🏴 On surrender, craft, and the cracked ones. Ten Bullets.

To the obsessed,

Here are your weekly Ten Bullets.

Ten ideas to help you build companies, make art, and fuel your obsession.

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PS- Tomorrow I’m starting the PR30 Challenge.

The challenge: Post 30 raw videos over 30 days- documenting your ideas, your journey, anything. On YouTube, IG, TikTok, or Twitter.

I believe unfiltered, authentic video content is the ultimate ‘strategy’ for content right now, and doing 30 videos like this would completely change your life.

Everyone is tired of consuming overproduced, impersonal videos. All people want is something real.

I’ve made dozens of these type of videos this year, and it’s completely changed the connection I have with my audience, and my ability to speak/communicate (online and offline).

It’s also a wonderful way to work through your own ideas around certain topics/problems/opportunities.

You can learn more about PR30 here.

If you’d like to pay to join the challenge officially, you’ll get:

1. Access to myself / others doing the challenge in a private slack.

2. A personal 30min call with me to discuss your video/content strategy (this will replace the weekly live calls, and IMO is more valuable).

3. Paid accountability/skin in the game to actually complete the challenge.

Click below to sign up to PR30 by end of day Monday (4/15/24). Would love to have you along for the ride.

1. On what you can’t escape from:

The best artists can't escape from their art. They are their work. There's no separation. There's no balance. Every step is brushstroke. Every word is a note. Every experience is a perfect scene. Once this clicks, life becomes simple. Nothing should be forced. Nothing should be regretted. When one lives authentically, a way of life can be art in itself.

— Share on Twitter

2. On surrender:

— Share on Instagram

3. On art and obsession:

“One of the biggest lessons that I learned from Prince, is that obsession is not a dirty word. Obsession is actually an artist’s best friend. All obsession really means is, passion at the exclusion of everything else. And the only people who won’t like you using this word, are the ones who are afraid that the ‘exclusion of everything else’ part, excludes even them. The only time obsession is unhealthy, is when it’s directed at things don’t serve you. Like when you’re obsessed with your phone, or someone you’ve never talked to. But being obsessed about creating art, can only be a benefit to your soul, and to the world around you.”

— Father Bronques, 25 Rules for Artists

4. On craft:

— Anthony Bourdain, via Michael Dempsey

5. On networking:

“Don't spend your time doing meetings unless you really, really have to. I really think networking is overrated. There are all these articles about how you've got to network more, and it makes me want to vomit.

Go do something great and your network will instantly emerge. If you build a great product or if you get a good customer base, guarantee you will get funded."

— Naval Ravikant (via Z Fellows)

5. On focus:

“Something I've been trying recently: wake up and go directly to work. Do not check anything-- no messages, no emails, no news, no nothing. There's something destructive / distracting about checking the outside world that I don't fully understand. It loads my RAM with a ton of distractors and my attention can't focus properly and fully on the highest priority work item. After a few hours, get lunch and optionally gather world state.”

— Andrej Karpathy (Previous Director of Tesla AI, Founding Team OpenAI)

6. On the cracked ones:

“Our business needs massive transfusions of talent, and talent is most likely to be found among non-conformist, dissenters and rebels. Again, that description and much more likely he's not saying this, but it's I think implied here, much more likely be hired by a founder-led company, right?

Big companies are not hiring nonconformist, dissenters and rebels.

And then the team at Ogilvy summarizes this chapter, which is great. It's the cracked ones. It is the cracked ones, in other words, that let light into the world.”

— Founders Podcast #343, The Eternal Pursuit of Unhappiness: David Ogilvy

7. On creation:

“The truly creative mind in any field is no more than a cruelly delicate organism with the overpowering necessity to create, create, create- so that without the creating of music or poetry or books or buildings or something of meaning, his very breath is cut off from him. He must create, must pour out creation. By some strange, unknown, inward urgency he is not really alive unless he is creating.”

— Pearl Buck (h/t @AlexJoh13)

8. On the journey:

9. On content ideas:

"You’ll know you have a good idea for a podcast if you are already doing it and just not recording.

Strike Force Five was already meeting by zoom. All-in guys were already bantering over poker. David Senra was already reading bios If you do it for free already, turn the mic on."

- Patrick O'Shaughnessy​.

The best content is the thing you're already doing, packaged in a new way.

10. On dopamine:

"Dopamine is not about the pursuit of happiness, it is about the happiness of pursuit."

- Dr. Robert Sapolsky (via Andrew Huberman)

If you enjoyed this, forward it to an obsessed friend.

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