Hey Everyone,
Hope you're having a great week. Here are a few things I've been reading, writing and pondering lately. Enjoy!
A quick update on Superpath:
- we have a few new jobs up
- our new podcast ep with Devin Bramhall is 🔥 (quick snippet here)
- our community is bustling these days
1. 11 Commercial Writing Skills
I wrote this post a few years ago but it feels very relevant today. It's about how to make a good living as writer.
The written word is more valuable than ever. So for all the journalists looking for a new career path and recent liberal arts grads trying to figure out what to do with their lives, know that there’s an industry willing to pay for your skills.
Your task is to understand how your work helps a company grow. Purists might see this as a corruption of the craft of writing. Others, a beautiful pairing of business and art.
2. The ladders of wealth creation: a step-by-step roadmap to building wealth
This is a great post by Nathan Barry, who has done exactly what he prescribes in this post. His company, ConvertKit, is now making more than $20 million/year. I believe he owns all of it (or nearly all of it). He hints at making "far more than $250,000."
I especially liked this line:
In college I first heard Jason Fried from Basecamp talk about how making money is a skill—like playing the drums or piano—that you can get better at over time. That resonated with me immediately. I wouldn’t expect to be able to sit down at a piano for the first time and immediately play a concerto.
3. The Uncertain Future of Post-Pandemic Starbucks
I believe that reading good business analysis is one of the best things you can do for your career. Stratechery and Marker (where this post came from) are my two favorite places for this kind of thing.
If Starbucks is going to revive itself as the center of coffee culture, it needs to figure out how to react to the very real possibility that the office core will not return at scale.
4. Tweet of the Week
in creating a preliminary writing artifact that you can use to get feedback on, i find it more helpful to get 2 sentences on the driving narrative rather than an outline with tens of bullet points.
— smalter (@smalter) July 29, 2020
substance vs form
5. Random Links
- Kieran Flanagan and Scott Tousley were kind enough to have me on the GrowthTLDR podcast this week. We talk a lot about content marketing, as you might expect. 😆
- This is awesome: "A People Map of the US, where city names are replaced by their most Wikipedia’ed resident: people born in, lived in, or connected to a place." (Pudding.cool is a great site.)
- This is really good: Everybody Wants Thought Leadership Content. But How Do You Do It, Exactly?
- I'm intrigued: How to Write Without a Keyboard
Have a great weekend!
Jimmy
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