Next Post Will Be Monday / Behind-The-Scenes

Over the past four months, I’ve written 10,000 words per week for this newsletter. That’s roughly 250 words per hour of work. All while focusing on high-quality.

How is that even possible?

The answer is simple.

Over the past 10 years, I’ve spent thousands of hours on three things:

• Thought Leader Skills. I have broken down the skills of thought leadership into their micro-skills, sequenced them, prioritized them, studied the top performers for each micro-skill, practiced the micro-skills, and then taught them.

• Stress-Tested Knowledge. I’ve built up a base of timeless, foundational, universal mental models related to learning how to learn, thought leadership, adult development, cognitive science, psychology, biases, problem-solving, creativity, decision-making, motivation, etc. Then, I’ve stress-tested this knowledge by applying it to my life, writing about it, and teaching it to others.

• Notes System. I’ve built a notes system from the ground up to store my knowledge so I could easily reference it over and over.

These three things have drastically increased my productivity:

• Learning skills to the level of unconscious competence has helped me go 10x faster and 10x better than when I was a beginner.

• Having a knowledge-based stored in a notes system has helped me reuse previous research over and over.

That’s the good news.

The bad news I keep on re-learning is this…

Writing About New Topics Slows Everything Down

My posting schedule has been off for the past week as deep dive on the topic of AI.

When I move away from topics I have deep expertise in, my writing output becomes unpredictable and slow. The challenge with research on new topics is that you just never know how deep the rabbit hole goes before you get a fundamental understanding.

While I’ve spent hundreds of hours learning about AI over the years, there’s still a lot I don’t know. And, I don’t write about anything until I’m confident I have fundamental understanding of it.

There’s already so much noise on the Internet, and I don’t want to add to it.

In the next few years, AI will transform how thought leadership is created, published, and monetized. Therefore, I’ve come to the conclusion that now is the time for me to really understand it and share what I learn with you. Not only that, while there are a lot of posts about new AI features/tools , there actually isn’t much content that provides practical, deep, strategic explainers for people outside of the field.

My next post will be on Monday.

I appreciate your patience as I deep dive.

Have a great weekend!