KAIZEN CH.84 - 7 lessons from writing every day for 30 days

Thoughts on writing, Wealth and resets

Feb 10, 2021

Hey friend 👋,

Welcome to the 84th edition of the Kaizen Newsletter ⛩, a weekly newsletter where I share my thoughts, new ideas I learn and make weird connections between self-improvement, productivity, product, tech, sports, anime.

(if you got referred to this page by a friend or are simply visiting you can subscribe here👇)

Just a quick announcement, but the Kaizen Newsletter just reached 500 subscribers! I know it's nothing big, but it means a lot that 500 people enjoy reading my newsletters every single week. So I just wanted to thank you all 🙏.

Now, on to the newsletter.

So last week I finished my writing challenge, Ship30for30. For those who haven't been following, I wrote a mini-essay every day for 30 days straight and it's honestly been an amazing experience.

Here are 7 lessons of what I learned from this experience:

Have an accountability partner

Dickie is the one who convinced me to participate in the cohort, so I knew that I wouldn't want to disappoint him. On days that I just didn't want to write an essay, I would think of "letting Dickie down" and that pushed me to go and write.

And if you don't have an accountability partner? Don't worry because there are plenty of ways to have one from the ship30for30 community.

Surround yourself with like-minded people

I have to admit, I was skeptical about the community portion of Ship30for30, but holy shit is it good.

I got to meet so many cool new people (Saira, Khadija, Alex Phan, Nicolas, Alice, Anne-Marie and Austin just to name a few) through the cohort and it definitely made it more fun for me to ship every day.

Anything can be used as an inspiration

When you write every day, anything and everything can be used as an idea. Because you constantly need to think of what to write about next, your brain is always trying to make connections between real-life situations and articles you read.

That's why it's also important to have a system to capture these ideas.

Have an idea capture system

I knew right from the start that I needed a way to capture my ideas quickly (Drafts) and store them (Notion).

There were so many times where I didn't know what to write about during the day and my idea backlog saved me because I was able to look at past ideas and salvaged them into my daily atomic essay.

Somedays your writing is going to suck

It's almost impossible to have good writing every single day. If you can do that, then you're either a genius or a liar.

You have to train yourself to show up every day and be okay with not getting 50 likes for every atomic essay. What's important is building up consistency.

Writing is a great way to test out ideas

What's great about writing atomic essays, is that it's cheap (aka free) and it's fast. This means that you are constantly shipping out new ideas and can see what resonates with your audience.

Even if it does poorly, it doesn't mean that the idea itself is bad. Maybe it means the copy wasn't catchy enough or maybe you have to re-word it correctly. This then allows you to iterate.

Write for yourself

Instead of writing for virality, I learned that my best writing comes when I write for myself.

When I write for myself, I tend to write about things that I'm truly interested or that I truly believe in and you can see the difference in my essays.

So what's next?

I took the last week off and didn't write a single essay, but I really enjoyed the aspect of writing every day as it forces me to make my gears turn and really helps with my idea generation. Although I feel that posting an essay on Twitter is cool, sometimes I feel it’s too much. So instead, I’m looking to continue writing every day, but posting on my personal blog (which I should update) instead and then post my best ones on Twitter.

🤔 Thoughts

🤑 Thoughts on Wealth

Since I’ve been on Twitter, I’ve always thought the best path to wealth is through entrepreneurship. I’ve always viewed creating and owning a business as the logical way to wealth.

But after listening to Chamath’s most recent podcast on Invest Like The Best and reading this blog post, I don’t think it’s necessary the case.

On the podcast Patrick, the host asks Chamath what he believes is the biggest edge that the “rich” have over the “poor” is they understand the difference between labour and capital.

It’s a mental shift to understand that to be wealthy, you need to own a piece of a business.

And that’s the key.

You don’t need to own a complete business. You just need to own a piece of a business.

It depends on your definition of “wealth”, but even if your aim is to be a millionaire, you’re still able to do it while working in a 9-5. You don’t need to follow the entrepreneur path if your simple goal is to get wealthy.

I like this quote from Nick Maggiulli in his blog post, “There is Nothing Wrong with a Traditional Career” that sums it up nicely.

You don’t have to own the businesses directly, but you do have to own them. So if the entrepreneurial life isn’t for you, just keep buying index funds and don’t stop. It’s arguably the most reliable path to wealth that exists.

🚨 Thoughts on Reset

I started a YouTube channel in November but took a break after posting my third video. I realized that I was trying to aim for too many high-quality outputs through my newsletter, my essays, my tweet-threads and my YouTube videos. But what happened was that the overall quality of each all went down instead.

So what I did was a reset on almost everything (I still continued writing my newsletter) to dial back and choose which outputs I wanted to concentrate on.

My friend Michael created a video talking about a similar subject. In his case, he bumped his video production too quickly which created an artificial quality-barrier that he thought he had to meet every week.

This created so much friction that he decided to just stop.

So to combat this, he decided to take a reset and re-started his video production from (almost scratch). Instead of focusing on all the fancy edits, he wants to concentrate on just releasing the video, so he went with the minimum of edits and released this video.

Obviously, in the ideal world, you would be want to release consistent high-quality videos. But when the high-quality is preventing you from releasing, it's preferable to dial back on it and continue releasing regardless. You can then dial-back up the production at a slower pace.

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