5 Ideas For The Interested This Week - For The Interested

5 Ideas For The Interested This Week

“Start where you are. Use what you have. Do what you can.” — Arthur Ashe

It’s easy to come up with a reason to wait to launch something.

You haven’t figured everything out yet or aren’t sure what you want it to be, so you wait.

But you’ll never know what something can be until you put it into the world.

Thinking alone won’t help you figure it out.

You’ll know it when you do it.

So stop waiting.

Now, on to this week’s ideas…

1. You Get The Audience You Deserve

“An audience isn’t a right, it’s a responsibility.”

When it comes to growing an audience, I’m amazed how many creators chase more fans while ignoring the ones they already have.

In this post I explain why you get the audience you deserve and suggest five things to do with your existing fans if you want to attract new ones including to give more than you ask, deliver what you promise, and care as much about them as they do about you.

Related: 100+ resources to help you grow your audience.

2. The Secret To A Rewarding Creative Career

“The secret to success is doing what you love, whether or not you’re being paid. The secret to a rewarding career in film (and many other fields) is focusing entirely on execution and not on result.”

If you only read one thing in this week’s newsletter, this should be the one.

Oscar-winning filmmaker Christopher McQuarrie breaks down the secret to a rewarding creative career based on his own experience and it’s a blueprint for how every creator should approach their work.

Long story short? Stop waiting for permission and go make something.

Related: Nobody can stop you from getting your dream job.

3. 21 Behaviors That Make You Realize There’s No Limit To What You Can Do

“If you read what everyone else is reading, you’ll think like everyone else thinks. If you think like everyone else thinks, you won’t be able to come up with anything unique.”

This one is as actionable as it is motivational.

Benjamin Hardy, PhD outlines 21 behaviors that make you realize there’s no limit to what you can do including to ignore what everyone else is doing, focus on quantity in the beginning, and track only a few things.

Related: Your life is a reflection of what you think you deserve.

4. The Secret To Learning A New Skill Is To Treat It Like A Language

“A language is just a system of communication, and once you realize that you start to see ‘languages’ everywhere.”

Once you realize everything is a language, you’ll discover it becomes much easier to learn things.

Brian Medavoy suggests the secret to learning a new skill is to treat it like a language and explains how to start with the building blocks and look for the patterns in anything you want to learn.

Related: How to balance learning and doing.

5. How To Build A Minimum Lovable Product

“Lovable products aren’t simply functional or useful — they demonstrate an acute understanding of what users find valuable.”

A lot has been written about building a minimum viable product to launch your idea, but that may not actually be the best advice.

Jianona Zhang breaks down how to build a minimum lovable product instead including to start with the user’s why instead of the business why, separate the problem space from the solution space, and listen to your users without taking their feedback as the gospel.

Related: People don’t buy products, they buy better versions of themselves.

Do the following five ideas interest you?

• How to improve your writing by removing anything that doesn’t fit one criteria

• A collection of the most effective company memos ever written

• How to redefine what it means to be rich

• How to get people to listen to the advice you give them

• How to create a tweet that goes viral

Become an FTI All Access member and I’ll send them to you next week.

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Some of this week’s ideas came from Josh Shayne and Creative Mornings. Image via Road Trip with Raj.