(og thread) When you’re starting out, it feels like you don’t have a lot of value to contribute. but as you get better at some X, the amount of value you can create increases… not just in tandem with the value of your X itself, but the value of your X multiplied by the value of someone else’s Y.

This sounds abstract so lemme describe some examples like. Consider say, doing good design, copywriting, etc etc – this value isn’t much in a vacuum. But if you help a successful business owner improve his sales by 10%, then the value you’ve created is that much. Could be anywhere from $1k to $100k to $1m or beyond, derived from the same principles.

When i was starting out as some kid, i was mainly hanging out with other kids like myself, none of us having built or accomplished anything of note, and we reasoned about possibilities by extrapolating from our experience. This is erroneous: the market is larger than your experience.

When I was starting out I thought I had to sell to people who didn’t understand marketing, and that can be an excruciating thing. These days i get clients who startle me with how good their products are, how they already have an existing customer base, etc, and they pay me more.

this is an off the cuff thread because i want to express this before i forget, so i’m not really being rigorous in laying the whole thing out properly, but it’s just… wack, how tremendously varied the possibilities are. you can build a life where your clients are excited to pay you. There are actually people in the world who are already doing wonderful work in their area of expertise, who don’t have the time and energy and headspace to work on the secondary/auxillary thing that would improve their situation, and they love to work with other serious people.

And interestingly i find that there’s an element of… prospecting, that goes into anything. like 80% of success is choosing the right clients and gently saying no to people who you can’t help. the regular job equivalent here is abt choosing the right company/manager to work for

choosing the right people and the right contexts is ~80%+ of the outcome. but we hardly talk about this openly/publicly. like, this is true for friends, lovers, spouses, everything. completely different life depending on where you go, who you interface with, how you present yourself

i’ve read probably 10s of 1000s of articles, blogposts, etc, maybe 100k+, and a common feature of mediocre writing, mediocre advice, mediocre everything is a lack of emphasis. emphasis takes conviction, which mediocrity does not have. it’s listicles of 20 things when you need 2

you know someone really, really knows their shit when they say things like “focus on X, a bit of Y, and ignore everything else until you’ve gotten Z result”

people who don’t know will waffle about, “here’s 30 things that I learned” what’s the point? nobody internalizes 30 things! (i’m being a bit overdramatic here, there are surely exceptions bla bla but this is the spirit of the truth of it imo)

i wanna share a funny story I remember about the best striker on my secondary school’s football team, who iirc was kind of a chubby dude who hardly showed up for training and smoked cigarettes etc. This was so long ago i might be making some of this up but its good so bear with me lol:

“Mani is so slow, so unfit, his ball handling is so mediocre, his shots are so average. the only thing he has going for him is that he mysteriously somehow always manages to be at the right place at the right time to score goals”

now imagine you could have Mani on your team, who scores goals, vs someone else who is fast, fit, amazing ball handling, amazing shots, but is somehow never in the right place at the right time, and thus never scores goals.

What mani had was a fingertip sensitivity for the nature of the game. he was an opportunist. he could smell opportunity and he seized it. and that’s what winners look like. they win. you know them by their wins. they can look and sound like absolute clowns but they win.

I have a bunch of other threads I could link to from here but I guess I’ll just link to the google doc and update that with the other threads ok i got other things to do kthxbye