I’m writing this on Saturday morning. Heading to the Warriors/Lakers game later tonight and neither team was involved in any of the trade deadline craziness. I’ve been journaling a lot more lately but, as always, am trying to get back to hitting publish on things. In any case, the info diet is the old reliable when I have nothing else to write about.
Read: NITRO: The Incredible Rise and Inevitable Collapse of Ted Turner’s WCW
I’ve been listening to this before bed so I definitely wouldn’t count it toward a “Books I (actually) read this year” list, but I’d definitely count it on a “How I read 200 books this year” list. That said, it’s been great hearing behind-the-scenes stories of things I watched growing up.
Creative takeaway: Steal like a hairstylist. The first nWo promos were inspired by an old Paul Mitchell commercial. Not sure which one specifically but it might be one like this.
Listen: “Winging It Podcast” by Janis Ozolins and Alex Llull (Spotify, YouTube)
Learned about this podcast through Janis, who does great visualizations about the creative process. Janis (@OzolinsJanis) and Alex (@AlexLlullTW) just got started with a few episodes so I’m binging on it to catch up. Lots of good insight into how Janis and Alex think about Twitter as a tool and how visuals and writing fit in.
Creative takeaway: Mimic if it makes sense. Mimicking your favorite person on Twitter is okay but understand what they’re doing and whether the outcome you want is aligned. The more your business depends on Twitter, the higher your signal has to be and the less you can just talk about whatever.
(Also, kudos to them for not using the first podcast to talk entirely about starting a podcast. They just get right into talking about creativity.)
Watch: “My First Million” This App Entrepreneur Made $10,000,000 By Cloning a Viral Game (YouTube)
Sam Parr (@thesamparr) and Shaan Puri (@shaanvp) talk about Pomp (@apompliano) and all the different content he creates. This was in relation to Shaan and Ben’s new newsletter The Milk Road. I took Shaan’s Power Writing course and one of the concepts in there is being a curious novice when writing content. It’s cool to see Shaan apply it himself. He’s not a crypto expert but he wants to level up his knowledge and he’s sharing what he’s learning as he’s going along.
Creative takeaway: if you’re going to make content daily, you better find a way to enjoy making the content: Pomp has mentioned that doing the daily live show isn’t as difficult as you might think. He gets to talk to his brothers about things they’re interested in.
Bonus takeaway: When I eat we all eat. It’s great seeing how Pomp helped his brothers build up their own followings. They were successful in their own careers but Pomp knows how to build audiences on the internet and helped them do the same. Now they’re creating content together. Shaan has mentioned this in a previous episode: some of the best friends you’ll make are the friends you create things with.
If you want an audience like Pomp has, study WCW/nWo and professional wrestlers because they’re masters of personal branding. And remember that most people are just winging it.