Welcome to the Action Digest, helping you focus on what matters like noise-canceling headphones on a busy flight.

A glimpse at the action we’re bringing you this week:

• 🚀 The world’s most famous content creator shares his biggest piece of advice for improving fast

• ✅ An advisor to hundreds of successful startups reveals the special trait of people who produce great work

• 🎙️ An award-winning journalist teaches us how to make sure our effort translates into tangible results

P.s., you can check out editions 1-28 here in case you missed them, including insights such as the mindset that helped an entrepreneur build seven different billion-dollar companies, how Steve Jobs cultivated great creative taste, and why success might be much closer than we thought possible.

Seriously, there are some gems you’ll appreciate in these earlier editions ;-)

1. It’s gonna flow s*** water for a substantial amount of time

In 2014, Ed Sheeran was asked for advice in front of an audience of budding YouTubers.

“When I first started out,” Sheeran responds, “I saw Damien Rice in concert, and I mention it in a song, I say ‘I won’t stop till my name’s in lights, stadium heights with Damien Rice,’ and literally I watched him and was like, I wanna do that one day—write a million songs, do a million gigs, and I’ve ended up doing a similar thing. But it literally came from writing a song a day, or two songs a day, or five songs a day, and just getting all these songs out of me, doing a million gigs, sometimes doing three gigs—sometimes we did six gigs a day one year at Glastonbury. But I think you view it as a dirty tap. When you turn a dirty tap on it’s gonna flow s*** water out for a substantial amount of time, and then clean water is gonna start flowing, and now and again, you’ll get a bit of s***, but as long as it gets out of you it’s fine. So with songs, you’re gonna write s*** songs at the beginning. You are. My songs were terrible. My raps were terrible. I listened to it the other day, it’s awful. But I got it out of me and the more and more you write, the more and more you experience, then you start flowing clean water and songs start getting better and better.” “And it’s the same with gigs, you will always play bad gigs at the beginning. That’s what you need to do. And then the more gigs you do, the better you’ll get. Now and then you’ll have a s*** gig but that’s alright because you’ve got it out of you and you’ve experienced it. So I just say the more and more you can do, you put in your 10,000 hours, write as many songs as possible, gig as much as possible.” 

We sometimes hope and even expect clean water to flow immediately. But that almost never happens. Sometimes it takes hundreds or even thousands of hours for the water to run clean. Our job is to just keep showing up and keep putting in the reps. 

But while repetition is necessary for the water to run clear, it is by no means sufficient…

2. Improve something every time

When people come to the world’s most subscribed to YouTuber, Jimmy Donaldson, for advice, he gives them an answer similar to Ed Sheeran but goes one step further.

“Like all you need to do,” Donaldson advises, “this applies to people who have not uploaded videos but have dreams of being a YouTuber, is: make 100 videos… and improve something every time. [The second video] put more effort into the script. The third one, try to learn a new editing trick. The fourth one, try to figure out a way that you can have better inflections in your voice. The fifth one, try to study a new thumbnail tip and implement it. The sixth one, try to figure out a new title. There’s infinite ways. That’s the beauty of content creation online. There’s literally infinite ways, from the coloring, to the frame rate, to the editing, to the filming, to the production, to the jokes, to the pacing, to every little thing can be improved. And they can never not be improved. There’s literally no such thing as a perfect video.”

It is possible to have thousands of hours of experience at something yet still lack competence. The bridge between repetition and mastery is the continual striving to make each rep better than the last. 

Despite the simplicity of Donaldson’s advice, most YouTubers don’t follow through on it.  Why? Well, it might have something to do with the flat start problem…

3. Don’t underestimate the cumulative effect of work

Paul Graham has guided dozens of startups from fledgling concepts to multi-billion dollar enterprises. In his essay on doing great work, he reveals why it can be so hard to achieve the fruits of our labor.

“Great work usually entails spending what would seem to most people an unreasonable amount of time on a problem,” Graham explains. “Great work happens by focusing consistently on something you're genuinely interested in. When you pause to take stock, you're surprised how far you've come. The reason we're surprised is that we underestimate the cumulative effect of work. Writing a page a day doesn't sound like much, but if you do it every day you'll write a book a year. That's the key: consistency. People who do great things don't get a lot done every day. They get something done, rather than nothing.”

Graham explains that doing this kind of consistent, accumulative work is what leads to exponential growth—where our success suddenly snowballs to levels far beyond what we may have imagined at the start. “But the trouble with exponential growth,” he continues, “is that the curve feels flat in the beginning. It isn't; it's still a wonderful exponential curve.” 

As we put in those painstaking early reps, striving to make each better than the last, it may seem as though nothing is happening. The curve feels flat, the dirty water seems endless, and there’s little evidence to suggest that the clear water will ever flow. But don’t turn off the tap prematurely. 

“Something that grows exponentially can become so valuable that it's worth making an extraordinary effort to get it started,” Graham concludes. 

4. Working with a bias towards action is the ultimate competitive advantage

When you study the world’s most prolific creatives, athletes, business leaders, etc, you see the same pattern over and over again.

Working with a bias towards action is the ultimate competitive advantage.

That means always knowing your next move. And it means building a habit of turning your ideas and notes into action steps.

The Action Method product line, designed by a research team devoted to optimizing productivity, was made to optimize working with a bias towards action.

Each page includes a dedicated Action Zone that encourages you to stay action-oriented.

That means getting more done, seeing more results, and feeling more satisfaction.

You can pick up or replenish your supply here. 

We’ll leave you with this…

Thanks for subscribing, and sharing anything you’ve learned with your teams and networks (let us know what you think and share ideas: @ActionDigest).