RC #017 📊🌪️
Getting started with SEO & Dealing with uncertainty
Hello friends,
Welcome to issue #017 of Rational Creatives!
Today I’m gonna cover:
Getting started with SEO
Dealing with uncertainty
How successful writers picked their niche
Spontaneous order
Let’s dive right into it 🤿
Growth 💸
Getting started with SEO
Back in August when I first created my website, I tried to learn about SEO. But I was so overwhelmed by the whole process of building my site that I was unable to push through the initial frustration that you naturally feel when you start learning something new. So I immediately dropped it. I couldn’t do it. And since I wasn’t blogging very frequently, I kind of allowed myself to look away and procrastinate it.
But now it’s becoming increasingly hard to ignore it. For almost a month, I’ve been posting my atomic essays for S30x30 on my website. And every time I hit “publish”, my SEO WordPress plugin reminds me with a red, sad emoji that I’m not doing a pretty good job.
Luckily, this week I ran into this amazing tweetstorm where Jordan explains the fundamentals of SEO in a very concise and accessible way. The thread is full of actionable tips and helpful resources to get you started.
My favorite part was the first tweet where he explains what SEO is actually about: trust.
Highly recommend you check it out and start putting all his advice into action. SEO is one of the best ways to drive consistent organic traffic to your website and turn it into an evergreen asset.
Rationality 🧭
Dealing with uncertainty
We walk through life with our heads full of assumptions, beliefs and convictions. And most of the time, we are not even aware of this.
Granted — without some basic level of certitude, life can be overwhelming. But as the world keeps losing the steadiness and uniformity that we enjoyed for centuries, the ability to thrive under uncertainty is becoming more and more important.
The first step to better deal with uncertainty is to understand that very few things are 100% right or wrong. Nearly everything is a matter of probabilities. As a result, nuance dominates reality, even when it comes to the hard sciences.
Once you’re able to see this, you’ll also understand that many -if not most- of the things that you deem “truths” are actually deep-rooted, highly inaccurate opinions. And unless you’re able to systematically get rid of them, you’ll have a hard time building a company, investing or doing any other activity that requires you to see reality as close as it actually is.
Here's where we can use some help from French philosopher Montaigne. A big fan and practitioner of skepticism, one of his favorite mottos was Que sais-je?" (What do I know?). By regularly asking yourself this question, you can start debugging your brain little by little. Mind you, though, this is a never-ending process. So you better learn how to be comfortable with challenging your own beliefs and acknowledging your recurring ignorance.
If you're curious about Montaigne's takes and philosophy, I highly recommend you read this great introductory article to his life and work.
Creativity 🎨
How successful writers picked their niche
This year I’ve had the opportunity to chat with a lot of other writers and creators. And struggling to find/pick a niche has turned out to be a very recurring theme. In fact, it’s something I personally struggled with for a couple of months, too. (I wrote a brief piece reflecting on my experience on this issue)
So reading this article by Compound’s founder Stew Fortier was very comforting — it confirmed my theory that everyone figures it out more or less in the same way: experimenting.
What’s even cooler is that two of my favorite online writers —Anne-Laure Le Cunff and James Clear— are featured as examples of people who found their niche by trial and error.
Whether you’re currently struggling with this right now or you have in the past, I highly recommend you check this one out.
Curiosity 🤯
Spontaneous Order
This week I wrote an essay that got me thinking about a life-changing concept that I first encountered several years ago: spontaneous order.
The concept refers to systems that emerge and organize themselves without man’s control or planning. Free markets, the internet and language are examples of spontaneous order.
Although the idea has apparently been around for a while, it was Friedrich Hayek and the Austrian School of Economics who gave spontaneous order a central role in their social and economic theories.
If you want to learn more about it, I highly recommend you check out this YouTube video, which, by the way, is the same video that first introduced me to the idea.
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