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- đ„ How To Do Great Work with Ed Sheeran, MrBeast, and Y Combinator Unicorns
đ„ How To Do Great Work with Ed Sheeran, MrBeast, and Y Combinator Unicorns
Welcome to the Action Digest, helping you focus on what matters like noise-canceling headphones on a busy flight.
A glimpse at the action weâre bringing you this week:
đ The worldâs most famous content creator shares his biggest piece of advice for improving fast
â An advisor to hundreds of successful startups reveals the special trait of people who produce great work
đïž 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 youâll appreciate in these earlier editions ;-)
1. Itâs 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.
âWhen I first started out,â Sheeran responds, âI saw Damien Rice in concert, and I mention it in a song, I say âI wonât stop till my nameâs in lights, stadium heights with Damien Rice,â and literally I watched him and was like, I wanna do that one dayâwrite a million songs, do a million gigs, and Iâve 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 gigsâsometimes 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 itâs gonna flow s*** water out for a substantial amount of time, and then clean water is gonna start flowing, and now and again, youâll get a bit of s***, but as long as it gets out of you itâs fine. So with songs, youâre gonna write s*** songs at the beginning. You are. My songs were terrible. My raps were terrible. I listened to it the other day, itâs 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.â âAnd itâs the same with gigs, you will always play bad gigs at the beginning. Thatâs what you need to do. And then the more gigs you do, the better youâll get. Now and then youâll have a s*** gig but thatâs alright because youâve got it out of you and youâve 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.â
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 sufficientâŠ
2. Improve something every time
When people come to the worldâs most subscribed to YouTuber, Jimmy Donaldson, for advice, he gives them an answer similar to Ed Sheeran but goes one step further.
âLike all you need to do,â Donaldson advises, âthis 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. Thereâs infinite ways. Thatâs the beauty of content creation online. Thereâs 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. Thereâs literally no such thing as a perfect video.â
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 Donaldsonâs advice, most YouTubers donât follow through on it. Why? Well, it might have something to do with the flat start problemâŠ
3. Donât 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.
âGreat work usually entails spending what would seem to most people an unreasonable amount of time on a problem,â Graham explains. âGreat 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.â
Graham explains that doing this kind of consistent, accumulative work is what leads to exponential growthâwhere our success suddenly snowballs to levels far beyond what we may have imagined at the start. âBut the trouble with exponential growth,â he continues, âis that the curve feels flat in the beginning. It isn't; it's still a wonderful exponential curve.â
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 thereâs little evidence to suggest that the clear water will ever flow. But donât turn off the tap prematurely.
âSomething that grows exponentially can become so valuable that it's worth making an extraordinary effort to get it started,â Graham concludes.
4. Working with a bias towards action is the ultimate competitive advantage
When you study the worldâs 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.
âGone are the days where I walk out of a meeting with long notes and no clear understanding what I need to do. These notebooks keep me on track.â
5. Put yourself in a situation where your reps are tied to aâŠ
Ira Glass is the creator and host of This American Life, a radio show that has attracted millions of listeners over several decades.
A group of young students once asked Glass how to figure out what career theyâd be successful at on an episode of the Roadtrip Nation documentary series.
âHonestly like even the stuff youâre really good at, youâre not necessarily good at right away,â Glass counsels. âFor me, like I couldnât make a radio storyâlike I started when I was 19 working at the network level and from that point it took me years.â
To prove his point, Glass plays the students one of his early recordings. As they all burst out laughing, Glass continuesâŠ
đThis insight, that reveals how to increase the liklihood that our reps will materialize into something valuable, is for premium subscribers (yep, this weekly digest is reader supported). For the price of one fancy coffee per month our research team will agonize over the lessons learned from world class creative leaders and teams who make ideas happen, and send their tightly summarized conclusions directly to your inbox on a weekly basis. What a proposition, huh?!
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Weâll leave you with thisâŠ
âI fear not the man who has practiced 10,000 kicks once, but I fear the man who has practiced one kick 10,000 times.â
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