10 Ideas For The Interested This Week - For The Interested

10 Ideas For The Interested This Week

“The purpose of art is to collide the intellectual and visceral together at the highest speed possible.” — Penn Jillette

Our best ideas don’t just appear.

They’re a direct result of collisions we have with other ideas and experiences.

This newsletter gives me an excuse to engineer collisions for myself, and I hope it also provides a way for you to experience them as well.

But if you ever find yourself at a loss for ideas, the solution is simple: Go collide into something.

Now, on to this week’s ideas…

1. HOW TO WRITE HEADLINES PEOPLE WILL CLICK, LIKE, AND SHARE

“A Personal Experience headline triggers our curiosity to learn about each other’s life, work, and experiences. It promises a voyeuristic glimpse into the life of somebody like us — or somebody we want to be.”

If you read this post, it will help you get more people to read your next post.

I share three headline templates that helped me attract millions of readers and explain how you can employ them on your own work.

The formats include Personal Experience headlines to attract clicks, Value Promise headlines to generate Likes, and Self-Expression headlines to get social media shares.

For additional writing tips, check out my take on How To Make Your Next Blog Post Better.

2. YOU HAVE TO GET COMFORTABLE WITH BEING UNCOMFORTABLE

“Comfort is overrated. Because being quiet is comfortable. Keeping things the way they’ve been is comfortable. And all comfort has done is maintain the status quo. So we’ve got to get comfortable with being uncomfortable by speaking these hard truths when they’re necessary.”

If you struggle to speak up for yourself or others, this 10-minute video just may change your life.

This Luvvie Ajayi TED Talk makes a powerful case for why you have to get comfortable with being uncomfortable and suggests you ask yourself three questions the next time you find yourself holding back your thoughts or your voice.

The questions include, “Do you mean it?,” “Can you defend it?,” and “Can you say it with love?”

3. NINE SCIENTISTS SHARE THEIR FAVORITE HAPPINESS PRACTICES

“We become so obsessed with accumulating that we forget about enjoying. It’s often on my mind, as I think about what is worth accumulating in life — and what is not.”

There are no shortage of happiness strategies out there, but it’s interesting to see what people who study happiness do in their own lives to find contentment.

Greater Good magazine breaks down the favorite happiness practices of nine scientists, which range from meditation, to gratitude letters, to recognizing high-quality connections.

Personally, I suggest you give my Great List experiment a shot.

4. CHANGE HOW YOU’RE PAID AND YOU’LL CHANGE YOUR LIFE

“Regardless of how much you’re paid, how and why you get paid dictates your lifestyle.”

No matter what you do for a living or how much you get paid to do it, this post makes a strong case that how you get paid ultimately has the most influence on your life.

Richie Norton suggests if you change how you’re paid, you’ll change your life and points out every element of your life is influenced (or determined) by the way you get paid.

He also explains how to adjust the way you get paid to better fit the lifestyle you want to lead.

5. HOW TO CREATE A REVERSE BUDGET

“Reverse budgeting simply figures out how much you need to save, makes those savings automatic and then you spend the remaining amount of money as you please.”

Budgeting may be important, but it’s also a hassle.

Peter Lazaroff’s reverse budgeting system is designed to make it significantly easier by creating a budget that focuses more on tracking your savings than your expenses.

In this post, he breaks down how to implement a reverse budget by following a simple three-step system.

6. THE SECRET TO SUCCESS ACCORDING TO GARY VAYNERCHUK

“You know zero people that have built something big that haven’t put in a ridiculous amount of work. And the bigger it is, the more they worked.”

Ready to get fired up?

This 3-minute video features Gary Vaynerchuk’s secret to success, but it’s not really much of a secret — it takes talent and effort. A whole lot of effort.

But this is an inspiring watch that will make you want to go out and put in that work.

7. 10 HIDDEN GMAIL PRODUCTIVITY HACKS

“If you find yourself typing certain replies or phrases over and over, then you would benefit from Gmail’s Canned Responses feature. This lets you create saved responses that you can later access, keeping you from having to retype the text.”

If you use Gmail, I bet you’ll find at least one thing in this post that saves you some time.

Larry Kim shares 10 hidden Gmail productivity hacks including how to undo sent emails, create custom shortcuts, and filter your emails.

8. HOW TO FIGURE OUT WHAT YOU WANT

“Every time I gave my attention to anything besides myself, I was actually telling myself, ‘This random thought is more important than you are.’”

There’s no shortage of advice out there telling you to go after what you want, but what if you don’t know what that is?

Kris Gage explains how to figure out what you want including to stop blaming yourself for not knowing, start paying attention to the signs, and go as far back as you need to in order to figure it out.

9. GRATITUDE COMES FROM NOTICING YOUR LIFE, NOT THINKING ABOUT IT

“Gratitude, when we do genuinely feel it, arises from experiences we are currently having, not from evaluating our lives in our heads.”

It’s one thing to be grateful for the good things in your life, but it’s another to experience gratefulness in the moment.

Raptitude suggests gratitude comes from noticing your life and shares ways to find things to appreciate in any life moment.

As the post explains, “If you want to feel grateful, forget the thinking exercises. Look for your good fortune not in some abstract assessment of your life situation, but in your experience right in this moment. What can you see, feel, hear, or sense, right here in the present, that’s helpful, pleasant, or beautiful?”

10. FIVE QUESTIONS TO ASK YOURSELF WHEN YOU START A PROJECT

“Understanding the potential value your project can provide to different entities helps you determine how to present it to those constituencies, which makes it easier to find and build an audience.”

The eventual success or failure of any project is often determined before you start working on it.

In this post I share five questions to ask yourself when you start a project that will help position you for success.

The questions include what is your key success metric, what value will your project provide and to who, and how much time and effort are you prepared to commit to the project?

BONUS: ANOTHER NEWSLETTER WORTH CHECKING OUT

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I discovered it recently and have a hunch you’ll dig it. Sign up here.

WHERE I FOUND THIS STUFF

I discovered some of this week’s ideas from the newsletters of Creative Mornings, Khe Hy, and Postanly — they’re awesome and worth your time.

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Thanks for reading!

Josh