Thoughts 2024-12-27

I’ve decided to start writing and publishing more content, not for the potential views but to keep myself engaged, practice producing content, and helping to gather my thoughts. This post is written as I’m watching “An Unfiltered Conversation with Linus Tech Tips”, a 2 hour (at 2x speed so 1hr) podcast style interview with Linus from LTT. At the bottom will be the live notes I took during the video while the rest will be my thoughts that I wrote as I was watching it. This is more for me than it is for you.

Communication is absolutely vital. Communication to the team, to the users, to the general public and potential users, to investors, to all that have been or will be involved in the project, communication is at the heart of all of it. While I myself personally am energized by learning new things and always have a million and one different things that I want to achieve I need to take to heart that in order to actually grow and actually produce value in a meaningful way it has to be a team effort, I simply cannot achieve everything that I want to in the timelines that I want to with just myself as a resource.

Now, is it impossible for me to take on those multiple hats and deliver something that crosses those categories to make progress? No, but I need to acknowledge and accept that it cannot and will not be able to be executed to the same standard that the people who specialize in these tasks are able to execute to and I need to adjust my own personal standards to take into account the tradeoffs that must be made in order to make progress on my goals.

Some other thoughts and practices I’d like to take away from this is needing to get value out of how I’m spending my time. If I’m going to spending time watching YouTube videos and justifying it by saying it’s educational, then I need to accompany that watching with note taking and picking out the key takeaways, writing, producing content (not necessarily content consumed by anyone but myself) at the same time as consuming it. It can be fine to do something “unproductive” for the sole goal of rest or relaxation, but I need to be honest with myself when that is the case and be able to time gate it in a way that allows me to continue making progress on the goals that I have for myself.

ADHD is a super power that is its own kryptonite; it empowers and energizes me to always be hungry for learning new things, trying new things, achieving new things; always moving forward – but it also can be crippling at times and I would benefit from continuing to recognize that and work towards adopting strategies that help me control and guide the application of it in my life.

The daily TODO list is incredibly valuable to me; but there are too many times when I’ll skip it and then all of the sudden I’m jumping forward a few days to a week where it becomes a sort of black hole of productivity in my life. That’s a negative from multiple standpoints, there’s the part that I’m just not making progress on various projects and obligations as fast as I’d like; but there’s also the aspect of feeling that way about several days of my life because I’m not truly seeing what I have managed to accomplish during those tasks.

The list making serves two purposes, it helps keep me focused and making progress on goals and tasks throughout all of the various aspects of my life and it also provides motivation and self reflection on the work that I am able to achieve to stave off imposter syndrome and feeling bad about myself.

Laws of Writing Good Videos:

• Colin & Samir
  • Who is this for?
  • Why would they watch it?
• LTT
  • Control the scope, keep it narrow, keep it focused
  • Don’t waste the viewer’s time
  • Load up the learning outcomes; viewer should get value out of the video
  • Plan for flow (think about how the whole video flows)
  • Make it personal
  • Provide context
  • Remember who you’re talking to
  • Plan for payoff
  • Tell & show them how to feel
  • Have fun, audience’s bullshit detector is finely tuned
• General Notes
  • Camera’s glass filters out 80-90% of your energy, you have to overemphasize
  • Happen in parallel
    • Video concept
    • Title
    • Thumbnail
    • Intro / hook (payoff in first 10-15 seconds)
      • Identify the problem
      • Show me there’s more for them to learn
      • Address the title / thumbnail
    • Flow
    • Payoff
  • Everything in your life can boil down to how effective you are at arguing your points
  • What’s the brand recognition on other communities as a metric for success over and above your own personal numbers
  • Achieving consensus is very important for team cohesion and productivity, if you can’t get people on board with your ideas and marching orders then they’ll leave or break ranks
• Maxims
  • serenity prayer
  • Occams razor