RC #015🚀
Joining Launch MBA & Managing Oneself
Hello friends,
Welcome to another edition of Rational Creatives!
I know I’m little bit late this time. And I’m sorry about that. I don’t like to miss my “deadlines”, but this past week has been kinda crazy.
In this issue I'm gonna cover:
Joining Launch MBA
2 weeks of shipping essays
The Purpose Of Writing
Managing Oneself
Let's dive right into it 🤿
Joining Launch MBA 🚀
I'm thrilled because this week I had the pleasure to join Launch MBA.
Launch MBA is a hands-on, 12-month program where you learn how to build online, profitable businesses. From scratch and without coding skills.
They provide you with a vibrant community of builders, tutorials, AMAs with experts, and a bunch of other hand-picked resources so you can learn by doing.
Recently, I promised myself that by the end of the next year I'd become a full-time creator. That’s why I joined. I wanna start creating digital products to supplement my writing. And Launch MBA struck me as the best way to learn how to do that.
I'm aware I'm gonna be insanely busy in the following months. But, at the same time, I'm confident that by the end of 2021 I'll be happy for making this decision.
My first launch is due by December 30th, so I need to start building ASAP. This first product will be the MVP of an idea that I had a couple of months ago and never executed.
In order to keep myself accountable, I'm gonna embrace KP's philosophy of "building in public" and will document my journey on Twitter and on my blog. I will also be sharing important updates here on Substack.
Special thanks to Kieran, founder of the Launch MBA, for making this possible and having me. And to Janel, who shared her experience as a member of the first cohort on Twitter, and helped me find this great opportunity.
2 weeks of shipping daily essays 🚢
As most of you already know, two weeks ago I started publishing an atomic essay every day. In last week's issue I shared some of my initial thoughts and insights from the experience. Today I want to share with you my favorite essays from this week:
In How Walking Has Changed My Life, I explore the role walking has played in my work and my health ever since I started doing it consistently, 2 months ago. Turns out it has become essential to both my productivity and my well-being.
Sturgeon's Law, Applied to Content is a call to building a solid creative habit and being prolific. But it also touches on the principles that have helped me build my own creative practice.
In No Unique Messages, I argue against the notion that you shouldn't repeat what others have said before, and encourage you to try to be yourself rather than to be original.
If you want to read the rest of my essays, you can find them all in this Twitter thread. If you'd like to share your feedback, please send me a DM. Due to my inflexible publishing schedule, I ship these pieces with little editing and pretty much no feedback. So hearing your thoughts could help me a great deal to keep improving my craft.
The Purpose Of Writing ✍️
A few days ago I opened Hacker News to submit the essay I had written that day, and came across an interesting post. It was ranked in the top 10 and it was about writing (a topic that, as you can imagine, I really care about). So I decided to take at look at it.
After reading the first paragraph, I couldn't stop. I’d heard a couple of people talk about the benefits writing has on your thinking before, but never put this way.
Sven’s essay, The Purpose Of Writing, is an elegant and encouraging argument for cultivating a writing habit as a defense mechanism against BS and intellectual arrogance. Furthermore, he makes the case for using writing not just as a tool for clearer thinking, but also as a device for seeking truth and discovering yourself.
Hands down one of the best pieces of content I read this week.
Managing Oneself 📖
This week I finished reading Managing Oneself by Peter Drucker.
I had tried to read one of his books before (can’t remember which one), but I had to give it up soon after. Back then, I found his writing dry and boring. I couldn’t relate at all.
This time it was different, though. I found his work interesting and stimulating. Very timely, too, as I’ve been reflecting a lot about my professional life lately.
The thesis of this book is simple, but powerful: your performance as a knowledge worker depends almost entirely on self-knowledge and self-awareness.
We will have to place ourselves where we can make the greatest contribution.
In order to succeed, you need to put yourself in a place where you can excel and stand out. But that’s impossible to do without an acute awareness and understanding of your strengths, your personality and your values.
Another thing Drucker emphasizes strongly is that you should only double down on your strengths and put no effort into improving your weaknesses.
One should waste as little effort as possible on improving areas of low competence. It takes far more energy and work to improve from incompetence to mediocrity than it takes to improve from first-rate performance to excellence. And yet most people—especially most teachers and most organizations—concentrate on making incompetent performers into mediocre ones. Energy, resources, and time should go instead to making a competent person into a star performer.
Although I don't fully endorse Drucker's idea that you shouldn't waste no time trying to change your "nature" (I'm a die-hard growth mindset believer), I agree with him that's probably a good idea to focus on your strengths before working on your weaknesses. Especially early in your career.
To sum it up, these are the four questions you need to find an answer for:
What are your strengths?
How do you perform?
How do you learn?
What are your values?
Once you've found your answers, you need to act on them and try to find the place where you belong.
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