These are my notes on ideas and concepts I found interesting — not a comprehensive summary of the book. Buy the book →
We convince ourselves that massive success requires massive action. Actually, the inverse is true: Small improvements accumulate into remarkable results.
Habits are the compound interest of self-improvement. The same way that money multiplies through compound interest, the effects of your habits multiply as you repeat them.
Ads are the best-known way to monetize your podcast. They work well for some established shows, but they can be time-consuming, distracting and unpredictable.
Thankfully, there’s an increasingly popular alternative to podcast advertising: You can convert your listeners into paid subscribers. You get a sustainable, recurring source of revenue (that can exceed advertising income!), and provide more value for your biggest fans.
“Podcasters in China can make over $8m a year with just 250 thousand listeners [via audience support]. In contrast, Serial, America’s most popular podcast ever, made about $500k in ad revenue in its first year.”
You’ve got scripting, interviewing, recording and editing down to a science. Thousands of listeners are eagerly awaiting the next episode of your show. You’ve put years of blood, sweat and tears into building a successful podcast.
There’s just one nagging question that keeps you up at night: How is this going to pay your rent?
The good news? You’ve done the hard part: It’s harder to create something so good that people choose to consume it regularly than it is to persuade a percentage of them to pay for it.
The bad news? There’s no one tried and true method…
These are notes on ideas and concepts I found interesting — not a comprehensive summary of the book. Buy the book →
Unlike Sapiens and (to a lesser extend) Homo Deus, 21 Lessons feels like a collection of good essays with only a handful of truly insightful passages. Those sections that did jump out did make me think enough to go circle back for some notes, though.
The nuggets that interest you may be different to those that stuck out to me, but here’s a few passages that were insightful to me (emphasis mine):
At present we are not doing…
These are my notes on ideas and concepts I found interesting — not a comprehensive summary of the book. Buy the book →
The decisions we make in our lives (business, saving and spending, health and lifestyle, relationships, parenting, etc) involve luck, uncertainty, risk, and occasional deception — prominent elements in poker.
Unlike poker, chess contains no hidden information and very little luck.
We get intro trouble when we treat life decisions as if they were chess decisions instead of poker decisions.
Jobs and relocation decisions are bets. Sales negotiations and contracts are bets. Buying a house is a bet…
These are notes on ideas and concepts I found interesting — not a comprehensive summary of the book. Buy the book →
A habit is just a choice that we deliberately made at some point (how to eat, how often to drink, when to go for a jog, etc), and then stop thinking about, but continue doing — often every day.
Put another way, a habit is a formula our brain automatically follows. When I see CUE, I will do ROUTINE in order to get REWARD.
By understanding how it happens, you can rebuild those patterns in whichever way you…
Back in March we launched the new Flow, which earned #1 on Product Hunt — the world’s most popular new product community. Getting to #1 contributed to an already successful launch, put Flow on a lot of people’s radars, and drove a huge number of new users into the app.
We’d hoped to reach #1, but didn’t exactly expect it. We knew luck would play a huge part, but also did a number of things that gave us a leg up. The single most important one? We successfully avoided alienating absolutely everyone around us.
More on that in a second…
These are my notes on ideas and concepts I found interesting — not a comprehensive summary of the book. Buy the book →
The 80/20 principle (aka the Pareto principle) states that 80% of the results come from 20% of the causes. A few things are important; most are not.
80/20 thinking requires, and with practice enables, us to spot the few really important things that are happening, and ignore the most unimportant things. It teaches us to see the woods for the trees.
80/20 thinking is reflective, unconventional, hedonistic, strategic, and nonlinear; in that it combines extreme ambition (in…
These are my notes on ideas and concepts I found interesting — not a comprehensive summary of the book. Buy the book →
The ideas most of us traffic in every day are interesting, but not sensational. Truthful, but not mind-blowing. Important, but not ‘life or death’.
So which ideas stick? Ideas that are (1) understandable, (2) memorable, and (3) effective in changing thought or behaviour.
Almost all sticky ideas share the same six principles:
To strip an idea down to its core, you must first know what to exclude.
Violate people’s expectations. Engage people’s curiosity over a long period…
These are my notes on ideas and concepts I found interesting — not a comprehensive summary of the book. Buy the book →
You will come across obstacles in life — fair and unfair. What matters most is not what these obstacles are are but how we see them, react to them, and whether we keep our composure.
Too often we react emotionally, get despondent and lose our perspective. All that does it turn bad things into really bad things.
We must learn to see opportunity inside every obstacle.
A few things to keep in mind when faced with a…
Founder of DoubleUp (DoubleUp.agency), co-founder of Supercast (supercast.com). Admirer of simplicity, fan of excess. Sharing notes at booknotes.email