RC #016 🥶🃏
The Art of Cold DMs & The Resulting Bias
Hey friends,
Hope you're doing fantastic!
In an attempt to make my life easier and my work more manageable, this week I'm going to start experimenting with a new structure for this newsletter.
Each issue of RCs will now have 4 sections: Growth, Rationality, Creativity and Curiosity. Under each section, I'll share and curate the best content I found (or created) during the week related to that category.
In Growth, for example, I'll share marketing and business-related content to help you monetize and promote your creative work. In Rationality, I'll share content that will help you become a better thinker. In Creativity, I'll share content that will help you nurture and foster your creative side. And in Curiosity, I’ll share a piece of fascinating content that will (hopefully) blow your mind.
In today's issue I'm going to cover:
The Art Of Cold DMs
The "Resulting" Bias
Laziness And Unproductivity
Reaching For The Sun
Let's dive right into into!
Growth💸
The Art of Cold DMs
Twitter is an amazing tool. Unfortunately, most people don't take full advantage of it. At best, they use it to share and find ideas. But there’s more to it — you can use it to create opportunities for yourself.
All you have to do is reach out to other people. Of course, the way you do that is what makes all the difference.
My friend Sean recently put together this amazing Twitter thread explaining the process he used to cold DM Robbie and land a great opportunity as a community leader for his Performative Speaking course.
In the thread, he explains the mindset behind the whole process and how he crafted each one of the messages he sent to him. He also shares 3 useful pieces of advice you can use to achieve similar results.
Twitter is just the tip of the iceberg, though. If you want to take this to the next level, you should also check out this other thread where investor Sriram Krishnan explains in detail all he knows about crafting a successful cold email.
Rationality🧭
The "Resulting" Bias
I always saw chess as the ultimate strategy game. Chess grandmasters, I thought, were the rational decision-makers par excellence. But that changed this year when I found out how poker really works.
Turns out poker has at its core a key element that chess completely lacks: uncertainty. And that makes it more like real life and, as a result, a better tool for learning how to make good decisions.
In her book Thinking In Bets, psychologist and poker champion Annie Duke introduces the concept of resulting: confusing the quality of a decision with the quality of an outcome.
Unlike chess, life is full of luck and uncertainty. And most of your decisions are subject to this two powerful forces. As a consequence, not all of your good outcomes are the direct result of your good judgement, and not all of your bad outcomes are the result of your lack of intelligence. Sometimes bad decisions can result in good outcomes. And sometimes good decisions can result in bad outcomes. That doesn’t make them less good or less bad.
If you want to dive deeper and learn more about this cognitive bias, I suggest you watch this video, read this article or, better yet, read Annie's book.
Creativity🎨
Laziness and Unproductivity
It's hard to be creative in a culture that rewards and celebrates workaholism. Creativity requires habits and behaviors that can be labeled as "lazy" or "unproductive". In an atomic essay I shipped this morning, I explore this dilemma between creativity and productivity, and try to explain why you should be willing to make a trade-off if you really want to be more creative.
Coincidentally, this week Anne-Laure wrote this excellent article that explains how laziness can positively impact creativity and innovation.
If you’re serious about being more creative, you also need to be serious about rest, idleness and laziness.
Curiosity🤯
Reaching For The Sun
I’m interested in a bunch of different things. But there's one particular subject that fascinates me more than anything else: science.
Little by little, I've been trying to educate myself and learn more about the ways nature works and the incredible discoveries that have allowed us to advance as a species.
This week I watched this great NatGeo's documentary about NASA’s Parker Solar Probe, a spacecraft launched in 2018 with the aim of observing and gathering data from the outer corona of the Sun. This spacecraft is the closest we've ever been to the sun. It's the only object made by men that has been able to travel all the way to the sun and resist the extremely unforgiving heat created by the huge star. Isn't that so freaking remarkable?
Even if you're not big into science, I highly recommend you check it out. It's relatively short (less than an hour), dynamic and ridiculously mind-blowing.
If you liked this edition of Rational Creatives, why not share it with a friend?
If somebody forwarded this to you and you liked it, why not subscribe?
Scientists have shown that by sharing or subscribing to Rational Creatives, you automatically become 35% more rational and 45% more creative. 🤷♂️
Are you gonna miss out on that?