Shiny Object Syndrome is an affliction that causes you to be attracted to “shiny objects.” Shiny objects can be whatever is new and trendy in your field. But oftentimes, the shiny objects are simply new ideas you have – other projects you’d rather be working on. In this form, Shiny Object Syndrome will ruin any chance you have of finishing your current project – unless you do something about it. Two sources of Shiny Object Syndrome How do you overcome Shiny Object Syndrome? What you need to do is simple: Commit to your current project, ignore the new projects, suck it up, and follow-through. The reality isn’t so simple. Shiny Object Syndrome causes mental distortions that will have you 100% convinced you’re doing the right thing: This old project is a dud. This new project is sure to be a success. To cure Shiny Object Syndrome, we need to know its true sources. That way, we can nip them in the bud, keep Shiny Object Syndrome at bay, and finish projects. There are two main causes of Shiny Object Syndrome: Naïveté of the novel Frustration with the existing We don’t know much about the new project, so we view it with rose-colored glasses. We know a little too much about our current project, so it looks terrible in comparison. This creates a “grass is greener” effect. Now how do we get in this position in the first place? 1. Naïveté of the novel As humans, we’re naturally attracted to the novel. That’s how we’ve become such an innovative species. We were not satisfied with the old way of doing things – eating our meat raw and sleeping in the elements – so we’re curious about our neighbor who’s cooking with fire and has built a straw hut. That explains why we’re attracted to the “shiny objects” in the first place, but there’s more happening in our minds that makes us not only attracted to the shiny object, but that makes us abandon what we have to pursue the unknown. The Dunning-Kruger effect A powerful force that makes us hop from one shiny object to another is the Dunning-Kruger effect. The Dunning-Kruger effect is named after it’s originators, psychologists David Dunning and Justin Kruger, who found that when we know a good deal about a field, we underestimate our knowledge, but when we little about a field, we overestimate our knowledge. The Dunning-Kruger effect is a favorite of internet “gotcha” culture. People love to point out the Dunning-Kruger effect at work in others, but it does a lot of good to recognize it in ourselves. When we get a great idea for a new project in a field we know little about, we often think that project will be easier than it actually will be. It seems like a good idea to drop what we’re doing, and move on. 2. Frustration with the existing This naïveté of the novel colludes with frustration with the existing. In fact, it adds fuel to that frustration. If we start a new project, thinking it’s going to be easy, we’re even more disillusioned when we realize it’s actually hard. We’ve run up against all the challenges we didn’t think about. We’ve seen the hidden complexity in the current project. As former guest, Tynan has pointed out, when we’re in the middle of a project, we’ve experienced all of the downsides, but none of the upsides, such as revenue or respect from our peers. Meanwhile, we know very little about the new project. It seems fun and easy. When we started the current project, we said to ourselves, This will be easy. We’ve realized it’s not so easy, but the Dunning-Kruger effect takes over again. We tell ourselves of the new project, Now THIS will be easy! Just knowing how the naïveté of the novel and frustration with the existing work together to cause Shiny Object Syndrome isn’t enough to cure it. When you’re in this situation, it seems rational. You can come up with good-sounding reasons why the current project isn’t worth the trouble and the new project has a better chance of succeeding. And we won’t admit we might be fooling ourselves. Shipping is a skill I have some good news: Your tendency to come up with new ideas is a good thing. Instead of trying to fight it, Shiny Object Syndrome is much easier to manage if you instead accept it. Accept it will tempt you to switch projects, then change the way you approach projects accordingly. Remind yourself that shipping is a skill. The mere act of finishing a project, no matter how small, is a skill you should cultivate. If you’ve never picked up a golf club, you would know better than to expect to play like Tiger Woods your first time out. So if you’ve never finished a project, why would you think you could take on a giant one the first time around? When I started on my own, I had almost zero shipping skills. I had piles of unfinished projects, and nothing to show for them. Fortunately one day, as I contemplated a giant shiny object I was about to take on, I realized I didn’t have what it took to make my vision a reality. I had had enough of my Shiny Object Syndrome, and was ready to put it to an end. So, I treated even the smallest things as practice in the skill of shipping. I looked up a recipe online, and planned my trip to the grocery store to get the ingredients. It sounds simple, but can you believe I had to go back several times? I planned parties and dates and trips. I treated everything as an opportunity to have a vision, plan how to execute that vision, and ship the project. The Fortress Fallacy In The Heart to Start, I introduced The Fortress Fallacy. We tend to have big visions, but those visions outpace our skills. We dream of building a fortress, when we haven’t built a cottage, much less a lean-to. This isn’t about “breaking your project down” into parts. This is about doing small projects that build skills you can later use in a larger project. Breaking your project down doesn’t build the skill of shipping. Doing small projects does. Make predictions A source of fuel for our frustration with the existing is our lack of foresight. We fall for the planning fallacy. The planning fallacy is why the Sydney Opera House took ten extra years and fifteen times the budget – you can see the same in countless construction projects. It’s why the Greeks thought the Trojan War would take four weeks, when it ended up taking ten years – you can see the same in countless military campaigns. It’s demoralizing to expect something to work out one way, and have it end up another. One way to fix that would be to have things work out the way we expect – but that’s not going to happen. The world is too complex and unpredictable. The solution is to make predictions. How do you predict the unpredictable? You don’t, really. But there’s a lot of wiggle room between This will definitely happen, and This will definitely not happen. In episode 245, I introduced the Avocado Challenge. Before you open an avocado, are you 100% sure it’s going to be perfectly ripe? No. In the Avocado Challenge, you make percentage-confidence predictions, such as “I’m 60% confident this avocado is ripe.” You then rate those predictions based upon the outcome. As you start projects, make predictions. Accept that you’re never 100% sure about anything, so make percentage-confidence predictions. For example, “I am 70% confident I will set up my blog and publish my first post by next Sunday.” After Sunday comes, review your prediction. You can even use a handy free service called Prediction Book to keep track. This does a couple things. One: It holds you accountable. We tend to approach all projects as if we’re sure we’re going to finish them – and that just ain’t so. Two: It keeps you from beating yourself up. You can’t be certain about the future, but when we don’t finish projects, we feel bad about it. If we feel bad, we learn to associate working on projects with feeling bad. So we’ll start fewer projects. As Roam Research founder Conor White-Sullivan said, "I can not speak highly enough for the practice of starting things before you know you’re going to finish them." Don’t fight shiny object syndrome, work with it In conclusion, the way to cure Shiny Object Syndrome isn’t so much to cure it – it’s to accept that you’re going to have new ideas, and you’re going to fail to finish some projects. If you pick small projects, make predictions about your ability to finish them, and treat shipping as a skill, you can reduce Shiny Object Syndrome, and work with it. Thank you for having me on your podcasts! Thank you for having me on your podcast! Thank you to Dolores at Attitudeable for having me on the show. As always, you can find all podcast interviews of me at kadavy.net/interviews. About Your Host, David Kadavy David Kadavy is author of Mind Management, Not Time Management, The Heart to Start and Design for Hackers. Through the Love Your Work podcast, his Love Mondays newsletter, and self-publishing coaching David helps you make it as a creative. Follow David on: Twitter Instagram Facebook YouTube Subscribe to Love Your Work Apple Podcasts Overcast Spotify Stitcher YouTube RSS Email Support the show on Patreon Put your money where your mind is. Patreon lets you support independent creators like me. Support now on Patreon »     Show notes: http://kadavy.net/blog/posts/shiny-object-syndrome/

If you want to grow an audience online, it’s great to have a consistent newsletter. It keeps you in touch with your subscribers, and it gives you a place to test out small ideas you can later grow into big ideas. I’ve been delivering my Love Mondays newsletter every week for more than 100 weeks (and you can sign up at kdv.co). Here’s how I streamline and automate the process, so I never miss a week. Small bites of information Newsletters work great as small bites of information. Your subscribers get your newsletter right in their inboxes, so they’re in a hurry. If they know they can get a quick hit or two from your newsletter, they won’t put off opening it. You can see this with newsletters such as Tim Ferriss’s Five Bullet Friday, or James Clear’s 3-2-1 Thursday. The fact that these newsletters are full of quick hits is right there in the titles. Keeping the bites organized I design Love Mondays to have a few tiny bites of interesting things, as well as a light main dish. Each Love Mondays newsletter has a quick thought – maybe 150–300 words, about navigating the Extremistan world of making it as a creator. Plus, I have what I call “ABCs” – Aphorisms (or Quotes), Books, and Cool tools. Additionally, I may make a short announcement in the postscript. Each newsletter has the main quick thought, two ABCs, and sometimes there’s a P.S., sometimes there’s even an P.P.S. That’s a lot of different things to think up each week, so I’ve designed my system so I don’t have to do it all at once. Using a spreadsheet I built from a service called Airtable, I’m able to organize the ideas I’d like to share in Love Mondays, as well as Aphorisms, Books, Cool tools, and other announcements. I combine them to create each week’s newsletter. My system keeps me from switching mental states trying to think up each item. The spreadsheet also allows me to track the performance of things like subject lines and clicks on items I share, so I can keep making my newsletter better. Collecting ideas Each newsletter idea starts as an even smaller idea. There’s a sheet in my database that’s full of some of my best-performing tweets. Using Zapier, I have an automation set up so that anytime I “like” one of my own tweets, it gets saved to this sheet in Airtable. It saves the body of the tweet, the number of favorites it has, a link to the tweet, and the date of the tweet. I “batch” my Love Mondays newsletters on a monthly basis, using the “creative system” I talked about in my book, Mind Management, Not Time Management. To begin a batch of newsletters, I start looking for ideas in this sheet of high-performing tweets. I sort them by date, then make sure the number of likes is updated on all the newest tweets. Then, I sort them by number of likes. I don’t always grow the most popular tweets into newsletter ideas, but seeing the number of likes does help me get a feel for what ideas resonate with my readers better than others. Collecting Aphorisms, Books, and Cool tools I also have individual sheets in my database for Aphorisms, Books, and Cool tools. My Aphorism sheet also gets populated with a Zapier zap. If I like one of my own tweets, and it has an em dash in it (“—“), that filters the tweet into the quotes sheet, instead of my sheet of ideas. Again, I can sort quotes I’ve shared according to how many likes they got, to get a better feel for which ones my readers will enjoy. Other than that, I manage the sheets for Books and Cool tools manually. Reviewing the data Each week, I enter the stats from the previous week’s Love Mondays newsletter. I plug in the number of subscribers it was sent to, and how many opened, to get the open rate. For Books and Cool tools, I enter how many clicks the links got, so I can see each item’s click through rate.   As I consider new Books and Cool tools to share, I check the performance of the past Books and Cool tools I’ve shared, to get an idea of what people will like. The data has been really surprising sometimes, as things I thought people would love got little interest, and things that didn’t seem like a big deal got a lot. Again, the numbers aren’t the only thing that decides what I share. I share a lot of things I just like, even if I don’t think the highest percentage of readers will be into it. Identifying finalists I keep a big backlog on all these sheets, so I never feel pressure to think up new ideas, or new ABCs to share. I just capture things as they come. But as each new month approaches, I comb through these sheets to identify finalists I’d like to share. I just change a field in each record in Airtable, so my top candidates for tweet ideas and ABCs are at the top of each sheet, where I can later narrow them down further. Writing the drafts Once I’ve collected some of my favorite ideas, I write the idea section of the emails. I usually get the month’s emails – four or five, depending – written in two sessions. In the first session, I write really awkward drafts. In the second session, I re-write those, and they usually come out much less awkward. I space the two sessions a week apart, so my subconscious does most of the work for me. Every once in a while, I just have a good first session and don’t have to re-write – just edit a little. I do this writing in Ulysses, one newsletter after another, in one document. Before the first session, I set up the document with a simple list of dates, the body text of the tweet that serves as inspiration, and whatever other things I might want to announce in that week’s newsletter. I consult the schedule of my podcast, so I can share any recent episodes, I check my other spreadsheet of podcasts that have interviewed me to make sure I’ve thanked them, and I check my calendar to see if there are any promotions I want to announce. Wrapping it all together Now here comes the cool part. Airtable helps me wrap my main newsletter body together with my ABCs, my announcements, and my greeting and salutation. The result is a field with all the Markdown text for the newsletter. To do this, I copy and paste the Markdown text of the main idea of the newsletter into a field. From other fields, I can select the Aphorism and/or Book and/or Cool thing I want to include in that week’s newsletter. Each record for Books or Cool things already has fields for my comments and the links for the items. Once I select any ABCs, all this is added to the main body, in Markdown text. Each newsletter also has a P.S. and P.P.S. field, and if they’re populated with anything, they get added onto that text, too. Scheduling Now all I have to do is copy and paste the Markdown into a translator. I then copy and paste the rich text into my email marketing platform, ActiveCampaign. Once I have the main content of all the month’s newsletters written, it takes about fifteen minutes to integrate the ABCs, the announcements, and to have the newsletters scheduled and ready to go. Sign up for Love Mondays and see for yourself! There you have it. This system really helps me save creative energy, so that I’m using it to think of good ideas, instead of trying to fumble around with all the things I want to put in my newsletter. Obviously, all this could be automated even further. I’m actually surprised I haven’t seen an email marketing platform that already has Airtable-like database elements for managing all the tidbits one shares in their newsletter. Maybe something for someone to build. If you want to see all this in action, be sure to sign up for Love Mondays. My readers really love them, I consistently get replies saying how much each week’s idea has shifted someone’s perspective. New Book: Digital Zettelkasten: Principles, Methods & Examples Learn how to think through building a database of the most interesting things you've ever read, or thought. Available direct from me, on Amazon, and everywhere else. Subscribe to Love Your Work Apple Podcasts Overcast Spotify Stitcher YouTube RSS Email Support the show on Patreon Put your money where your mind is. Patreon lets you support independent creators like me. Support now on Patreon »     Show notes: http://kadavy.net/blog/posts/email-newsletter-process/

You hear a lot about morning routines, but nighttime routines are every bit as important. Your parents probably had a bedtime routine for you, and if you have kids you probably have bedtime routines for them. But we need bedtime routines as adults, too. I follow a specific nighttime routine, and it helps me get to sleep faster, and wake up better-rested. Wind down, and don’t try to force sleep My nighttime routine follows two overarching principles: Wind down Don’t try to force sleep 1. Wind down: Before I started my nighttime routine, I didn’t think about what I was doing before bed. I just went to bed when I was tired. I was treating all hours of the day as equal – following time management instead of mind management. Once I started my nighttime routine, I realized “going to bed” starts well before you’re tired. It’s like the difference between crashing a plane and a smooth landing. 2. Don’t try to force sleep: I recently did a sleep study at a lab, and started doing my nighttime routine. But the study was supposed to start before my usual bedtime, and the nurses at the lab wouldn’t let me follow my routine. I didn’t sleep the whole night and the study was a waste. The problem for me was trying to force sleep. I had insomnia as a kid and trying to get to sleep always made me more anxious and less able to sleep. So now I’m careful not to force sleep. Two phases: wind-down and sleep-time In the spirit of not trying to force sleep, my nighttime routine follows two phases: wind-down and sleep-time. Wind-down phase: During the wind-down phase, I want to signal to my body that it can get ready for sleep. Again, I’m not trying to force sleep, just giving my body permission to get sleepy. I’ll get more into how I do that in a bit. Sleep-time phase: In the sleep-time phase, I’m again careful to not force sleep. But I have specific steps I follow that help me transition from the wind-down phase to actually getting to sleep. Five rules for my nighttime routine Your parents probably had bedtime rules for you. In your bedtime routine as an adult, you need rules for yourself. Here are five rules I follow: No social media after 9 p.m. No bright screens after 10 p.m. Blue-blocking glasses after 10 p.m. Reading only after 10 p.m. In bed by midnight. Here’s some more detail about each of those: 1. No social media after 9 p.m. I have a theory that associating with anyone you’re not close to before bedtime disrupts your sleep quality. The only proof I have of this is I’ve experienced it myself. Though it would make sense from an evolutionary perspective: You and the tribe might find it hard to sleep if strangers from another tribe were lurking around your campfire. I don’t want to think about a news story in the world at-large, witness a petty argument amongst strangers, or read a hostile Twitter reply too close to bedtime. I sense that it sets my brain on alarm, making it hard to sleep. Twitter is my social media of choice, and it’s valuable enough to outweigh the above negatives, generally, but not after 9 p.m. When I say no social media, that doesn’t mean that I won’t chat with a close friend on WhatsApp or Messenger. I would guess associating with people you’re close to before bedtime makes it easier to get to sleep, if anything. I often make a FaceTime call to my father after 9 p.m., but no Twitter. 2. No bright screens after 10 p.m. By now it’s well-established that blue light exposure late at night disrupts sleep and is even associated with higher cancer risk. Yes, our devices have nighttime modes that reduce this light, but I don’t trust that to eliminate blue light completely. So I avoid bright screens, wholesale, after 10 p.m. I stow my phone and tablet in a charging station in my living room, and ignore them until the next morning. This also makes it easier to follow my rule of no social media. The brightest thing I look at after 10 p.m. is my Kindle. It’s not great to be on an electronic device, but I set it in dark mode, so it’s actually less light exposure than I would get reading a paper book under lamplight. As part of this rule, I also switch off my internet and WiFi at 10 p.m. This is a good way to keep yourself off the internet, but it also may be better for your health. Studies have shown that EMF exposure before bed alters your brain activity during sleep. Scientists haven’t found any ill health effects from this (yet), but why not turn off your WiFi? We didn’t evolve to have our brain activity altered while we sleep, and you’re not using it anyway. 3. Blue-blocking glasses after 10 p.m. Even if the nighttime modes on my devices did eliminate all blue light, there’s still blue light in the lights in my house, or from street lights outside. So, I nip that in the bud with blue-blocking glasses. The blue-blocking glasses I wear are not fashionable. They are orange, and large enough to wrap around most of my face, as well as cover my glasses. Very little blue light gets past these, and I get sleepy easier and wake up more refreshed when I wear these glasses, starting two hours before my target bedtime. I even take them with me when I travel, and they help out when I need to push my bedtime earlier to get up for early flights. 4. Reading only after 10 p.m. Back when I didn’t pay attention to what I was doing before bedtime, I would often work until I could hardly keep my eyes open. I’ve since tried different activities before sleep, and found that nothing works better to get me sleepy than reading. So, the only activity I allow myself to do after 10 p.m. is read. This means there are a lot of activities I avoid before bed. Aside from bright screens, I’ve found that certain activities get my brain too active, and make it hard for me to fall asleep. If I play a video game on my VR headset, write in my journal, or even do something creative such as drawing, it’s not as easy for me to get to sleep, and I wake up less-rested. I also select the type of reading I do in a specific way that helps me get sleepy. For the first hour, I can read pretty much whatever I want. This hour helps me get through a lot of science, history, or biography books, the highlights of which I store in the digital Zettelkasten I talked about on episode 250. I use much of this reading as raw material for ideas for newsletters, articles, and books. As I’m reading, I’m looking out for specific signals help to me decide when I’m ready for bed. The first thing I’m looking out for is how well I understand what I’m reading. About this time of night, I can lose my reading comprehension very rapidly. One minute I’m engrossed in a complex neuroscience book, the next minute I realize I’ve read the same sentence several times over. This happens before I’m consciously aware that I’m tired, but it signals to me it’s time to change my reading material. When that happens, I switch from non-fiction to fiction. If 11 p.m. rolls around and I’m still comprehending non-fiction well, I make the switch anyway. Now I’m looking for the final signals that I’m ready for bed. At some point, I will realize I’ve just “come to.” I will have just started to doze off – my eyelids have gotten so heavy they’ve started to close, and I may have even lost control over the arm that holds up my Kindle. I’m not the type to fall asleep accidentally, but as soon as one of these things happens, I close my Kindle and go to bed. If by 11:30 p.m. my eyelids haven’t started closing involuntarily, I bring out the big guns. This is the reading that’s most likely to make me sleepy. I read some poetry by Robert Frost, or a play by Shakespeare. If I really want to go back in time, I’ll pull out The Iliad. Sometimes I’ll read some Emerson. The Robert Frost poetry is folksy and he and Emerson talk a lot about nature, which is very relaxing. The rhythms of Frost and Shakespeare lull me to sleep. And The Iliad is just hard to read. 5. In bed by midnight By following this progression of reading, I almost always get sleepy by midnight. My rule is “in bed by midnight,” but really if I don’t get sleepy by then, I find it does me no good to go to bed anyway. So I try to be in bed by midnight, but if I’m not sleepy, I’ll just keep reading the big guns. I have found that having a set bedtime helps me get to sleep more easily, and wake up more rested. There’s not a big difference between whether I go to bed at 10:30 p.m. or midnight, but once it gets past midnight, there’s suddenly a big difference. If I can’t get to bed until 12:15 a.m. one night, I’ll feel it the next day, and will take a couple nights more before I can get my sleep back on schedule. By the way, I make sure to have already brushed my teeth by the time I’m going to bed. I do that at some point during the wind-down phase. I hate the feeling of being sleepy and still needing to brush my teeth, so I try to do it before. And this helps prevent any late-night snacking. Going to bed: the sleep-time phase Once I’m in bed, I’m still following the principle of not trying to force sleep. I take off my glasses, but leave on the orange goggles. I get a couple of other valuable sleep tools ready: I position my sleep mask on my forehead for quick deployment, and I put in earplugs. Now, I lay on my back stare off into space, and let my thoughts flow. I do not close my eyes and try to go to sleep until I feel my eyelids get heavy again. You might wonder: My eyelids were just heavy, now I’ve gone to bed and am waiting again for my eyelids to get heavy. Why didn’t I just read in bed? I’m a big advocate of the philosophy that you should only do two things in bed, one of them should be sleeping, and the other should not be reading. If you do other activities such as reading or surfing the web in bed, you’re just programming yourself to not be sleepy when in bed. So, I make the small compromise of having to get myself to bed once sleepy, then needing to again wait to get sleepy. It usually only takes a minute or two before my eyelids are falling closed. At that point, I take off the orange goggles, lower my sleep mask, and fall asleep. There’s my nighttime routine There’s my nighttime routine. After that, I sleep until I wake up. I don’t use an alarm. I try to stay in bed until at least 8 a.m., even if I do wake up earlier. (I find if I’m patient, I do fall asleep again.) I hope this gives you some ideas for your own nighttime routine. Pay attention to what activities do or don’t help you get to sleep, wind down gradually, and keep a regular bedtime. You may, like me, get to sleep easier and wake up better-rested. Image: Gauze by Paul Klee New Book: Digital Zettelkasten: Principles, Methods & Examples Learn how to think through building a database of the most interesting things you've ever read, or thought. Available direct from me, on Amazon, and everywhere else. About Your Host, David Kadavy David Kadavy is author of Mind Management, Not Time Management, The Heart to Start and Design for Hackers. Through the Love Your Work podcast, his Love Mondays newsletter, and self-publishing coaching David helps you make it as a creative. Follow David on: Twitter Instagram Facebook YouTube Subscribe to Love Your Work Apple Podcasts Overcast Spotify Stitcher YouTube RSS Email Support the show on Patreon Put your money where your mind is. Patreon lets you support independent creators like me. Support now on Patreon »     Show notes: http://kadavy.net/blog/posts/nighttime-routine/

I once was a professional dater. I was good at getting dates. I was terrible at finding a partner – which I really wanted. I went on so many dates, I made $150,000 on an online-dating-advice blog (which I recently shut down). I’ve now been in a relationship for several years. Here are the harsh truths I wish my single self had known. Dating is noise. There’s nothing about dating that has anything to do with being in a relationship. Dating provides false signals. If someone is exciting on a date, that’s often a sign they’ll be a nightmare in a relationship. If someone is boring on a date, they may be great in a relationship. I don’t know how to fix that, other than be very careful how you judge whether or not a date went well. You’ll never be “ready” for a relationship. Self-help books will tell you, “You have to love yourself before you can love someone else,” as if you’ll never be ready until you’ve achieved the platonic ideal of a fully-formed human. At that point, you and another fully-formed human will fit together like puzzle pieces – forever. More likely you’ll meet someone who’s screwed up in the perfect way to complement your own screwed-up-ness. You’ll change one another, and your best hope is the people you change into will also be compatible. You’ll never be “ready.” You’ll always be changing. Yes, you need someone. Once in a while you might decide you’re fine being alone. A self-help book will tell you it’s okay to be single and you’ll be happy in life with hobbies, personal achievements, and pets. This is just fuel for the hedonic treadmill that keeps capitalism running. New products and services are always being invented with the purpose of replacing some form of love – whether that’s a meal delivered to your door, or a ride home from the airport. Love is free, but priceless. Love is bad for GDP. If dating is miserable, you’re miserable. Many people’s stated dating preferences are emotional judo to justify their own unhappiness. If you say to yourself, “I cannot be happy until I meet someone with [insert impossible set of criteria],” you have a great scapegoat for your unhappiness, besides its true source. Don’t blame your misery on not finding what you want. Perfectionism is a refusal to start the journey before you’ve reached the destination. Beware the ferris wheel. There’s a self-selection bias in the dating pool. It’s full of miserable people who blame their dating life on why they’re miserable. If you want proof, look at dating profiles. I don’t know how men feel about this question, but when I was dating I remember seeing many a woman’s profile demanding men have something better to say than “How are you?” The problem is, there is literally no question more central to existence than “How are you?” Every action every person takes their entire day is in pursuit of affecting the answer to the question, “How are you?” A truthful answer to “How are you?” is guaranteed to lead to a conversation relevant to your well-being. And isn’t that what dating is supposed to be about? So why would someone not want to answer the question, “How are you?” Because they’re miserable. They don’t want a real conversation – they want a source of entertainment. What does this have to do with a ferris wheel? Dating apps are especially full of these miserable people. Dating apps are like ferris wheels: Some people would like to see the lay of the land, but the seats are taken up by people addicted to the ups and downs. People are not e-commerce items. Dating apps give the illusion of customization. There is no magic algorithm, there is not an unlimited supply from which to deliver your perfect match, and you would be shocked with whom you can be happy. The lines of code are designed to play into your narcissism. Like Narcissus, you’ll think you’re looking at someone else, when you’re only seeing yourself. It’s a person, not a made-to-order blazer. You do not need to be “challenged.” You hear it all the time: “I want someone who challenges me.” This is usually code for them having an impressive job or education. I get it, you want to be successful and achieve things in life. You’ll do a lot more of that from a foundation of caring and support than from partnering up with a drill sergeant. If you want to be challenged, look for someone so attentive and considerate they challenge your own self-centeredness. So what if they like Nickelback? Oh, the energy you’d save if you realized similar taste in books, movies, and music is the last thing to look for in a partner. There you have it – eight harsh truths about dating from me, a former professional dater. I have to admit, dating is mysterious and it’s possible I know little more about what sequence of actions cause love to land in one’s life than does a cargo cult. But since I’m delivering these truths from my privileged position in a happy long-term relationship, I think I have a clear head about it. Think of me as your designated driver: More sober than you single people, but still capable of crashing us into a light pole. I’ll close with this quote from Roxanne Gay, “I didn’t really learn that I deserved to be loved well until I was loved well.” I hope you find the love you deserve – it may not be what you expect. Image Credit: Senecio by Paul Klee The Mind Management, Not Time Management audiobook is here! Listen to the Mind Management, Not Time Management audiobook free with an Audible trial, or search for the audiobook on your favorite platform. Thank you for having me on your podcasts! Thank you for having me on your podcast! Thank you Chris Sparks at The Forcing Function, Dan Pierce at Mentally Fit, and Joanna Penn at The Creative Penn. As always, you can see a full list of podcasts I’ve been here. About Your Host, David Kadavy David Kadavy is author of Mind Management, Not Time Management, The Heart to Start and Design for Hackers. Through the Love Your Work podcast, his Love Mondays newsletter, and self-publishing coaching David helps you make it as a creative. Follow David on: Twitter Instagram Facebook YouTube Subscribe to Love Your Work Apple Podcasts Overcast Spotify Stitcher YouTube RSS Email Support the show on Patreon Put your money where your mind is. Patreon lets you support independent creators like me. Support now on Patreon »     Show notes: http://kadavy.net/blog/posts/8-harsh-dating-truths/

Does image-based media make us think less about our principles and ideals, and more about pursuing mere appearances? Daniel J. Boorstin thought so. In his book, The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America, Boorstin breaks down why “The Graphic Revolution,” has built a world where our fantasies are more real than our reality. In this book summary, I’ll explain why Boorstin says, “By sharpening our images we have blurred all our experience.” Pseudo-events The thirtieth anniversary of a hotel is coming up. They reach out to leaders in the community to form a committee: A banker, a society matron, a lawyer, a preacher. The committee plans a banquet to celebrate the thirty years of service the hotel has given the community. They invite journalists to the banquet to take photos and report it in the newspapers. This hotel’s anniversary banquet is what Boorstin calls a “pseudo-event.” Pseudo-events have these four qualities: Pseudo-events are planned, not spontaneous. Pseudo-events are created so they can be reported. Pseudo-events are only ambiguously related to reality. Pseudo-events are self-fulfilling. The event is evidence of the thing the event was planned to illustrate. The thirtieth anniversary banquet didn’t happen spontaneously: The hotel created a committee for it. The main reason to have the banquet was to generate press. If the hotel was so valuable, would they have to task members of the community with planning the banquet? It was hardly real. But since this contrived banquet happened, it served as evidence that the hotel was, in fact, valuable to the community. The Graphic Revolution Boorstin blames the proliferation of pseudo-events on what he calls “The Graphic Revolution,” or our rapidly-growing ability create and disseminate imagery. The Graphic Revolution was cited, by the way – as a trigger to our departure from long-form text – in Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death, which I summarized on episode 252. The foundation of The Graphic Revolution was built when the telegraph was first applied to news reporting in the 1830s and 40s. The first American newspaper was monthly, but when information could suddenly be transferred around the world in seconds, news became a product to be manufactured. The Associated Press was founded in 1848, making news a salable commodity. As printing technology became more sophisticated – such as the New York Tribune’s press, which in the 1870s could print 18,000 papers per hour – the capital required to run a newspaper meant it made good business sense to find more and more news to report. The American Civil and Spanish-American Wars, while newsworthy events, made the news machine bigger and more hungry, leaving more space to fill with pseudo-events once the real events subsided. As the term “Graphic Revolution” implies, graphics were a part of the proliferation of news. The first photograph that appeared in a newspaper was published in 1880. But also, audio is a part of the Graphic Revolution. The phonograph was invented in 1877, followed by radio broadcasts in 1900. The copy is more real than the original In 1922, De Witt and Lila Acheson Wallace used scissors and paste to put together the first issue of their magazine, in a one-room basement office in Greenwich Village. They carried the magazine copies to the post office and mailed them. It was an instant success. The Wallaces were able to start Reader’s Digest with almost no money, because they didn’t need editors or writers. De Witt simply went to the New York Public Library, and wrote summaries of articles in the magazines there. Reader’s Digest became more popular than the magazines it was summarizing. In fact, it was nearly twice as popular as America’s second-most popular magazine. Reader’s Digest became so popular, that – according to the company’s official historian – they had to help the magazines they were summarizing stay in business. To do this, they would write a short summary of an article. They would then write the article and place it in another magazine. At one point, more than half of summaries published in Reader’s Digest were of articles they had placed in other magazines. The copy is more real than the original As Boorstin says, ”The image, more interesting than its original, has itself become the original.” The runaway success of Reader’s Digest was a symptom that reading had become not about reading – it had instead become about creating the perception of being “well-informed.” People wanted to browse the summaries to feel that they were aware of what information was out there, not to learn anything from the information itself. As the Graphic Revolution and our ability to reproduce images has strengthened, copies have become more real to us than originals. We go to an art exhibit to see the original of the painting we’ve seen copies of – visitors to a Gauguin exhibit once complained that colors in the original paintings were less-brilliant than the reproductions they were used to. Movies became important in about 1910, often reproducing stories found in novels – by 1917, Publishers’ Weekly was writing about “cinema novels.” In the 1880s, you could only enjoy music if you or someone near you was playing an instrument. By the 1930s, Muzak was mashing together 24-hour mixes of sound to be played in businesses as “background music.” At one point, streaming their “muzak” made them the largest user of telephone networks. And yes, bloggers like myself gain traffic by attracting readers to summaries of books, such as The Image, by Daniel J. Boorstin. Images beget images The proliferation of imagery creates demand for that imagery, which drives demand for pseudo-events. This shapes our culture, driving us away from our principles. Pseudo-events are in higher demand than actual spontaneous events for several reasons: Pseudo-events can be planned to be more dramatic. Pseudo-events are easier to spread (you can have the news release ready to go before the pseudo-event happens – Boorstin points out it should be called a news “holdback”). Pseudo-events are easily repeated. Pseudo-events cost money to produce, so there’s more incentive to spread them (the publicist wants to show results, the client wants those results, the journalists need something to write about). Pseudo-events make more sense (they are planned, after all). Pseudo-events are more memetic. They have elements people want to spread. Pseudo-events are social currency. Knowing about pseudo-events happening in the world becomes a test of being “informed” – something that’s encouraged on the societal level. Pseudo-events spawn other pseudo-events. The effects of pseudo-events As pseudo-events spread in our image-based media, they change what we value in our culture. Pseudo-events affect who we look up to in society, how we travel, and what art we value. Pseudo-events and heroes Pseudo-events shape whom we choose as heroes. We used to choose heroes based upon their accomplishments, and how those accomplishments represented our ideals. Now we choose our heroes based upon how they appear in media – are they in the news a lot, and do they project an image in which we see ourselves? I shared in my Amusing Ourselves to Death summary that early U.S. Presidents wouldn’t have been recognized on the street. We didn’t know them by their images – we knew them by the words they wrote or said. Demagogues such as Mussolini, Stalin, or Hitler show what we get when we seek someone who fits our image of a “Great Leader.” Today, our heroes are our celebrities. We don’t make them famous because they are great – we think they are great because they are famous. Celebrities know that to be celebrities they need to get in the news and stay there. They create pseudo-events of themselves, including intensifying their images by publicizing relationships between one another. Meanwhile, dead people who deserve to be heroes fall into the background – they won’t hire a publicist, and journalists get nothing out of writing about them. Pseudo-events and travel Pseudo-events have shaped the way we travel. The word “travel” used to mean the same as “travail.” In other words, travel meant trouble, work, and torment. We love that we can easily get directly to our destination, and bypass any places that might be along the way. We calculate distance not in miles, but in hours. We don’t move through space, we move through time. We expect the faraway to be familiar, and we expect the nearby to be exotic. But travel used to be travailing. It meant spending time with strangers and strange cultures. It meant getting lost and being disoriented. But the capital required to build railroads and then highways meant we needed more people traveling. And to get more people to travel, we had to make travel less travailing. Travel has become a tautology. At the time Boorstin wrote The Image, in 1962, that meant traveling to Mount Sinai to see where they filmed the movie The Ten Commandments – or traveling to Rome to see if the Trevi Fountain really looks like it did in the movie Three Coins in the Fountain. Today, we go to see the places we’ve seen on Instagram, then take a selfie to…post to Instagram. Pseudo-events and movies I already mentioned how novels were made into movies, which then spawned novels written to become movies. The mass-distribution of actors in movies spawned the star system. Movie-goers wanted to see stars with a distinctive look, such as Mary Pickford’s golden curls or Charlie Chaplin’s bowed legs and cane. By being put on film, actors no longer get direct feedback from their audiences. Actors aren’t tested by how well they interpret the story – the story is tested by how well it displays the actor. The “bestselling” book is a pseudo-event The publishing industry became driven by what Boorstin calls best-sellerism. The Bookman was a literary journal that turned the idea of the best-seller into an institution, around the turn of the century. Printing books costs money, so publishers started planning “reprints” before they even released the originals. A paperback publisher wouldn’t plan their paperback until they had a contract to print the hardback. The hardback publishers wouldn’t print a hardback until they had a contract to print the paperback. Either contract served as evidence the book was popular, which would drive sales. Booksellers only wanted to order new books they were sure would be bestsellers. Yet the public became so obsessed with purchasing bestsellers, bookstores couldn’t carry the really big bestsellers. Retail stores like Macy’s would sell them below cost to attract customers, thus making bookstores unable to compete. We want to be deceived Pseudo-events are so ubiquitous in every part of our life, we’ve come to expect them. We actually want to be deceived. We expect the advertising we encounter to be hyperbolic and non-sensical. Maybe we want to see the originals of the photoshopped model not to change our unrealistic expectations, but rather to marvel at the work that goes into deceiving us? Consider that Schlitz advertised their beer bottles were steam-sterilized, which boosted their sales, or that Lucky Strike advertised the tobacco in their cigarettes was toasted. Nevermind that all beer bottles were already steam sterilized, and all cigarettes toasted. The claim by Ivory soap that their soap is 99.4% pure is just a little modest, so as to be believable nonsense. Are we pursuing images, or are we living life? Boorstin may sound like he wants people to get off his lawn – and he does write with a shrill tone much of the time. But much like Marshall McLuhan would say two years later in Understanding Media, which I summarized on episode 248, Boorstin is mostly trying to make us aware of our own illusions. Boorstin’s concern is mostly that, “We fill our lives not with experience, but with the images of experience.” Neil Postman later built on Boorstin’s ideas to warn in Amusing Ourselves to Death, that image-based media was devolving our discourse into nonsense. A final quote from Boorstin: Chewing gum is the television of the mouth. There is no danger so long as we do not think that by chewing gum we are getting nourishment. But the Graphic Revolution has offered us the means of making all experience a form of mental chewing gum. There’s your The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-events in America summary I hope you enjoyed this summary of The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-events in America, and lest your reading experience consist only of summaries, check out the full book. I personally found it to be a great history of media and publishing. It’s one of the major classics of media theory – a must-read for anyone who creates media. The Mind Management, Not Time Management audiobook is here! Listen to the Mind Management, Not Time Management audiobook free with an Audible trial, or search for the audiobook on your favorite platform. About Your Host, David Kadavy David Kadavy is author of Mind Management, Not Time Management, The Heart to Start and Design for Hackers. Through the Love Your Work podcast, his Love Mondays newsletter, and self-publishing coaching David helps you make it as a creative. Follow David on: Twitter Instagram Facebook YouTube Subscribe to Love Your Work Apple Podcasts Overcast Spotify Stitcher YouTube RSS Email Support the show on Patreon Put your money where your mind is. Patreon lets you support independent creators like me. Support now on Patreon »     Show notes: http://kadavy.net/blog/posts/the-image-a-guide-to-pseudo-events-in-america-daniel-j-boorstin/

The business of creative work is the business of riding randomness. If you want to write a bestselling book or launch a revolutionary company, you’re going to need luck. You’re navigating Extremistan, not Mediocristan, as I talked about in episode 253. How do you increase your chances of having a hit without risking everything? You do it with “The Barbell Strategy.” You can use the Barbell Strategy in many areas of life and work. The Barbell Strategy defined The Barbell Strategy is introduced in Nassim Taleb’s The Black Swan, which I summarized on episode 244. The Barbell Strategy protects you from catastrophic losses that can take you out of the game. Meanwhile, it gives you chances to make big gains. Why “barbell”? Think of a barbell – a very lopsided barbell. On one side of the barbell is a big weight. On the other side of the barbell is a small weight. In the middle is the thin bar that connects the two. The Barbell Strategy is an investment strategy Taleb introduces The Barbell Strategy in an investing context. This is the strategy Taleb has used as a financial trader. As we’ll see, you can apply it to other areas as well. Taleb says: If you know that you are vulnerable to prediction errors, and if you accept that most “risk measures” are flawed, because of the Black Swan, then your strategy is to be as hyperconservative and hyperaggressive as you can be instead of being mildly aggressive or conservative. (emphasis mine) In other words, you have to accept that the world is full of Black Swans. As a review, Black Swans are outlier events with extreme impact. We think we can explain Black Swans after the fact, but we really have no idea. They can be positive, or negative. Things like financial market crashes or mega-best-selling books. By being hyperconservative, you avoid the negative Black Swans. By being hyperagressive, you expose yourself to positive Black Swans. 85% hyperconservative investments, 15% hyperaggressive investments Most people go with the “safe” investment. I’m not a financial advisor, and nothing I’m saying is investment advice, but for most people, that’s the index fund: Keep putting money in an S&P 500 ETF. Expect to get a 7% return over your lifetime. The strategy Taleb espouses is to avoid so-called “medium risk” investments. Instead, put 85% of your portfolio in hyperconservative investments – places where you won’t lose money. Invest the other 15% of your portfolio in hyperaggressive investments – places where you might lose your money, but where there’s also no limit to how much money you could make. When you’re invested in the index fund, your entire portfolio is exposed to Black Swans. The stock market dropped nearly 90% during the Great Depression, and swift drops of 30 or 40% are not uncommon. If 85% of your portfolio is spread across hyperconservative investments, you’re unlikely to need to weather such storms. With 15% of your portfolio in hyperaggressive investments, you can only lose 15% of your money. Meanwhile, there’s no limit to how high those hyperaggressive investments can go. Imagine you put 1% of your net worth in Bitcoin five years ago. Multiply that by 100, and that’s your current return. Even if you lost all the other 14% of your net worth in hyperaggressive investments, you would have nearly doubled your money, with little downside risk. The Barbell Strategy in creative work As you learned in episode 253 about Mediocristan vs. Extremistan, creative success is unpredictable. As award-winning screenwriter William Goldman said, “Nobody knows anything.” Most creatives expect their success to go “up and to the right.” When someone suggests they take some chances, to justify not taking those chances they abuse survivorship bias – as I talked about on episode 251. So they stick to “the middle.” They do the thing they feel will get them a little success. For authors, this is the strategy of cranking out a formulaic novel every month that’s sure to sell some copies – but for which nobody is ever going to camp in line outside a bookstore to be the first to get. Maybe they make the graph go “up and to the right,” but they’ll never have a breakout success. Find some “sure bets” – protect your downside To play the Barbell Strategy in creative work, first, you need to find some sure bets. Protect your downside, so you can stay in the game. Remember on episode 251 when I told you about my poker-player friend who needs a certain “bankroll” to make $100 an hour? That’s what you need. You need some room to explore long enough to let ergodicity take over. That could be a literal bankroll. I personally invested a lot when I had a secure job, knowing that some day I’d use the bankroll as runway to start something on my own. Some creatives like to have a secure day job, and spend a little time creating before or after work. Anthony Trollope and Charles Bukowski worked at the post office. Octavia Butler’s many jobs included potato chip inspector. Comedian Mark Normand was a janitor, which allowed him to think about his bits while he worked. When I first started on my own, after I had gone through savings I had bookmarked for exploration, I spent ten hours a week freelancing – the rest of the time I spent building passive income streams. I told you on episode 214 how one passive income stream made me $150,000. I now live in Colombia, where my three-bedroom apartment costs less than $700 a month – which takes off a lot of financial pressure. To play the Barbell Strategy, you need to protect your downside. There are no guarantees in life, including life itself – so this means something different for everyone. Figure out what it is for you. Play some “wildcards” Now, play some “wildcards” (Note that “sure bets” and “wildcards” are my own terms. Taleb hates gambling analogies because in gambling the actual odds are known – but you get the idea.) Wildcards are things that – as Seth Godin would say – “might not work.” In fact, they probably won’t work – but they have unlimited upside potential. They’re the “asymmetric opportunities” Tynan talked about on episode 145. “Asymmetric” refers to the risk profile: The potential downsides are small, but the potential upside are huge. The profile is not symmetric, it’s asymmetric. For example, it costs little to write a blog post. You have little to lose, but you may gain a lot. I’ve written many hundreds of blog posts in seventeen years. Two of those have led to positive Black Swans: One got me my first book deal, and catapulted my status online from nobody to somebody. Another got me an advisory position with a company that sold to Google, and became the subject of my latest book. Numerous others brought smaller benefits, but I can’t think of any I regret. Your wildcards have a chance to become positive Black Swans. You can’t predict what will work, so make lots of small bets with unlimited upside. Avoid “the middle” Finally, avoid “the middle.” There’s a few reasons for this. One, the middle is crowded. As restauranteur Nick Kokonas said on episode 213, most people aren’t as afraid of failure as they are of success. They want to do okay, but they don’t want to do great. At the same time, we have a loss-aversion bias. We hate losing an investment twice as much as we enjoy gaining from an investment. So, everyone goes for the middle. And there’s more competition in the middle. Two, the middle is where the negative Black Swans happen. You’re only investing a little in the wildcards, so you can afford to lose it all. We tend to go all-in on the middle, so when an unexpected catastrophe happens, we lose a lot. Three, the middle has little chance of bringing positive Black Swans. Your index fund is supposed to return 7% a year. It could lose 40% of its value in a day or two. Meanwhile, does it have any chance of gaining 1,000% just as fast? Very unlikely. What’s hot is usually “the middle” Look at what is hot in your field, and you’ll probably find “the middle.” In writing, it’s churning out formulaic fiction series for Kindle Unlimited. In blogging, it’s making sure you’re sharing every blog post to every social media channel. In SEO, it’s manufacturing mediocre articles on high-volume keywords you have little chance of ranking for. In SaaS entrepreneurship, it’s A/B testing to make minuscule gains in conversion rate. Some of these things might bring a little progress, which is why people do them, but they have no chance of big upside. Avoiding the middle protects your downside, and gives you a chance for more upside. With less invested in the middle, you can invest more in the wildcards. The Barbell Strategy in other areas The Barbell Strategy is useful in investing, and it’s useful in creative work. If you look around, you can also apply the Barbell Strategy to other areas. The Barbell Strategy for exercise “The middle” for exercise is steady-state, medium-intensity, training. Taleb himself is an advocate of doing power lifts, as heavy as you can. This certainly exposes you to upside, but I think it also exposes you to the downside of injury. I think the true Barbell Strategy for exercise is Body by Science, which I summarized on episode 160. It’s a very intense and short protocol, with little chance of injury. Other than that, go for long walks or do physical activities you enjoy. The Barbell Strategy for technology use You can apply the Barbell Strategy to your technology use. Some technology exposes you to potential serendipity. Surfing around on Reddit or social media is fun, and you never know when you’ll happen across a breakthrough idea. But like a risky investment, it’s risky to spend all your attention in these areas. The “sure bets” in technology are to use specific tools for the job you’re trying to get done. I talked about “grippy” and “slippy” tools on episode 230. If you’re a writer, get an AlphaSmart, or a typewriter for the initial brainstorming phases of your work. High-powered technology such as smartphones and laptops can be sure bets, too. But just use them for short bursts for specific tasks. What you want to avoid is the always-on use of the highest-power technology available. If you’re always glued to your smartphone or laptop, you’re connected to the internet, but you’re disconnected from your own mind. You can’t use technology without technology using some part of you. Marshall McLuhan, whose book, Understanding Media, I talked about on episode 248, would say that as technology extends, it also “amputates.” Another “wildcard” for technology is to not use technology at all. When I took Naval Ravikant’s meditation challenge, which I talked about on episode 246, I found that during meditation I thought more about asymmetric ideas, which I later implemented when I was using technology. The Barbell Strategy for time management You can apply the Barbell Strategy to time management. “The middle” is trying to get the most done in the shortest time. It’s being on clock time instead of event time, like I talked about on episode 235. The “sure bets” for time management are to have clear priorities, build habits, document processes, and automate what you can. These tactics help you use time and energy more effectively, without stressing you out and disrupting your creativity. The “wildcards” for time management are mostly the opposite of the sure bets. Meditate, daydream, go for walks, take naps, tinker, play, and discuss. As Taleb says, “Go to parties!” Instead of having clear priorities, spend time on “anti-priorities”: Things that don’t seem important, but that you want to do anyway. What you want to avoid is the stuff most people try to do to “save time”: full schedules, tight deadlines, last-minute crises, mindless outsourcing, and complexity creep. These tactics lead to negative time Black Swans: When one thing goes wrong, everything collapses, you lose time, and stress yourself out. Live the barbell life Let’s close with a quote from Nassim Taleb: I will never get to know the unknown since, by definition, it is unknown. However, I can always guess how it might affect me, and I should base my decisions around that. To apply the Barbell Strategy to any area of your life and work, avoid the middle, find sure bets, and play some wildcards. It’s the best way to stay in the game long enough to get lucky. Last chance to join the True Fan Patreon tier I'm offering the special "True Fan" Patreon tier through May. Join today and get lots of benefits at a discounted price. Learn more here » About Your Host, David Kadavy David Kadavy is author of Mind Management, Not Time Management, The Heart to Start and Design for Hackers. Through the Love Your Work podcast, his Love Mondays newsletter, and self-publishing coaching David helps you make it as a creative. Follow David on: Twitter Instagram Facebook YouTube Subscribe to Love Your Work Apple Podcasts Overcast Spotify Stitcher YouTube RSS Email Support the show on Patreon Put your money where your mind is. Patreon lets you support independent creators like me. Support now on Patreon »     Show notes: http://kadavy.net/blog/posts/barbell-strategy/

Discover how reducing exposure to EMFs through a low-EMF computing setup improved the host's writing clarity. Learn about the potential health effects of EMFs emitted by electronic devices and the host's journey in exploring electromagentic hypersensitivity.

After fourteen rejections, as I outlined on episode 247, I finally landed a BookBub Featured Deal. Once I tallied up my results, I had lost more than $4,000 running the promotion. I’ll tell you why, and why I’d still do another BookBub Featured Deal in a heartbeat. My BookBub Featured Deal Results Book: The Heart to Start: Stop Procrastinating & Start Creating BookBub Category: Advice and How-To Date: Wednesday, June 10, 2020 List Price: $9.99 Deal Price: $1.99 Territory: United States BookBub Promotion Fee: $1,008 Promotion Size: ~1,000,000 subscribers Copies Sold: 2,541 Revenue: $1,841 Supplemental Ad Spend: $4,847 Total Profit (Loss): ($4,014)   The breakdown of copies sold (across all countries): Amazon: 2,236 Apple: 204 Barnes & Noble: 49 Google: 36 Kobo: 16 Total Copies Sold: 2,541   The breakdown of revenue results (across all countries): Amazon: $1,462 Apple: $266 Barnes & Noble: $59 Google: $34 Kobo: $19 Total Revenue: $1,841   Overall ad spend results, broken down by network: BookBub Ads: $1,910 BookBub Featured Deal: $1,008 Amazon: $1,761 Facebook: $1,187 Instagram influencers: $185 Total Ad Spend: $6,051 My BookBub Featured Deal made my book a bestseller across several categories The Heart to Start ranked as high as: #136 overall on Amazon #1 in Self-Help/Creativity #1 in Arts & Photography #1 in Entrepreneurship & Small Business #6 overall in Self-Help #6 overall in Business & Investing Three reasons my BookBub Featured Deal results were poor (financially) The three main reasons I lost $4,000 running my BookBub Featured Deal are: I was trying for a bestseller list I poorly allocated advertising spend throughout the promotion I poorly allocated advertising spend amongst platforms 1. I was trying for the WSJ bestseller list Word on the street is, to qualify for the Wall Street Journal nonfiction ebook best-seller list, you need to sell 3,000–5,000 ebooks in a week, in the U.S. Supposedly you need to sell at least 500 of those copies in a single non-Amazon channel to trigger reporting to the list. I contemplated not trying for the list and instead reaping what profits I could, but decided to go for it. I felt The Heart to Start was a longshot, but was curious to learn so I could later apply what I learned on my then-upcoming-now-out book, Mind Management, Not Time Management (read about my BookBub Featured New Release results for my new book). Despite spending more than $6,000 on the promotion, I did not break the 3,000-copy barrier. Here is my sales breakdown for U.S. sales (the above sales are worldwide): Sales (U.S.) Amazon: 2,123 B&N: 51 (countries unknown) Apple: 185 Kobo: 7 Google: 29 Total U.S. Copies Sold: 2,395 As you can see, perhaps harder than selling 3,000 copies overall is selling 500 copies in a non-Amazon channel (for this book in this genre with my audience, anyway).   2. I poorly allocated ad spend throughout the promotion I broke my ad spend down into three buckets: Warm Up: Starting around 10 days before the promotion, I built awareness about my book to “warm up” the audience, so they would act more readily when the deal hit their inboxes. During: The day of and a couple days after my promotion, I advertised the discount (where possible). Last Day: The final day of the promotion, I advertised the discount, with messaging that it was the last day (where possible). My ad spend results amongst these three buckets: Warm Up: $2,225 (46%) During: $1,477 (30%) Last Day: $1,145 (24%) Total: $4,847 I do not recommend this allocation. Without much time to plan my promotion, I got overly-zealous, and spent way too much early on. By the time I got to the Last Day, I was trigger shy and didn’t want to spend more money. If anything, this should have been reversed. The last day of any promotion will generally get you more bang for your buck. In the future, I plan to spend 50% of budget on the Last Day. 3. I poorly allocated supplemental advertising spend amongst platforms I ran ads on Amazon, BookBub, and Facebook. My breakdown amongst these channels: Amazon Ads: $1,761 (36%) BookBub Ads: $1,910 (39%) Facebook: $1,177 (24%) Total: $4,847 (note, I spent $10 on Instagram ads, which went to Facebook thus the discrepancy from above “Facebook” numbers. I also paid $185 for promotion from Instagram influencers, which is not reflected in this report, for simplicity.) I do not recommend this allocation. I spent too heavily on Facebook, and I especially did so during the Warm Up phase. I do not normally advertise on Facebook, and don’t aspire to build my skills in running Facebook ads. I already run Amazon Ads regularly, but their terms and platform features make it impossible or impractical to advertise discounts, especially with “Last Day” messaging. I think you get more bang for your buck on a BookBub Featured Deal by advertising on BookBub itself. Yes, you can target BookBub subscribers on Facebook, but it’s more straightforward to advertise on BookBub. Therefore, in the future, I plan to spend 50% of budget on BookBub Ads. The long-term results of my BookBub Featured Deal Part of the appeal of a BookBub Featured Deal is not just the sales you make during the promotion. There are also long-term benefits. Amazon algorithm boost (and increased profits) Word on the street is, Amazon has 30-day and 90-day “cliffs” on their algorithms. If your book has a big sales spike, you can expect to see a lift in organic sales for 30 days, and a less-pronounced lift that lasts for 90 days. I can tell you that once Seth Godin recommended The Heart to Start on his blog, my sales were lifted permanently. In the five months before the month of my BookBub Featured Deal, my average monthly profit for The Heart to Start was $511. In the five months after the month of my BookBub Featured Deal, my average monthly profit for The Heart to Start was $633. I saw a 24% increase in average monthly profits after my BookBub Featured Deal. It’s impossible to say the deal caused my increased profits, but I’m sure it didn’t hurt. New readers It’s fantastic to get a shot of 2,500 new readers in a single week. The effects your book can have on someone can last a lifetime. It’s hard to measure the impact new readers can have on your author business, because new readers may buy every new book you publish for decades. Sales of other formats, or books BookBub Featured Deals are discounts on ebooks, but readers who like your ebook will sometimes buy other formats. Directly after my deal, I noticed a spike of a few dozen sales of my IngramSpark hardcover version. I suspect readers who liked the book picked up “souvenir” copies. I make more than $8 per book of profit on the hardcover. It can be worth losing money initially on a BookBub Featured Deal if your book is the first in a series. As a nonfiction author, I don’t string together my books into series – at least not as strongly as fiction authors tend to. It’s hard for me to say how the promotion affected sales of my other books. I was promoting a new book at the time, too, so there were too many confounding factors. More reviews You need decent reviews to get a BookBub Featured Deal, but your deal also brings in a lot of new reviews. When I ran my BookBub Featured Deal, I had 275 Amazon ratings/reviews. After the deal, I quickly gained more reviews. Now, nine months after the promotion, I’m closing in on 500. Cheaper Amazon Ads When you make more sales on Amazon, your ads run more. This also usually means you can run your ads more cheaply. As I reported in my June 2020 income report, I had a number of Lockscreen Ads set up on Amazon well before my BookBub Featured Deal. With my 18¢-per-click bid, they weren’t running. But once the promotion kicked in, suddenly I was getting cheaper clicks. More sales on Amazon leads to cheaper ads, which can lead to more sales. Why would I run another BookBub Featured Deal? My BookBub Featured Deal wasn’t pure gravy like my Kindle Daily Deal, but I would run another in a heartbeat. Why? Because I’ve learned through experience that I should have allocated my ad spend better. If I spent ads more wisely on a future book, I may be able to hit that WSJ best-seller list. And if I didn’t try for a list at all, I’d be interested to see if I could break even for the promotion – which would surely be profitable in the long-run, thanks to the effects of a sales boost. Free budget calculator To better plan my next BookBub Featured Deal, I’ve created a calculator. Enter your total budget and it helps break down ad spend according to phase of campaign and advertising channel. Get this calculator free here. No email address required, though if you’d like to get my highly-detailed income reports delivered to your inbox, I do recommend signing up for blog post updates. Want help with your BookBub Featured Deal? Call me! If you’re planning a BookBub Featured Deal, and would like to discuss it with me, I do consultations. Book a call with me on Clarity or Superpeer (recommended). The Mind Management, Not Time Management audiobook is here! Listen to the Mind Management, Not Time Management audiobook free with an Audible trial, or search for the audiobook on your favorite platform. Thank you for having me on your podcasts! Thank you for having me on your podcast! Thank you to Trey Kauffman at The Mosaic Life and the team at Domestika for having me as a Comic Sans expert on their Curious Minds podcast. As always, you can see a full list of podcasts I’ve been here. About Your Host, David Kadavy David Kadavy is author of Mind Management, Not Time Management, The Heart to Start and Design for Hackers. Through the Love Your Work podcast, his Love Mondays newsletter, and self-publishing coaching David helps you make it as a creative. Follow David on: Twitter Instagram Facebook YouTube Subscribe to Love Your Work Apple Podcasts Overcast Spotify Stitcher YouTube RSS Email Support the show on Patreon Put your money where your mind is. Patreon lets you support independent creators like me. Support now on Patreon »     Show notes: http://kadavy.net/blog/posts/bookbub-featured-deal-results/

If you want to succeed in anything creative – whether that’s writing, art, or entrepreneurship – you’re navigating unfamiliar territory. Everyone else is living in Mediocristan, but you’re living in Extremistan. You need a different approach for deciding how you define success. “Extremistan” is a term introduced by Nicholas Nassim Taleb in his book, The Black Swan, which I summarized on episode 244. We tend to think we’re living in the opposite of Extremistan: Mediocristan. When we as creatives measure success and make our decisions as if we are in Mediocristan, we ruin any chance we have of succeeding in the world we’re actually in: Extremistan. Extremistan defined Extremistan is an imaginary place where events are random and unpredictable, and the impact of those events are extreme. It’s a world full of “Black Swans.” Extremistan vs. Mediocristan Mediocristan is a place that’s the opposite of Extremistan. Extremistan is unstable. Mediocristan is stable. Extremistan is the world of the unpredictable and unexpected. Mediocristan is the world of the predictable and expected. Extremistan is full of singular events (“Black Swans”). In Mediocristan, the same things happen over and over. Extremistan is full of variables that scale infinitely. In Mediocristan, all variables fall within a range. We’re used to Mediocristan Our modern world is built to be Mediocristan. We think we can predict what will happen. Some of this may be that our mental hard-wiring makes it difficult for us to think in terms of the unpredictable and unstable. Some of it is definitely because we’ve spread, across the collective, risks that face the individual. An hourly-wage job is in Mediocristan Imagine you have an hourly-wage job serving coffee at Starbucks. You’re working in Mediocristan. There are plenty of unpredictable things Starbucks has to deal with serving millions of customers across tens of thousands of locations. Employees will call in sick or stop showing up. There can be a coffee bean shortage, causing prices to suddenly spike. Someone might slip and fall in the bathroom and sue for millions of dollars. All these things affect Starbucks’ profits. One month, they may make a big profit. The next month, they may lose money and need to take out a loan to stay in business. But all the while, you know exactly how much you’re getting paid each hour you work. Starbucks can handle these shocks and pay you a steady wage because they spread risk across the entire organization. You don’t even notice if a water main breaks, flooding another location, or if the Director of Operations gets in a car wreck and ends up in the hospital for seven weeks. Your hourly-wage job at Starbucks is mind-numbing, it’s boring, you’re living on rice and beans from Aldi. But, it’s impressively predictable. It beats the heck out of foraging in the jungle and hoping you don’t get pounced on by a puma. Creative work happens in Extremistan A Mediocristan job is a pretty sweet deal if the wage is livable. Though, stable, well-paying Mediocristan jobs are more and more scarce. That’s not the thing I want to talk about. What I want to talk about is how important it is to understand that when you’re doing creative work, you’re not in Mediocristan, rather you’re in Extremistan. An author works in Extremistan Imagine if when you get off your shift at Starbucks, you sit down and write each day. After you build a writing habit and keep it for several years, you finish your first novel. You upload your novel to Amazon, and: nothing. You get a few sales a month. Then one day, you log into your Amazon dashboard, and see a huge spike. You’ve sold 3,000 books, and it’s not even 10 a.m. Turns out an influencer shared your book on TikTok. 3,000 books is just the beginning. Your book becomes a massive best-seller. You sell millions. A big publisher picks it up and distributes it around the world. You’re getting six-figure checks for foreign rights deals, then you get a seven-figure check for the movie rights. You quit the Starbucks job. Your life is forever changed. Extremistan is a world of extremes Your job at Starbucks is in Mediocristan. Your work as an author is in Extremistan. Remember, Extremistan is unstable, unpredictable, with singular events and variables that scale infinitely. You wrote every day after work, with no financial returns – suddenly you had more money than you knew what to do with. That’s unstable. It looked as if your book was a failure, until it wasn’t. That’s unpredictable. By some fluke, the influencer shared your book. That was a singular event (a “Black Swan”). There’s virtually no limit to the number of books you could sell. Your book sales are a variable that could scale infinitely. As the name would imply, Extremistan is a world of extremes. In Mediocristan, variables fall within a range In Mediocristan, variables fall within a range. The height of humans is a good example. The height of humans is distributed on a bell curve. There are a lot of people who are about average height. There are far fewer people on the tails of the bell curve whether extremely tall, or extremely short. There are no adults nine inches tall, nor ninety feet tall. No one has even been nine feet tall. In Extremistan, variables scale infinitely In Extremistan, variables scale infinitely. The “average” net worth of a U.S. family is about $700,000. But while there are a lot of people who are average height, there aren’t so many with average wealth. To be richer than half of all Americans, you need “only” $100,000. Why are so many Americans below “average” wealth? Because if Bill Gates walks into a bar, on average, everyone there is a billionaire. The people on the high edge of wealth distribution are so wealthy, they skew the average. Jeff Bezos has 1 million times the wealth of the average American – over $100 billion. Human height has a predictable and limited range – it’s in Mediocristan. Wealth has an unpredictable and unlimited range – it’s in Extremistan. Be careful what you learn in Extremistan Because Extremistan is so unpredictable, with unlimited variables, you have to be careful not to draw conclusions too soon from what you see in Extremistan. A quote from Taleb: In Extremistan, one unit can easily affect the total in a disproportionate way. In this world, you should always be suspicious of the knowledge you derive from data. In other words, the individual can skew the collective – Bill Gates walks into a bar and on average everyone there is a billionaire. So be careful what conclusions you draw from the data, when you’re working in Extremistan. It wouldn’t matter how long you worked at that hourly-wage job at Starbucks – you wouldn’t get rich. If the wage were livable, and you enjoyed the work, that could be fine. Don’t measure Extremistan success on Mediocristan terms But you’re in trouble if, while writing your novel, you measure success on the same terms as you measure success at your hourly-wage job at Starbucks. You’d be measuring Extremistan work on Mediocristan terms. You could do something well at work, and get a dollar-an-hour raise. You’re seeing progress. You could write an incredible chapter in your book, and not see no immediate benefit. Yet the impact of that dollar-an-hour raise, stretched out over your entire Starbucks career, may be tiny when compared to the lifetime benefit of the incredible, climactic, chapter in your novel. If you only looked at the data you immediately received, you’d quickly conclude there was no point in working on your novel. You might as well stick to serving coffee. Another quote from Taleb: What you can know from data in Mediocristan augments very rapidly with the supply of information. But knowledge in Extremistan grows slowly and erratically... In other words, in Mediocristan, the more data you collect, the more you know. In Extremistan, the more data you collect, the more you think you know – if you’re not careful. In reality, new data in Extremistan tells you very little. Success in Extremistan is explosive Like wealth, success in creative work scales infinitely. Art De Vany studied the box-office performance of 350 movies that came out during the course of nine months. The top four of those 350 movies made 20% of the total revenue. The bottom four: 0.0036%. The top movie made almost $50 million. The bottom movie, about $5,000. Success in Extremistan is random Nobody spends millions making a movie to only make $5,000. If the movie industry knew how to make $50 million instead, they would only make the movies that made $50 million. William Goldman wrote a lot of screenplays, including the cult classic, The Princess Bride. He won two Academy Awards for other screenplays. Still, he said, Nobody knows anything.... Not one person in the entire motion picture field knows for a certainty what’s going to work. Every time out it’s a guess and, if you’re lucky, an educated one. —William Goldman This applies to movies, books, scientific discoveries, and entrepreneurship. You can learn and apply skill, but ultimately success in Extremistan is random. Success in Extremistan is delayed Success in Extremistan can also be delayed. Vincent van Gogh, after only two years of painting, wrote his brother Theo saying that maybe he had made a mistake investing so much in painting. It wasn’t until after ten years of painting that Van Gogh’s work was recognized – just before his early death at 37. It took Leonardo three years to paint The Last Supper. It took Marie Curie four years to isolate radium. It took James Cameron fifteen years to produce Avatar. Don’t use Mediocristan terms to measure Extremistan success When you’re measuring success in Mediocristan, you expect to see the graph go “up and to the right.” But success in Extremistan looks more like a poorly-shaved porcupine. The more you measure success in Extremistan on Mediocristan terms, the less you’ll invest in doing the kinds of things that will bring you success in Extremistan. If you focus all your energy on A/B testing, you’ll only ever see incremental gains. Misleading A/B test data aside, you’ll never take chances that lead to explosive growth. If you dismiss advice or don’t try something based upon a flawed interpretation of survivorship bias – as I talked about on episode 251, you won’t have the perseverance to stick around long enough for randomness to give you a boost (remember, The Queen’s Gambit took 37 years to become a bestseller). Creative work is about riding randomness in Extremistan If you want to make it in creative work, you need to recognize that you’re riding randomness. That’s a tough thing to get comfortable with – we like to have sure bets. A good strategy is “The Barbell Strategy,” which I talked about in The Black Swan book summary on episode 244: Go ahead and take the sure bets, but leave some room for the wildcards. Work the Starbucks job, but spend your evenings writing the boldest novel you can. We think of our world as predictable. We want to see steady growth. But the predicable and steady is from Mediocristan. Finding your way to success in creative work is a journey through Extremistan. The Mind Management, Not Time Management audiobook is here! Listen to the Mind Management, Not Time Management audiobook free with an Audible trial, or search for the audiobook on your favorite platform. Thank you for having me on your podcasts! Thank you for having me on your podcast! Thank you to Trey Kauffman at The Mosaic Life and the team at Domestika for having me as a Comic Sans expert on their Curious Minds podcast. As always, you can see a full list of podcasts I’ve been here. About Your Host, David Kadavy David Kadavy is author of Mind Management, Not Time Management, The Heart to Start and Design for Hackers. Through the Love Your Work podcast, his Love Mondays newsletter, and self-publishing coaching David helps you make it as a creative. Follow David on: Twitter Instagram Facebook YouTube Subscribe to Love Your Work Apple Podcasts Overcast Spotify Stitcher YouTube RSS Email Support the show on Patreon Put your money where your mind is. Patreon lets you support independent creators like me. Support now on Patreon »     Show notes: http://kadavy.net/blog/posts/mediocristan-vs-extremistan/

Just a quick note here to tell you loyal listeners about a new opportunity over on Patreon. As I’ve said in my Patreon pleas at the end of the episodes, some money that I make feels better than other money. When I sell a book, that money feels good. When I get a sponsor for the podcast, that money feels...not as good. Other money I get that feels good is the money I get from Patreon supporters. This is why I don’t take podcast sponsors anymore. Each dollar feels like a little note that says, “Hey, I like what you’re doing. Please keep doing it.” And practically speaking, the money I get from Patreon supporters helps keep the business running. Books are the biggest part of my income, but it takes a long time to finish a book. Getting a few bucks a month from a reader helps me keep doing my work until I have enough ideas worth putting into a book. I’ve asked you over the years many times for your support and many of you have joined, and for that I’m grateful. But now I have a special opportunity: For a limited time I’m offering a special “True Fan” level. The name of this is inspired by Kevin Kelley’s essay, “1,000 true fans.” Basically, if you can find 1,000 people who think your work is worth $100 a year, you have a sustainable business. This special True Fan level brings you all the benefits you’d normally get at a higher level of support, but at a discounted price. You get early access to episodes – there’s two waiting you could listen to right now – plus audio of my monthly income reports, masterclasses with folks like Noah Kagan, and patron-only Q&As – all delivered to your own personal RSS feed you can easily copy and paste into your favorite podcast app. Normally, all of this goes to Patreon supporters at the $15 a month level. For a limited time, you get all this for only $9 a month. If you’re already a supporter, this offer is open to you, too. Whether that’s bumping your support up a bit, or if you’re at a higher level you can get locked in for the same benefits at a lower price. The offer, as I said, is only available for a limited time, but after it goes away, you’re locked in at this price. Plus, if I add anything to the package in the future, you’ll get that, too. The more members we have, the more cool things I can offer. Not everyone is in a position to pay for something they could get for free. If you can’t support my work, nothing will change and you can keep enjoying my free work as long as I can afford to do it from here in South America (assuming I can still live in South America). So far we have over 250 episode of Love Your Work from the past five years, and more than 100 Love Mondays email newsletters, all free to enjoy. Otherwise, if you consider yourself a “True Fan” *and* you have the means, please take advantage of this special Patreon level. As I said this is a limited-time offer. It’s an experiment, and I will close sign-ups to this level at some random time in the near future, so do act now. Again, that’s patreon.com/kadavy