Dickie's Digest - Mindset, Frameworks, Better Living, Audience-First, and Figma
Hey there, happy Sunday.
I hope everyone had a tremendous New Year. Here’s to 2021 and another 52 editions of Dickie’s Digest!
One thing from me this week: I wrote a thread on my 30 biggest lessons from 2020. I spent a little too much time this week reflecting on 2020, but there were so many things to learn from. If you check it out, let me know if any lessons resonate.
That’s it from me! In this week’s Digest:
Have an epic week!
Dickie
💸 Shaan Puri’s Visualize Value Office Hours
This week’s Visualize Value office hours were a masterclass in leverage, building an audience, and money mindset. Shaan Puri is the co-host of one of my favorite podcasts, My First Million. In this Office Hours, Shaan and Jack take a deep dive into some of Shaan’s epic frameworks (which were part of last week’s Best of 2020 Digest edition)
Here we’re a few of my favorite quotes:
Those who should be envied have assets other than money: cult followings, knowledge, and an audience (or a combination of these three.
The biggest thing you can do to improve your money mindset: start hanging out with people that make a lot of money.
Don’t overplan. Focus on your AB..Z’s:
A: Where you are
Z: Where you want to be
B: The exact next step to get there
To escape competition, seek authenticity. Find what feels like play to you but work for others, that the market will pay you for, then do it every day for a long time.
You can find a great thread with even more takeaways in this thread from my friend Graham.
Watch more: Shaan Puri’s Visualize Value Office Hours
🧹 100 Tips for a Better Life
Despite the cringy title, this one actually had tons of good stuff. It’s rare I read a post like this all the way to completion, but I enjoyed quite a few of these.
Here were a few of my favorites:
4. “Where is the good knife?” If you’re looking for your good X, you have bad Xs. Throw those out
28. You can improve your communication skills with practice much more effectively than you can improve your intelligence with practice. If you’re not that smart but can communicate ideas clearly, you have a great advantage over everybody who can’t communicate clearly.
32. Make accomplishing things as easy as possible. Find the easiest way to start exercising. Find the easiest way to start writing. People make things harder than they have to be and get frustrated when they can’t succeed. Try not to.
53. To start defining your problems, say (out loud) “everything in my life is completely fine.” Notice what objections arise.
83. Compliment people more. Many people have trouble thinking of themselves as smart, or pretty, or kind, unless told by someone else. You can help them out.
92. You have vanishingly little political influence and every thought you spend on politics will probably come to nothing. Consider building things instead, or at least going for a walk.
Read more: 100 Tips for a Better Life
📖 The Ultimate Guide to Building Audience-First
In the past, builders would spend months or years creating a product, then look for people to buy it. But with the rise of the internet, social media, and content creation platforms, everything is changed. Now, you want to spend months or years building an audience, then simply build products to solve their problems.
Your audience is not a particular demographic. It’s simply a group of people who have common problems, common goals, and common needs. By attracting a group of like-minded people, you can simply ask them what their problems are, then solve it with a product.
The operating system of the 21st-century entrepreneur: Start sharing ideas, attracting like-minded people, figuring out their problems, solving their problems, then extract proof that you solved their problems. I wrote about this for Jack Butcher’s Value.app
This post is a good breakdown of how to think about building an audience by asking what audiences you belong to. If you start by logging all of your daily activities, you begin to see the subgroups you can begin to attract. From there, you pair your experience with your unique specific knowledge and a key trend, and voila, you are off to the races.
Read more: The Ultimate Guide to Building Audience-First
🔥 Last week’s most popular link
🎧This Week in Podcasts
If you love the Digest and its weekly podcast recommendations, consider checking out the Digest Podcast Compendium. It’s a curation of my favorite podcast episodes ever recorded, tagged, and summarized with three key takeaways. Supporters get three new podcasts and summaries every week plus an invitation to a private Slack group to chat about the best episodes.
Figma Founder Dyland Field on Invest Like the Best [HIGLY RECOMMEND]
I’ve been picking up design recently, starting with the fundamentals of Figma. So I quickly clicked on this interview with their CEO. He had one profound insight that stuck with me so clearly: in the future, learning the basics of design will be like learning the basics of word processing in 1980. Saying you “don’t design” because you’re “not a designer” will be like saying you “don’t use a word processor” because you “aren’t a writer.”
Dr. Jim Loehr on the Tim Ferriss Show [HIGHLY RECOMMEND]
Jim Loehr is the author of the Power of Full Engagement, a book that’s been on my reading list for far too long. His core thesis is that energy, not time, is our most precious resource. I’m not sure I 100% agree, because I think you need time to use your energy, but that’s nitpicking. He is big on the power of the inner voice, and this quote stuck out to me:
But the power broker in your life is the voice that no one ever hears. In other words, the voice in your head, how well you revisit the tone and content of your private voices. What determines the quality of your life? It is the master storyteller and the stories we tell ourselves or our reality.
🧠 Tweet of the Week
Thanks for reading!
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