10 Ideas For The Interested This Week - For The Interested

10 Ideas For The Interested This Week

“Often when you think you’re at the end of something, you’re at the beginning of something else.” — Fred Rogers

What could you accomplish in 30 days?

I want to help you find out.

That’s why I’ve made my 30 DAYS OF DOIN’ IT program available once again!

You can learn more about it here.

It’s a 30-day email program designed to help you develop a new habit or accomplish a goal.

Of the people who signed up for it in the past, 90% wound up doin’ their thing for at least 15 days during the month and 78% found it so valuable they’d like to do it again.

I know you’ve got something you want to do and I’d love to help you make it happen.

Now, on to this week’s ideas…

1. 18 IDEAS ABOUT HOW TO CREATE A HIT FROM THE BOOK “HIT MAKERS

“Some consumers buy products not because they are ‘better’ in any way, but simply because they are popular. What they’re buying is not just a product, but also a piece of popularity itself.”

Hits are never guaranteed, but this post can improve your chances of creating one.

It’s my summary of 18 ideas about how to create a hit from the Derek Thompson book Hit Makers, which breaks down what goes into the creation of hits across a variety of genres including music, movies, books, business and more.

The ideas include that most hits are familiar surprises, hits tend to be tweaks of existing genres, and people like what’s popular because it’s popular.

RELATED: 17 ideas to improve your creative work from the book Perennial Seller.

2. HOW TO BECOME WEALTHY

“You’re always the best investment. Don’t invest in others, until you have properly invested in yourself.”

This post offers something much more valuable than stock tips.

Eric Kim shares 35 tips on how to become wealthy including to seek good enough instead of perfect, avoid advertising, and remember a Lexus is just an expensive Toyota Camry.

RELATED: How to get rich without getting lucky.

3. “FIND YOUR PASSION” IS BAD ADVICE

“The directive to ‘find your passion’ suggests a passive process. Telling people to develop their passion, however, suggests an active one that depends on us — and allows that it can be challenging to pursue.”

Feel free to ignore anybody who suggests you find your passion because recent research indicates that’s bad advice.

Quartz shares a study which suggests you’re more likely to develop a passion than you are to find one.

This approach — a growth mindset as opposed to a fixed mindset — only offers benefits whereas a fixed mindset carries dangerous downsides for people who struggle to identify their passions.

RELATED: You don’t find your voice — you develop it.

4. HOW PSYCHOTHERAPY WORKS

“Psychotherapy is a tool for correcting our self-ignorance in a most profound way.”

If you’ve never been in therapy before, this will help you better understand what it’s about. And if you have been in therapy, it will help you understand what actually happens when you spend all that time on the couch.

This seven-minute animated video from The School of Life explains how psychotherapy works and compares its methods to medication and cognitive behavioral therapy.

RELATED: 10 things to give up to heal your anxiety.

5. HOW TO BUILD A NETWORK FROM SCRATCH

“In moving to a new city, you get to decide what version of yourself you want to be as you embark on a new chapter of your personal journey. My chapter’s mantra was one very short word: ‘Yes.’”

If you want to strengthen your professional network, this post can help.

Inc. explains how to build a network from scratch including to make your introductions count, embrace agenda-free meetings, and create the network you want to be a part of.

RELATED: How to grow your network when you hate networking.

6. THE 100 BEST YOUTUBE VIDEOS OF ALL TIME

“At the end of the day, what makes a YouTube video great? Like most treasures online, you know it when you see it.”

I guarantee you won’t agree with this list, but that’s not the point.

Thrillist compiled its take on the 100 best YouTube videos of all time and it’s a fun trip down memory lane including a ton of nostalgic videos you probably haven’t seen in a while and a bunch you somehow may have missed.

RELATED: 12 great YouTube channels for entrepreneurs.

7. SOMETIMES YOU HAVE TO QUIT TO GET AHEAD

“For every moment you double down on something that’s not working out, you are forgoing other potentially valuable opportunities.”

If you want to accomplish something, it’s as important to commit to quitting something else as it is committing to doing the new thing.

The New York Times suggests sometimes you have to quit to get ahead and points to several studies and thought leaders who found a willingness to quit projects can lead to greater overall success and happiness.

RELATED: How quitting everything daily improves your work.

8. AMERICA ISN’T AS POLITICALLY POLARIZED AS IT SEEMS

“Do most people legitimately disagree with one another? Or are they merely conforming to supposedly dominant ideas? Though there are legitimate disagreements, we contend that modern American political tribalism has been artificially inflated by group-based conformity. That is, the moderate majority’s submission to the demands of dedicated partisans has created a mirage of polarization.”

The conventional wisdom says America is a divided country these days, but that may be a misinterpretation of what’s actually happening.

Quillette argues political moderates are lying and suggests what’s actually happening is “group-based conformity” has pushed moderates to support values and policies they don’t actually believe in.

The post also includes a bunch of interesting stats such as that 30% of the population in 2016 said they followed the election campaign “not too closely” or “not at all.”

We’re not divided — we’re just not paying attention.

RELATED: How CNN makes us dumber by treating politics like sports.

9. HOW BLOGS BROKE THE WEB

“Once you’ve had a taste of effortless updates, it’s awfully hard to back to manual everything. So they didn’t. And neither did thousands of their peers. It just simply wasn’t worth it. The inertia was too strong. The old web, the cool web, the weird web, the hand-organized web… died.”

As somebody who launched his first blog way back in 2000, this one really resonated.

Amy Hoy explains how the blog broke the web and reminisces about what the Internet used to be like.

She suggests the introduction of blogging platforms made it easier to blog, which brought on the unintended consequence of ruining the handcrafted nature of the web. This then removed much of what had made the early web so interesting.

RELATED: 50+ blogs that will make you smarter.

10. HOW TO USE A ONE-ACTION STRATEGY TO ACTIVATE YOUR AUDIENCE

“You’ll find more success — short and long term — if you focus on a single action you want your audience to take when they encounter your work.”

Most content creators ask their audience for too many things — their competing asks confuse the consumers of their creations and as a result they don’t get nearly the conversions they deserve.

In this post I explain how to use a one-action strategy to activate your audience and break down the three steps necessary to do so.

RELATED: A 10-post, five-week content plan to get your work noticed.

WHERE I FOUND THIS STUFF

I discovered some of this week’s ideas from the newsletters of Christopher Penn, Further, Postanly, Jason Kottke, and How It Actually Works — they’re awesome and worth your time.

Image via Kelly Sikkema.