Info refinery #20: Constraints and Seth Godin
Celebrating 20 issues of info refinery, this week something a bit different.
đ§ Whatâs on my mind
Constraints can be powerful. Making us find creative ways to do things, a good example is lowcostplay who uses stuff you can find around the home and lots of imagination to dress as anime characters, here is one example.
Constraints can also simplify our decisions making it less likely to fall into analysis paralysis. For example, I have constrained myself to go to the gym first thing in the morning to avoid people. Before I had many hours in which I could go and that often meant I didnât really decide and I ended up not going. Now thanks to the constraint, I have a unique window in a day to go.
It feels great to do send the 20th edition of this newsletter, and it will be a bit different than usual. This time I limited myself to do the newsletter based on a single source ( I usually put links to multiple articles, Twitter threads, etc.).
This edition will be based on the conversation between Tim Ferris and Seth Godin, almost two hours of podcast with so much information that alone can fill this whole newsletter. here is the link in case you want to listen to it. All the quotes below are attributed to Seth Godin and are taken from the transcript of the podcast.
đ€Ż What have I learned this week
Defining quality: âMeets speckâ, thatâs it.
âQuality, if you want to be a perfectionist, is a great way to hide because you donât want to be an enemy of quality, that when someone says well I canât ship this yet because the quality isnât there,
but perfectionism has nothing to do with perfect, and perfect doesnât have a lot to do with quality.â
Smallest viable audience: Forget about 100 true fans, even less can bring you a long way and maintain you accountable and in movement
âThe smallest viable audience means youâre on the hook because if you are specific about who itâs for, then that group gets to say, âYou made me a promise, and you didnât keep it.â Whereas if you say, âI have this big shiny idea, but this VC wonât fund me,â or âThis media company wonât write about me,â or âOprah wonât call,â now you have a great excuse....
I think what matters is choosing to find your smallest viable audience, understand your genre, and explore what it means to make magic in the small, so you can do it againâ
The power of incompetence: Seth argues that incompetence is necessary to learn things.
âwe learn things by becoming momentarily incompetent. We used to feel like we were in control, that we understood things and then all of a sudden, a new fact arises that counters what we know. In that moment, weâre feeling incompetent and thatâs when most people quit, but then we get through it, and now we know something more than we used to know, and now weâre on to the next thing. Pacing that process is tricky. â
đź Interesting things
Authenticity is overrated?
âAuthenticity enables us to say whatever we want and if people donât like it, well I was just being authentic. It is a ticket to self-absorbed inconsistency, and I donât think anybody we serve wants that. I think what they want is consistency. I think they want us to make a promise and keep it, and the reason itâs called work, not my hobby is because I made a promise.
I think authenticity is overrated and talked about far too much.
the way we act determines how we feel way more often than the way we feel determines how we act.â
Patience with oneself
âMost of the struggling entrepreneurs Iâve seen are impatient when it comes to things that look like an external hustle. Theyâre emailing people too many times, theyâre looking for a shortcut, theyâve got an elevator pitch, theyâve got the fancy business card, theyâre pushing and pushing externally. Thatâs the wrong place to be impatient, but when it comes to confronting the thing theyâre afraid of,
Where we need patience is in confronting the things weâre going to get better at and in strapping in for a useful journey, and where we need impatience is with our fear and with our selfishness.â
Stone age economics
âbreakthrough book in the â60s called Stone Age Economics. It is about what it was like to be a caveman. It turns out that cavemen, who in my view were wearing these horrible Flintstones-like clothes and barely surviving, only worked three hours a day. They spent the rest of their time being present and alive and with their family, and all the things people say they want to do more of. Whatâs fascinating to me about that is lots of the people that you and I know, who go to work and just dig it out day after day, donât do it because they need more money. They are seeking some sort of status, some sort of emotional engagement, some sort of energy, but they forget along the way, because they signed up for this other game, that thereâs the game one can play of, âWow that really was cool what I just made. That fills me with joy. I just did something generous. I just connected with someone at an elemental level.â But theyâre too busy playing somebody elseâs game to play that game. â
đŽ Food for thought
Quote from Elizabeth King is, âProcess saves us from the poverty of our intentions.âÂ
Tomorrow morning when you wake up, you probably wonât feel like engaging in the practice, and if you do, you probably wonât feel that way the next day. That what we do is once decide. We decide that weâre a runner, and runners go running every day. We decide weâre a blogger, and bloggers blog every day, and that decision lightens the cognitive load so much because thereâs no time, no reason to negotiate with ourselves because we already had the meeting. We already decided. Now the question is not should we go or not.
đ Visualization of the week
On a separate note, I am taking part in #30daysmapchallenge, which consists of sharing a map every day based on a theme.
Here is my entry for day number 4. I am enjoying it a lot and learning by doing, which is my preferred way to learn.
If you want to see more of my maps click here.
Thanks for being part of this! Remember that you can reply to this email at any moment to talk with me :)