Future Work/Life is my newsletter in which I explore the changing relationship between work and our personal lives. Every week, I share something I’ve written, a few things I’ve enjoyed reading, and something great to listen to. If you find it interesting, please share it!
Morning,
You’ll have noticed I missed a week last Sunday. I had my head down all weekend completing the draft of my book, Work/Life Flywheel, which I’ll be sending to my publisher this week for review by the development editor. No doubt I’ll need to make some tweaks and changes when they send it back to me in a few weeks, but it’s 99% there.
I’ve loved the process of writing it so far, but it’s been VERY hard! I know that sounds obvious, but it’s one of those things that you can’t wrap your head around until you’re in the middle of it. As is my personality, I’ve become obsessed with trying to make it perfect, and it’s taken up too much of my brainpower for months - as my wife, Carly, would attest! With that in mind, I’m looking forward to having a bit of time away from it and being able to focus on other work.
I’m also keen to catch up with anyone working on the challenges I regularly discuss in this newsletter and who would like to get my take. To mix metaphors, I’m free as a bird and a gun to hire (or something like that), so feel free to book a 25-minute call over the next few weeks, HERE.
Today, I’m sharing a short post that I wrote for LinkedIn last week - it summarises a couple of the key points from my recent article for the private equity firm, Tenzing, where I advise portfolio companies on the future of work.
Have a good week,
Ollie
You can pre-order a copy of my book, Work/Life Flywheel: Harness the work revolution and reimagine your career without fear, HERE.
The Writing:
We ALL experience imposter syndrome.
No more so than when sharing our ideas on LinkedIn.
Here's the key lesson I've learned from the people who do it best:
🔥 Name and claim your expert niche 🔥
How do you do it?
- Combine your knowledge & interests to give a unique point-of-view
- Make it clear who your ideas will help and why
- Be consistent in sharing your insights
I focus on sharing ideas that would've helped me 2 years ago, when:
- I was pivoting careers and wondering what to do next
- Was nervous about sharing my ideas in public
- Was juggling work and a busy family life
Consistently creating - writing and podcasting - has changed my life.
Practice this over 3 months & the results will speak for themselves.
You will...
- Cultivate 100s of new relationships
- Learn to articulate problems and solutions better
- Create opportunities from places you'd never have expected
I curate the lessons of the best public thinkers to help you create the time and build the skills to share your ideas with the world.
By being yourself.
You can read the full article on the Tenzing website:
Thinking in public: how to create a new habit to fuel more effective communication
If you’re interested in learning more about the insights and systems I’ve created to help you share your ideas with the world, then please get in touch.
The Reading:
In 2009 Kevin Kelly, the founding editor of Wired magazine, wrote that creators only needed to earn "1000 True Fans"—at $100 per fan per year—to make a living. The 1,000 fans model illustrated the internet's opportunities for creators to monetise their knowledge and creativity.
"To be a successful creator, you don't need millions. You don't need millions of dollars or millions of customers, millions of clients or millions of fans. To make a living as a craftsperson, photographer, musician, designer, author, animator, app maker, entrepreneur, or inventor, you need only thousands of true fans."
He’s just turned 70, and to make the occasion, he wrote this brilliant article on the ‘103 Bits Of Advice I Wish I’d Known’. There’s loads of great stuff in here, but here are three of the best:
The biggest lie we tell ourselves is “I don’t need to write this down because I will remember it.”
Half the skill of being educated is learning what you can ignore.
Getting cheated occasionally is the small price for trusting the best of everyone because when you trust the best in others, they generally treat you best.
Many of us have applied the principles of Eric Ries’ The Lean Startup for our businesses and clients over the past decade or more. Many of the key principles still hold true - not least, the value of rigorous experiments. However, one major issue is that model is better suited to incremental innovation rather than breakthrough ideas, as Ethan Mollick explores in this HBR article.
How do we keep the best parts of the Lean Startup methodology without holding on to the bad? Here’s one idea. Focus on an approach that:
“Starts with a strategy — a theory about why your company is going to win — and, based on the choices founders make, suggests the right experiments to conduct. By returning power to the founders, rather than the customers, to develop key breakthrough insights, this approach has the potential to be the next step in the evolution of Lean.”
As businesses cling on to bringing people back to the office as often as possible, they’re struggling to work out what really matters to employees. This article from WorkLife explains the emergence of “Hangover and ‘disappointment’ days: Unusual flexible work policies that will have you raising a glass.”
The Listening:
This podcast is five-years-old but has some brilliant insights from The Atlantic columnist Derek Thompson. He discussed ideas from his book, Hit Makers: The Science of Popularity in an Age of Distraction, but the killer insight from the show is this one about the power of the internet to achieve scale:
“People who want to be big sometimes think, “I have to immediately reach the largest possible audience.” But in a weird way, the best way to produce things that take off is to produce small things. To become a small expert. To become the best person on the internet at understanding the application of Medicaid to minority children, or something like that.
And the reason why I think this is true I call my Tokyo example. If you go to Tokyo, you'll see there are all sorts of really, really strange shops. There'll be a shop that's only 1970's vinyl and like, 1980's whisky or something. And that doesn't make any sense if it's a shop in a Des Moines suburb, right? In a Des Moines suburb, to exist, you have to be Subway. You have to hit the mass-market immediately.
But in Tokyo, where there's 30-40 million people within a train ride of a city, then your market is 40 million. And within that 40 million, sure, there's a couple thousand people who love 1970's music and 1980's whisky. The Internet is Tokyo. The Internet allows you to be niche at scale.”