Jordan Bishop’s OnceaMonth: June 2014
a launch in the making
No more travel stories.
Not in June, anyway.
I’m officially back in Toronto. I can hardly imagine a better place to be during the summer months (my opinion changes quite drastically during winter months). There’s so much to do in the city, and I’ve only just realized how much of Toronto I had overlooked when I limited my stomping grounds to Financial District plus a few blocks of overflow. My Asia travels have given me a new respect for exploring all different parts of a city and reserving judgments until after I’ve seen them all. The West End of Toronto is definitely my most recent locational obsession. And with World Cup in full swing, it’s hard to justify leaving Little Italy, Koreatown, or Little Portugal (yes, I realize the irony in this statement as I write it).
Perhaps ironically, I’m happy to say that June has been a month of work. After such a long time of creating relatively little tangible long-term value for myself and others (Asia trip), I’ve been itching to solve some new problems. The mind gets restless when not applied.
I’ve been working on a semi-secret project that I’m launching in July (click the Recommend button at the bottom of this page for early access). I’m applying a lot of principles I’ve learned from my heroes in order to move extremely quickly while creating the best product possible. Here’s what I mean:
Steve Jobs: Product Wins. I’ve built good things in the past, but there’s nothing large-scale I would look back on and say was amazing. This time around, I’m committed to creating a product that’s the best in the world. No exceptions. Steve’s perfectionism made Apple what it is today — a company of undeniable excellence. Following his lead, I’m happy to say I fully believe my product designer is the best in the world, and the deeper I dive into his daily designs iterations, the more he surprises me with his genius. Every detail is being examined with the utmost care to ensure no corners are cut.
Tim Ferriss: Hire Experts. As someone who loves to learn, I used to face a challenge and commit to solving it myself. I would spend hundreds of hours learning the necessary skills, solve the problem, and then move on. Not only is this approach slow and tedious, it’s dangerously unscalable. In June, I finally learned to hire experts instead. Tim is able to oversee many different projects at the same time, all of them on remarkably-tight deadlines, because he hires the right people to execute. If you want to build a product that’s the best in the world, you need to work with people that are the best in the world.
Elon Musk: Solicit Feedback. This is the only way to make a world-class product. If no one has seen it before you launch, you’re going to miss stuff. A lot of stuff. And then your product stinks. Elon is a master of iteration because he seeks feedback, incorporates it into his product — be it online payments or reusable rockets — and ultimately delivers what consumers actually want. Gain feedback regularly from people you trust so you know what questions consumers will be asking when you hit the market.
Following their lead, I’m getting pretty anxious for my own launch.
Outside of work, I’ve been writing a lot more, all of which can be found on my Medium profile. Writing is a good creative outlet for me, and I like to do it quickly and with as little editing as possible. Just about everything I write is written in 30-60 minutes with a single pass of speed-editing to look for grammatical errors. I use the 80/20 principle to make my writing better every day — I think writing will become an even more critical skill as the Internet continues to change and develop. High-quality writing is already the most underrated skill; very few people are good writers, and only a subset of those are good thinkers. I’m trying to join that exclusive club.
Anyway, that’s it for June. As you can tell, my thoughts are very work-centric right now. Hopefully that pays off when I launch in July. Click the Recommend button below for early access to the launch.
Jordan
