Free Blinkist book summaries:
- “Inclusify” (Stefanie K. Johnson, 2020)
- “Die größte Chance aller Zeiten” (Marc Friedrich, 2021)
Seth Godin: “Lucky breaks“
When you plan and execute a project, it is a good thing if you set it up so that luck can benefit you, but you cannot rely on that hope, no matter how optimistic you want to be.
Advice To Writers: “You don’t get a pension plan“, Margaret Atwood
Writing is both work and “gambling”. There are no certainties, so you’d better be mentally prepared for that. Don’t whine.
Twitter Content Creation Plan
Tim Denning on Medium gives a few great tips on how to set up a Twitter content creation process. Here is the gist of it.
Benefits of posting on Twitter:
- you have to go straight to the point, as each tweet has a maximum number of characters allowed. This is good as you learn to express yourself clearly and concisely.
- you can get instant feedback from knowledgeable people.
- it’s a great place to find inspiration, both in terms of people to follow and ideas they’ll give you.
A potential downside of Twitter, as with any other social media platform actually, is that it could end up taking up way more of your time as it should. So, in order to make it work for you and not the other way around, you a plan. Here’s Tim’s:
- batch compose tweets one day a week. You get the benefit of the flow state (you need enough time doing just one thing in order to find inspiration and creativity.
- tweet in-between tasks before you take a break. It will create a habit.
- recycle content from elsewhere. This applies to both your own content published elsewhere, as well as highlights from articles you read.
- tweet threads once a week. It could simply be the outline of one your blog posts. Pro-tip: you can make the last tweet a link to the full-length post on your newsletter.
- don’t overthink it, tweets have a short lifespan anyway
- keep a library of tweets you can publish even when you are busy
- publish your best tweets, not every tweet you create
- interact, answer, contribute to the discussion
Podcast Notes-Taking
Podcasts are a great source of knowledge, but if you don’t take notes you won’t be able to capitalize on it later. Srinivas Rao on Medium has a few good tips on how to take the best podcast notes.
The reason you want to take notes is that just listening is not enough for learning something new. The first step is being able to repeat in your own words (paraphrasing) the concepts that you took in. Second, you should be able to make something out of it, which could consist in writing about it or applying that new knowledge to solve a “problem” you have.
So, here are 3 rules you might want to apply when taking notes from podcasts:
- Take notes only when you know there is a big idea or concept or something you think is really important.
- Always take notes by hand.
- Write down the information in your own words.
Finally, an app (Airr podcast app) that lets you take notes while you listen to a podcast. It gives you the transcript of the podcast and even lets you save an audio highlight or AirrQuote by highlighting a portion of the podcast’s transcript. You can add a caption to each highlight that you should use to paraphrase it in your own words. You can then export the AirrQuotes to your favorite notetaking app (Notion, Roam, etc.) using Airr’s integration with Readwise.io.
To finish off, the author suggests this video and this book on how to take smart notes.
