On a recent episode of Ryan Holiday’s “The Daily Stoic”, he mentions the idea that you never step in the same river twice. You should re-read great books because you’ll pull new things out since you’ve likely grown from the first time you came across a book.
It was good to listen to David after reading his work and taking his course, Write of Passage. Some things have changed and some remain as true before.
- Changed: he’s stopped doing his podcast – Early on, it was a great way to explore a lot of different interests. It gave him a reason to reach out to experts and gave them a reason to say yes to having a one hour conversation. But you can only do so much, and he shifted his focus entirely to running his cohort based course.
- Changed: he’s stopped tweeting as much – He does say he wants to increase this, but there was a time where he was tweeting 20 times a day and really trying to grow his audience. But it got addicting and crossed a negative threshold. Now he uninstalls during the day and installs at night to catch up.
- Same: still using Evernote – It just works just well enough. When I took WOP in 2019 it seemed like there’d be a chance he’d switch entirely to Roam or entirely to Notion. He uses Notion for running things with the team but Evernote for his personal note system.
- Same: still focused on his cohort based course – He compares the live sessions to concerts. You get the same content but something about the live nature of it changes things. Students are more engaged. It’s more memorable. A culture and community is built knowing others are doing the same thing at the same time. (Neville does a mix of recorded content and live feedback sessions.)
And some other quick tips:
- Scroll through people’s “likes” to see recent content that you’re probably interested in but from people you don’t follow directly
- Create lists for different moods (Neville has a science list and David has a golf highlights list)
- Don’t use acronyms in your Twitter bio (they do rapid feedback on bios at the end of the episode)
He also compared Julian Shapiro to the San Antonio Spurs. If it looks like Julian is doing something wrong with his marketing, you’re probably witnessing some new technique.
Main takeaway: find the Spurs of whatever it is you’re doing and learn from them.