You make new discoveries by figuring things out for yourself.
No matter what information I give you throughout this course, you have to develop the crucial skill of “figuring it out.”
That is how you create the most value. If I can teach it to you, I can teach it to others.
Your job is to take everything I say here, understand it through direct experience, and create a way of doing things that is unique to you.
Learning By Doing, Imitating, & Emulating Life becomes more meaningful when you can connect everyday thoughts, experiences, information, and stimuli to a project.
In other words, you are nerobiologically rewarded with dopamine and other chemicals when you apply what you learn.
A personal brand is a giant project that allows you to test, understand, and practice everything you learn.
Throughout this course, we will be focused on the principles and fundamentals of any given skill. Your job is to implement immediately by applying that information to your brand.
You learn web design by creating websites and landing pages.
You learn to write persuasively by practicing persuasive writing.
You learn storytelling by telling stories in your content and products.
Awareness begets awareness.
You cannot become aware of what you need to learn unless you have applied and understood what you are currently aware of — otherwise it stays in your head and causes random problems that you are unconscious of.
Research the basics, fundamentals, and principles online (Google, YouTube, books, book summary apps — like Shortform or Blinkist)
(If necessary) Research the best tool (software, product, etc) to get the job done at your experience level and watch a video on how the basics of that tool
Find 3-5 “mentors” to pull inspiration from (whether it be design, tone of voice, writing style, problems they use, benefits they use, anything)
Outline a real-world project by combining everything you found by researching your mentors — this can be “fake” for practice or straight into your brand
Start the project, become aware of what step you are struggling with, and research how to do that specifically via Google or YouTube
Complete a first iteration of the project, publish it, see if it gets the results you’d like, and improve it as you learn more about the skill — this is a lifelong process.
An example of this process for creating a beautiful profile picture or header image would be:
Research graphic design or headshot photography principles or basics on YouTube — take notes on the levers you can pull with the least amount of effort to get the best results
Research a tool to create a profile picture or header image (PhotoShop or Canva) and watch a video on how to navigate it FOR a profile picture or header
Find 3-5 people on social media whose designs you like, specifically their profile picture or header image
Try to recreate the best parts of their image with your own
Watch videos or search for resources to help you navigate roadblocks you encounter (at a basic level, everyone has hit these roadblocks and you CAN find resources online, it may take a bit of digging.
This is the process for learning anything rapidly.
Visualize the end result, outline the project, and research to solve problems along the way to create your first iteration of a project.
Documenting Your Life When you applied what you’ve learned in a public setting, you are documenting the phases of your life.
By putting your creations out into the real world, your next creations will be built on (or iterated from) the previous creation.
Think of your idea generation, content curation and synthesis, life experiences, and creations that stem from those as documentation.
You are documenting your mind and consciousness when you make sense of ideas
You are documenting your failures, successes, and solutions to problems in your content
You are documenting systems for getting results in certain areas of life with your products
You are helping guide and order consciousness others throughout all of this — especially consulting
You are documenting and creating systems for yourself “behind the scenes” to produce better work and make more money
All of these things will hold more value than you could ever imagine in 2-3 years.
People remember the ideas that you introduced them to and how it changed their life (most won’t explicitly tell you this until years later).
People will get massive results from your product and praise you for your work.
Your products, content, brand, and life will improve with each and every iteration.
These are all incredible — and often unseen — benefits of this line of work.
It is You — but at scale.
Connected to the universe that the coders have created.