I'm a designer who turned into a writer who turned into a startup CEO. My mission is to help creators earn a living. Subscribe for essays on building an audience and earning a living as a creator.
How to decide what to stress about
|
Hey Reader, If I say something dumb, I'm probably still replaying it in my head 11 years later. Just me? It’s an exhausting feeling. You're not really solving anything, you're just reliving the moment over and over. And when you're building a business, there's always something new to add to the pile. After a while, it gets hard to tell which things actually need your attention and which ones you've just been dragging around. Start by writing everything down. When a worry stays in your head, you feel it but you’re not really able to examine it as easily. Getting everything onto paper helps you take an objective look. Here's the two-question filter I use for this: Question 1: Does this problem get better or worse with time?When I was 19, I broke my retainer and went back to my orthodontist to get a new one. They brushed me off and told me it was fine. I was pretty upset. The broken retainer was poking holes in my mouth. Why wouldn't they look at it? I held onto that anger for years. Eventually I realized the problem wasn't just that my retainer was hurting me. With every passing month, my teeth shifted more and more. All of the work from braces was slowly undoing itself. My anger was justified, but sitting with it wasn't fixing anything. Question 2: Do I have any control over this?With the retainer, the answer was yes. I could find a new orthodontist, get a new retainer, and solve the problem. So that's what I did. Some worries don't hold up to this question though. If you're losing sleep over something you don’t actually control, knowing that may not make the feeling disappear. But it does tell you that spending mental energy on it won't change anything. Go through your list and ask both questions for each item. What you're left with are the problems that are getting worse and that you can actually do something about. Pick one of those problems and take one solid step on it today. PODCASTHow Diary of a CEO Gained 14M Subscribers in 4 yearsThe Diary of a CEO grew to 14 million subscribers in four years. Grace Miller, Flight Story's Head of Failure and Experimentation, led that growth by running constant experiments across multiple shows, some that worked and some that didn't. In this episode, we break down what those experiments looked like and what it takes to grow on YouTube. We cover:
Watch or listen to episode » ARTICLEHow this engineer found a tech job that actually works for working mothersAisha Ahmad is a software engineer and a mother who's carried a lot. She lost her husband to cancer, raised her son alone, eventually remarried, and relocated to California when her husband took a new job. Finding a new role meant finding somewhere that could actually support her life alongside her work. This piece on the Kit blog follows her story from interview to first year. She talks about the things that convinced her to say yes, including a flexible schedule where her team has her son's school pickup on the shared calendar. X POST$150k revenue in 6 weeks… made by AI agentJust last month, Nat Eliason was talking about how Felix, the agent he built, made $15k in two weeks. Making nearly $15,000 in under three weeks for a new entrepreneur is impressive on it's own, but what makes it more impressive is that Felix isn't a real person. Now, the total is $150k and climbing. Nat says they may be "hitting the limits of what a Zero Human Company can do" and he's looking for a human cofounder for Felix. Have a great week! —Nathan |
Nathan Barry
I'm a designer who turned into a writer who turned into a startup CEO. My mission is to help creators earn a living. Subscribe for essays on building an audience and earning a living as a creator.
Hey Reader, If I could solve only one thing in my business, that would have the biggest impact, what would that be? This is the question every great entrepreneur obsesses over. Rather than trying to do everything at once, you look for the bottleneck and focus on solving that. There’s a book called The Goal by an Israeli physicist named Eliyahu Goldratt. It’s a 1984 business novel that business systems nerds love. However if you’re not a business systems nerd you probably… won’t love it. It’s...
Hey Reader, Have you ever spent money on something and immediately felt guilty afterward? Will Guidara spends his money foolishly on purpose. And he thinks you should too. He once bought an entire barrel of whiskey and put it in his basement. He also put a skee-ball machine in the office. Is he going to get a monetary return on either of these things? No. But that’s kind of the point. He calls it the 95/5 rule: Manage your money and time like a maniac 95% of the time (no expense is too...
Hey Reader, Have you ever spent a whole day on something almost nobody saw? It's painful when the whole reason you worked hard was because you wanted to reach people. If you teach a workshop in person, you reach the 20 people in that room. But if you record that same workshop once, you can keep teaching for years on autopilot. This is the concept of leverage, and it's something I talk about in my upcoming book, The Ladders of Wealth (you can pre-order it now). A lot of people will look back...