Louis' Learnings 7 - The Content Creation Butterfly Effect
The Power of Warm Introductions & The Impact You Don't Know You Have
☀️ Welcome to another edition of Louis’ Learnings ☀️
I hope you are enjoying the holiday season and are making the most of these last few days of 2020 🗓
This past week was spent preparing for today’s launch of The How To Grow Your Podcast Audience Summit. In addition to the work involved for that, I had the incredible opportunity to interview Tal Gur earlier in the week.
In this email, I share a bit more about my motivations as a content creator and some analytics behind a lesson I’m relearning over and over again!
But First 🥇
A Few Major Things From Last Week
Reread Deep Work by Cal Newport (fifth time is the charm?)
Caught up with my home-town Rabbi over really good coffee
Caught up with a few home-town friends over frisbee and Poke
Ate pounds and pounds of salmon (re-discovered asian markets)
Watched both Wonder Woman Movies
Why write?
Chasing after the butterfly effect 🦋
In 2021, I want writing to play a more substantial role in my life than it did this year.
More than anything else I do, I receive frequent positive validation about my writing, and I’m taking that as a sign to do more of it.
Our most recent interview with Taylor Pearson discussed the butterfly effect from his content creation ecosystem. We shared with him how his book, The End of Jobs, inspired Michael Kennedy to quit his job and become a Python (computer programming language) educator by creating a podcast and online courses.
5 years later, Michael recently crossed 40 million podcast downloads and 50,000 students in his Udemy courses. People now come up to Michael at events to tell him how he’s changed their lives through his teaching materials.
Michael’s amazing story is just one of countless positive testimonials from Taylor’s book. The End of Jobs has sold tens of thousands of copies and Taylor can never fully measure the wide reaching cascading positivity his work produced.
I want my writing and content creation to produce a similar butterfly effect. Just earlier this week, I caught a glimpse of how that’s starting to happen.
My friend told me that his girlfriend is spending her winter break reading Rich Dad, Poor Dad out by a lake. Just a few months back, I convinced that same friend to take on the 75HARD which kickstarted his reading habit and inspired his girlfriend to follow his lead.
These random, one-off examples are the best part of creating this type of content. Being able to play a small part in a chain of actions that lead to someone voluntarily educating themselves about an important topic is extremely motivating.
This is the type of positive impact I hope to continue to have through my work!
One-Meta Lesson I’m Relearning
Warm Introductions & Asking For Help
So many of my favorite interviews come about from warm introductions.
I was introduced to Tal Gur by Tomas Laurinavicius, for example.
I am continually working on shedding the limiting belief that people are annoyed when you ask for help (if it is a fair request).
With this in mind, I mapped out the statistics for how the 31 participants in the summit came to be involved.
Over half of the participants came from completely cold outreach (direct messages or email). This type of communication converts at a low rate and lead to a much greater time expense assembling the list of participants for the project.
Additionally, many of the warm introductions started their own butterfly effect. One person introduced me to another who then introduced me to another and so on.
With the production of this project coming to a close, one of the biggest learnings for me is how substantially the work involved could have been reduced by simply asking for more introductions and referrals!
Anytime someone asks me for a (reasonable) favor, I want to help them out if I can.
As I shared with the Rich Dad, Poor Dad example, seeing others on the path to success and playing a role in that is deeply rewarding.
When I attempt another large interview project like this in the future, I’ll be referring back to my own notes here to remind myself to ask for more help!
Content Updates
How To Grow Your Podcast Audience: Over the course of this week, we are releasing 31 interviews with podcast hosts about how they’ve grown their audiences and marketed their shows. Here’s the highlight reel!
LK Podcast #47 with Taylor Pearson: Taylor was on my day-one list for the podcast. He’s been a dream guest since the very start. We discuss the implications of ergodicity, anti-fragility, proof of work, and decentralized trust.
LK Podcast #46 with Dee Murthy: Dee chats with us about how to build and maintain a network, launching big brands like Young and Reckless, becoming famous on purpose, connecting Nas to Ben Horowitz, and working with Kanye West.
5 Quick Clicks
(1) Book 📚 : The Art of Fully Living by Tal Gur
Tal shares the wild adventure of his decade spent pursuing 100 life goals. It’s impossible to finish this book feeling uninspired.
(2) Podcast 🎧 : Louis & Kyle Lessons from 25 Episodes
With the “sequel” coming out soon (Lessons from 50 Episodes), I wanted to recommend our most recent milestone reflection episode from August.
(3) Tool 🔨 : Parabola.io — software for easy website data automations
I use Parabola to automate data transfer between our podcast rss feed and website. It is an extremely versatile “No-Code” tool for working with APIs.
(4) Blog Post 📝 : Taylor Pearson’s Essay — Markets Are Eating the World
This is one of Taylor’s best essays. It discusses the observed past and expected future implications of lowered transaction costs.
(5) Tunes 🎼 : Hustle Beats by Trabbey
I’ve recommended this playlist before and will again. I’ve had it on repeat while writing the past 4+ newsletters. Amazing study/work music.
Photo of The Week
I’ve loved doing the Wim Hoff breathing in the mornings for the past two weeks. This was my best round so far and the first time I’ve ever held my breath for over 2 minutes!
That’s All For This Week
Let’s end this year strong and hit the ground running going into 2021!
With gratitude,
Louis Shulman
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