How to Build a Personal Monopoly with Jack Butcher

hello everybody i uh you know when i was when i was getting started in my career there were a lot of things i thought i'd be able to do but doing a workshop where almost 5 000 people sign up is one that i never thought would happen so thank you all for being here this is i was just you know we have this group chat going the five of us on the screen i'll introduce everyone and i just said you know few people get to do this and together we basically i'm going to get to this at the end of my presentation we get to learn about a game that most people don't even know exists and that is how to be a citizen of the internet what it means to build a personal monopoly and have a compounding advantage that works for you in your career and that's what we're going to spend the next 90 minutes exploring and i know that we said it was only good me an hour but i called jack up i said hey man we gotta do a q a and then i invited anna fabrega who is a model personal monopoly and she's gonna talk about she's one of my students and she's gonna talk about how in the past year she has actually built hers in the q a anna why don't you introduce yourself from the 305 that's right hey everyone i'm anna i'm from panama former elementary school teacher um and in the past year i sort of became a citizen of the internet um now i'm a content creator and entrepreneur building alternative learning experiences online starting with synthesis which if you have kids ages 7 through 14 you better check it out i'll talk a little bit more about that later but yeah i'm excited to share my experience and how finding my personal monopoly has helped me in this journey this past year and then i'm gonna kick it over to jack butcher you know uh is pretty cool like there's probably no two creators in the world that i'm more bullish on than anna and jack and to be able to have them here to share what they're thinking about is really exciting for me jack put together some slides building off personal monopoly that were a huge improvement and jack is just an all-time creator and jack welcome why don't you introduce yourself thank you mate thanks for having me jack butcher um david i can't remember when we met initially scott i've been a couple of years ago in new york in person and this was kind of the early days of working on the internet for me and since then i've taken a lot of the principles you've talked about to heart experimented a lot and hopefully codified a few things that can help other people uh sort of reverse engineer the process that i've been through over the last couple of years so yeah excited to share a couple slides on it great okay so the concept of a personal monopoly i'm going to try and break this down into a couple of visual explanations that can help you overlay some of these frameworks on your experience to start to move in this direction yourself so david again thanks for having me here if you're not already definitely get to follow david on twitter posts quality content all the time around this very uh interesting emerging subject of a personal monopoly so let's break down what a personal monopoly is so i've been thinking about this ever since i started working online a couple of years ago and just slowly refined how specific the work i've been doing uh has been in the course of those two years or so so in retrospect trying to figure out what are these elements that come together to build a personal monopoly and this is where i'm at with uh with breaking that down so you have these three elements uh the first being competence down there on the bottom left the second being curiosity and the third being character so how do these three elements combine to form something unique which is represented by the middle of this diagram uh really there's three stages to building a personal monopoly as i see it the first being what do you care about so you know subject matter the ability to consistently show up and talk about something competence is what you're good at so your ability to deliver a result against that curiosity and then the final piece which may be the most elusive and hardest to deploy is who you are what what is unique to you uh your personality traits how that comes through in the things you produce so if we look at that in the context of the market i just want to build this idea up so competence is is not enough to build a personal monopoly right there are plenty of people who are good at x so the incompetent at something puts you in a uh a field where there's plenty of competition you're competing purely on you know a a marginal difference in your ability if you add curiosity to that mix you narrow the competition slightly so the person who is competent is going to lose to the person who is 10 times more curious and therefore explores a bunch of different things goes off in directions that the competent person might not so this this small adjustment in curiosity that may even combine things outside of the field that you're operating in with your competence again shrinks that area of competition and these arrows represent kind of how far you can go as a result of combining those two unique things and then finally once you add yourself into the mix here you're completely unique you completely eradicate competition because you've combined these three things you have the ability you have the curiosity to pursue it to a degree that other people won't and then your unique spin on this your character your personality the intangible things that make you you that you combine with this pursuit in public so to now talk about okay those three elements come together to sort of inform what you're going to talk about or or what you're going to spend time working on but then the the next stage of that journey is packaging so i'm not an economist so excuse any uh economic terms i use out of context here but the idea of a monopoly is something you achieve by producing something uh that dominates in a certain market so to use this this analogy i'm going to try and explain how uh packaging is the next sort of piece of that puzzle so you've combined these three things into this intangible combination so if this diagram on the left represents you arriving at that place where you found your competence your curiosity and you're leaning into your personality your job then becomes making that tangible so in the context of what we're talking about today we're talking about publishing content on the internet we're talking about making media we're talking about using media as a device to carry your point of view into the world and connect you with the people that share that point of view or want to learn that point of view and the packet loss that happens between intangible and tangible you know for me to be talking my own book and david's book here that is uh something you combat with great communication so you know what you're thinking about your ability to get to get that to the market in the highest fidelity is definitely a function of how good of a communicator you are so become a great writer you know use design to add context to your ideas and you have a much better shot at forming this personal monopoly than um you know somebody doesn't have those skills so these these concepts just layer on top of each other for me and that's why i think david and i have had uh great exchange in formulating these ideas and trying to articulate how we both see this uh how we both see this concept working because what you're really doing is is closing that gap by increasing your ability to communicate it gives you a much more effective medium to reach the market so to use another economic analogy there's the you know there are commodity goods there are luxury goods and uh in the same way that those three layers combine to make something unique the way that is uh the way that's distributed in the market i think follows the same pattern so you have commodity ideas commodity content that you can get anywhere and you know i'm using a physical product analogy here so on the left hand side there's a hundred thousand versions of this thing um and obviously interest dissipates among that hundred thousand versus on the right hand side you have this one off product limited supply so the equation flips entirely so your ability to lean into and combine those three things is going to drive you towards the right hand side of this spectrum which is going to increase uh demand as a function of reducing supply if you're the only person in the world that can do x you control the market you control the price you control you know the amount of people that are going to come to you for that perspective so this is the goal is to get to the right hand side of this diagram so how do you get there where do you start how do you think about this one of my favorite quotes that [Music] summarizes this process it may be a cliche but it's very very excellent in this context is this quote from steve jobs where he talks about connecting dots looking backwards so i think this was in reference to um i think this was originally said in the context of him going to a typography lecture and that spark forming this passion in the back of his mind to then add um the typographic control to the mac applications that they were developing years and years later so this quote he really just talks about trusting your intuition to the extent that your curiosity is going to draw you towards the things that are going to allow you to make unique um products content whatever it is you're in pursuit of having the faith that your curiosity is going to be uh the most powerful device to seek that out is is something that i think you know this is what is apple the most valuable uh company in the world at this point this is a sort of a testament to that process being uh at the at the center of this philosophy so my final couple slides here are just trying to sear this methodology into your brain this is what i've been using since uh i started to think about the world this way and it's been extremely helpful this idea of dice and what i mean by that is this process of divergence initially so you're in the steve jobs quote so you can only collect the dots look connect the dots looking backwards sorry so the first part of that process is to collect dots that's you know pursue the things you're interested in what is tangentially related to this thing that got me super passionate about it in the first place the first part of that process is really just collecting all that information so it's divergence the second part of that journey is connecting those dots is convergence right so the um essentially the retrospective ability to connect dots so i started my career in in new york about 10 years ago worked in a bunch of different environments a lot of jobs that i honestly didn't wasn't that passionate about or interested in at the first place but there was a nugget of something somewhere along the journey that got stuck you know worked on software in one place worked on advertising in another place like bus advertisements in another place all these like weird little experiences came together to form this you know package of experiences and perspectives that allow you to then concentrate and emerge so the idea of dice being a semi acronym of this thing is um a helpful framework i find to sort of locate yourself within that journey too because you're going to be somewhere along the spectrum at any point in time and obviously once you've connected the darts there is even that process of adding to that composition that you figured out over time so visualize value in in my case it's not a finished product by any means there is still plenty of dot collection going on but the ability to sort of coalesce those things and package them in stages as you continue to collect dots is something that i think helps frame up this uh this journey that um you know that you don't wake up one day and have this figured out it really is a process of discovery and packaging and refinement dice keep can you talk a little bit about i i love this dice framework it's so good um can you talk a little bit about some of the emergent properties of visualized value i mean when i first met you you were still working at an advertising agency and you were working with mostly some car companies and some other high-end brands and you know as i was preparing for this workshop one of the things that i thought was really interesting was to judge the work that you did from the agency from what has stayed the same and what has changed and you've always taken a very simple approach to design lots of thin lines easy to read typography ideas that really speak for themselves rather than trying to get really fancy with design but once you started to move on to visualize value one of the things that you did was you picked a font and you picked black and white with a splash of green as an accent color whenever you needed it so talk about the emergence for you and then also reference that tim ferriss quote in terms of the brand side of building a personal monopoly in terms of making decisions yeah so let's start with that that tim ferriss quote he said make a single decision to eliminate a thousand decisions and that to me was the complete opposite the complete contrarian of the complete contrarian view of the environments that i'd come from so uh in a creative agency every day eighty percent of the work you're doing is kind of this meaningless stylistic exploration as opposed to the process of refining an idea or making something communicate more effectively efficiently etc so that little truth i think is is where you reach this inflection point so the ability to say i found a i found a set of rules that's working for me and then i'm going to start to just push the limits as far as i can within these rules flips the um it flips the onus onto you to be creative and to be um to improve your own skill set within the constraints you've set as opposed to like returning to the blank page every morning and having this like this relationship with your work where it isn't compounding at all so the i think the the inflection point where you see that emergence happening is okay i've i've made a decision that this that i'm not going to break these rules from here i have you know a thousand different ways to iterate on this set of rules that i've um i've at least found some appetite for in the market and then from there you really can expand um you can expand at this unnatural rate because there's i mean there's so many things working for you i think equity in terms of people recognizing your work or your style or your um you know the consistency of the ideas you talk about this isn't necessarily graphic design right it could be i mean to use an example like dave portnoy this guy's not a graphic designer but you know when you read a tweet from dave portnor you know when what he's going to say when he gets on a live video right he's found the point of emergence and he's just going after it every single day and i think that is uh the it's kind of unnatural but to go back to the product metaphor the personal monopoly you have to understand what your product is and lean into it i think you can you you could find any company in the world that has succeeded and i think that's you know what's the killer feature of our product or what's the you know the killer benefit to our customer we're going to lean into that as hard as we possibly can i think in the case of visualize value that is how do you visualize something to make it simpler uh and anything outside of that is superfluous to our mission so let's strip away all of the things that we could waste time on that don't drive us towards that outcome and really lean into that and i think that's true of um that's true of anybody that has found this level of specificity and resonance with their audience their customers etc so uh it's yeah it's uh again the hindsight the hindsight bias that you have in this situation is also interesting because um i was i was really leaning into that visualized value methodology and approach for probably a period of time where people would think why are you still doing that you know it took like three four five months of just doing it every day as a practice to for it to show up with external validation i think you know the culture that we exist in you think if i don't get it on day one then it doesn't work but um the other side of this coin is is this practice making you better as a practitioner so there's some again contrarian way to look at that where you have a selfish approach to honing your skills and as a result of you being selfish in pursuit of your skills you create a better product for the market too yeah one of the things jack just my last question for you is you know you're talking about creating a better product for the market and one of the things that i think is really important is just to be listening and so in what ways has listening to others and listening to the symphony of feedback that you get informed your work and the strategy that you have when you build visualize value yeah great question so um i think what is very interesting about content as a vehicle and the idea of a personal monopoly is you are essentially coalescing a group of people that share at least a slice of your world view so the content that you produce as a result of what you're thinking about what you're working on what you're personally curious about is a magnet for people who think similarly to you and that doesn't necessarily mean you've cracked it on the product side right it means you've tapped into a common um feeling of some kind it's then your job to dig into what that is and i think in the case of visualized value there the ideas that we're translating into these visuals attracted people that were for the most part in pursuit of some agency of some kind so whether they're building businesses whether they're you know trying to instill these mental principles that make the world a easier place to navigate those the type of people you attract and then really spending time with those people and understanding what they need to make the next step in that journey informs how we build products how we iterate on content what we're talking about so it's uh there's this principle in the build one cell twice course called make noise and listen for signal and that's essentially the distillation of this principle it's you just keep talking about the things that you're interested in and then as soon as you get this you know even slight level of like consistent response to something you're on to something to the degree that you should investigate and then the product of that investigation normally is insight that you can turn into an even better way to serve your customer your reader your viewer whatever the um whatever the context is in in your business or your your life i love it i love that make noise and listen for signal i think that's a a really good like flag to plant and just some just a principle to build upon i'm gonna hop in to basically share a bunch of slides that now build off of everything that jack said above and then as i present jack and anna will pop in with comments so i want to talk about of course what are the principles of building a personal monopoly and i want to start big picture because you know whenever somebody comes up to you and says i have this idea you have to ask what changed about the world you have to ask that question because you have to say well why doesn't this thing exist already and you know there was a book that i read a couple years ago it's called the sovereign individual great book and this book was written in the late 90s and he's just this unbelievable distillation of how the world has unfolded i mean it just blows your mind and you know there's one sentence that i just put the book on the floor and i said that's it that is what we should be doing and it was the greatest source of wealth will be the ideas that you have in your head talking about this new internet age that we're moving to and as i've reflected on the book you know i've had to ask what changed i gotta answer this question three things globalization computers and robotics and everybody is internet connected and so this is the frame for this idea of a personal monopoly when i was working my first job i was getting paid nothing i was getting paid forty five thousand dollars a year live in new york city the most expensive city in one of the most expensive cities in the world and it was hard to pay my rent for for living in new york it's really tricky and throughout that time i was saying you know what my work is gonna be replaced by somebody else if unless i'm talented unless i can do something that nobody else is able to do my career is at risk and so in a state of quite frankly fright and panic i said you know what we're moving to this world with global customers as a benefit but global competitors as the drawback and this my friends is the challenge that we face in our careers what the internet does is it gives us gifts just as it takes away the things that we once took for granted and so i was looking at my site analytics this morning from the last week all these blue countries are places where people have visited my site in the last seven days almost every country in the world saved probably 25. in the last week and so what i can do is i can sit at this little desk in the middle of texas i can just move my fingertips and then ideas zip around the world at the speed of light seven times per second and they land in the palms of all these people magic united states india united kingdom canada germany australia france nigeria singapore unbelievable that is the gift that we have all been given and then there's computers and robotics you know last summer i had the opportunity two summers ago i guess at this point i had the opportunity to go to dearborn michigan dearborn is where the ford factory is and this is an old photo of the factory you know factories they used to be loud they used to be dirty men all over the factory floor making stuff with their hands lifting heavy things hard work really hard work and all of a sudden these assembly lines began to change you began to have many more different kinds of people on the factory lines people of all different genders and colors and from all over the world people beginning to work in a factory that was no longer super loud where the assembly line was much simpler where the cars could move instead of the people and this is what i saw when i was in in dearborn michigan i said oh my goodness this is where the world is going the machines are beginning to do more and yesterday i was driving through austin and i looked to my right and i saw a giant new building the guy i was with says that's the new tesla factory what does that look like silent humans nowhere new world computers running the show one machine learns something the rest of the machines automatically get those ideas new world that is computers and robotics and this world rewards systems reward systems builders over systems implementers and so you look at these factories and you say well david i don't have access to a factory what are you talking about you know what i say you're dead wrong because an army of robots is freely available it's just packed in data centers for heat and space efficiency so use it all of us right now whenever we post something on facebook share something on instagram tweet something publish an article you get to use the robots they just don't look like the walking robots that you saw in the movies they look like this but they're robots they work for you 24 hours a day seven days a week basically free and so what you see is now because of the internet changes because of the way the internet is now in our pockets we all have smartphones everybody is a media company and this came to life for me in 2016. i was traveling in chile new year's day checking out these old hieroglyphics with my family go up to the guy at the front and do what i always do when i travel i'm in rural chile i'm in northern chile atacama desert driest place in the entire world go up to the guy at the front i say hey we'd like to uh you know have some have some lunch what do you recommend oh my friends there's there there's nothing that's open within two hours of here it's new years everything's closed uh oh i'm pretty hungry i'm hangry at this point i'm i'm in a bad mood and this guy calls his friend this was her she lives 40 minutes away and he says drive to the end of this road you'll end up in this town there's no paved roads once you get here and everyone lives in these in these huts basically there's no internet access and there's rocks on all the buildings so we're like okay you know sounds like an adventure so we walk up to this woman's place this is her backyard filled with alpacas no internet and you know i'm sitting there and i start asking her you know how do you communicate with the world well there's no cell service there there's no internet her life her experience is entirely constrained in this world of 150 people or so she hadn't left the town at least more than 20 miles out she said in like five years and for us we live in a different world you can sit here and you can just tap your fingers and reach all these different people that is the gift that you have been given by the internet because writing online is like having a personal agent working for you 24 7 who travels the world and finds opportunities for you for free for free and so as we talk about personal monopolies this is what we are thinking about we are here to become citizens of the internet and so when it comes to what changed we start with globalization we think about global computing maybe some robotics and then everybody every single person here is internet connected so that we need to know in terms of building our personal monopoly and this idea was inspired by this quote from the famous musician jerry garcia who once said you want to be the only person who does what you do and so on one hand oh my god i'm so inspired on the other hand you're like how in the world do i make that happen how do you do this and the famous chess player jose raul capablanca he once said to begin you must study the end so that's where we're going to begin so start at the end and i'm going to walk you step by step back to exactly how you can do this so what you're going for is what i call the personal monopoly cues you're trying to build skills that are complementary so they reinforce and amplify each other unusual skills your knowledge that aren't found together experiential skills gained through experience and specific where the more narrow and niche the better so complementary you want them all to work together unusual you should be able to have something where you look and and other people say you know i've never met someone like that experiential what's great about you know jack worked for what eight ten years in an advertising agency in order to have that same skill in terms of the experience other people need to spend that time in the advertising world time is the greatest competitive advantage of all time because there's nothing you can do to speed up time in normal life right and then specific a personal monopoly should be clear and as sharp as a pin and so what we're trying to do here and this is where you begin is not to say oh i haven't gotten to the personal monopoly and stress out about that but to just try to find your personal monopoly path and then you walk this path towards the beautiful view at the end that we'll get to and you got to remember it's going to take years to build a purse monopoly but that means that you should start now and i want to share this video with you and i love this video it's really short and i think it explains our mindset very well that we need to have the world is a very efficient place right there's lots of podcasters there's lots of runners there's lots of tv shows lots of writers the world is very efficient so the people who succeed are the ones who are irrationally passionate about something so they're not doing it for the money but you just need to be patient this is the problem it takes 10 years to build a career in anything it takes it takes 10 years to minimum to raise a child it takes 10 years moving to build a business it takes 10 years to build a career irrationally passionate and patient that's what we need to be looking for what are we irrationally passionate about then how do we walk the personal monopoly path and know that once we do things will work out for us if we can stay patient as we do it so our short-term goal is to get on the personal monopoly path with the long-term goal being to get your personal monopoly and my one of my favorite stories of this is because i've seen every single step along the path that is still unfolding is anna fabrega who is here right now where she joined as a writer passage student and she had been a teacher she was really upset with the education system it wasn't fulfilling her it wasn't paying her well she saw a path to some kind of dead end but at the same time you know she slammed her fists against the table and she said you know what i'm going to change this i'm going to become an entrepreneur and i'm going to start by improving childhood education so this was the beginning of her personal monopoly called on up one day i said you know what this is a great place to start let's keep building and all of a sudden she says you know what i'm actually gonna get more specific use the internet to improve childhood education and you know i said i said to anna and she began to realize you know that still wasn't still wasn't quite enough and so she joined a startup called synthesis which is inspired by the ideas of elon musk it's their chief evangelist she said you know what i'm going to use games on the internet to improve childhood education and i want to just kick it over to anna to just talk a little bit about her experience of what this was like going from the hopelessness and the anxiety to now a bit more certainty about what her future is going to look like because she's walking this personal monopoly path thanks david for that intro do you mind sharing um the twitter screenshot i like that so that i can sort of walk you through um yeah it speaks to the personal monopoly part thank you um so yeah i just want to rewind a little bit so about a year ago a little bit over a year ago i was sitting in panama very frustrated i had recently quit teaching a job that i loved i loved working with kids i had been doing it for five years in different countries i myself had attended 10 different schools growing up in seven different countries so although i loved working with kids i was really frustrated with my inability to transcend the education system right that's very outdated um and so i quit the only thing that i knew i didn't really have a plan was that i was going to take right of passage and sort of start building my online persona um and at first i had all these ideas but what i kept telling david and the different people i'm in the community of rite of passage was well what what's gonna make what's my edge like what's the difference because there's a lot of people out there writing about education a lot of people that feel like me that are questioning the system so what am i bringing to the table what's different about my writing what's interesting and part of the process in writer passage is finding your personal monopoly and i thought it was going to be that after one session i was going to have it all figured out and i was texting david yesterday and i told him wow after an entire year i finally feel like i have my personal my personal monopoly in place and this is really what's taken my writing and my and you know has allowed me to build my audience and do all the wonderful things that i've been doing this past year so if you look at my profile and i'm just going to walk you through the different areas that jack spoke about and that david spoke about and see how it comes to play in just one screenshot so first you have my tag line that says i get kids and kids get me and that sort of gives you a sense of my personality and what i'm into and what um jack was talking about the um your curiosity right like what are the things that i like i like working with kids then the amount the cartwheel emoji gives you a sense of my personality right like the character what am i about i have this very playful and childlike personality so it's a subtle way to sort of show you that then the term edupreneur is a term that i coined last year when i was thinking well what do i want to do now i want to start building different learning experiences in the alternative education space i'm a really passionate educator outside the classroom i like that word to sort of summarize that paired up with former teacher known by little one sesame fab so my last name is fabrega my students started calling me miss fab and i decided to make this my logo and to build my brand around it and you can see the logo on the top right of my cover picture very again colorful goes with the vive of my personality it all goes in context and then um chief evangelist which is i recently joined synthesis um it's a education startup we use a game-based approach to teach kids the things that they're not learning in regular school um and and it's it really goes with my mission and what i've been writing about for the past year and then you have my pin tweaked which anyone that comes to my profile for the first time when they read that it's a bit controversial it's a bit thought-provoking and that's sort of the vibe that i'm going with with my writing the whole purpose of everything that i do is to get people to think about education in a new way and start you know asking questions about why we've been doing this for such a long time are there better alternatives so that tweet sort of speaks to that um so this that you see here is really the sum of who i am and what i do and it's all in one screenshot but it did take a year to get here it took a year of thinking through this and thinking well what what really moves me what am i really passionate about like the video that david just showed what am i irrationally passionate about and willing to work through for the long term um and yeah by writing and then david talks a lot about the content triangle putting different ideas out there and seeing the feedback and how people respond to this and that's really helped me come to terms to with who i am what what am i different like what what skills and what differentiates my content and i realize that everyone has this we all have that unique set of skills and interests that give us that edge but we just have to think about it and work it through and like jack was saying it's a process of discovering and refining and this is where i am now so the other slides that david created if you want to move to those again it sort of shows a progression of you know i started with a very vague idea right like i wanted to rethink education come up with something different but that was not enough like what am i going to do about that then with david we started sort of an online summer camp i started exploring this idea of the cohort based model and actually getting kids to find their own personal monopoly and start thinking about these things that make them unique that make them different and you know those skills that they have that other people don't but then we moved it up another notch which is what if we use games in the internet online to actually teach kids and and i don't mean like oh making school like a game i mean like actually creating a game and that's how kids are learning and that's what i'm doing now at synthesis um and it's really part of my evolving process so i'm sure that if we talk again in a year my personal monopoly is going to have evolved to something else at that point so fantastic so anna if you have any questions she will be with us in the q a and she led me in perfectly to the content triangle which begins with an idea called the creator path and you know i want to walk you through on this person monopoly path like what are the different signposts to think about and what we've spoken about is the first one which is discovery and this is where we're going to begin and i'm going to show you what do you do to actually discover your personal monopoly so what from what anna was saying the last year this was the phase that she was in then we're going to talk about income and we're going to talk about how you can use a personal monopoly to earn more either in employment or in entrepreneurship neither one is better than the other it's really just about what is your personality type and both personal monopolies can be fantastically successful fantastically successful but in both they are best when you get to a place where you are building equity i guess i have a find and replace on my screen so let me get that off there we go and so this begins with a quote from cal newport and he says rather than believing they have to start with a big idea or plan out a whole project in advance they make a myth methodical series of little bets about what might be a good direction learning critical information from lots of little failures and from small but significant wins this rapid and frequent feedback allows them to find unexpected avenues and arrive at extraordinary outcomes and so that's where we begin the discovery phase where this is what jack said this is what ana said where writing about what you're inherently interested in is the best way to make unexpected discoveries and ana led me right into it that begins with the content triangle so you know there's this there's this challenge where how do you actually develop new ideas what do you have to do and the problem is writing takes a ton of time it just takes forever it frustrates me it might frustrate you and it's hard and so what we do though in our daily life is we have conversations and so rather than treating conversations is i'm just going to sit back and you know kill some time with friends what if your conversations could be really interesting and actually help you develop ideas and learn so what you find is you have conversations you're at a coffee shop with a friend at a restaurant somebody says hey that was a really good idea and then you know happened the other night for me actually i said something and then i said you know what i'm going to share this and so maybe you share it on twitter maybe you share in your email newsletter something that's low cost right something you're going to type up it's not gonna you know be on your website forever nothing like that you just share it so then you share it and all of a sudden you start getting feedback some people respond here they say you know what that's really interesting but i i had this one question and another person says you know you might want to add this because then people start adding things and then all of a sudden you write an article about it so now you've written an article about it you're you're building on the feedback of everybody and instead of just being like thoreau who in order to write walden he goes to walden pond for two whole years escapes from all of society just to write something what you're doing is you're actually in the water the waves of conversation and you are having conversation feedback sharing feedback creating feedback feedback feedback then you end up at a place where by the time you publish a book you've gotten all this feedback on through all of these iterations and as you do this is what jack was talking about you realize that you don't exactly find a niche what the content triangle allows you to do is move towards that zone where you don't have a lot of people competing with you and so you don't find a niche but you create one and so i wrote an article about this recently where i said when you build a personal monopoly you are creating demand for an idea people didn't know they were interested in the most successful creators tend to define their own subculture instead of molding themselves into existing ones you know in 2017 i didn't sit down and say hey i wish there was somebody who had some beautiful drawings and did an amazing job visualizing ideas that thought never entered my mind then last year i was walking in mexico city with will will manon and he goes dude you gotta check out this guy jack butcher i'm like who is jack butcher and he goes who is that and he goes oh this this this amazing basically like twitter artist he's a designer and i've never seen anything like it wait well well that sounds interesting so then i go you know i pick up the book i say wow this is amazing i start following him on twitter see all this sort of stuff and so what jack did in terms of building his personal monopoly was he actually created his own niche the same thing that anna did created her own niche and so i want to give you some more examples you know one of my students his name is uh packy mccormick when he joined write a passage it you know it's amazing to watch because he started off this was his original site and he said you know i run this thing called the not boring club and he writes this semi-weekly not boring newsletter on business strategy and pop culture what's really interesting is you can actually see the seeds of his personal monopoly in this original site and now this morning i went on his site it's so much more clear it's so much more simple and he's all about the not boring idea he just says business strategy and finance but a hundred percent not boring that's killer the most fun way to learn what's going on in business then there's onlar huge fan of her work and she was working all these corporate jobs and she said you know what i'm really interested in something called mindful productivity i'm going to coin that term and i'm going to use science and researching and kind of research and combine that with mental well-being and overall health and wellness and i'm gonna take those two things and boom right about productivity and now i have my personal monopoly you know i'm also a huge fan of julia gailiff she is she she used to run a podcast called the rationally well i guess now she runs the rashly speaking podcast and she used to run a podcast with a guy named moscow palucci who was my third ever podcast guest so he introduced me to julia and when it comes to like reasoning and thinking clearly and just using more logic in the way that you move through the world she has this killer personal monopoly when it comes to how to think more clearly i always go to julia her rationally speaking podcast is fantastic there's no one else in the world who does it like she does and then we can also leave the world of writing and when i was living in new york i had a friend and his roommate was this guy his name was eric lewis and i had heard that he was some sort of big deal but i actually i didn't know and he was kind of always out of the house and like whenever he was at the house he was just really chilling you didn't talk much i was like okay whatever and one day i actually heard a podcast that he was on he was interviewed by eric weinstein and i was like this is eric lewis he's amazing and what he did was he didn't find a niche he created one and so let me explain here's what i wrote in that article rather than playing the piano conventionally he reached inside the piano and pulled the strings directly instead of actually touching the keys and through the force of that niche he combined the energy of rock with the improv improvisational aspect of jazz you gotta look up one of his videos this guy is one of the top piano players in the world right now and this all-out performer and his personal monopoly is the energy of rock the improv of jazz and soul like you've never seen before and what i learned is the reason that he was so calm and just casual when i whenever i met him was because he when he plays this guy is an outrageous presenter and just saves all of his energy for that and through this personal monopoly he created the niche of rock jazz so when it comes to building our personal monopoly ana said it jack said it we see it with elu we see it with all of these people got to be specific how do we do that well i think of it like a what i guess i would call a three pinch personal monopoly and so in order to find that you take three things you zoom in on it three times with pinches the three by three rule so the best metaphor for this in terms of the pinches is google maps so you look back and you know if i were to look at france on google maps on my phone this is what you see right you don't see a lot of detail it's just you got some highways and stuff you see paris smack dab in the middle belgium luxembourg london all the way up there you zoom in oh cool now i can see paris i can see the suburbs of paris all the roads the river sienna that runs through the city but you know i still don't know a lot about this city where are the good parks where's eiffel tower how about the louvre ah let's zoom in okay now i'm beginning to see what's going on and now we're getting to the stuff of a personal monopoly where you're actually zooming in on your idea and you're seeing things that the casual observers would have never seen because you're spending the time in here right but now look at what happens you actually get into an idea and you have what i call an intellectual phase transition where instead of map view that's sort of abstracted you begin to see the world in high fidelity street view you actually go into the map and you can see the details that someone who was way out would have never seen before and that's why you go in you get specific and things begin to emerge that you have never seen and jack is actually a really good example of this where jack started off in terms of his first pinch that last really zoomed out view was just design that's it and then he actually jumps into communicating ideas with design and he says you know what that's actually not enough i'm going to do another pinch into the map and i'm going to use the internet to communicate ideas with simple design and then he has this intellectual phase transition boom visualize value and that right there is like that vivid picture of the eiffel tower you actually see an opportunity that you wouldn't have seen otherwise so once again another visualization we start with design communicating ideas with design using the internet to communicate ideas with simple design so what should we remember what should we learn from jack's story you know jack says get good get going then get good and so a lot of people are stuck on this personal monopoly path because they look at the end and they're like you know what i'm not there i'm just going to be a perfectionist i'm not going to do anything and then there's the procrastinators and look the perfectionists the procrastinators they don't do much but watch what happens with the iterators they go up they go down they go up they go down and then later on things begin to work for them and jack said you know it took me a while honest that it took me a while took me david pearl took me years to begin to find my personal monopoly but what allows people to find their personal monopoly is walking this personal monopoly path jack any any comments anything that you want to build on i was so much in there um i think there was a few notes i took over here that i think there were so many slides ago that it might be it might be like dropping us back in a like a weird place context-wise but the when you were talking about the building of the factory that was towards the beginning of the start of your presentation the uh there was a tweet um elon musk made about three weeks ago and it was a reply to somebody who was essentially criticizing the fact that tesla's share price is what it is based on their manufacturing numbers and he's like doesn't look like a car company to me it looks like a factory company and uh elon replied he said the factory is the product and i think that uh analogy even for what we're talking about here is very interesting it's like what is the methodology that you are um or what what are all your experiences converging to become that that become the mechanism for producing things that make sense it's kind of abstract idea but i think that to me is you're not thinking about just the end product you're thinking about what is you do uniquely to produce that product so there's like an intellectual factory that you are consistently upgrading the equipment of and the products that come off the line of that factory get more refined like more well received by the market etc etc so i think again refine the process like the process becomes your um the process is really the product and then the things that the process produces are really just sort of milestones in that journey that was one of the notes i made the other the other was uh engineers and entertainers like this is bifurcation like there's essentially two jobs at the end of this like massive transition you're either building the things or you are existing on the platforms creating the things that are holding the attention of others so that whole metaphor about economics like this is all an attention game right like the in the same way that money flows towards the most refined or the you know the most appropriate i should say product the same applies on the internet it's like how do you find um how do you find how do you carve out your content market fit there's another great example of a guy i think he wrote a newsletter about amazon literally a new a weekly newsletter about the company amazon and i think within a few months he's making six figures a year and the specificity of that i think a lot of people will be scared of that level of specificity but i think the um that to me is one of the mental shifts that makes this uh makes this journey easier is understanding that the longer you resist specificity the longer it's going to take you to get a hold on this thing it's i think it's a we falsely optimize i want to stay broad i don't want to shut off any opportunity but in staying broad you never go deep enough to get the resonance you need to actually hit that emergent phase exactly exactly so i'm gonna go back and i'm gonna build on this personal monopoly path idea and this is one of the things that jack has really gotten to understand well which is okay we focused on discovery which is what i really focus on and write a passage well now what happens how do we actually get income from this and how do we begin to benefit and like i said before there's really two opportunities here there's employment and there's entrepreneurship and both are fantastic and work really well and so with employment you know there's actually so many examples that i'm just going to talk about my friends and so the two are alex danko who through writing online now became like uh almost like an evangelist just like anna for shopify and he was writing and writing and he attracted the attention i wouldn't be surprised of the ceo of shopify and they brought him on and now he gets to do a lot of writing there and it's one of the fastest growing companies in the world right now and then there's my friend nick majuli who 2016 he was working at a litigation consulting firm in boston he's thinking to myself he's thinking to himself i don't want to do this anymore i got to get into finance that's what i want to do so new year's day 2017. he looks himself in the mirror and he says i'm going to get going then i'm going to get good says i'm going to start a blog called of dollars and data and i'm going to publish every single tuesday and never miss a week it is now more than three years later and he's never missed a single tuesday he's now the chief operating officer at rit holds wealth management which if i was working the finance industry i'd make a beeline for their front door and i'd say i would love to work here and now he's their co and he focused with that personal monopoly on what is the intersection of writing investing which is the dollars and data just that intersection and just like what jack said i'm gonna be specific so that's employment then there's entrepreneurship and jack says whatever the content is on the front end there's an opportunity for product on the back end and he very famously says build once sell twice so build and communicate skills with content and then monetize them with a product build and communicate skills with content so that's how you actually advertise to the world hey i can help and you've built these skills look at the world look at all the things that are messed up things that don't work well all of us look at the news that we're just like oh my goodness and from that i say you have a duty if you are talented and if you are skilled you have a duty to tell the world how you can help and like jack said to become a magnet for like-minded people so that you can get involved and work on the highest potential projects for yourself hey david can i just interject quickly yes sir my friend because i think there's also a uh there's a risk reduction process in play here too where content can be the vehicle for sourcing these one-to-one engagements so if you're a designer writer consultant engineer that has a very specific focus content uh visualized value essentially began as a lead generation tool for one-on-one consulting clients like here's the design style that i practice do you want to hire me as a designer to implement this for you personally so the scale doesn't tick doesn't have to at least tick from i am writing online and i'm selling x number of thousand products products by month three there is um a really functional way to apply this as a method for sourcing work that doesn't scale first absolutely thank you jack and from that you see that experience leads into building a product where you do something once and then you are replicating that over time and this is exactly how jack then can go from doing consulting with a bunch of different clients to then having a product where he's productizing himself and so you know this is now what i'm going to move into is equity and this is the cutting edge of where all this is going and this is what i'm really interested in trying to figure out is how then do we build this equity portfolio what are the different ways to actually have equity in a business because once you own a business that is when there's real opportunities here to become that citizen of the internet to become somebody who has that sovereignty because you have control in terms of reach in terms of distribution in terms of direct relationships with your audiences anything like that what are the different ways to actually get equity in what you're building so that we're moving beyond a salary into something bigger and so the first option is to start a company and now this one is hard like i i i run a school and it takes a lot of my creative time away from me now i also make a decision where i could start a business that would be more work maybe like something like convertkit convertkit is the platform that i use to send email newsletters nathan barry he's their ceo he built an online audience really focused on the intersection of design and software and then building authority in a niche and he said you know what i understand these people he had that three-pinch personal monopoly went into that photo of paris went into that visualized value intellectual phase transition and he said you know what i'm going to start an email platform called convertkit and he says look i've been working on convertkit for seven years i think that it's going to take me at least five more to build convertkit into a company worth 1 billion dollars so that's the first opportunity then nathan wrote this amazing essay called the billion dollar blog and in it he talks about another great example of somebody who started a company and was able to leverage the owned reach and distribution and unique perspective into building another billion dollar business and that's emily weiss a total legend and he writes nathan writes about emily who's the ceo of glossier says in the summer of 2010 emily weiss a fashion assistant at vogue had the idea to start her own fashion block into the gloss showcased the real world beauty routines of fashion influencers and celebrities the blog was an immediate hit and by 2012 it received more than 200 000 visitors per month from into the gloss emly created glossier the ground breaking beauty brand now valued at over 1 billion dollars that's the power of an audience so now emily has taken the own detention her unique perspective her personal monopoly she's advertised it and shown the world hey come here we have a unique perspective on beauty and we're going to start a company around this another option is you can evangelize a company this is a real emerging opportunity and look there's the sort of classic example of sponsorships and my friend sara dietschy she does this extremely well she's really into technology and she's just got great taste she's super fun and when it comes to whenever i need anything tech related i ask sarah dietschy and i say the lens that you're looking at right now i texted her i said sarah help me out what is the best lens for this space sarah helped me out and she makes hundreds of thousands of dollars in sponsorships every year so that's the sort of classic route the one that i'm really interested in right now is what ana's doing with chief evangelist where you join a company you become a part of what they're building you don't sacrifice the creative potential actually you add fuel to that fire of creativity and you say i'm not going to be responsible for running this thing because that's going to take away from my creativity which it will there's always a trade-off there but she says you know what creativity is really important to me but i believe in this and i can serve as an evangelist somebody who unlike a sponsor is actually part of the heart the soul and the spirit of this company and then the third opportunity here is investing where packy mccormick one of my students who i spoke about earlier he launched something called the not boring syndicate and he says the not boring syndicate is the first to use a newsletter to generate deal flow think in public and bring the power of a targeted community to bear on early stage fundraising and when started off and read a passage the guy had almost no following had written just a handful of followers and now this is what they're doing typical investments of of looks like a hundred twenty thousand four deals in the last four twelve months and a hundred and different limited partners then there's lee jin and her personal monopoly the thing that she is going to become globally known for might even already be is the passion economy what is the intersection of creators and internet businesses and people being able to actually make money from the things that they're passionate about and now she's the founder managing partner at her own early stage venture capital firm and so to zoom out what you see is this equity portfolio has different options you can start a company evangelize a company or invest in a company these are the different ways that building a personal monopoly can go to work for you so what we see is all of these people and this is where to begin is walking the personal monopoly path so what exactly do you do in order to walk that four c's basically create converse consume and clarify so create you write every day you publish regularly converse you talk to people who can improve your thinking remember the content triangle you consume you're expanding your knowledge through consumption and then you're clarifying your personal monopoly you're defining yourself in ever more clear and specific ways and so when it comes to walking the path you start walking by writing online and you ask yourself what is the unique intersection of skills interests experiences and personality traits what is your unique intersection there and then just like jack was saying you go from one to two to three you know layer on these skills and what i want to remind you about is that most people they don't even know that that this path exists and they aren't familiar with some of the ideas from something like the sovereign individual which says the greatest source the greatest source of wealth will be the ideas you have in your head and i just want to remind you of the fact that the sun is still rising and this is the view and the sun is still rising even at the view at the end of the path so this is where we're going but this is where we need to start thank you very much so will what are the the best questions from the last hour 17. definitely there's a few themes that emerge we've had a ton of questions down in the q a so uh first question is on what you all are just talking about at the end there you know you don't want to be too broad for too long you want to get specific but tushar asks you know the fear with going specific is that you go deep into this hole and and what if it doesn't work right so how can you be confident when you're going to go deep that you've found the place to go deep how do you all think about that yeah so the way that i would say this is that you always want to be listening for signals so you don't want to just say you know what this is going to be my my big plan and i'm just going to do this and have and think it's all going to get figured out what you want to do is just take all of these very small risk steps and then listen to what people are responding to right this is why the content triangle has multiple steps going up because you create and you listen you create and you listen and when people diverge and end up in a place that nobody is interested in it's just because they weren't listening but if you publish consistently and you listen and you seriously work hard to strive to improve that will not happen perfect um we had a thoughtful question earlier on from cameron uh jack had been talking about you know diverge then converge you can't connect the dots looking forward david had talked though about start with the end in mind he thought there's a contradiction there um i wonder if you guys could clarify that jack i know you had a few thoughts on this and david maybe you want to chime in as well yeah i think they're uh i think we're framing the same process from two different angles essentially so where david is talking about begin with the end in mind i think that is um the end would translate similarly to what we're talking about emergence here so you're beginning with the understanding that you're in pursuit of finding things along the way and david correct me if i'm wrong the the end is not um exactly where i'm going to end up what i'm going to be talking about what i'm going to be selling or where i'm going to be working it's uh recognizing the fact that i want to collect experiences and keep iterating on this feedback loop to get to that point exactly so what i would tell you is i know with my end in mind that i am going to be building businesses and writing online as my strategy to do the things that i want to do in life i know with basically 100 certainty i'm doing that for the next 10 years maybe more i've always known that but the actual specifics of this idea that i would go become the writing guy would have never guessed that i don't know if write a passage is going to become a writing school an entrepreneurship school a business school of the future i would love that that is my 10-year vision to have read a passage be a business school the future but to the first question i'm not going to be so high resolution with my end in mind that i don't then listen to what the world wants and what the world needs and what it's telling me so would start with the end of mind with really high resolution maybe the meta principles of how you work but also listening and iterating over time just like what jack said so i don't think they're contradictory yeah and just one more point i think um the the two things to balance there are the feedback you're getting with the things that you can sustain personally so definitely you take into account the feedback you get from the market um i don't think it's always a literal transaction of feedback where you get say somebody's going to tell you hey do this instead of that um there's there's this sort of painful gully phase so you go through you know for me being in an agency environment being told exactly what to do was comfortable in some ways but also like very creatively frustrating and i think balancing the feedback you're getting with the things that you want to be doing those again is a there's a there's no hard delineation between those two things but i would never abandon the process of you know creativity that the creativity that gives you the energy is always going to be the edge so it's kind of a sprinkle of feedback into that thing that's already fueling you anna do you have any thoughts on this of the ways that your personal monopoly has stayed the same versus the way it's changed um i guess that one thing that i've been thinking since you guys were talking about this was that and related to the question that came before those who think that going really deep in their niche is sometime a bit scary or they don't know if people are going to be interested and what i realized was that you don't you you sort of start playing with the content and you guys talked about earlier about how what you're writing should reflect your interest but also a little bit about what the world wants so the way that i've done it is i'm really interested in kids and that's sort of like my irrational obsession but that doesn't mean i'm writing about kids the entire time i'm really interested in learning about ideas in different fields and always approaching it from the lens of a kid or how would a kid sort of like benefit from this and then i write it in that way and i realized that that sort of started to stick and that's where the content triangle comes in that's what people started resonating with so again i am writing about what i'm interested in but also it is what sort of people want to hear um so i'm exploring ideas like big level ideas but from the perspective of a child so that's very niche but at the same time um it's it's it's in a way that it's still interesting to people who are maybe not that interested in kids particularly so perhaps exploring that and trying different things out and seeing what resonates with your audience so the number one theme from the q a is how to start out if you're new if you don't have a lot of followers how do you get this whole engine into motion so i think the best way to approach this question is from personal examples um so we'd love for you guys to talk about anything you were doing uh originally an approach that wasn't working for you so specific examples there or how did you validate the concept behind visualized value right of passage uh on your writing in synthesis yeah so what i did i mentioned before i mean i've always just sort of known and it was just very obvious to me that writing online was such a huge opportunity because when i was in college i remember reading a line from a tech writer named ben thompson and he said i remember so well he said people cannot imagine the scale of the internet and so i just said you know what i'm just gonna spend my career just until it stops working arbitraging the difference between how big people think the internet is for just how big it actually is like the simplest idea and monger charlie munger says take a simple idea and take it seriously that's exactly what i did i'm still doing i'm telling you right now so i said okay that's what i'm gonna do now what's the best way to do this okay well all the people i know about from the internet what do they do they write online so if i read online other people know about me super simple and then i said i am going to write every single day for 90 days or every single day for 90 minutes and i'm never going to stop i'm never going to stop and so that's what i do i took the insight i said okay this is what i'm going to do and then i just executed and i went and i went and i went and things began to emerge 2018 end of the year i tweeted that my actually when i first met will will tell the story of me at the venice whaler so david and i grabbed dinner i guess over two years ago december 2018 i've been reading his newsletter he was in l.a we met up and he said my ambition i want to i want to teach a dozen people how to be creators online those are the big vision i said okay that's pretty cool you know i'd love to be involved in some way two weeks later this guy tweets out i want to teach a thousand people to write online next year so in that two weeks i don't know what happened but the sites went up from a dozen to a thousand and here we are but uh david so what happened so what happened was i was sitting i remember sitting on my sit on my couch my old apartment in brooklyn and uh and i just tweeted i want to teach people to write online dm me if you're interested in in doing that and i got so many dms from this i probably had you know 6 000 email subscribers 8 000 twitter followers at the time and i was just like okay i struck a chord and you just sort of know like you just say things you're like okay something happened here so then i started write a passage and i said i'm just gonna teach people to do what i've done did it first cohort you know maybe we had 50 70 100 people next cohort had a third of that and i i i kid you not i thought that i had it i had reached the entire market of the world for how many people wanted to write online and that at this point i needed to start a whole new business and change and find a new personal monopoly meeting with a friend and she said that's not true you're not thinking about this well just keep going third cohort i hire will and will goes dude i have all these ideas like we can make it so much better and so then will comes on third cohort ends up doing really well anna was in that and now i just switched i just realized there's actually a lot of energy around this writing concept there's a huge opportunity to be the global writing teacher and now then that is becoming this emergent personal monopoly similar to what jack said but from that story like this was not planned at all but the meta principles were and those meta principles will work for you find something you're uniquely interested in publish all the time listen for feedback don't stop yeah and i guess i would add to that that it always helps especially at the beginning when you don't have an audience and you're sort of trying different things out to see what resonates um to have to to keep in mind what is the reaction that you that you want to sort of cause in the audience through your writing whether it is a twit a video or whatever it is that you're putting out there for me my goal was really to get people to stop and think about education in a different way so i always aimed for my tweets to either be something that people would you know i would i'd always aim for to cause an impression like either you're interested or it's a bit controversial and you're sort of like wait what is she talking about both those reactions lead for you to stop and think about what i'm talking about so i really had that in mind and that helped me publish content that was aligned with my goal so keeping that in mind and then again trying different things out and seeing what language and what tone um makes people you know relate to what you're writing about that was really helpful for me especially at the beginning i i can uh reflect a little bit on i think what worked and the lessons i learned in my early career as a designer were always um [Music] currency in that world is a portfolio so i think the principle that was drilled into my head really early on in my career was nobody cares about what institution you um attended to learn x they care about what you can do so try to distill this into a line nobody cares what you can do everybody cares what you can do for them so in a design interview you show up with a portfolio if you don't show up with a portfolio that you know there isn't really no point for you to show up so taking that principle building a body of work with a very specific outcome in mind so what do i want somebody to think when they see my body of work not just oh this person is you know this person has a good sense of taste and they can uh you know they can make something look pretty which is essentially the takeaway in a lot of cases when you look at a design portfolio as soon as i pivoted to this idea of i want to build a portfolio of work that somebody who has something really complex to communicate looks at and it's like i need to hire this person and as soon as i changed my focus to having a body of work that demonstrates an outcome everything changed so perfect jack you talked earlier in the workshop about personality being the hardest part uh to layer on and somebody had a question it probably applies to a lot of people if you're a writer or creating something and you've got competence down you're getting some curiosity mixed in but having trouble shifting and really expressing your personality any advice any of you all have for how to let your your unique personality shine through in the work that you do david you are muted do you i can start there all right um i think one huge caveat is a game of reps like i am from a small town in england definitely not a culture of going out and projecting your every thought to the world every time you have one and i think you kind of layer these things on in the order that i tried to illustrate them so as you find your competence and your curiosity that confidence starts to build so if it's a a piece of information that you have that as david described is this art like this demonstration of arbitrage you have way more confidence to share that because you know you're doing um you know you're providing value you're you are um yeah providing service in some way so i think a lot of those things build on one another so you can have personality and you can go and like be a comedian on twitter that's definitely not my uh forte but the confidence to be yourself i think comes from the depth of study research repetition the amount of work you've put in then um sort of gives you permission to at least in my case i feel like it gives me permission to speak uh very candidly about how i discovered that information what the process was uh the the work itself kind of unlocks that permission in my mind i think um we try and you know put the cart before the horse in some cases and that's where we get uh that's where we start to stumble perfect uh another question i want to ask about specificity you know it's a huge principle of everything we're talking about here is that the internet rewards specificity in a pretty dramatic way so david do you want to share any thoughts uh on that topic in particular yeah i think so this will be the last the last answer and i'm reminded of a story because i know a lot of you are frustrated by this idea of like how does specificity actually help and you know the thing about specificity is it's really hard to actually predict what's going to happen but being specific attracts like-minded people in a way that's just impossible to identify when you just go out on the streets and like i want to tell you just sort of through a story specific we can actually get so in 1977 there was a guy named bill james he was working at a security guard at stokely van camp pork and beans factory he's working there and in 1977 he publishes his first book and it has the very exciting title of baseball abstract featuring 18 categories of statistical information that you just can't find anywhere else talk about specific who's going to read that so he puts this book out there and you know the title is insufferably boring the topic is painfully precise but the good news is because it was so precise it attracted a lot of readers so what he does he goes he pays for an advertisement in a magazine called sporting news that first advertisement leads to 75 orders then 1978 he publishes the second edition 250 people read it and of those 250 people they're research scientists their university professors studying physics economics statistics wall street analysts math wizards all these people who are influenced obsessed with baseball they want to learn about how bill james thinks about the game and then a guy named billy bean who's the general manager for the oakland days reads this book and billy bean sees this brings bill james just into his intellectual orbit and billy bean through this book transforms the game of baseball and bill james gets to be a part of that kickstarts the statistics revolution that has defined sports for the last 40 years and the key to bill james's influence was that he wrote for a tiny group of people who were intensely interested in baseball the statistics of baseball how to think about baseball differently instead of for a mass audience and that what i call the paradox of specificity where the more specific you go the more opportunities you end up getting is why as we walk our personal monopoly path we want to be specific we want to create consume communicate and clarify so thank you all so much for joining we will have a s we'll have a full recording for you we'll have notes we'll send you slides we'll see you on twitter and really appreciate you being here thank you all everybody thanks everyone appreciate it

Channel: David Perell

Views: 53,048

Rating: 4.8898549 out of 5

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Id: VINZMrpPIg8

Length: 91min 12sec (5472 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 29 2021