Weeks #12 & #13

Blow your own mind

Happy Easter, everybody!

This is Daniel’s weekly-ish newsletter though 😁, not Daniel’s weekly newsletter.

If you’re reading this, nothing crazy happened to me yesterday. I wish you happy holidays and hope you’ll enjoy the post.

🧘 Life

• Life advice from a Russian Mafia Boss (>1 minute 📽)
  • Keep calm and follow your guts
  • Never forget, I'm ok, you are ok
  • Do it, don't speak, do it
  • Have a good team, people with soul
  • Work hard, but one day a week, do not work
  • Only one thing at a time
  • Do not make money no. 1
  • Keep your word
• Day in the Life: Steve Jobs (~5 minutes 📖)

  

• Sexy Goals (~10 minutes 📖)
  • Ordinary goals are not enough. You need sexy goals. Lady Gaga surely did not aspire to get married, be a good housewife and sing in the church choir! If you want to be incredible or you want to do something incredible, you need to make your goals sexy. Sexy goals are goals that are interesting, provocative and desirable.
  • To achieve your sexy goals, you need to do three things.
    1. First, you need to deconstruct your goal to define it.

       You can deconstruct your goal by questioning it.

       Q: Why do I wish to get a high paying job?

       A: Because I want to provide for my family.

       Q: Why do I want to provide for my family?

       A: Because I want my children to grow up healthy, happy and with good opportunities in life.

       And so on.

    2. Then you need to formulate it into a sexy goal.
    3. Finally, you need to prepare an action plan.
  • Click on the link up there to read the full article and all my highlights.

🎧 Songs I had on repeat this week

(no music videos this week, just put your headphones on and close your eyes)

• 4422
• Always
• Distant

🎙 Effective Communication

• Julian Shapiro on Storytelling (~15 minutes 📖)

  I’m obsessed with this guy called Julian: he constantly challenges himself to master new skills from the ground up and, at the end of the journey, shares everything he has found. His last newsletter mail, about storytelling, is probably the most effective essay about storytelling I’ve ever read. He first tried to recognize the storytelling ingredients:

  • Hooks

    You're either a person telling a story or you're a storyteller. Storytelling is the art of strategically withholding information. A hook raises a question without immediately providing the answer. For example, “It was the worst date of my entire life.” Listeners wonder, “Why?” You're not going to tell them for a while.

  • Limited memorization

    Hooks require premeditation. The best storytellers on the planet write all the time and talk about the things they’ve already written. But you never want to memorize your words. You only memorize key points then you rediscover the rich details and spontaneous turns of phrases in real-time. This produces pauses, moments of self-reflection, and false starts.

  • Time dilation

    When they finally get to the nail-biting answers, they then drag out the telling. For example, consider how the climax of a blockbuster film is always a drawn-out action scene. The action is never resolved within seconds—even if that’s how long it would take in real life to play out. Instead, every detail is magnified. Every punch is slow-motion. Beyond slow motion, great films also slow down the parts between the action.

  • A hero’s perspective

    It’s necessary to have a hero and a villain. We’re hardwired to put ourselves into the shoes of others and root for them like we are them. That’s what happens when you read fiction or cheer on a boxer in a fight: you transfer your identity into theirs and live their experience—instead of it being told to you.

  • Vocal rhythm

    You talk. Then faster. You go silent. You strike with fast staccato sentences. The audience feels pressure on their heels. Then you slow down to quiet your voice. Now they relax. A sigh of relief. Without vocal rhythm and pauses, you're just a human wall of text.

  Then, he found out these things are just byproducts of great storytelling. The forces behind great story delivery are simple. You focus on two things and your body reflexively does the rest:
  • Blow your own mind when telling stories

    Blowing your own mind entails being excited at moments of excitement, being shocked at moments of shock, and being wowed at moments of wonder. Listeners feed off this like sugar. When you blow your own mind, something mesmerizing happens: you relive the story and its impact on you in real-time. People then see that reflected on your face and in your authentic emotions. That's the feeling you need to transfer to your audience. They do not feel it in their bones unless you're feeling it first.

  • Project charisma: confidence, joy, and love for your audience

    When you embody all three, you put listeners at ease. They feel like you truly want them to be there. And when they feel that way, your thoughts flow into listeners’ minds without friction. Listeners lower their guards and their judgment. They're no longer focused on your eccentricities, insecurities, and weird hand movements. Instead, they’ve opened their minds to you. The more a storyteller loses themselves in their telling, the more the audience does too. To drop your self-consciousness so that a crowd drops theirs.

🌎 Entrepreneurship

• Steve Jobs on Consulting (>2 minutes 📽)

  Without owning something over an extended period where one has a chance to take responsibility for one’s recommendations, where one has to see one’s recommendations through all action stages, accumulate scar tissue for the mistakes, pick oneself up off the ground, and dust oneself off, one learns a fraction of what one can. Coming in, making recommendations, and not owning the results, not owning the implementation, I think is a fraction of the value and a fraction of the opportunity to learn and get better. Like having a picture of food on the wall but never having tasted it.

🦉 Quotes of the week

Retirement is when you stop sacrificing today for an imaginary tomorrow. When today is complete, in and of itself, you're retired.— Naval Ravikant

Fear is a natural reaction to moving closer to the truth.— Pema Ch ödr ön

I, and I alone, am responsible for everything I think and feel.— Naval Ravikant

When people earn their freedom from money constraints, they usually don't stop working. Instead, they start doing their best work.— Mr. Money Mustache

You're a work of art. Not everyone will understand you, but the ones who do, will never forget you.— unknown