🤯Unknown Unknowns #33 - Discovery
By definition, the hardest part of unknown unknowns is finding them. If you don't know they exist, you can't look for them. But an unknown unknown will probably be the most likely catalyst if you're trying to change your life. I share one unknown unknown that I discovered about myself this week and one technique for discovering your own unknown unknowns.
This Week:
Writing:
I wrote a short tweet thread on the idea of selling sawdust. Selling sawdust is the idea of monetizing the byproducts of creation. Either assets that are created in the process of creating a product or sharing the journey.
I think one of the biggest obstacles to selling sawdust is not thinking that it's valuable. It's hard enough to sell the product, why would anyone sell the sawdust? But the NFL, one of the biggest enterprises in the world, got that way by selling its sawdust.
Discoveries:
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Mark Manson writes about the self-improvement industry.
The skillset of personal growth doesn’t exactly work like the skillsets of basketball or chess. The skill curves are inverted. In basketball or chess, the better you get, the more effort is required to further improve. Whereas, in personal growth, the better you get, the less effort is required to further improve.
This was truly an unknown unknown for me. I've always looked at life or skills as a struggle. A very Protestant work-ethic type mindset. If you're not struggling, you're not trying, you're not accomplishing. The question was always "What's next ?" Manson concludes:
The whole point of this stuff is to one day be free of consciously having to think about it. The way to “win” at relationships is to be completely comfortable in your relationships. The way to “win” at anxiety is to stop caring about your anxiety. The way to “win” at health and productivity is to integrate them into your life so completely that you stop thinking of them as health and productivity.
=> Article Here
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I took a course with Daniel Vassallo on the strategy of small bets. He believes that luck plays an outsized role in the outcomes of life, so the best way to go through life is to take as many small bets as possible.
I see this as a method of increasing your luck surface area - the skill of being lucky. This is similar to the idea of loose connections being the actual cause of karma that I wrote about a few months ago. The best way to discover unknown unknowns is by maximizing the amount of serendipity in your life.
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Have a great week,
Chris