[One Idea Monday #3] Find the fun while doing the hard

Akwaaba friends,

🌟 Good Stuff I Consumed This Week

• Do you know what type of business are you actually running?: Everyone who’s into building a creator-led business should be reading this essay. Jessica breaks down 3 types of creator-led businesses, and suggests the general product roadmap for each type.

  The 3 are The Delivery, The Creator, and The Brand.

  A major challenge in building sustainable businesses is that advice for founders is lumped together in the same bucket, whether they classify as entrepreneurs, freelancers, creators, influencers, solopreneurs, or small business owners.

• Video 8 Powerful Laws of Success That Changed My Life:

  All models are wrong. The question is: “Is it useful?”

• Studying Mark Rober’s 2 TED talks: (1) How to come up with good ideas? & (2) The Super Mario Effect - Tricking Your Brain into Learning More

  
  His first TED at Penn wasn’t crazy good. But what’s inspiring to me is seeing how much Mark has improved in his second talk. Such a brilliant design (large-scale experiment pre-talk), storytelling, and key messaging.

  
  Mark really embraces his lesson on trying and failing:

  The focus is to beat the game, not how dumb you might look attempting to play it.

  I really hope I can do better on my next talk this November :) (You can watch my first one HERE.)

• Blog How to do hard things: When taking on a challenging quest, is your dominant thought “This is so hard!”, or is it “Some part of this I enjoy so much!”?

  All meaningful work in life is hard. So people who thrive in the pursuit of these quests are those who find joy in the hard process, not the ones who constantly remind themselves that “it’s hard”.

  Find the fun while doing the hard.

• One of my favorite quotes, resurfaced when my housemate asked me if I write every day - to which I said yes, I try to, even on days when I don’t feel like writing. Why?

If you make an effort in training when you don’t especially feel like making it, the payoff is that you will win games when you are not feeling your best. - Nadal

💡 1 Idea From Me

I wrote a piece about the immense loneliness associated with writing and why it doesn’t have to be like that.

Sometimes we don’t need advice. Sometimes we just need to hear that we’re not the only one. ~ Matthew McConaughey

And there’s also this piece about Embracing The Messy Middle When Writing I just published yesterday:

Người viết hay không phải là người viết câu nào là xuất sắc câu đấy.
Người viết hay là người đã quá quen thuộc và thoải mái với những bản nháp dở của mình.

💌 Life Update

• Second week in Saigon ✌️ I met up with my students and alumni from Writing On The Net this weekend. We talked about the mentality you should prepare before embarking on a Content Creator journey.

  

• As I’ve established a pretty solid routine and a decent home base, I’m looking for cool things to do and cool people to meet. If you’re aware of things happening in Sai Gon this week/ month, please let me know via email or comment :)

🔌 Cool Plug

Tuan Mon and I are hosting a FREE workshop on “Note-taking Systems for Creators” this Sunday. If you are a creator and have no idea what note-taking is or why you need it, go read my 2-part series:

You can sign up for the free workshop here:

That’s all this week! Thank you! 💖

I’m always grateful for your attention. You could have given it to anything and you chose to invest it with me.

Cheers,

Akwaaba Tung