Reducer #1: Zettelkasten, Writing & Personal Moats
The method consists of making notes more powerful, using links to connect ideas. Our brain memory is weak. Keeping everything you learned linked helps to get new insights.
Zettelkasten
Apps like RoamResearch and Obsidian are trending with implementations of the Zettelkasten technique. Tomaz Tunguz wrote an overview of its history and future.
The method consists of making notes more powerful, using links to connect ideas. Our brain memory is weak. Keeping everything you learned linked helps to get new insights.
It forces you to consume content more thoughtfully. And the result is a valuable piece of curated content. For instance: my notes for the week with some edits build this newsletter. This is what Nat Eliason calls effortless output. I'm using Obsidian.
Writing
I found David Perell on Twitter a few days ago. From there found a lot of interesting people and content on writing:
Perell has a lot of material on his website.
Julian Schapiro created a fantastic handbook on writing.
On the newsletters world:
Josh Spector is a newsletter ninja that publishes many strategies on his Twitter and blog:
Lenny Rachitsky runs a famous Product newsletter. He shared interesting insights on his learnings this week:
Testing Ideas
It's good to test an idea before committing to writing an article. Start with conversations with one friend, then groups, and so on. It ensures things you write are interesting. But people are not available all the time to test ideas.
One giant playground for writing ideas is Twitter. Testing an idea with a tweet is easy. If people engage, then convert it to an article. It already worked for me: I wrote a thread on how Stripe's API is so good. It went pretty well. Now I'm converting it into a blog post.
Personal Moats
One of the things I'm working on is defining my personal moat. Identify the key things in me that stand out and leverage them. It helps to stay focused on the elements that have more leverage, and I enjoy most. Anything I work on should be improving this moat.
Erik Torenberg, who wrote the personal mote article, also published How to Find a Co-Founder. It has a lot of important questions one should ask potential co-founders. I'll answer them for myself to help me think them through.
EndNote
That's it for the first Reducer; I hope you enjoyed it.
Andrios.