Every discovery, improvement, and breakthrough begins the same way.
With someone saying, “I don’t know.”
Amazing things happen when you treat “I don’t know” as a green light instead of a red one.
Now, on to this week’s ideas…
1. How I Write Clearly
“You can’t write clearly until you’re clear in your own mind about what you want to say, why, and who you want to hear it.”
Everything I write has the same main goal: To be understood.
In this post explain how I write clearly in five steps including how I tell small stories, rehearse, and simplify my language.
Related: Read this if you’re not sure you can succeed as a writer.
2. Five Ways To Avoid Bad Decisions
“Never let anyone define the problem for you.”
Sometimes success is just about avoiding failure.
Farnam Street shares five ways to avoid bad decisions including to avoid solving the wrong problem, focusing on optics over outcomes, and using insufficient information.
Btw, I found this link in the Swiss Miss newsletter.
Related: 18 ideas about how to make smarter decisions from the book Thinking In Bets.
3. Five Mostly Free Marketing Strategies That Will Grow Your Business
“Build free and affordable tools that bring potential paying customers into your business.”
Your marketing strategy will only succeed if it’s relevant to the moment we’re in.
In this 14-minute video, Noah Kagan shares five marketing strategies that work well right now including to leverage online marketplaces, weekly newsletters, and YouTube to attract customers.
Related: How Steve Jobs approached marketing.
4. Pick A Single Rule To Guide Your Creative Work
“Pick one rule for your creative project and marry it.”
This is a simple concept, but it can have a massive impact in your creative productivity.
Fred Dust suggests you pick a single rule to guide to your creative work and explains how the random advice of an Uber driver helped him write a 500-page book.
Related: Don’t think outside the box, create the box.
5. How To Optimize Your YouTube Videos To Get More Views
“The sheer size of YouTube’s active user base means that when this is set up properly, the algorithm will send more traffic to your song than any promotion you can do on your own or ads you can buy.”
This is written specifically for music videos, but its step-by-step process can be applied to whatever videos you produce and get you more views on YouTube.
Amber Horsburgh breaks down how to optimize your YouTube videos to get more views including what to do with titles, tags, descriptions, and more.
Related: How to create YouTube thumbnails people will click.
These Four Tweet Formats Work For Me Every Time
I put together a seven-page PDF that reveals four tweet formats I’ve used to grow and serve my audience of 13,000+ Twitter followers.
You’ll learn how I create effective tweet formats, examples of the formats that consistently attract engagement and new followers for me, and a set of universal principles you can follow to post more effective tweets.
Get my four tweet formats here.
Or…
Join This Is How I Do It for access to my full library of 42 resources to help you grow your audience or business, plus a new one each week.
Join today to get $1,410 worth of resources for just $120!
Classified Ads
• Start your day along with 2.7 million people who read Morning Brew — a free daily newsletter that keeps you informed and entertained. Subscribe today.
• From financial ruin to multi-six-figure travel blog. Learn Y Travel’s secret to online success. Subscribe to Cursor (free) and read the case study.
• Pro Letter delivers a punchy dose of wisdom straight to your inbox… Actionable ideas on productivity, habits and doing life better.
• You know the chaos of social feeds? This isn’t that. Salmon Theory is a short newsletter about finding meaning in marketing and life. Come say hi.
• Musicians, like this newsletter? Then you’ll love my twice-monthly email called 5 Things To Help You Keep Going. 1,000+ other musicians get it.
Have something you’d like to tell 10,000+ FTI readers about? Reserve an ad here.
My Final Words Of The Week
Once upon a time I had to hire someone to build out a new department and it came down to two candidates.
One was talented, but young and way less experienced than the other candidate.
But the young candidate sent me a full presentation deck outlining his vision for the department and how he’d approach it.
I didn’t ask him to do it, he just did it.
That got him the job and he turned out to be fantastic.
You don’t secure opportunities by simply doing what you’re asked — you get them by doing the unexpected and showing how much you want them.
Have a great week!
Josh
PS — If you enjoy my newsletter I’d love you to tell others about it.
Thanks!