KAIZEN CH. 87 - Should You Build an Audience?

Thoughts on passion, feedback loops, building an audience and publishing

Mar 03, 2021

Hey friend 👋,

Welcome to the 87th 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.

Working on 2 new YouTube shorts as well as a longer one. One will be released tomorrow and expect another one to be released before next week’s Kaizen.

If you haven’t checked out my latest video, you can see it here.

Now, on to the newsletter.

🤔 Thoughts

✍️ Thoughts on Building an Audience

If you create content or eventually want to create content, then this is a must-read piece.

Jakob's thesis is that you focus on building a business, not an audience.

Meaning that creators should stop remixing other people's content and instead focus on building meaningful and "valuable content that truly advances the conversation".

And I largely agree with him.

Even if I woke up with 100K followers tomorrow, but my profile is filled with remixed content and platitudes, is it actually worth something?

Maybe? But probably not that much.

And that's why I've stopped posting as much on Twitter and decided to put more focus on gaining experiences by taking action and sharing what I learn as I go.

However, I would've preferred if his article would be a bit more nuanced. I'll speculate that the reason why he wrote it in this way is to create more discussion and impact - which it did, but I disagree with the overall statement that "anyone who remixes content is not good."

It’s especially important for someone who’s starting out to know that it’s “okay” to curate and remix people’s content.

My overall opinion is as follows:

When starting out, do whatever it takes to be consistent at shipping. It doesn't matter if it's original or curated. Just make sure that you become comfortable with creating. But once you've passed that hurdle, then I think it's important to consider finding your own voice and sharing your own thoughts of the world.

✍️ Thoughts on Publishing

This reading pairs very well with the previous one as it continues my thought at the end.

My friend Salman, wrote this piece in his newsletter yesterday and I love it because I'm pushing the exact same movement.

There are so many people out there who are afraid of sharing their thoughts because they worry that it's not good enough or that nobody cares.

But that's why it's so important to lower the barrier for creation. Anybody, if they want to, should be able to create.

That's why pieces like the above are good, but it's also important to add in the nuance so that people don't pressure themselves, even more, to make their first creation "perfect" and end up never releasing it.

😍 Thoughts on Passion

Since I've started this self-development journey, I've always had a bad relationship with passion.

I thought that passion was the ultimate thing to strive for and without it, you couldn't be happy. So for the initial years where I didn't know what I was passionate about, I was confused and lost and sad.

But I later realized that:

There are different ways to find your passion (It's not just something that you suddenly wake up knowing).
You don't even NEED to find your passion to have a fulfilling life.

In this article, Greg Campion offers a way to "manufacture" passion. Now, I don't like the word manufacturing as it seems deliberate and strategic, but I enjoy the thoughts behind it.

The gist of it if this: Passion is not something that you find, but something that you create through iteration.

If you follow what you’re curious about and practice, you will become better at it and after going over the hump of being bad at that particular subject for a certain period of time, you'll start to appreciate it more, master it and eventually even gasp become passionate about it.

It becomes iterative in the sense that sometimes you'll realize that you're not interested in that subject and want to move on to something new. And the cycle repeats itself.