✪ How to Write and Create Value, Without Selling Your Soul - #46
Beyond the hustle: Writing as a craft for real transformation. I don’t want to go viral. I want to go deep.
I was sitting there the other day, staring at my notes, and this question popped into my head:
"In this noisy world full of growth hackers, self-promoters, and people doing all sorts of weird stunts for attention, how does someone with real expertise (a doctor, a coach, a journalist, a scholar or a specialist) earn trust and credibility without having to play those games?"
"How the hell does one create content that’s so good people actually want to talk about it?
Content that doesn’t just blend in with the AI sludge and the ten other gurus saying the same thing?"
How to Write and Create Value, Without Selling Your Soul
These days I see so many good writers. So skilled, so fluent, with such a unique language and ability to convey their ideas. There’s seem no end to them. The more I browse the more I find new interesting ones.
When I started writing online there were a few hundreds of us. Now there a hundred thousand more.
And so I wonder:
“Is there still space and reason for my voice, my thoughts and ideas to be here?
What can my contribution be when there are so formidable authors and thinkers out there?
How do I stand out, how can I be indispensable to my readers while I keep earning their trust?”
And you know what’s my honest answer?
I don’t know.
I am still digging.
But as I dig, stuff pops out from underground, that is worth paying attention to.
This is what I have started to change:
a) Freeing More Brain Space
The first shift I have started making is to realize that AI isn’t my enemy.
I was quite cautious with it in the beginning, but as I explored more of it, I saw that AI was like a mirror.
The quality of what it generates depends on the depth of my input. The more I feed it quality references, context and real tough questions, the more interesting its answers become.
So my next step has been converting my knowledge, research skills, values and evaluation criteria into precise instructions for AI.
Why?
I don’t need to be doing all the heavy lifting and repetitive tasks that take up most of my work time.
With AI assistance I can free up more time and mind-space for sense-making, dot-connecting and extracting valuable insights and patterns.
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Benefits:
greater depth
more insights
more non-obvious realizations
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Practical take-aways:
Write down the dull, repetitive things you keep doing.
Teach AI how to handle them. Be picky. Be detailed.
Use the space you gain to go deeper into the parts only you can do.
b) Expanding Viewpoints
I start from this assumption: if I am only consuming ideas that reinforce my vision and beliefs, I am not growing.
To grow and have interesting ideas to write about I need to expose myself to different perspectives while questioning mine.
So I started teaching AI how to help me find complementary, contradicting, and disruptive perspectives from other authors. The goal is to increase the number of lenses and perspectives through which I explore and discover new stuff.
It’s not always downright enjoyable but, becoming more aware of a wider range of viewpoints, helps me see more clearly what most people are not noticing and affords me the opportunity to make my ideas harder to knock over.
The wider my view, the least unexpected surprises as I dig deeper.
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Benefits
broader view
better and deeper understanding
stronger argumentation and confidence
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Practical take-aways:
Ask AI: "Who strongly disagrees with this? Why?"
Seek out opposing perspectives and explore counterarguments to each.
c) Embodying the Vision
Great ideas are pretty useless if people can’t do anything with them. So I made a point to myself to keep exploring new ideas but to also be very practical and grounded.
To explore ideas without venturing into realizing them, it’s like learning to swim by reading a book.
And what better way to get my feet wet than by building, creating, giving shape and tangible use for the ideas that I believe in?
To transform what I am passionate about into collections, toolkits, resources, tools, mini-apps, guides, playlists, checklists, templates, frameworks, that little by little embody my voice and vision.
I don’t want to be a reviewer of good restaurants. I want to be a chef.
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Benefits:
my vision and value materialize beyond words through the tools I create.
I am nor just a writer, a reporter, a curator… I am more like an artist. A creator. A philosopher-builder. I transform into value what I imagine.
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Practical take-aways:
Identify what are the key elements at the core of your vision and purpose.
Build simple, tangible tools around them.
Onward
I know I don’t want hustle, I don’t want to be in the spotlight, nor I want to showcase how good I am or play reciprocal supporting tactics in groups I don’t even feel part of.
I don’t want to be louder or flashier.
I want to create something that’s so damn valuable that people not only enjoy reading, and want to tell their friends about it, but that they actually use to realize their dream(s).
My content, though, isn’t at this level yet.
Getting better requires asking hard questions, looking beyond my beliefs, going out of my comfort zone.
Not easy, not fast.
It is going to take time.
The important thing is that I have started questioning and changing things that I thought were already a given.
Because if you don’t change anything, nothing is going to change.
Recommended Picks
☞ People with very high expectations have very low resilience.
…and unfortunately resilience matters in success
…how don’t know how to teach it to you except for I hope suffering happens to you
…greatness is not intelligence.
…greatness comes from character and character isn’t formed out of smart people, it’s formed out of people who suffered
Duration: 1’:40”
Jensen Huang - Nvidia CEO
Media & Culture
☞ Where To Find the Interesting Content Instead of Doomscrolling
“…ultimate guide of publications, magazines, podcasts, YouTube channels and fun corners of the internet where I source my media from.”
” …attention is the new currency and I have been on a journey to reclaim it by finding content across the internet that is actually worth your time.”
☞ Project.Beau
I don’t even remember how I discovered this. It must have been the Instagram algo. Maybe it realized that I like unique, out-of-ordinary imagery, especially the “not in pose” theme, mini-sets and nostalgia of 60’s and 70’s moments. Maybe it saw how much I like Sami Youkilis, Vita Lenta and similar channels that it tried to smuggle this in. Well, what can I say… I am in love with this glamorous visual carousel. Curation, juxtaposition, music selection, make this a perfect example of TASTE at work.
To do work like this, you must have good sources, good memory, lots of experience (age), and an extraordinarily refined tuning-selection knob. It looks easy, but it ain’t.
All the pictures in Project.Beau are curated from many different sources and authors.
P.S.: Do you know other projects / channels like this? (post them in the comments)
☞ A new interesting way to discover film and TV content
Ozu is a video search engine for moments from (mostly american) film and tv shows.
It is still in “under construction” but the idea behind it, is that there is a lot more that can be extracted, re-used and worked upon from all of the television and cinematography we, as humans, have produced.
Scenes, dialogs, emotions and locations from the huge catalog of films and television material can be indexed, queried and put to use in ways most of us cannot even imagine today.
What’s interesting: These guys are turning huge film and video archives into structured data and testing how it could be leveraged to create new profit-making services and apps.
Hint: Business potential of blending
real-time video search,
editing, and
curation across massive video libraries.
“We believe moments and scenes can be a new way to make money for filmmakers, writers, artists, and studios - and could even help bring the industry back to growth. We love discovering new stories, filmmakers, actors - and we think we've found the start of a new way. More video is watched around the world than ever. Billions of hours. What if our collective memory for the world's films and tv shows could be explored?”
Curious on what they may be cooking up? Follow the money. Check their backers: Angels, VCs, and entrepreneurs from Figma, Atlassian, Runway, NVIDIA, and Maximum Effort.
☞ The Games and Pleasures of Childhood (1657)
Curated collection of engravings depicting children playing various games in vogue at the time. France, mid XVII century.
What’s interesting: Curiously enough, if you go through it you will find a “fart in the face” challenge, that caught me really off-guard.
No, it’s not the one below. I restrained myself.
Music
☞ Smooth Jazz House - DJ Set (chill)
(Duration 56’:43”)
Good music I can work with. All instrumental. Good grooves, 120bpm rhythms and smooth Rhodes chords keep me in a relaxed, high-energy focused mood.
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☞ “Pini di Roma” - Ottorino Respighi (classical)
(Duration: 23’:55”)
Reminds me of when I was 6 years old. Sundays full of sunshine. Home before lunch time. June. Rome, Italy. Light beams inside the kitchen. Windows fully open. Familiar, inviting, friendly smells. Listening to the radio. Waiting for the live chronicle of the soccer matches at 2pm.
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☞ “Live from Malibu” - Yussef Dayes Quintet (fusion)
(Duration: 33’:15”)
It’s nearly a year that I keep returning to it.
The more I listen the more I enjoy it. Great music from great musicians.
Nine tracks shot live at sunset on the hills of Malibu.
Have eyes for it too: check out in the video the sensitivity of Elijah Fox on the keyboards, the exquisite playing style of Rocco Palladino on bass, and the luscious grooving passion that moves every beat that band-leader drumming guru Yusef Dayes strikes. Watch these guys closely.
Tools
Learn and talk, with the experts
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Advisors.ai - Instant Personal Advisory Board
Need expert advice, ideas or mentoring? Assemble your personal private panel of 6 top experts and thought leaders (from Steve Jobs to Warren Buffet, Satya Nadella, Mark Cuban, Jack Ma, to Jesus, Dalai Lama, etc.) and ask them anything you want.✴ 7-day free trial
.Stanford STORM
STORM (Synthesis of Topic Outlines through Retrieval and Multi-perspective Question Asking) is a research project from Stanford University designed to generate long, grounded, Wikipedia-like articles from scratch. The interesting thing is that, given any topic of your choice, STORM is capable of assembling a panel of diverse virtual top experts ready to start a roundtable conversation where you can be an active participant. Impressed.
✅ 100% free
How I Can Help You
Feedback and Ideas To Improve Your Channel
Let me audit your publication. Critical analysis (video) of your site/landing page/newsletter/blog (choose one) pointing out limits and weaknesses while suggesting improvements and opportunities.
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Positioning and Personal Branding
Communication strategy definition. Focus on providing feedback to your existing editorial approach (website / social / newsletter) + planning how to improve your visibility, authority and content strategy.
Interested?
Send me a direct message.
Follow a path with a heart.
From Koh Samui (TH)
Robin Good