🤯Unknown Unknowns #100 - How This Began 100 Weeks Ago

May 22, 2023

I started this newsletter over two years ago. I only started it because it was the last assignment of an online writing class. I had no expectations, no goals. And yet here we are, one hundred issues later.

How? At first, I kept going on sheer stubbornness. Then, I started to enjoy the process. I started experimenting. If you’ve been here since the beginning, you might remember that I originally shared an Idea, an Experiment, and Something Interesting each week. Coming up with an experiment every week was really hard, so I scrapped it. I started leaving out what was hard and trying things that were interesting.

Over time, some reactions started to trickle in. I felt like I wasn’t just indulging myself, but other people were getting value out of reading the newsletter. I started to have some conversations and ideas started popping out.

For the last couple of months, I’ve been writing about creativity. Without this newsletter, I would never have thought that much about creativity and wouldn’t have had great conversations about it.

But the biggest benefit of the newsletter is that it’s an outlet for the creative process. I look forward to writing the newsletter and the act of writing vitalizes me. I’m looking forward to working out ideas and seeing what I really think. It’s become an act of recreation. I’ve noticed that a lot of entertainment serves as a distraction, to pass the time. We only have limited time on earth, why do we want to kill time?

Creativity makes me wish I had more time, not that I successfully completed another rotation of the earth.

I really believe there is a need for creative acts, that it’s a need within every human. I go deeper in the Writing of the Week.

This is why I encourage everyone to start a newsletter. Newsletters are one of the smallest bets that you can make. You can lower the lift as much as necessary. Rohun Jauhar’s newsletter is 3 tweets and a sentence describing each one. And you can adapt the newsletter to anything you want. It’s a place for you to experiment and have fun. A newsletter is the smallest step for your creativity, a place for you to find intrinsic motivation.

Doing something 100 times forces you to strip away everything you find painful and you find something interesting inside. - from Unknown Unknowns #95

Since it’s a milestone issue, I’ll share some of what I’ve been up to:

Here are my favorite essays:

The Path - The first essay I’ve written that wasn’t a school assignment.

The Dance of the Bees: Finding Your Path as a Creator - I’ve always had trouble with the idea of a niche. This essay is about exploring your

Creativity series - Unknown Unknowns Issues #86 - #99 - My exploration of what creativity is, why it’s important, and maybe how to pursue it.

What I offer:

Newsletter Launchpad - A three-week course on how to start your own newsletter. We will give feedback on every newsletter draft during the cohort. I believe that a newsletter is the easiest way to explore your creative side, and we will show you how to fit a newsletter into your lifestyle.

Free as part of Daniel Vassallo’s Small Bets Community. The next cohort starts on Tuesday, May 29th, and runs for three weeks. We’re having a free webinar tomorrow night, May 22 at 9PM ET.

Course Catalyst - an email course to help you get the most out of taking an online course. My understanding of the range of opportunities has broadened because of the courses that I’ve taken over the past three years. But courses can be intimidating and confusing. Over a week, I’ll show you how to get the results you want from the courses you take. - free with coupon “Beta”

Concept Crafting - Writing is difficult. The words on the page don’t come off how they sound in our heads. I will help you craft in order to get your ideas out of your head and into your audience’s eyes. I will help you come up with personal stories, metaphors, and structures that will engage your readers and convey your ideas. - 20% off with coupon “Newsletter”

I’m focused on helping others find a creative outlet to heal my scars from my corporate past. Reply to this email if you’re having trouble finding an outlet, I’m here to help!

Writing of the Week:

Essay: The Purpose of Life is Through Intrinsic Motivation

Discoveries:

1️⃣ I don’t find Seinfeld’s story compelling. But it’s fascinating that Seinfeld has discovered what’s interesting to himself. But it may not be what this guy wants. It may not even be what Seinfeld wants NOW.

h/t

Paul Millerd

🔗 Jerry Seinfeld and Orny Adams

2️⃣

visakan veerasamy

muses about how we get from point A to point B. From an alternate interpretation of Robert Frost’s Poem The Road Not Taken, to how lightning strikes and ants find food, it’s a fascinating dive into decision-making and how we retrospectively think we made a decision.

🔗 branching paths

3️⃣

4️⃣ I’ve been thinking that life is all fractals and recursions.

Chao Lam

makes the point that when you’re in flow state, that means you’re at the right fractal level.

🔗 IF stuck THEN zoom in OR out

5️⃣ The whole interview is great, but you need to listen to the story that starts at 18:15

Hardest hitting quote: “I don’t know what it’s going to become, but do that because one day you’re going to wake up and you’re going to be 40 years old like me, and you might be dying of cancer, and you may have spent your entire life doing something that you never truly loved.”

🔗 Tim Ferriss interviews Bobby Hundreds