see sequel after sequel after Sequel and
The standards to are not a popular thing where like you're saying there's it's all about frictionless Ness making things easy sign up and we'll take it for you. Hey, you don't have to go to the restaurant. We will go deliver it to you as if the whole goal of society is to make money from your couch to eat from your couch to entertain yourself from your couch. And you know, what whatever you want. It's okay and I worry sometimes
times that the endpoint of a world of anything-goes liberalism is that we conflate what feels good with what's true and what I do take pride in and it's where I am inspired by things like Navy SEAL boot camp is when things are difficult you come together and you build these bonds through challenges in a way that you just can't do if things are all about ease and what's
Hard is I still don't know the answer to this. How do you rise up to those standards to say we're going to hold you accountable. We are going to get you to do excellent work and to truly have you do things that you never thought that you could do and it's going to be hard. But at the same time we have this idea called rite of passage guilt where people fall behind because it's hard and because you're not in this physically located
environment there are certain people who are just behind and how do you also accommodate for those people because when you run a business
You don't always want to go for the most Mass Market, but we don't want to just kick people out. That's not right. So it's like the part of the reason why we have these no standards ideas is because no standards is the biggest market and if you're trying to get more customers you lower your standards, but what is the shift of that look like? Yeah. Wow, it's that balance is tough right because you don't you don't want to
You don't want to definitely want to punish people. You don't even want to make them feel bad. You don't want to make them feel guilty generally people already. Are that way too much. So it's it's it's this Ella. It's a really tricky balance elevating people standards without
without sort of other ring them or without guilt tripping them or anything like that. I can't say that it's something I don't feel like I've mastered I still get messages that sometimes people are disappointed. Sometimes they can't keep up and we do have some things like allowing people to come back and take future cohorts or posting the recording so that they can catch up there. It's okay to have sort of other alternative paths, but I mean one big thing for that has been raising the price.
Maybe one of the most important ones there's all these really interesting things. The psychology around pricing is just utterly fascinating because it's the strongest signal, you know, I can have a hundred pages of this is high-quality. This will give you great results. This will bring you success and wealth and happiness and all these things promise after promise after promise. None of that. All of that combined does not have the anywhere near the impact of just adding a zero.
Doesn't matter what people say, it doesn't matter what you say pricing money. Is this sort of that like the gravity well of money is so powerful. It's such a black-white either you have it or I have it in a funny way. I don't I don't believe money is zero sum, but at that moment of purchase, it does feel like that. You're really asking them to step over a line and the the higher that price is the more of a moment that is right like
Recently bought a car and when I went to do the payment, it was fascinating like my heart was beating I broke out in a sweat. I felt like like fear all these things from hitting a button on a website that would send the payment to buy this car. I was like what in my psychology has linked such an abstract thing as much as digital money on some Bank website to these visceral feelings of like survival almost and but so so I think what we're doing is sort of
turning that connection into a positive by asking people to make a commitment to really opt into something to place themselves into a new kind of context where who they show up as is going to be is going to be different. It's going to be a higher version of themselves. It's just like great assistant where what we did was we went with a lower price and we didn't give our assistance the respect that they deserved. Yeah, and then we paid up and we said wow.
This is now a serious commitment. And now whenever Becca text me first person. I respond to like above my parents right? It's like we now have this Duty because we have made this investment and hopefully the same thing is happening with our students. What if we learned about remote work so we have this
Forever issue where you really want to focus on second brain. I want to be focused on rite of passage. We like being aligned. We like being separate and I wouldn't say that at least four how closely we work. We don't actually talk that much we might do a phone call every two and a half weeks or maybe even more than that. And so there's this
For us at least how we like to work. What we like is hiring people and I think that remote work encourages this hiring people who are very self motivated because we don't really like to manage people and so hiring people are very self-motivated. Then we get together a couple times a year. We set priorities for the business then we have one weekly check-in 30 minutes and then we just go back and go off but this only works because everyone is self.
Evaded and then what we do is even though there are five people who are really tied into the business rather than talking to everyone at once. We have all these one-on-one connections and that's how most of the business operates. Yeah. It's very easy. It's very straightforward. I feel like this is one of the the benefits of small teams is everyone can have a relationship with everyone else you all know each other you all know what each other can do.
You could have a 30-minute weekly call and everyone talks every single person on the call. There's like six to eight people shares a usually what we do is we share a victory some sort of when and if there's anything that's blocking us or sort of stopping us that the group can help than we share that too but it's really it's really pretty amazing. Yeah people who are self-motivated self-managed. It's kind of cool because maybe this is something unique to our courses but our our product which is our courses are also the training.
For the people that we work with so this has been it's been interesting to have Bethenny my assisting start going through the courses, which is serving two purposes use getting familiar with our products so she can answer customer service emails, but then each course that every one of our things un even blog post every little bit of content. She's been consuming she comes back and she was like that was amazing. I never knew that there were ways of working with technology ways of organizing your thinking organizing information like this. And so she's so much she I mean she
makes me all the time that she has the opportunity to take these courses which cost me nothing. So there's a there's an interesting Synergy where where it's sort of like we can train people buy them becoming customers which then helps them serve our customers even better. Yeah. Let's get concrete with what our way of working is and I think that if there's two words that explain it is reusable packets. So what does that mean what we do fundamentally?
Is writing is the frontier of our thinking writing is our R&D for ideas and what we do and so internally, we write a lot ourselves which is where we come up with new ideas. And then whenever we come up with a new process and new way of thinking a design for for example, our Mentor program, we write it down. We put it into like in a thousand word memo. But then once it's written down everybody can read it and
whenever then we need to create a new project.
What we do is because we have created these small little packets. We can combine them like Lego blocks to then create the project. So how most people think about things is consuming information.
is something that you don't have a lot of time to do because you need to spend most of your time on projects most of the way that I think about projects is
All the project is is combining Lego blocks that I've already built. So let me give you an example. I just created my rite of passage writing curriculum. We added five new live sessions to the upcoming cohort. And what I had done was I knew that that was coming. So I read a handful of writing books. I probably wrote a hundred and fifty tweets and I just built a all these little Lego blocks ding ding ding ding ding ding ding and then it took me.
Two hours to put all those into an outline and then it took me another hour to take all those Lego blocks and organize them. So it took me a three hours to create five hours worth of writing content because I had already had them and this is the advantage of working with the second brain is you already have all the tools and you can then create things it's sort of like cooking but you are ready in the middle of a Whole Foods. So it's like the the kitchen
Each encounter is right in the middle of the fruits and vegetables and meat section and you just grab what's already there? Whereas usually it is like every single time you need new information. You need to go Garden that information. And so what it allows us to do is because we can save things and reuse things every piece of work that we do can then get recombined and repurpose like a Rubik's Cube into videos workshops live conferences live cohorts and
That then gets us more leverage and what you call return on attention where there's return on Capital how much rate of return can you get with each dollar for us? It's how much rate of return can you get with each minute of information? Yeah. This is this is cool. I wanted to talk about this for a long time. I've had some insights on it. Yeah, I so so back to the beginning of what you said. I think we one way of talking about this is our work is object.
Oriented, which I'm not sure if there's a parallel to like object-oriented programming. I think that's probably is something missing there. But you know most the way most people work I've noticed is they by default make humans the linchpin like I can remember back when I worked in Consulting we'd be in a meeting and I'd really like really pay attention to what people were saying. This all comes back to language language is really powerful and they would say these things like hey, can you remind me to do that?
Like that comes up in every meeting. Oh, hey, can you follow up? Can we once that happens? Can you do X. Oh, let's wait until why happens and then we can think all these these these phrases and I'm sitting there like part of this is I have a terrible memory and I have a very one track mind so soon as my mind switches away it that first thing is gone. Right and I would just look around like am I going insane? Am I the crazy one here that thinks no one is going to remember any of the stuff and of course most of the time they don't, you know, you come back.
The next week and someone goes. Oh, hey wasn't someone going to think of this wasn't someone going to oh and then it's just completely expected. Oh, no, of course the thing we said we were definitely going to do didn't happen. And I was just like this. This is complete Insanity and that's why GTD was so revolutionary to me. I saw that you could capture in the flow of daily work like several times like a couple times a minute to you could capture. It was completely integrated and once you've captured things away from your mind, you could stay in the flow of what you were doing.
Give an example that I mean the the classic one is the things quick capture feature. This might be the single most transformative. What what is it even feature of a software that I've ever encountered and I can remember you know, this consulting job wasn't like my first professional job. I left the Peace Corps went to San Francisco. I was like, okay, I guess now I'm going to have a serious Adult Career. What do I do and my manager was a Charles was his name is this french guy was a really cool guy who's a program.
Were very smart very strategic and as we were talking we would have accomplished the same conversations. But when some one of those things came up, he'd reach over sometimes without breaking eye contact and he would do the little shortcut this little tiny window would pop up in the middle of his computer screen. So he didn't have to switch over to have to open anything. This little one would pop up. He'd write down what I just said and close it while staying in the conversation. I was just like wait, what? What did you just do how how and he was the one that term?
The things that turn me on to to to the quick capture stuff and then of course, you have to close the loop. You have to come back later and pick up on those things, but it's basically it's one way of thinking of it as systematic Integrity. It's really Integrity Integrity is doing what you say. You'll do saying what you'll do and then doing what you said, right and most people leave that up to chance all have integrity sure. If I remember if it comes up again if I notice like hopefully all
I'll have integrity and I just felt that integrity was so fundamental to living the life. I wanted to live from the smallest just like keeping my appointments with friends all the way to achieving my goals that I needed a system for integrity talk about object orientation where you were began that answer. Yeah, so instead of making humans the linchpin assuming or hoping or praying that humans are going to remember things. We Orient us ourselves around objects by
I mean these concrete they're not really physical or digital but that doesn't mean they're not concrete. So we have memos we have notes. We have Sops. We have checklists. We have templates. We have blog posts podcast episodes notion Pages Evernote notebooks these very specific things that we can reference that we all know how to use that. We all have many of and so instead of like you can imagine a visually instead of a group of humans talking and just throwing around
Around ideas, you're all sort of sitting around an artifact a a document a Google doc a note and all of the thinking is around. How do we create this artifact that compresses all of this thinking in a way that it's not going to be lost. And so what that leads to eventually is just what you said like, we don't think of projects. We only think of finishing projects. You could almost make a rule of thumb. I'll never start a project. That's not already 80% finished.
Right because why would you why would you go from 0 to 80? That's risky. It's time consuming. It's expensive. No, you just create Lego blocks which by the way are things you already want to create. Anyway, they're fun things their summaries of books their podcast conversations like this one. And then once you have enough Lego bricks, you just look around and you say hey, could I make a cool Lego dinosaur or a spaceship or a castle or a Star Wars set or whatever it is and
that it's so counterintuitive to to the way that people work because the thing that you might create you might never have planned for right we're so we're so anchored two goals and plans. What's the goal? And what's the plan to get there? What's the goal? What's the plan to get there? But if you look around and you realize oh my gosh. Hey, if I put together these dozen pieces I can make a you know, an undersea Lego monster. Let's just do that because it's this really backwards. It almost sounds backwards because it's so easy it makes sense to do.
Which usually we think no for it to be worthwhile. It has to be hard but I don't know. It's just the way we think I'm gonna see you and raise you one hand. So the key here is with the Lego blocks that you're making you didn't even know that you were making them. Yeah. So what I found is when in rite of passage one of the key ideas is that in school when you have an essay due for your social studies.
Eric in History Class, how does it work? You have your big essay? You spend years very purposefully collecting researching information. And then you write your essay. And what you are doing is you are researching first and writing second. How could it be any other way and for us we write first and we research second. So what we do is we only
only start writing an essay when we're 80 percent done with it. And we just need to recombine the different Lego blocks and then research is just filling in the different empty pieces. So what we do is we compile bricks. We then organize them into a structure and then we research to fill in the mortar between the bricks and what's important here is to start essays once you have enough information, but you've never
her actually researched for that essay yeah you've just in your own intuitive flow somehow someway developed the Arsenal of information so that now you can write that thing that you're trying to write and this is how last year I published the equivalent of three books and I'd never write for more than 10 hours a week ever usually I average between 4 to 6 and
because all the components are ready there and then we go try and then we get it and it's the same thing one-hour workshops are generally just combining different pieces based on what we're trying to do I remember I asked you to do something I forget what it was and I was like God y'all go so lazy and you're like now too much work because you would have had to do more work for that but if I ask you to do something that you already have all the components even if it looks
New to the outside world, you're like, oh no I could do that 10 minutes. You know what? I mean? Yeah it that this way of working leads to so many weird situations. Yeah, what you said about about about writing essays something. I've noticed two, which is
There's a deep fundamental Paradox of writing which is as soon as you know enough to say something interesting. You completely forgotten what it's like to see that topic for the first time. I mean, it's almost this. This is like a kind of crazy Paradox right the moment. You actually be have some sort of expertise or interesting point of view or something to say you've lost the ability to connect with with a newcomer with a novice so over time that's led to this thinking where I realized.
beginner's mind is my most important asset my ignorance is my greatest strength because with ignorance I can walk into a room so to speak and just say I mean this is happening with construction with container homes we're doing some work soon to be announced around container homes and I could just so basically container homes are making homes like fully livable homes out of shipping containers which is this utterly fascinating new trend that has so many interesting
actions to what's going on in the world but anyway I could so my brother is has been doing this for ten years he's been researching and working on it but he has no perspective no ability to explain it to a newcomer so I walk in and I'm just asking questions like how big is the container how much does it weigh if I stand in the middle of a container and I reach out my hands well I touch the sides like idiot questions stupid questions and yet these are the questions any newcomer to this topic we're going to ask right so in a weird way I try to stay there
It sounds so bizarre, but I try to if I know a topic is interesting and I know eventually I want to get into it. I try to stay ignorant of it as long as I can and I'll still collect things. I'll sometimes collect some book notes collect an article like collect research. Sometimes don't even read it just sort of like collect it and then wait until I'm actually going to create something to actually dive into that research. So with writing your book and going through the book publishing process your first time doing it. It's going
to be very valuable to other people when you write about this and here's what's interesting. You're not writing about it because you're an expert on the publishing industry. You're not somebody who has all these credentials who's been working at some big New York City book publishing firm for the last 27 years. You're not somebody who's written eight books. This is exactly what we're getting at here. You are going through the process for the first time you are.
Taking notes and collecting Lego blocks as you do it then as you experience it you are thinking about how do I write The Ultimate Guide to online book publishing? Exactly. This is such a such a I think a different way of looking at it is it's much closer to a journalist think of how think of how a journalist thinks. They're not like, you know, let's say you go to I don't know you go to some foreign country where there's a war you
To Afghanistan, you can't go to Afghanistan spend months there and then come home and write all your things. You have to do it while you're there. You have to share your experience almost as it's happening because that's the most interesting angle by the time you've done all the things and know everything that's going on and have all the answers you might be an expert but you can't the story is not nearly as interesting than if then if you report from the field, so it's sort of like we're reporting from the field of whatever field we're learning about we
our sort of intrepid explorers of the theory of constraints our design thinking or online publishing or whatever it is and Reporting back in little chunks one little lesson or one little insight are one paradigm shift at a time and that's how you build an audience yeah you know what I've noticed it's learning in public you know what I've noticed too is when it comes to writing well to constantly take notes in the moment so we're recording this in Venice I was walking around last night and
as I walk through over by the beach and looking at for example here you know what's interesting about this neighborhood is the homes are this mix of very modern and then mid-century modern so they were either built between 2005 and 2020 or they were built in the 60s and the 70s and so the homes have a lot more of a higher percentage of modern buildings where's the stores are almost all that 60s and 70s rugged
Los Angeles movie look I thought that was fascinating have you noticed how many old cars are here old trucks old Chevy's stuff like that so what I did was I walked around the neighborhood last night and I just paid attention to what I observed everything that intuitively surprise me that's there's nothing else that matters here besides what's intuitively interesting to me I wrote it down and then what happens is because I have it saved I don't know if I'll ever use it but then three
five ten years from now I can pop into my note taking system and remember what I saw with the Fidelity of a baby seeing something for the first time because I've already written it down and so that's what I'm trying to do I'm trying to live then jot down make concrete as many observations as possible take five observations per day and by the end of the year I'll have 1,500 observations and then I go
Ding ding ding Rubik's Cube, and I Rubik's Cube it into all these different essays and it's so everyone can do this like it requires. No Talent at all, except for the ability to notice things and to pay attention to your own bodily Sensations to say Ah, that's interesting and exciting, but then to have the capture Habit to write something down and then you come back to it many years later.
And you write something that to you just saved in your pocket. It took no effort and somebody's like, how did you remember that? And the grand irony here is you and I have two of the worst memories of anyone. I know. Yeah, it's funny the thing about you know, 80% finish you might think. Oh, well, yeah, you can do projects that way because you did all this up front heavy lifting to get to to have those 80% of the packets, but then look at any individual one little
Lego brick okay, what is involved in creating that lets say a note the note that you mentioned of some observations in the neighborhood. Well 80% of that is just breathing and thinking it's just living living is the the highest overhead activity there is but if you're living you're already accomplishing most of what you have to do just having neurons firing, right? So each individual packet is it's the same it's like fractal going all the way down your just when you notice the buildings are this way.
Way right in that moment. You've done 80% of the work to capture that one little Lego brick, which is one little note. You just need that that 20% and I bet if you follow it all the way down you would find that that that kind of similar ratio applies at many different levels. What have we learned about?
marketing from looking at other people so what stands out to me and we talked about this at the beginning was just the importance of email what has surprised me is how much books are a stamp of legitimacy at least for the general public you know I very much think of this landscape of knowledge as having a very strict line in the middle there's the people who have crossed over to the internet world and the
internet world has stamps of approval like Twitter followers like engagement interestingness which is this very subjective thing that is absolutely something like if somebody can write an interesting ways it is this thing this unspoken thing in The Ether that oh that person is interesting like venkatesh Rao somebody a writer who both of us really admires breaking smartbook is one of the if not the most influential book on how we are building this company
together but then there is this whole other like I guess you could call that West Coast thinking and then there's everybody else and that is these more mainstream stamps of approval and I'm continually surprised both by how fast the attention is going to the internet but how much legitimacy is still granted in buildings between 14th Street in Manhattan and 60th
great and 59th Street in Manhattan like that Corridor still is a stamp of approval and that's why you're going towards writing a book I'm going to have to go towards writing a book and it's very surprising to me how both of those things can be true that Joe Rogan has so much attention as a podcast but still the New York Times Daily if you're on that it's a staple it's an institution and a lot of what we're thinking about credibility
It even if you take someone like James Clear James Claire, it's such a popular blog on his own but then he writes Atomic habits. Boom. Now. He's speaking at the TD Ameritrade Global conference, and it's fascinating this this Paradox of how
Legitimacy and detention aren't operating hand-in-hand. Yeah, I think there's something there's something about it that there's that idea that every kind of abundance than creates new kinds of scarcity and solutions to Old problems themselves create new problems sort of a pendulum back and forth and what's so great about the internet is there's few barriers to entry anyone can start a website. Anyone can open a Twitter account. You can you can create content so easy.
So then that's now created a demand for credibility signals.
which
are different some of them are different than ones you mentioned, but some it's this weird thing where the very collapse of the publishing industry.
Somehow gives it this kind of old-world credibility. I kind of think there's probably a parallel to this but it's like it's like, you know what it is when the old form of status is basically what we're talking about status.
makes less sense it can become more prestigious when there's no utilitarian there's no dollars and sense there's no strictly logical reason for it to exist it's kind of like people having ranches or people having like wearing tuxedos are what are some other examples like things that are so illogical horses that they they therefore somehow gain an extra level of status because it means you had to you had to be wasteful or you had to not care about the logic
that you just did it because you wanted it maybe it's something like that I don't know yeah generally the harder it is to maintain a certain article of clothing the higher status so felt shoes are high status because no one in their right mind would wear felt shoes and when things are difficult to produce then it becomes High status and what's interesting is
take fashion for example the markers between what high status is and low status is have gotten so small that it takes a very sharp eye to see the difference so it used to be that a higher status you'd wear a suit you'd wear a top hat lower status you wouldn't be wearing that you just couldn't afford those goods now clothing has gotten quite cheap and there's this interesting Circle where streetwear looks
Homeless people wear like the the difference is so small ripped clothes fairly baggy and how is that? It's this weird Circle where the highest status and the lowest that is kind of look the same but they're these very subtle indicators and I was talking to a friend who he's an immigrant and he's from India and he was saying it's actually really hard that we live in this hyper casual world for an outsider because the
Stink shins are so slim. Whereas it used to be. Oh you just wear a suit and it'd be fine. But in a world of fast cat or athleisure casual or in a world of street where the status symbols are so are so difficult or the differences between the top and the bottom are so small and I don't really know how that relates to book publishing. But I think it's interesting. Yeah. I don't know either this it's a
The logic of status is so backwards and upside down. It's not about solving. It's a solving a certain kind of problem, but it's definitely something I'm new to although I have to say is something We've joked about that. You know, we're always like the Democratic rabble-rouser Grassroots like for the people because we've been kind of breaking into into the into the industry so to speak but working with the publishing industry. You know, I have a
New York agent very like the one of the top literary agencies and my publisher is one of the big five also very prestigious and all these things and it's actually a very nice way of doing business. Everyone knows each other. Everyone is friendly they all get drinks and dinners. I can get introductions to almost anyone in that industry. Now I can get introductions to other authors that are published by that publisher because it's so it's such an exclusive group. So We've joked that now that I've gotten past The Gatekeepers, I love
Gatekeepers, like all this the Paradox of book publishing that Publishers won't give you a book deal until you have a big following a big email list a great idea and that they know that you can write well and sell books. But then once you get there, you don't actually need the book publishers and
so book publishers traditionally are set up to give you an advance so that you can live off breadcrumbs as you write your book, but what we found now from speaking of Publishers you now just signed with Simon & Schuster and I now have Publishers reaching out to me and it's now they're reaching out to us and we can get a good deal because we don't need them anymore. Yeah, and it's amazing how much of the world works that way? Yeah. Everyone wants a sure thing. They want a sure bet.
it's wild where do we see online education going in terms of the next chapter you know what I think breeds these transformative experiences is when they're live and isn't it funny how no one has really found a fully integrated live platform so teachable works because it's a place where we can host are recorded videos you sell on teachable but then we use
umm as sort of a plug-and-play duct tape system to host our live courses and then we have an email service provider that's coming in so that we can communicate with our students we're using three to five different platforms somebody's going to come in with this new wave of live education and build something new it's waiting to happen and this is how it always works right there's always the frontier where you're figuring things out you're plugging different things together
Heather and you get a return for the risk and the inconvenience that you take on of actually being out on the frontier but the if online education is actually going to be some kind of replacement for colleges it's going to have to be live because the friend aspect is important but my goodness it is so hard to figure out how to run an online course now and
The knowledge isn't written down anymore. You know, it's the first time in my entire life where I've actually known about something that isn't written down anywhere like it is actual tacit knowledge. It is distributed and networks. It is distributed in ideas that we haven't even expressed contextual cues and
It makes it exciting for what the future is going to be. You know, the whole Narrative of online education right now is that at best it can be as good as live education. No new stories. Our live online education is actually better. They're all oh it isn't as good as live education and there's going to be a flip where what we do is better by virtue of being online. But unless
In this day after day after day, you don't realize that. Yeah. Yeah. I think that the narrative is Shifting so fast now because it has to it has to be good enough as to be better. So how so many million. I mean, it's just every month is the equivalent of a year. I think during this this lockdown because it's just people are being forced to to learn online. I think I think you're right. It's this
Thing we're in the early days. We thought we could just poured it over. We thought oh you just like record the class just as it happens and you just post it on a website that that's all an online course was and I think now we're going through a deeper transformation where we realize there's totally different assumptions assumptions about how big a class can or should be assumptions about how many different ways there are of interacting possible in one class the it's really really deep assumptions. And I think you're right. It's it's amazing to
you know, I first started teaching courses this way in late 2016 when I took a course that was like this. I was actually by venkatesh. He had a long form writing course and there's only like a dozen people in it, but I saw it was the first time I'd use zoom. I don't even know what Zoom was before then and I got on this call and I just realized this could scale perfectly. In fact, it would get better with scale because the chat is just as interesting as what people are saying.
and that's when I started and it a light bulb really went off in my mind last year when our business coach who really specializes in online course marketing told us that he doesn't know anyone else doing this and he thinks it's the most effective model has ever seen and this is someone who works with multi-million dollar online course creators and companies and clients all over the world and he said you have the best model and I just thought oh my gosh why is no one copying us
I wish more people would copy us and see how effective this hybrid of asynchronous and synchronous interaction can be yeah what is it I mean it's it's it's something around the energy you know it's it's well we're in Venice so I can talk about energy man but it is something there that when there is scarcity isn't it funny these words that are popping up right now
we're talking about scarcity we're talking about adding friction into the experience we're talking about standards and it's really interesting field to watch the barbell swing back of what the internet is culture is is have everything be accessible virtual reality you can go anywhere then you can order something order food or order Amazon and it'll just come here everything is all about being
easy and what we're finding is that how can we create scarcity and friction and make time important again using the internet and I have this vague intuition that that is where we want to go of this moment is important it's like a are used to watch 24 it was a show on Fox Kieffer
Sutherland Jack Bauer saving the world every season every Tuesday night me and my friend Sam Blake spurred my best friend in Middle School we're Reckless together absolutely Reckless and every Tuesday night we would drive over 8 p.m. to 10 p.m. we'd watch prison break and then 24 back-to-back on Fox and so we would always be live 10 minutes away from me we would skirt in my mom would drive me with skirt and we'd get there I jump right in and I'd go previously on
on Prison Break and then we'd watch both episodes but it was every Tuesday the reason we would skirt there's because the time felt so meaningful if I didn't watch it now I don't know if I was ever going to watch us and then I'd miss an episode and part of me even just wants to make these courses not even recorded like you gotta be there you gotta be there now and I'm excited to see what we end up doing here because I think that that's scarcity of time
I'm
I'm excited to watch that be important again and I think that's part of the reason why I'm drawn to sports live sports I remember 2002 World Cup Brazil vs. France I think Brazil versus Italy and
what happened was it was in another country so I missed the game and we recorded it and it was the World Cup final like the biggest game in sports and I ended up watching it not live and it was the most boring thing it was so boring the outcome it already happened it wasn't the same but then 2010 I watched Holland Place Spain in the World Cup final I was in a small town in southern Spain called so
Car the bottom ala Spain one and there were so much anticipation for the event. I remember where I was at this little restaurant watching on this little screen how crazy everyone went when I think it went into either overtime or I believe it went into penalty kicks, but the excitement of a live event is something that online education is totally forgotten about yeah because back to the thing about entertainment entertainment is all about timing.
It's about timing. It's about spontaneity. It's about courage. It's about Instinct all these things that you know, I have a theory about this. I just realized I've never really talked about and maybe this is a widely known Theory. I don't know. This is more than in your in your Arena, but I have a theory that the basic shift happening on the internet right now is for the first time you can be your full self online. That's it always before one sliver of your
One aspect of yourself could make it online your nerdy side or your you know, your weird Niche interest on a subreddit or your your kind of diary thoughts on a blog or something like that. And this was especially true. If you did business online, then you had to be so buttoned up you had to present this nice, you know official business casual kind of facade and that is collapsing now.
people realize wait the internet is not it's not a
It's not like one little tiny window or peephole into who I am. I can actually take my whole identity there my whole personality all my interest my friendships all those things right? Like Facebook was part of this bring your friends. That was their whole framing still is like get your offline friendships bring them on line. And so a result of this is we're having to translate all those things I said, what is what is Instinct look like online like we talked about this in our courses. We teach people how to follow their intuition.
Tuition and follow their intuition when it comes to sharing their ideas online. It's an idea that's completely foreign to the to the online World part of I don't know that I would take this all the way but let's just play with this idea part of the reason why Instinct works is because it kind of doesn't matter who you are as long as you're different and of course, it supported beam or roll and stuff like that, but that's not really what I'm talking about. I'm talking about every human being is so different that
Once they actually pour themselves out online and that's not terms of emotions and let me tell you about all my vulnerabilities. It's like let me just share my weird mix of interests that only I have everyone has their own unique mix of interest and they deeply Bond on certain ones and then on others, it's just like different world like you came to the golf course and remember last week of your on the phone and you had that golf metaphor.
and it was just the worst metaphor like golf is such a huge part of my life but we don't bond there you have all of Science Fiction I don't know the first thing about science fiction I've never read a science fiction book but we have all of these different personalities that we can show and you can kind of connect two different personalities with people online and then we come together through writing online and through an interest in the future of work and productivity
and every the reason why I like to tell people to it's funny it's a deep Paradox build a personal Monopoly be the only person in the world who does what you do and everyone's like how do I go do that rationally but that's not it it is how do you pay attention not to who you're supposed to be but to who you are and then go online and be honest about your interests I think so much of writing on
I always say that people are excellent text messages, but they're terrible writers and it's the same thing when you watch someone on video, you know how people look so stiff. They're so nervous so much of what it means to do. Well as an online Creator is to Circle back to the person who you were without publishing, but you have to go through this hero's journey of trying to be other people trying to be different. Who am I supposed to be and then you get
Back to the personal Monopoly, which is literally the home base that you started from beautifully said beautifully said that's that's the hero's journey really is. Yeah. It's like you you have to because you can't fake that if you try to fake it you come off as faking it and that's actually the least attractive thing you actually in some sense have no choice but to just get back to the root get back to your authentic interests your off.
Take desires your authentic can't believe we're using the word authentic, but we're in Venice Beach. So I'll let it let it pass. You know that it's like you have two choices to just Embrace that whoever it is you are or not. There's no third choice and but it's hard to do because from such a young age. We have that beaten out of us. Oh, no, your desires are selfish. They're too small. They're too offensive there.
Are too loud all these messages get drilled into us. It's really really kind of sad.
Yeah, the what's crazy is.
And then let's talk about this Mentor idea. So one of my you have this idea where you can have these mentors of people who you've never met before but through the internet you can be kind of close to them and you can have them on your shoulder is people that you look up to and you could ask what would this person do and for me one such person was Tyler Cowen and he has this program called emergent Ventures and I applied in the second batch after I
him one time and I he was such a hero to me that I took the I took a bus five dollar mega bus from New York City to Washington DC and I was on the bus with it was a seed of for four five hours and the three other people were all crammed with me and we were facing each other so it was a really crammed bus it smelled terrible
and there was like a drug addict on my bus I mean I've come a long way but I did it because I really wanted to meet Tyler and I told him that if he agreed to do a podcast interview I'd go all the way down there so I did it I stayed on my friend from college has couch and I went down and I spent the afternoon with Tyler and he continued to be someone who I admired from afar and he has this great line that at certain critical moments in
time you can say something to somebody and it can be such an offhanded comment but it can totally change the course of somebody's life raising their Ambitions or unblocking them and he with emergent ventures in my acceptance email he rejected the project that I applied with and just said I don't want you to specialize your talents are more of a generalist
and I just want you to keep doing what you're doing and to be more you and it changed everything for me I got that note in November 2018
when didn't like my work
had didn't have the money that I would have really needed to live the life that I wanted to and I remember getting it I was about to go on a date with this girl and I was standing the first date I just met at a concert like four nights before and I was standing outside of the bar she's walking downhill and I get the email I read it read it read it you've been accepted 20 seconds later she goes hey David how you doing and I'm like you'll never believe what just happened and I just had this moment I'll never forget it for the rest of my life
But to what you were saying, I got that message from him. Did you say be more you and stop trying to be this round Peg and fit into a square hole just be you and it's so hard to do that even though it's the easiest thing to do. Yeah, that's beautiful.
Isn't that wild that? No, I think very few people understand they have that power.
They think you can only make a big impact on someone with an extraordinary effort and sometimes it's just getting permission little bits of permission little bits of little nudges.
Yeah.
I think it's just the opposite of our conditioning. Our conditioning is fit in conform. Obey survive.
And the survival mentality is not compatible with a flourishing mindset. You can't be in survival mode and scarcity mode and at the same time flourish and take advantage of any kind of abundance. I had a similar a similar moment when I first launched building a second brain.
So what am I maybe my biggest Mentor at a distance and we've now met a number of times so maybe not quite at a distance but is venkatesh should we've mentioned a couple times already and it's so funny because we would never be in the same Social Circle, you know, he's 10 years older than me. He's an Indian guy. I guess we share that we're both kind of in text circles, but that's about it. But he has such a unique way of looking at the world like I've never seen in any other place.
but that also reminds myself of me like I almost feel like it's time traveling like what whatever he's doing now it is 10 years in my future maybe not the exact specific thing but that way of thinking that way of feeling that sort of ethos that life stage I know is coming for me so it's like I mean think how valuable it is to receive messages from a sort of future self just watch out for this or to notice that or to look out for this this thing happening and so he so I launched the course
and I just remember thinking
I remember feeling having zero credibility just no reason that anyone should listen to me I'm saying you can build a second brain what is a second brain why would I want to do that who are you to teach me this and I think this was before it was either before the very first cohort so I had no track record no one had taken the course there were no testimonials he wrote in his newsletter to thousands of people like his newsletter is like leaders and very influential people
and silicon Silicon Valley he not only said you should take this course I think it's going to be really great he just casually at the very end of the newsletter said I think this guy Tiago is the next David Allen
and I just I was in a Whole Foods Cafe and it was like those moments where it's like the lens the aperture widens I was just like what
I uh I didn't even see that myself see that in myself by a long shot I had no such ambition I had no such vision for myself right it's like someone is like you know looking at your like you're like I don't know
I can't even think of a metaphor but it was so beyond what I had thought it was especially it was especially sort of impactful because he doesn't typically use hyperbole in fact he never he tends to weigh under state things tends to be kind of skeptical kind of conservative and also there's a second thing which is he had worked with David Allen he had been a guest blogger on David Allen's blog back in the day so it really felt like it carried weight so much weight that he convinced me that I was that that I could be that and I feel like that
field me for years I feel me for years and ironically the funny thing is I was kind of already familiar with David Allen at that point but at then made me look to David Allen as a mentor I started going back and reading you know things he wrote a decade or more ago I started studying the early history of getting things done which is the book that David wrote you know what were the decisions he made every time I saw podcast interview he was on the Tim Ferriss podcast listen to that I now work with his editor my editor is Janet Goldstein she published 20
is ago the first edition of GTD like think about the stuff I met the CEO of David's company Mike Williams at a bluebottle cafe in San Francisco like and you know this all makes me sound incredibly strategic and kind of creepy like I kind of stalked this guy but a lot of these things they either happen accidentally or they sort of happen in the flow of things you know I noticed Mike Williams was in town for a meet up and I just reached out to him on Twitter these very small serendipitous moments but it's funny if you have a goal
and then you just pay attention you can sort of guide Serendipity you can you can push Serendipity in a certain directions by just saying yes to certain things and Achieve I guess goals that you never really plan to achieve but those are kind of two examples of how I I chose these two guys to be my mentors just by consuming their public information having conversations with them same thing with David I eventually was a guest on his podcast as well
but these I feel like I learn more from these these two men than if maybe even if I had like worked in their companies or been around them physically because they operate on the world of ideas and that is a world that that I can enter freely and spend hours and hours and hours reading their post their interviews they're writing all these all these kinds of content they've created Switching gears here we talked a lot about how this was from article that you read a couple months ago about how online
Schools can't find product Market fit and it's a contrarian opinion talk about that. This is from a
he's become a friend. His name is Brian toal and he he was brought in to really scale Flatiron school, which was I think a coding bootcamp in New York City took it to a seven or eight or more locations in different cities. Then I think Flatiron was acquired by we work and he became the head of academics head of courses at we work. This was before the huge kind of implosion and I love people who are really nerdy and just really into this tiny Niche things and he really is like
had a call last week or the week before you told me he's like yeah no one understood that article but I loved it I tweeted it I shared it I was like this is the most important thing I've read like all year and it's just very subtle point which is which actually I think is a profound point is the unit of measurement sort of the center of gravity with education got smaller no one noticed but previously it was all about the school right think about what comes to mind when you think education Harvard Stanford UC
Berkeley or the high school you went to these institutions right and then if you look a layer below those no one knew what the courses was chemistry 101 introduction to physics like these completely courses that were actually designed to be anonymous on purpose they were supposed to be completely interchangeable why because What mattered is that you could take that credit to a different school or you could put it on your transcript and say okay this guy knows chemical engineering or whatever it is and something that happened
organically with both of us is the course is the most prominent thing right we're now starting to think about what is a school what is the curriculum but the center of gravity is clearly the course and building a second brain I mean right now it's a course and over time it's other kinds of content and I have a splitting a second brain podcast it's going to be a book we're launching a coaching program right like the course becomes the core identity of an entire hopefully eventually an Empire
power of different things that I create and I think the saying I think rite of passage is definitely going to be on that same track is on that same track but that is such a counterintuitive thing because when the course is the center of gravity the core should have a cool name should have a well-known instructor should not be interchangeable right like the key to a strong brand is that by definition you are not interchangeable there's no substitution there's no competition and so that's what this article that he wrote on his substance newsletter was getting at which is
not only is this happening naturally it's a good thing because it's so much easier to sell a course than a school
because a school has to have so many purposes that it fulfills right like Harvard University has to has the signal status help people build a good Network provides stable jobs for instructors actually teach students good stuff that's like a minor job right and so they so marketing is so much more difficult when you're selling many different outcomes to many different kinds of people whereas with a course you can sell one kind of outcome that's our course promise we design the entire course
Turns around one a one-sentence promise. Think about that and we designed it around one one promise and we sell the one kind of person which means we can be so focused we can be so specific in the kind of language in the metaphors and examples we use beyond that. What we have said is we are not a curriculum first school as much as we are a Creator phos focused school, so
What we do is if we end up adding new courses rather than saying we need this curriculum. We find people in this very bottom-up way and then say hey you're really talented. I'm just going to let you do your thing. And that's what you've done with Joe. That's what I'm doing with Ana we're on was one of my students and I said wait, hold on here. You are so talented.
I wanted you have such a bold vision for the future of education and all I'm going to do is I'm going to be like bumpers at a bowling alley stop stop stop stop doing that nope nope nope don't go over there yes okay that is where the pins are at the end of the lane but it is your vision it is your momentum and whenever it comes to something that is related to ideas and not tactical implementation you get to decide and
the way that that relates to schools can have product Market fit is we have no idea what we're building because we don't know what the end curriculum is because with knowledge and a worldview it takes so many years to build up and it's possible that in your entire life you can only have one maybe two probably not three World Views throughout the entire
Arc of your life but rite of passage is the story of my first 25 years alive condensed into a course into a curriculum and you are now getting all of that compressed it's the same thing with you and second brain you can't divorce building a second brain from your health issues that you had five years ago you can't divorce building a second brain from your time in the you in the Ukraine from your time in Brazil working in the Peace Corps you can't divorce
you're spilling a second brand from your love of Science Fiction nobody else can replace you as a second brainer and so what we end up building what we end up looking for is people who
Inspire us who we think that we could work with who are very disciplined than we bring them in let them do their thing and then watch what emerges and sort of like we only work on new things when they're 80 percent done we're just sort of things are happening it's sort of like reading articles and at some point we'll Rubik's Cube this into something new there's something really I was I was also going to going to reference it back to that because you know what it is I think the experience of building
building creating growing a business for us is Discovery
it's not building like Oh by back-breaking labor one one brick of top this brick wall that I'm creating it's more like Discovery I think of like back in the days I used to play Starcraft which is this like this computer game and they had something called the fog of War
I know nothing about this you would basically have this battlefield and it was just dark and you would your characters would walk across the field and the map would be revealed like oh what's around this Bend you have to go there and then it's the fog of War disappears and suddenly you know there's an enemy camp or there's a waterfall or there's something like that and so not only is that more fun like Discovery is more playful it's more serendipitous it's more about surprise
it also takes weight off our shoulders we are not singularly responsible for birthing this new thing that was never and will would never exist without us I don't think we think we're that important it's more like there's a set of ideas that are emerging in the world they're going to happen this is the way I think they're going to happen they're going to find a vehicle right there going to find a channel an outlet we have the privilege we are lucky enough to be the vehicle of those ideas
yeah it does take a lot of hard work of course but it's it's more about fine it's like finding the terrain it's exploring the terrain that is already taking shape and it's just a lot of fun but yeah I want to get back to what you said about so this is another huge inversion before it was always what needs to be done who can we find that's willing to do it that's the basic frame right who will Who will conform again that's there's Conformity to the needs of this project that the
see the president the CEO someone decided has to be done but I think the nature of the internet is so it's so winner-take-all and it's so driven by hits that anything you can do to be that one in a hundred or one in a thousand that really takes off the captures people in people's imaginations you should do one of the very best things one of the kind of few things you can do is harness someone's passion harness someone's
Vision their heartfelt like deep in their bones need to see something exists in the world and that's inherently scarce knowledge can be transmitted
but Vision combined with passion is singular their one person's vision and passion will never in all of human history be recombined
and so that's what we're saying we're trying to take in people who have that thing and I don't know I'm still trying to find out does everybody have that I don't know but what I do know is the number of people who do have a vision and a passion for something within them is much higher than the number of people who are expressing that oh yeah and what I adore about the internet is
it
rewards people who just show that they're different because I always say that online differentiation is free marketing because the internet's this weird Duality where you get scale so you have a lot of people but you also have person personalization so you can go out into the billions and find exactly what it is that you're looking for and so what that does
does is it like in the 20th century it was all about what we call division of labor so you're going to specialize in that there is an entire system of kind of pre-existing needs and so you specialize in terms of skills and now it's sort of like what you called the perspective era now you're specializing in terms of a lens or a way of being and then it Alan Kay always says
div is worth 80 IQ points and so then you have your lens on the world and you just manifest that and you know what's so interesting about it when you do that you can't help but be Innovative Innovation is the byproduct of this Innovation isn't something this is why Innovation Labs at these companies they don't often actually produce new ideas because innovation
Ian when you come up with these ideas that other people like wait that's a really good idea you don't even know how you got to that idea and the only the closest you could get to reproducing it is to just follow your intuition turn off your prefrontal cortex and just do stuff and then see what actually works that's the same way I feel about learning I spent a lot of time arguing with education experts on Twitter it's my hobby and
I think it comes down to this and also like I have some disagreements that I've had with even other thought leaders who do things like accelerated learning to me the accelerated learning is a non sequitur because learning is like love the more you try to make it happen the less it happens it only can happen as a side effect as a byproduct of something else so to me what that is is working on hard interesting problems if you find something that's interesting or that
it's hard and you just move toward it learning just starts happening you can't you can't stop it from happening and whereas if you try it try to learn oh let me let me what is the densest form of learning a textbook okay just open the textbook just read as fast as you can and memorize you spaced repetition memorize as many fat that's that has nothing to do with learning that's something else that's memorization so I think that this is something actually that's fundamental to our our courses and our material to is like people think of learning as this giant
one time Preparatory stage I mean learn learn learn learn learn learn and then stop doo-doo-doo-doo-doo-doo right and you only get like one shot at each learning is what happens up until your 22 or 24 or 26 and everything after that is doing but I think if you really like like collapse in your mind we're doing and learning don't even mean different things like that's that I can't I can't even like distinguish in my brain how those are different then you realize that
every interesting work challenge is a learning opportunity and any learning opportunity is a chance to create something so how do you have that mentality and still have like a hierarchy of learning because learning is definitely a thing and if it's a skill of some sort I'm just going to let's just play with the Axiom that you can learn better or learn worse so then how do you think about what kinds of things to do so that you learn faster
because you can't just sit back and do whatever you want guarantee that learning is going to happen yeah I think that's that's where this and it's definitely an art or skill is finding certain kinds of problems and a lot of this comes down to self-awareness when you're self-aware
which which who knows what that means but basically you're willing to look inside to really look at your own psychology to let thoughts and feelings be expressed and then to interrogate them share them with others talk through them all these different things you you'll know one of the things you'll be self aware of is what you're missing what you're lacking what you're blind to what you don't know what is confronting and then I think you can pick the way I see it is your picking certain kinds of problems that get that
suppose that underdeveloped side of yourself to feedback that's how I think of it almost it's like a part of your body it's like you know if your if your arm was not tan enough and it was two white you would just like turn and expose it to the sun and it would get tan it's like it's like almost a physical it's like an orientation so you know one example is
like I'll use one of my examples I realized at some point that I had a major difficulty being vulnerable in groups
very hard for me I did a course like one of these weekend personal growth courses wear something simple you had to like get up to like and this is what these courses are designed to expose it's like a boot camp for finding what that that underdeveloped part of you is it till I get up to a mic and like share something and I was like terrifying it was so confronting and that might seem like a like a like a niche thing being vulnerable in groups like what are you going to be a stand-up comedian or something but then if you look something I've
just about underdeveloped parts of yourself which you can also call your growth Edge is a term that I like they expand they don't stay still if they stayed still you could just say look I don't want to be a stand-up comedian I'm just going to leave that part of myself over in the corner never pay attention to it but what there's something about humans that we expand we naturally grow and expand and want to do new things and So eventually that thing over in the corner is going to start to consume you it gets bigger and bigger and bigger until it's this
monster that is showing up in every part of your life and that's what started to happen to me I started to realize oh I'm getting invited to do a training at this company right and one little part of training is and teaching is to have a little bit of vulnerability to show a little bit of yourself that's an effective way to teach plain and simple I started noticing when I was working with people I would hire say a few people to work with me on a project or have collaborators couldn't be vulnerable if you can't be vulnerable people don't trust you it's one of the
laws of humanity we we do not trust people that do not reveal anything about themselves so I started noticing all these things and I went to work on it I started taking on public speaking gigs I started doing free workshops at my local co-working space I started doing the zoom based calls where you have to be way more vulnerable because you don't know what's going to happen versus the pre-recorded video where I would do 10 takes and then you know stitch together five parts the five takes where I sound supremely confident
and only present those you know and so that's an example you like this this is I think one of my core beliefs you can have personal growth on purpose you can just decide that you want to develop certain parts of your psyche you want to develop certain parts of your emotional resilience your emotional intelligence your self-awareness and go out and seek Retreats meditation programs mentors coaches and make reliable almost predict not completely predictable but
you know reliable progress in those ways and those are the most satisfying kinds of learning to do way more satisfying than than most kinds of book learning I remember right after we finish the first read a passage cohort we're about to get into the second one and you called me remember where I was sitting I was sitting on the right side of my bed and my old Brooklyn apartment and you said hey man I really need to focus on second brain you're going to have to take this next rite of passage cohort and you're going to have to assume responsibility
bility for it and
I was like I don't know if I could do this I Tiago I don't know how to teach I don't know how to run one of these curriculums
oh my goodness and I was freaking out and you said something to me that was something along the lines of you are capable of much more than you think you are here and in retrospect in some ways I was and in some ways I grew into that and I think that this is where I really see what you're saying that did come true where I was able to do so much more but also I think that there's something in growth
you know like within what you're saying about growth Edge is theirs
let me just strawman it for a bit but you're saying there's places that you have weaknesses and then you can go turn those weaknesses into a strength and actually I think that what a lot of growth is it's even more subtle than that it is also just paying attention to what you're not capable of and for me most of what has made work more enjoyable what has made the business more successful is not only getting better at the things that I'm
that or the things that I'm bad at but also just realizing where I'm just not capable of doing something and the same thing that allows me to have kind of a schizophrenic mind and come up with new ideas and and published published published make make make new ideas is the same thing that also makes it very hard for me just painfully so to just slow down and to just organize something and this is something that
that I've learned from you that is really helpful you'll always have this intuition to make the first organization a very concrete thing so what you always do in our weekly meetings and will and I have adopted this from from from watching you and it's part of what makes remote work so hard when it comes to strategizing is the computer isn't quite concrete enough to actually like things are very abstract so what
will do is we get big Post-it notes and big Post-it boards and we take everything out of the screen and organize it with our hands like when I was a kid I used to make these airports I had hundreds of fake airplanes and I would just spend hours on end designing Airport Air Traffic Control the terminals my favorite Airlines and had all these United plans so I might United Hub and I would just play all these are
plane games and it was super fun but I think that there are something about the concrete organization that I needed to develop but my point here is I've learned two things both that I can be a better and more organized person by making things concrete so that's weakness into a strength but also knowing that you are so much better than me at that particular skill or with other things like the
experience for both of us will is so good at talking to our students he loves it at creating Community he loves it and students love him and then there are certain things that we say you know what will at 50% is going to be way better than us at 200% so that's your job so it's both of the growth Edge but then also knowing what isn't your thing and My worry is actually twofold that you limit Yourself by trying to take
on too many things that's a problem but it's also a problem when you get the classic old dad who refuses to try anything new both are a problem yeah I know what you mean I know what you mean but I think you can even just shift it to a sort of a more meta level where
the skill of determine I mean a lot of people just don't know what they're naturally good at or don't know the difference between this is this is another subtle point the the slight difference between this is a challenge and I'm uncomfortable and I there's something here for me to discover about myself and my disposition and my personality and who I am is fundamentally incompatible with this it's early on it's really hard to tell the difference right and so I think even
it is a skill that you can choose to develop I feel like one way you develop it is by saying yes to a lot of things that you're uncomfortable with and then learning to tell the difference there's there's just that difference like okay this is going to be one of the hardest things I ever do it's going to be worth it this is going to be versus this is going to be one of the hardest things I do and it's going to be painful and I'm not going to be no happier or better or anything after doing it than I was before
take self awareness and also security you know when you to reach the point where you're comfortable we're talking today earlier today about the Bliss of being able to say no to something and not feeling any fomo it's just like the greatest gift it's like you just don't even have to consider that thing it's just off your plate off your radar but then you need the security in the confidence that the things you are committed to the things you are doing are worth while they're going to succeed they're going to give you enough of whatever you're seeking
you know that hits that one of the things that I feel most strongly about in the world one of the things that I think is just corrupt truly is watching how to things how many of people who are from the children of wealthy parents who go to our best universities are working jobs that they despise they work jobs that are at prestigious companies but if you talk to them they're they're they're soul-crushing jobs and
part of the issue is is with when you're the kid of a wealthy parent you have this need to live up to something and you do that by acquiring Prestige and I was at dinner with a good friend from college and he's working at one of the big four consulting firms by all accounts crushing it living in Manhattan and he said to me
you know looking back at my parents
they really wanted me to be successful but they never stopped to ask if being successful would make me happy and it reminded me of a conversation that we had in Mexico City a couple months ago of how much of what it means to succeed
with ordinary measures of success how successful you are synonymous with how good you are at doing things that you don't want to do
and so you have certain people who aren't secure because of the love of their parents and they feel like they need to follow Prestige so that's bucket 1 and then the second bucket is just how it's expensive it is now to acquire an education and the rising student loan numbers and all the people thousands who have five degrees and their six figures in debt and I've had a lot
good friends who have been thousands and thousands of dollars in debt and their purpose they start their careers behind you know it's like running the a hundred meter dash against the fastest person on your cross country team who you already life is already hard enough let's be honest and trying to beat that guy or girl is already going to be hard but now you're starting 20 feet behind you got no shot and at every point
point they had to optimize for what is going to help me make more money at every point so the whole idea of do what you want to do the whole idea of security which you need in order to take some level of risk just went out the door and what I really want to do with this work is to allow give people the security with information with an online audience with the ability to make money
any online so that they can then move up
a kind of Maslow's hierarchy of needs so that they can go find that thing that is singular about them that we were talking about earlier I think what you just talked about is a I think it's a a big jump that a lot of people are going through now and it's also a key part of how we talked about becoming a you know a first class or a full citizen of the internet is when you get on the internet
you realize a certain kind of self-reliance you realize that you can reach anyone you can reach consumers customers you can build an audience you can create your own communication channels whereas before the only way for you to realize any of the value that you could create as a worker was to be an institution was to be a cog in a machine and then receive whatever share of that value that you created the corporation is willing to give you
now you can create your own stack and what I think people if there's one thing that people really miss is the benefits of that aren't only at the end when you have this massive audience and you're making all this money and you're a thought leader they start right at the beginning right when you have 10 20 30 followers right when you're just starting your e-mail newsletter you have 30 40 50 people on your on your newsletter you know a bigger network is not necessarily a better Network it's the quality of the network
work the quality of the people in that in that Network that matter and I think this is why we're so passionate about equipping people with these skills in these tools is there is no security like self-reliance when you know that you can create something new that didn't exist you can distribute it package it sell it deliver it all using off-the-shelf software there's a kind of confidence and power to move in the world that I think
no salary or prestigious title could ever give you in the old world it's a great way to end thanks Tiago that was that was lovely we are we are very lucky to get to do this work together it is like nothing I ever imagined work would be like me to meet you David
hey again it's David here one more time before you leave I want to tell you about my online writing school called a rite of passage now it's nothing like the boring writing classes you took in school it's made for Curious people just like you who want to write more think better and use the internet to spark incredible friendships and don't tell your English teacher I said this but there's no talks of adverbs or conjunctions none of that boring stuff right of passage is
more practical than that see I've taken everything I've learned from interviewing some of the world's most effective people on this podcast and I've asked them how they write and then I distilled those lessons into a powerful set of principles for helping you write better if you want to start writing online rite of passage is the best place to begin that's all for today and thanks so much for listening
