This is an experiment where I share 3 things every week with my friends and potentially anyone interested. I’ll share 1 thing on my mind, 1 piece of content I recommend, and 1 picture from my life. I’ll try to do this for the next two months on Sundays. Feedback is encouraged.
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No picture this week…but fresh comedy material!
Instead of a picture from my life, this week y’all are getting an audio clip of me working out some new standup material. Chug a beer and then click play at the top of this email for an enhanced experience. If you want, take some notes and send me your feedback. Which parts did you find funny? How can I make something funnier?
Thing on my mind:
3 small things.
When to be thoughtful: People think I’m a thoughtful guy, but I should be more selective about when to be thoughtful. Thoughtfulness is a great default, but in business when you are making lots of new and lightweight relationships all the time, it might be better to take a more transactional approach at the start to identify value alignment before becoming thoughtful about the relationship. That sounds bad because I said “transactional” but it’s just productive.
Standup is like building product: Doing standup is like building a product. Write down things that make you laugh and go to open mics to test them out in front of an audience. Listen for laughter and see how they confirm or disconfirm your hypotheses about what’s funny. Go home and iterate. I don’t think it requires much talent because I once saw Chris Rock at the Comedy Cellar working out his material and he was not very good. The whole iterating based on feedback thing should be second nature to anyone building products.
Getting more leverage from writing: I published a new blog post this week about ideas that I’m interested in working on next. I love the process of writing and the feedback I get, but I don’t love promoting them except I have to in order to make writing a more leveraged activity. So I do things like post to all of my social media accounts and write summary Tweetstorms to get more attention, but I feel like I have to do way more, which makes me uncomfortable.
Piece of content I recommend:
“How to Get Lucky: Focus On The Fat Tails” by Taylor Pearson
This is basically a lesson on how power law distribution dominates our world, which means that our activities should focus more on depth than breadth. I enjoyed it because it maps well to how I’ve always tended to operate.
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I published a post called “I got next!” — a personal #RequestForStartups - should be a fun read if you are curious what I’m thinking about building next.
As always, you can find out what I’m thinking in more real-time on Twitter and my blog posts are on my website.
Fresh comedy material (Ricky Weekly #5)