BC LIFE

Jack Butcher
@jackbutcher 5 years, 9 months ago 1066 views

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10 ideas that changed my life: (thread)

Illustrations by @visualizevalue.

1/ Get more done by doing less.

2/ You can't get better unless you get started.

3/ Zoom out. It's getting better. (IP via @behaviorgap)

4/ 'Normal is an illusion. What is normal for the spider is chaos for the fly.' — Charles Addams

5/ No one owes you anything. Figure it out.

6/ Invest time now, earn time later.

7/ If it's too easy, you're leaving opportunity on the table.

8/ To get nowhere, obsess over what other people think.

9/ Bad decisions compound faster than good decisions.

10/ Shoot.

More from Jack Butcher

Jack Butcher
@jackbutcher

Hindsight in 2020: (10 thoughts)

Relationships > everything:

My relationship with @celiapreihs is the foundation of all the good things in my life, and has amplified the quality of hundreds of relationships with people I've got to know and learn from this year.

Shiny objects make us duller:

The grass is always greener until you're standing on it. "No" is still the highest ROI word in my vocabulary.

The internet is very, very big:

Make something work for one person (could also be yourself), then work on distribution.

Scale is seductive but you can't get it if you don't have something people want.

You can't please everyone:

If you could, there would be no point anyway - it's tough when someone doesn't love your work but it's how markets function.

The blows hit harder in the early rounds, just keep getting up.

Jack Butcher
@jackbutcher

Building a Personal Monopoly: (thread)

How to combine competence, curiosity, and character to create a category of one.

↓

1/ Competence

If we want anyone to spend their time, attention or money on anything of ours, we must first be competent.

Lots of people are competent, so there's lots of competition here.

Let's say this is "school teachers"

2/ Competence + Curiosity

If we add curiosity to the mix, competition starts to thin.

This separates the generalist practitioners from the irrationally passionate.

Let's say this is "school teachers who are curious about learning innovation"

3/ Competence + Curiosity + Character

Now combinatorics put us in category of one territory.

Let's say this is "school teachers who are curious about learning innovation, building a gamified school inspired by SpaceX's Ad Astra." (real example: @anafabrega11)

4/ Making it Tangible

All this is great until it comes to communicating it to the rest of the world.

Which is why bad packaging kills amazing ideas.

Writing, design, marketing — our job here is to lose as little as possible in translation from the intangible to the tangible.

Jack Butcher
@jackbutcher

10 ideas that changed my life: (thread)

Illustrations by @visualizevalue

1/ Get more done by doing less.

2/ You can't get better unless you get started.

3/ Zoom out. It's getting better. (IP via @behaviorgap)

4/ 'Normal is an illusion. What is normal for the spider is chaos for the fly.' — Charles Addams

Jack Butcher
@jackbutcher

Building Principles:

↓

1/

Value = doing things that other people don't do, won't do or can't do.

"You get paid in direct proportion to the difficulty of problems you solve" — Elon Musk

2/

Service is high-touch result generation (building experience), product is low-touch result generation (scaling experience).

3/

In a world of infinite distraction, focus is the only path to freedom.

4/

Sell time to buy experience, sell experience to buy time.

“If you don't find a way to make money while you sleep, you will work until you die.” — Warren Buffett

Jack Butcher
@jackbutcher

Why promoting yourself/your business/your ideas feels uncomfortable:

You must repeat things that are obvious to you until they become obvious to others.

This is why most people hire marketers or outsource the amplification of their message.

The problem with that is no one is an invested as you are, and no one knows your message like you do.

And why those who break through their discomfort reach an escape velocity that eludes most.

This is a difficult and unnatural process, hence the upside on the other side.

Another way to think about it is the famous shelf analogy:

No one wants a drill they want a hole, no one wants a hole they want a shelf, no one wants a shelf they want to a place to put books to look smart, etc.

People care about the 2nd, 3rd, 4th order effects of your work.

More from Life

Steve Stewart-Williams
@SteveStuWill

THREAD: 12 Things Everyone Should Know About IQ

1. IQ is one of the most heritable psychological traits – that is, individual differences in IQ are strongly associated with individual differences in genes (at least in fairly typical modern environments). https://t.co/3XxzW9bxLE

2. The heritability of IQ *increases* from childhood to adulthood. Meanwhile, the effect of the shared environment largely fades away. In other words, when it comes to IQ, nature becomes more important as we get older, nurture less. https://t.co/UqtS1lpw3n

3. IQ scores have been increasing for the last century or so, a phenomenon known as the Flynn effect. https://t.co/sCZvCst3hw (N ≈ 4 million)

(Note that the Flynn effect shows that IQ isn't 100% genetic; it doesn't show that it's 100% environmental.)

4. IQ predicts many important real world outcomes.

For example, though far from perfect, IQ is the single-best predictor of job performance we have – much better than Emotional Intelligence, the Big Five, Grit, etc. https://t.co/rKUgKDAAVx https://t.co/DWbVI8QSU3

5. Higher IQ is associated with a lower risk of death from most causes, including cardiovascular disease, respiratory disease, most forms of cancer, homicide, suicide, and accident. https://t.co/PJjGNyeQRA (N = 728,160)