Maximize Your Creative Output with Nat Eliason
We were excited to have Nat Eliason as our June guest on Forcing Function Hour.
Nat is the CEO of the marketing agency Growth Machine and a master of scaling businesses with SEO-driven content. Nat is also the co-founder of Cup & Leaf, a boutique tea brand, the creator of "Effortless Output With Roam," a course on knowledge management, and the publisher of Monday Medley, a fantastic weekly newsletter.
Nat is incredibly prolific and has a proven knack for quickly turning ideas into action. Recently Nat has been real estate investing, biohacking, fundraising for charities, and building a cafe in Austin, all while managing his agency, newsletter, course, and e-commerce brand.
Nat thrives on learning from experience, using feedback loops to quickly uplevel himself. No domain remains unfamiliar for long.
We all have postponed projects. Identifying a career pivot that excites us but that feels too risky. Seeing an opportunity to make an impact but not knowing how to get started.
Knowledge is never the bottleneck. It's best to jump headfirst into any domain and just fill in the gaps in our knowledge as we go.
See below for the audio recording, resources mentioned, topics, and conversation transcript.
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Links and resources we mentioned during our conversation:
Book Notes: https://www.nateliason.com/notes
Newsletter: https://www.nateliason.com/join
Experiment Without Limits: https://www.theforcingfunction.com/workbook
Performance Assessment: https://www.theforcingfunction.com/assessment
For previous Forcing Function Hours, click here.
Topics:
(3:35) Learning to learn as a competitive advantage
(12:03) Hiring people to help you learn
(20:43) Resonance
(29:56) The blog and process of sharing work
(36:26) Our opportunities are proportional to our reputation
(48:18) Q&A
Conversation Transcript
Note: transcript is slightly edited for clarity.
Chris (00:05): Welcome to Forcing Function Hour, a conversation series exploring the boundaries of peak performance. Join me, Chris Sparks, as I interview elite performers to reveal principles, systems, and strategies for achieving a competitive edge in business. If you are an executive or investor ready to take yourself to the next level, download my workbook at experimentwithoutlimits.com. For all episodes and show notes, go to forcingfunctionhour.com.
If I can describe Nat in one word, it would be 'prolific'. Nat has a super knack for getting up to speed extremely quickly, and you could say he goes from zero to sixty, where he has an idea and he is really good at building those feedback loops, creating that flywheel so that he creates momentum around a new project. Another way of thinking this could be the Peter Thiel metaphor of going from zero to one. Is that you have something that you want to do, but you haven't started it yet. You're at zero. How do you boil water? Get over that threshold from going from zero to one. It's a verb change. "I'd like to do something," "I'm going to do something," to "I am doing something." How do you go from zero to one? And that's what our conversation is going to be about. I think Nat has been more successful going from zero to sixty, going from zero to one, than any of my other friends, and I would love to try to deconstruct what allows him to do that. What is his learning process, and how do you make output feel more effortless?
Now, Nat and I met over sushi here in New York City while that was still a thing, and when I was living in Austin earlier this year, Nat built a café for his Cup & Leaf tea brand, and his café was one of my favorite places in Austin to work and hang. And so hopefully that space will be open up again soon. Crossing fingers. And so if you're passing through Austin, definitely recommend stopping in and saying, "Hey."
A couple things about Nat, you know, bio-wise. He's got a lot of projects in the portfolio. Most notably he's the founder and CEO of Growth Machine, which is an SEO-focused content agency. He's the founder of Cup & Leaf, which is a boutique online and physical tea brand. Some of you guys know he created a course recently called Effortless Output with Roam, which teaches personal knowledge management in Roam research. And finally he's been publishing a fantastic newsletter for a number of years called Monday Medley. So if you're interested in signing up for that, that's on his website nateliason.com/join.
A couple more Forcing Function resources I'll mention here before we kick things off. We also have the Performance Assessment. And so with getting started with a project or otherwise, it's difficult to know what your biggest opportunities for growth are, and so we created a quiz that would illuminate what that biggest opportunity is for you. You can take that for free at theforcingfunction.com/assessment. And finally, we do these once a month. This is the fourth one we've done so far, so we've been with venture capitalist Steve Schlafman, we've been with other PKM masters . . . Tiago Forte and Khe Hy. So Tiago, we were talking about how do you create an online course. What's the fastest path from zero to 100K? With Khe Hy we were talking about what are the systems for building a good life, which I think touches on some of the themes that I hope to discuss today. How can you, you know, money aside, make sure that you're living a good life, doing things that every day make you feel like you're growing, feeling more fulfilled. So if you're interested in checking out those conversations, the full videos and transcript are available online, theforcingfunction.com/lunch-hour.
A couple housekeeping items. As you guys can see the chat is open. Glad you guys are in there. We recommend . . . The default is "all panelists," so if you've something you want to say to the whole group, change that to "all panelists and attendees." Now we're going to be here until 1:15 Eastern. This is gonna be a thirty-minute conversation between Nat and I, and then we're going to open it up to Q&A. So if you have to leave early, no worries. We're going to be recording this, and everyone who registered is going to get an email from Zoom in two days, so noon Eastern on Friday, with a link to the video and audio recordings as well as the transcript. So if you have to bail, no worries. We'll carry on without you.
Now, if you'd like to ask a question (and please do), use the Q&A function. You can see it on the bottom bar. I see a couple people have already found it. And I'm going to be asking those questions at the tail half of the this discussion on your behalf. And the way that I know which questions you guys want answered is using the upvote function. So if someone else asks a question and you're like, "Oh that's interesting, I'd like to hear what Nat has to say on that," upvote that question so it increases the chances of getting answered.
All right. Well, I think I'm ready to kick things off. What do you think, Nat?
Nat (03:36): I think we're ready.
Chris (03:39): Awesome. So I always like to start, you know, I'd love to hear a little bit about your background. And you know, the context of today is conversation. What . . . Do you remember maybe a moment or an activity where you discovered that you can learn how to learn, and that this could be a competitive advantage that would carry over to anything else you want to do?
Nat (04:01): Yeah. I've . . . I talk about this kind of off and on, on Twitter occasionally, but I haven't really written anything up about it, which I should at some point. But through pretty much until my sophomore year of college, I spent almost all of my time on video games. So that was kind of like the main thing that I was focused on and like cared about doing well in. I kind of always did the bare minimum to do well in school, and I think I was fortunate that I like just had access to really good education, and was kind of like smart enough that I could just go in and wing it on tests and like get an 81 or something and like, do well enough to pass and have okay grades without having to like spend a ton of time. Very, like, Pareto-optimal studying, where it was like, "All right, I'd rather just spend ten, fifteen percent of the time and get the B," versus like trying to get to the A. So it was all about maximizing time I could spend on video games, probably spending like at least four to six hours a day, and for a hot sec I was even on my college's competitive DOTA team, which was kind of a fun experience.
But that was actually kind of where I first got interested in this idea of learning how to learn, or like self-education, to become better at things, because I was playing with a bunch of friends who I knew from high school, primarily, and for the most part I was very competitive with them, and I wanted to progress faster than them, but without spending as much time playing as them. And that's when I kind of discovered Twitch streaming. So going on Twitch and watching pros play.
So I was playing a lot of StarCraft II back then, and I realized that if instead of just spending four hours just playing and doing the same thing I was always doing, if I spend like a couple hours watching pros play and then a couple hours going into the game and trying to duplicate the strategies they were doing, that actually helped me move up like a lot faster in rankings than just this blind repetition. And Anders Ericsson has a really good book on this called Peak, and he's the guy who invented the concept of deliberate practice, that got sort of misappropriated by Malcolm Gladwell in Outliers. I strongly recommend reading Peak. Malcolm Gladwell like gets it very wrong in his representation, but one of the things that Ericsson points out in the book is that like there are these concepts of like naïve practice and like deliberate practice, and in naïve practice you're like going to play tennis with your friends. Right? You're playing tennis, and you could do that for ten thousand hours, and you wouldn't necessarily get any better at it, but if you're doing a more deliberate kind of practice, you're like actually studying elements to get better at and figuring out where the weaknesses are, and then like working on improving on them.
So for me I kind of discovered it by just like, way of experience, realizing that I could learn a lot faster by watching these pros play and then going and trying to implement their techniques. And then I eventually stopped playing as much StarCraft, started playing more DOTA, and I was like a very high-level overview . . . In DOTA there's sort of like three or four main types of roles you can play, and most people specialize in one of those four roles, where they're either like what's called the Carry, where you start off really weak and then you come in at the end of the game and like win it for your team, you're like the Support where you're helping keep everyone alive and helping make sure your teammates don't die and you're usually the one to like sacrifice yourself to preserve a more important teammate's life. There's what's called like Mid, so you're either . . . You're in the middle of the game and you're really good in the middle of the game, but you might get weaker towards the end . . . Like, most people pick one area and they focus on that, but I found that I could get better at each role by like getting really good at the other roles, and then coming back and applying those knowledges to figuring out how to better support the other members of the team by getting better at their respective roles.
So it's kind of like this other interesting area, where it's like maybe specialization isn't always the best way to get really good at something. Sometimes blending in a certain level of generality actually helps you improve within your specialization. And so trying to find that balance was really good, because again it's like not always just about hammering on this one thing, it's about like figuring out where else you can go to get useful knowledge, and then bring it back to the core thing you're trying to improve on.
And then what I usually say is, eventually the computer video games just got kind of boring and less motivating, less interesting. They weren't a sufficiently infinite game, I suppose. And that was where I think some of the entrepreneurship stuff came in, where that to me was a much more interesting, more challenging game, given you know, there's really no constraints on the rules that . . . You get more interesting real-life spoils for being good at it. There's always new things to learn and new challenges, and it just sort of started transferring over from video games into the entrepreneurship, logging, SEO . . . Like I think of a lot of SEO marketing as its own kind of video game, I think. And so I never really got over that addiction, so to speak, I just managed to transfer it into a different realm.
Chris (09:37): Thanks, Nat. Man, it really reminds me a lot of the process of becoming a really good poker player. I was a bit of a competitive gamer, but in much bluer oceans. My game was Microsoft Ants, it was like an early version of StarCraft and DOTA. And it's cool what you talk about as far as specialization being overrated, and it's something that I see a lot in competitive pursuits. Like poker— if you have a weak point, something that you're not comfortable with, that weak point tends to be exposed, and you find yourself avoiding this sense of discomfort. And that being comfortable with not knowing, being comfortable with being a beginner and being on the frontiers of knowledge, I think this is a really good mindset to have. It's like they talk about with the Khans and that they always were on the move, always exploring new lands, because the second that they settled down and got comfortable, that's when the civilization started to become weak, and in order to continue improving and remain strong, needing to continually be exploring these new domains. And that specialization carried the seeds of just ultimate demise.
And on this theme of teams and being part of a team, playing a role, knowing that in many pursuits we're not flying solo. There are others who we know who can help us achieve what we want to achieve. And that's something that I've learned, and I know you have a lot of practice at this point delegating to a team, as far as if you want to accomplish anything at sufficient scale, you need to recruit and work with others to get there. I would love to hear what you've done as far as tapping into your network for expertise. Right? This notion that we don't need to be an expert in everything, that there's people who we know who can help illuminate these blind spots and accelerate our learning curve. What have you done to kind of build relationships and tap into your network to accelerate some of these projects?
Nat (12:03): Yeah. I've been thinking about this more recently, because I think that the traditional concept of networking is kind of weak. Like what you learn in college, about, "Oh, you need to build your network and add people on LinkedIn, and congratulate them on their new role." Like all of that kind of bullshit doesn't really build relationships. And you can do it right, especially when you're young and either in college or just out of college, you can reach out to people and say you know, like, "Hey, I've nothing to offer you, really, but I'm super interested in what you're doing, and if I could talk to you for fifteen, thirty minutes, that would mean so much to me."
And that works for a while. But I think eventually as you kind of move up in whatever you're trying to do, a lot of professional relationship building and being able to learn from other people comes from like working together on things. Right? And for lack of a better word, hiring your friends' expertise for stuff as relevant.
So you know, I am really fortunate now, where you get to a certain point in working in any kind of business where you can afford to hire people to help you learn things. And there's kind of like these multiple levels to it, because when you're just starting out in pretty much anything, you sort of have to do all the self-education yourself. Right? And there are lots of good ways to do that. You can get pretty far doing it on your own just from like books and experimentation. It's gonna be a lot harder in some fields than others based on like the budget you need to start learning how to do something. But for a lot of the valuable skills today, you can get yourself to a fairly competent, very high five-figure low-six-figure salary just on your own reading and messing around in your free time. Right? So . . . And then once you're kind of at a point where you can do your own area very well, it eventually becomes less efficient to try to teach yourself everything.
Right? Because you can go the self-education route and like try to find the right books and find the right projects and do it all yourself, but it eventually . . . It's like as your time gets more valuable (and you and I have talked about this too, right? Like thousand dollar an hour time), as your time gets more and more valuable it starts making less and less sense for you to do things that you're bad at. Right? Because even though it might be cool to learn that new skill, if you can make you know, two hundred fifty dollars an hour effectively . . . That's a lot. If you can make like a hundred dollars an hour doing programming or something, it might not make sense for you to spend twenty hours or twenty-five hours learning marketing when you could just make, you know, two grand in that time and like hire somebody to do whatever it is you're trying to do for you. Right? So eventually you get into this weird trade-off where it's like, "All right, I really want to learn this thing, but it's like financially inefficient and unproductive even for me to like learn it on my own." So how do you bridge that gap?
And the thing that I've been trying to do more of is like building good relationships with people who are experts in their own domain, and then doing some combination of either like hiring them and just letting them do it and like me getting to like ride along and see what they're doing and getting exposed to it that way, or you know, doing some kind of like skill trade or like sharing amongst us and getting access to their brain and their talent through that, and you know, like giving something that I'm good at in return instead of me trying to get good at both of those things. This is kind of a funny example, but I think it's really nice. My friend here in Austin, Cathryn Lavery, she's the founder of BestSelf, which makes a lot of really great productivity tools and conversation-starting decks and things like that, and in her former life, she was actually an architect. So she used to like design buildings and everything, and when she moved into her house here in Austin, she designed this beautiful like backyard-deck-fence setup whatever, and then she eventually found some local guys who could build it for her. And then after they finished building hers, she offered to design our backyard for us, and then I did some like SEO work and help for her in exchange.
And so it was really fun, because she's this incredible artist who could do these cool 3-D mock-ups of the house and layout and whatnot, and I got to see her doing that and how she was thinking about laying out space and like organizing principles of an area. Like, things that I know nothing about. And in exchange, I was able to help her like set up a few of these processes and do some of this research for her site. And then going out and like hiring people to build out the backyard, it's like learning some carpentry through them and seeing how they're doing things, and getting to talk with them about why I do things this way or that way versus just like trying to go out and do it yourself. It's like you can start to kind of jumpstart a lot of the education process, and then in doing it you kind of like start to build up this network of experts, which is one of the most valuable things that you could do in I think any professional domain.
It's like the quality and the number of experts you have access to, who you could go to with questions about anything and who you can like refer out to friends, is like one of the most valuable things that I think you can have. Because you know, one, if you can build a network of people who you can learn from and asks questions to and like tap into and who you can share your knowledge with, that's great for you, but then it also makes you more valuable to like other people. Right? If people know that you're going to know somebody good for them to talk to for like anything else that they want to learn. Like I had this conversation with my personal trainer last week, where he said something where he was like, "Oh, you guys . . . It looks like you were starting to get some plants for the backyard. You know, what kind of plants did you decide to get, or like how did you pick them?" And I was like, "Oh, well like we actually have another friend who's like a plant consultant who will go into your backyard or house and she'll like sketch up the area and lay out what plants you should have based on like the light profile and the water profile and she gives all these recommendations," and he was like, "Man, you actually have a person for like literally everything." He was like, "That's pretty cool."
And I hadn't thought about it, but I was like, yeah. It's a super valuable thing, and it makes the learning process so much easier, and it allows you to bring a lot of value to other people's lives as well. So like realizing when you should start making that transition from doing like full self-education, like figure everything out yourself, to like finding and sourcing experts . . . And even if you can't afford to pay them, like what can you offer them in return to help them like jumpstart your learning process? That's where you can really get into these like really quick self-education cycles. Right? And you might not be able to hire them at all, but if you can even just watch them work, right? Kind of like watching the professional gamers on Twitch. You can pick up a lot just by osmosis and seeing what they're doing that you might not be doing.
Chris (19:07): Yeah, thanks. It reminds me of this frame that I try to have whenever I meet someone new, around you know, "How can I”—rather than trying to be interesting and impress someone—“how can I be interested in them?" And what helps is to know that everyone is an expert in something. And the thing that we're an expert in, we tend to think like, "Oh, well that's no big deal. Like anyone could do that. You know, who cares about the right types of plants to have? You know, that's not really . . ." But like, if you take this frame of, you know, "What is this person's hidden superpower? What are they really passionate about, what are they an expert in?" Not only can you learn something really interesting . . . People generally love talking about what they're passionate about, at least a lot of time . . . You never know when that indirect connection, sharing that knowledge can be useful to someone else. It's a really easy way to add lots of value to others, by being that node in that knowledge network. Bridging those gaps, as you put it.
So it's super cool to build friendships around that. What are you passionate about, what do you like doing, how can we help each other? Because we don't need to know how to do everything, we're all on the same path. And I think that's really key to these self-education cycles, because knowledge is no longer the bottleneck. If we don't know ourselves, we know someone who can at least help us get to that next stage. You know, I think this touches on a really important values question that Khe and I talked about. And I know we've talked about it as well, I'd like to hear your perspective. Because what comes across as you're talking is if you're strictly focused on the bottom line, right, efficiency as value, we would only do the thing that we're best at, and delegate everything else. Like why become good at something that we can't become the best at? But what I see in your life is that you're driven a lot about what interests you or what you're passionate about. And you don't need to become an expert, but that you get good enough in order to either get the project started and hand it off or to learn enough so you can effectively delegate.
And it seems like it creates this trade-off where we're doing things that might not be the most efficient, right? It's maybe not the highest expected hourly, but we derive a lot of happiness and fulfillment from getting better at things. How do you make those trade-offs? How do you decide, "Hey, I know this isn't the most important or highest-leverage thing for me to be doing, but I'd like to learn anyways." How do you navigate that?
Nat (21:58): Yeah, I think there's probably not a perfect answer for it, but it would have something to do with resonance. Right? Where it's like, "Is this . . . Am I excited about learning how to do this, and is this something that I think I'm going to keep doing into the future?" Right? As like a really simple example, we needed to pour a concrete slab for our backyard, and for a few days I was like, "Oh, let's learn how to pour concrete and buy the materials for it and try doing it ourselves." And then started looking into it more, and it was like, "Man, am I ever going to do this again, or is it going to be better to just let a pro do it?" Right? And there just wasn't very much resonance there with learning how to do it. It just seemed like, "Oh, maybe this would be cool." And so we decided like, "No, we should just hire it out." Whereas for Growth Machine, like we do SEO and content marketing and link building, and there's no like really great tools out there for managing a link building process at scale. You can like hack it together from other tools, but there's no great software out there for it, because it's such a niche need.
So I did a little bit of programming off and on throughout the years, and I've been picking it back up in the last few months so that I can actually like build us a tool we can use for managing our link building process and make it a lot more efficient, right? Because something that pretty much always has resonance for me is like efficiency, and like maximizing individual output for like minimal input. Right? 'Cause I was thinking about this the other day, and I haven't figured out the best way to articulate it yet, but I think that one of the ideal character combinations for an entrepreneur is being very motivated and very lazy, because if you're very motivated you're going to really want to make stuff happen, but if you're very lazy you're going to figure out ways to make that stuff happen a lot faster, or without you repeatedly doing things. And it can be hard sometimes to . . . What you wanna avoid is kind of doing the same thing over and over again, and like not getting better at it. Right? And that's sort of where like . . . Or not not getting better at it, but like wasting time doing repeated processes.
Where like for me I'm always very motivated to like cut out steps of the process while retaining quality, find ways to like outsource, automate . . . I have well over a hundred Zaps set up in Zapier like running different processes of the company. It's probably my favorite tool. And so for me, that's just an area where I have a lot of resonance, where if I can learn how to do something that's going to save me or the people I work with a ton of time or energy, like that's super high value. Whereas like other areas, it just might not be there, and so I'm going to default to like hiring out help or letting somebody else handle it.
And so I think you know, especially if you're doing something entrepreneurial, like finding the areas where you have some amount of resonance where you can focus on and keep learning, and then finding people who resonate in other areas where you don't in working with them, that's like a really good way to cover your weaknesses, because it's like nothing's necessarily better or worse, right? But you need to find people who can cover some of those other important areas where you know you're going to fall short. Right? Like I have a lot of weaknesses as a professional. Like, as a working person, as like a team member, whatnot. And so creating systems to help cover those and then like hiring people who are good at the things that I'm not is way better than trying to like . . . I don't know. Overly force myself into becoming someone I'm not. I feel like is the best way to frame it.
Chris (25:39): What does resonance feel like?
Nat (25:42): I would say that it's the . . . You do it when you should be doing work that has deadlines. Right?
Chris (25:56): Productive procrastination.
Nat (25:58): Yeah. Productive procrastination is probably the best way to frame it, where it's like, okay. I know I should be doing this other stuff that's like in my Asana to-do list, but I wanna work on this right now. And like long-term, this is gonna have high value even if it's not urgent right now. Right? So it's the not-urgent important stuff that actually manages to crowd out the urgent important stuff. Right? 'Cause I think like the thing you wanna avoid is like there's a lot of non-urgent important things that are probably on your plate, but if they're not getting done, it's not just because they're not urgent. It might also be because you just don't actually care about them that much, and they're just things you feel like you should do or like you're supposed to do. And those might be things where you should like hire someone to help get you across that threshold. Right?
It's like . . . You and I talked about this, Chris, when we were working together. It was like hiring a personal trainer was such a big thing because . . . It's like the issue for me wasn't working out, necessarily, it was doing the programming for working out, and like deciding what I was gonna do when I go to the gym and figuring all of that out. And just having somebody manage that process for me was such a huge force multiplier, right? It's like I signed up for a personal trainer and then like ran my first marathon six months later. Right? It was like that was by far the biggest bottleneck, was just like having somebody doing the programming for me. It wasn't getting to the gym. So finding those areas of your life where it sort of like keeps getting pushed off, or it's like, "Oh yeah, no, I care about this, I want to do it, like it's important," but never gets done, it's like you probably don't actually want to do that thing, and you should find a way to get somebody else to handle it so you can actually do the stuff that is making you push back your other to-dos.
Chris (27:38): I love that, trying to reveal what are the things that subconsciously or emotionally we feel pulled to do, but that maybe giving ourselves permission to pursue that. I really key into that word "should" when I hear someone use it in a conversation, is we have to realize that we have a lot of latitude in the projects that we choose to take on, right? If you think about this in a two-by-two in terms of need to do and you know, want to do, there are things that we definitely don't want to do, but that we need to do. Right? And if you think about it, it's like taxes, payroll, that sort of stuff. But within the things that we pursue, especially as a business owner but even as an executive in a company, we have a lot of latitude in what we do day-to-day, and sometimes we can have artificial blinders on and get trapped in doing the things that we think we should be doing. We're plowing forward rather than asking, "what are the things that we want to do?" And we need to kind of give ourselves permission there.
So kind of leaning into that, as you put it. And discovering that there are many paths to the mountain, and a lot of times rather than going uphill and slogging up that mountain, we can kind of go downhill, and instead of . . . I like the way that you put that, it feels "more effortless." Something that I discovered with poker was like, "Wow, I found something that I can make money doing that doesn't feel like work. I could just . . . Someone has to pull me off of the table." Right? You dropped the word "addiction." I think a lot of the difference between addiction and passion and compulsion and mission . . . Those words are all kind of interchangeable, they're just cultural labels on something that we enjoy doing for its own sake. And I think that's a good thing to think about as entrepreneurs, as executives, is, "What are the things that we do for their own merit? Where do we put off other things so that we can spend more time doing, and is there a way to pull value out of that, even if it's just sharing that work with others?"
I think this is a great time to talk about the blog, and I think your process for sharing your own work. For those of you guys who don't know, I'm gonna share a little bit of background about Nat. You know, when we met, I think you remember, on the lake house in Alabama, Nat had been blogging on his website I think for over a year, just building an audience, writing—
Nat (30:02): I think three or four years at that point, yeah.
Chris (30:22): Yeah. Multiple years of just writing on everything that he was reading and learning, just continually sharing that process on a variety of topics. Everything under the sun, everything that interested him and made him feel fulfilled. It was just a natural process of learning, repurposing that into assets, into content, kind of documenting that process. Even before he started Growth Machine, he was already learning that value of SEO-driven content, and you know, opening up the kimono, sharing that process. You know, I would love to hear about how that feels for you. Why do you think it's important to share your work?
Nat (31:02): Yeah, it's a good question. I mean I started the blog back in 2014, and I started it because I knew roughly that I wanted to go into content marketing of some sort, but I needed a portfolio to show to companies who I wanted to work for. So I made the blog so I could start putting a few articles on it, and then I used those articles to reach out to companies I wanted to write for. The first two companies I reached out to are Buffer and Zapier, so I didn't . . . It's like two of the best content marketing sites online. Like in retrospect it was like a pretty bold move, that I just assumed I could get one of those right off. Zapier actually bit, and they hired me as a freelance writer, and so I did a couple articles for them, and then ended up interning for them. And so that was like right from the beginning it was clear that using the blog to share knowledge was like a huge like leverage point for my career.
And then a number of months later I started learning more about SEO and started like getting up the SEO for the site and then started monetizing the site more, and then there was a point after like two-ish years of working on it where it was making like a modest enough income . . . It was making like maybe three grand a month, but that was enough. And it was totally passive, and that was enough for me to go live in Argentina for a little bit and like not really have to work on anything, and do the whole like four-hour workweek passive income lifestyle for a bit. Which gets pretty boring and sucks after like six months, so I don't recommend it as a goal. But it was still cool to hit that point. And that was like . . . Everything on the blog was really just like, "Hey, I'm interested in this thing. I'm gonna go learn some more about this thing, and then I'm gonna write about this thing." Or it was, "Hey, I've been interested in this thing for a while, I've learned a lot about this, let me share it with you."
And my style on the blog has always been to try to do just like one big post on each topic, you know, when it makes sense. So I've got like really just one main article on like how to be productive, and I have like one main article on how to make passive income, and I have one main article on, you know, growing a blog. And like I try to do these big mega posts distilling a bunch of knowledge on something to make it super useful, and that's like paid off super well. Right? I think that it's allowed me to build a little bit of a reputation on the site of like providing very good information, contrary to like what most other blogs do. And that's sort of like let me build a bit of an audience there. And same thing with the newsletter, right, where my newsletter's not you know, "Hey, I just published this post, go check it out and leave a comment." It's like, "Hey, here's all of the interesting things that I'm reading and then new things that I'm finding, here's like some ideas I've been thinking about." And that just worked super well for growing that audience over time.
'Cause I think that like a lot of blogs try to position themselves as this, you know, crazy expert, like knows everything, like, "You should listen to me," whatever. And I've always tried to balance between like, "Okay, I know a decent amount about this thing and I'm gonna share that knowledge, but also like I don't really know that much about anything, and I'm trying to keep it light." So I think that's worked really well. And then just sharing the book notes has been huge too. I mean I've got something like two hundred fifty, two hundred sixty book notes up on the site now. I've been building that database for the last like seven years or something. And a lot of those book notes rank on Google when you search like, "Summary of XYZ book." If you search like, "48 Laws of Power summary," I think I'm still like number three or four.
Chris (34:42): First page.
Nat (34:43): First page?
Chris (34:44): Yeah.
Nat (34:45): Yeah. So it's like there's a bunch of those now, which is really cool, because it's like SEO really is the force multiplier for a lot of content like that, where it's like the site gets something like twelve to fifteen thousand visitors a day, right? Even if I don't publish for three or four months it'll still get you know, twelve to fifteen thousand visitors a day. And that's like a lot of people. I mean like my entire college was six thousand people, so it's like two and a half of my universities on the site every day. It kind of blows my mind a little bit. But it's just from getting interested in stuff, and then writing about it and sharing it. And I say this a lot. It got me that first marketing internship, it spun out my first like side hustle that I did with a friend in college, it got me my first marketing full-time job, it got me pretty much all of the little passive income side things that I have, it started Growth Machine, which is you know, the marketing agency that I run now that's like doing a few million in revenue, and has like a bunch of employees. It's like . . . All of it pretty much started there, just getting interested in things and sharing knowledge.
So I think it's one of the highest leverage things you can do as an individual, is like put yourself out there or share what you're learning, you know, share any takeaways, things that are interesting to you. And over time, kind of like what you were saying before, don't try to be interesting, just try to be interested. And by just being interested in stuff other people are interested in, you're naturally going to attract like-minded people. And it's like . . . I mean, the reason you and I are friends is because me and Taylor are friends, and me and Taylor were friends because I got intro-ed to him by Scott Britain when I moved to Austin, and I met Scott from like something on my blog. Right? It's like you and I are also friends because of the blog. It's like I can trace back so many things to it, which is really cool looking back on it six years later.
Chris (36:36): Yeah. I think the opportunities that we receive are proportional to our reputation, and reputation has two elements. The first is signal. If . . . Is there proof that you can do what you say you can do? Like you said, building out that portfolio. And the other one is being top of mind. And so putting out things regularly, sharing the process, you're continually reinforcing that of someone who is learning, who's doing things. In the VC world they talk about this as lines, not dots. Where if you just meet someone and they're a static image of "this is where they are now," right, "Oh this person is on their tower of expertise," but you don't know how they got there. It's difficult to know where they're going to be in the future. Versus you're sharing this process and like, "Oh, it's like Nat's interested in starting a tea brand. Oh, Nat has a tea brand. Oh, now Nat is starting to build a café," and you start to connect these dots, and you see, "Oh, this is a person who does things, who knows how to get things done, who is capable in a lot of ways."
And I think that's really powerful for building a reputation and increasing the surface area of optionality, where opportunities come to you just by notion of having signal, having proof that you can do things, and being reminded that you are that person who, "Oh, I need someone who might know a plant consultant. Well, Nat knows a bunch of people who do a bunch of cool things. Let's ask Nat. You know, Nat's super approachable, he doesn't need to establish himself as an expert. He's happy to share that process." And I think everyone is a beginner in something, and I think everyone's an expert in something, and so it's important to establish that that journey is possible. And that's a really big value add for others.
Maybe it would be cool to talk about that process of creating Cup & Leaf and now the café because I remember it all started because you were having all of this amazing success with clients at Growth Machine, but obviously, you can't share all of that behind the scenes of clients, and so the idea was, "Well, why don't I just create my own brand, and then I can share all of the results along the way?" And that led to creating the online site and then the café. What was that process like?
Nat (39:10): Yeah. I mean you gave a good summary there, where it was really like we needed a good case study to use at Growth Machine for showing to clients, but we can't share that much of our clients' numbers, of course. So we started Cup & Leaf just as a blog, right, to talk about tea because we saw there was a big SEO opportunity there. And so we started that and just started writing about tea, and that ended up getting to like a hundred fifty thousand visitors a month in like eight months. Right? Like it grew very quickly. And then as that was growing, my wife and I sort of saw an opportunity to start selling actual tea, behind the blog. So if we were bringing in all this traffic, and we were sending it to Amazon and Teavana and Harney and Sons and all those, why not actually sell our own tea instead? So we looked into it and figured out sourcing and packaging and like setting up the Shopify store and whatever, and it was something like three or four weeks from deciding that we wanted to do it to actually getting some product and being able to put it up on the site.
So we were able to move really quickly there, and then we were able to start plugging everything in from the blog, and as the blog kept going the online sales kept growing, and so we were running that together. She eventually took over much more of it. And we were doing that for about . . . Not even a year I guess, was it? Yeah, it was like eight or nine months, and then we had moved to Austin, and obviously real estate in New York is like crazy expensive, but commercial real estate in Austin, slightly more reasonable. So we found like a little spot in East Side, our neighborhood, that we could rent and kind of renovate into a café. And this is where it can be a little bit dangerous. This is where it can be too confident in your ability to like figure stuff out and have it be fine, because it's like we really had no idea what we were getting ourselves into.
It's very different to try to like . . . You can't MVP something in the real world. Like you can MVP an online store, right? Like you can make a minimum viable product in a weekend, and like put up a store and get some sales, and you could even do that before you have a product and you can like test it out, but in the real world, you have to get permits, you have to do construction, you have to do plumbing. I mean like . . . We just had no idea what we were really doing. Like we rented the space without even having a plumber or an electrician come out and do a consult or like having a permitting guy come and look at it and see if it was gonna be feasible. We just got super excited and jumped into it, and it ended up being like a ten-month process to renovate the space to be able to turn it into a café. And then two months after all the renovations are done and we're open, COVID hits and we have to shut down. Right?
Just like . . . I mean and obviously you can't plan for a global pandemic in starting a business like this, but that's been this whole other experience, just dealing with that and learning it. I mean one example I always give is, you know, we had to plumb in like our sink and our dishwasher and everything. Right? So we had the appliances, and they're spaced out in there, and we had like . . . I mean, we designed the layout ourselves. We didn't even hire an architect to design it. We were like, "No, we can figure this out." So we have it all designed, we have the appliances where it makes the most sense for us.
The plumber comes out and starts looking at it, and he's basically like, "Oh, you guys don't have enough fall for the drain, so the drain can't tie into the sewage from here." We're like, "Well, what do you mean?" He's like, "Well you can't really have appliances in here, because there's no way for us to tie in to the sewage." And we're like, "Well, there has to be some way." He's like, "Okay, there are some ways. But you're not going to like 'em. Like option one, is you can find some day laborers or something who are willing to crawl under the building through the crawlspace with very small shovels and dig out the ground under the building so that there's enough room for the pipes to go through to get to the sewage. That's option one. Option two is we can get a jackhammer and blast through this concrete slab in between where your drink area is and where the sewage tie-in is, and then we can run the pipe through the concrete slab and then repour the concrete on top of it to like lock it in and fix the aesthetics. Option three is you can go out the other direction and connect to a sump pump, and the sump pump will carry it into the sewage, and that will have to be cleaned and changed every like month or two. And any of these options is going to run you like north of $20,000."
And we're just like, "Whoa." Right? 'Cause I think we had budgeted like two or three grand for the plumbing. Right? And eventually, we did find an alternative solution that was much cheaper and that worked, but we had to talk to like five plumbing companies. So there were just all these things that we had no idea what we were getting ourselves into. And you know, I think it probably cost north of $100,000 to do all the renovations and to get it open, including all the rent we had to pay for the months we weren't open. So we learned a ton, right, but sometimes that instinct to just like, oh, jump in and figure it out as you go is like maybe not the best instinct, especially if it's in a very foreign domain where the cost of being wrong is very high. Right? It's like that's the biggest lesson here definitely, it's like, okay. If you're going into a very unfamiliar area, like be careful. Right? And like estimate . . . I heard this rule somewhere, after we had already done this of course, but like, "Budget out what you think the worst-case scenario of this endeavor could be in terms of like the money you could lose on it, and then spend five to ten percent of that evaluating it and seeing if this is actually a good idea."
Right? And we were trying to be so budget-conscious in the beginning that we didn't really spend much money evaluating the option. We just jumped in. And if we had spent five or ten grand on having some experts go out and look at it and have them tell us whether or not it was a good idea, they probably would have told us to find a different spot or ask the landlord for more money or things like that, which would have saved us a ton of headaches. So that's been a good lesson there. And also, don't open a café before a pandemic if you can avoid it.
Chris (45:43): I love that story because it demonstrates so much of this jumping into new domains. I like to talk about decision-making a lot with my clients, and something that I always have them do as an exercise is trying to identify what are the key assumptions. And so, in this case, you have a project and you have a timeline and you have a budget, but what are the key assumptions that this timeline and this budget rests upon? And that's where the value of new information, talking to experts like a plumber, is the highest, because especially when we're jumping into a new domain, some of our assumptions won't be great. You know, we try to lean in on the outside view. How long have similar projects taken, what have similar projects cost? Adding some padding, usually like a multiplier onto that, but saying, "Well, what is the one thing that if it goes wrong could double the length of this project or it could double the size of that budget?" And that's where you focus that initial learning, is trying to disprove this key assumption that we're looking at with rosy-colored glasses.
And I think it really illustrates the truth of a lot of projects, is that they're really messy. We look at things that others have accomplished, and it's a little bit intimidating at times, but when you talk to them and you talk about the process, it's often like, "Hey," like—say a successful entrepreneur who has an exit, you're like, "Wow, we were totally naïve to think that we could do that, or we had no idea what we were getting into." And those are the successful ones. Like, well, yeah. I mean even if we had failed, it would have been cool that we attempted. We would have regretted not trying. I think that's a kind of cool compass to use to guide you, you know, what would you regret not doing even if you failed? Right? That the learning itself would be worth it. But that all of these projects, they're going to take longer, they're likely going to be even harder than you expect, but they're worth doing for their own sake regardless of outcome. I think that's a really good driver.
And I talked to you about this and all of the headaches with the permits, and it's a fun saga, but the kind of takeaway that I get is despite, "Hey, we might have done a couple things differently if we're doing it again, but like, no regrets. It was like a really fun experience." And that's a cool thing to have, and it's a cool way to live.
So with that, I'm going to hand it off to Q&A. We've got some good ones in here. Start with Lloyd Williams' question. I think this kind of ties into . . . You know, it started with the video gaming, as far as I like to say that the speed of your improvement in any pursuit is proportional to the tightness of your feedback loops. Lloyd would like to know, Nat, how do you maximize feedback loops to adapt and change?
Nat (48:43): Yeah. Well some areas, it's sort of like built-in, right? And that makes it easier to improve. Right? So video games is a great example, and poker is a great example too, because you're getting basically immediate feedback on your decisions. You're going to win or lose, you're going to make more money, less money, whatnot. And you can evaluate pretty quickly. Where it gets challenging is like areas where you don't get that quick feedback loop. So SEO is actually a good example of this, because you probably won't know for three, four, six months whether or not your SEO strategy is working, so it's very hard to evaluate day to day whether or not what you're doing is effective. So for something like that, getting more samples, right? So one thing I really like about doing Growth Machine is since we're now working with like twenty, thirty clients at a time, we're seeing what's working for different people in different industries all at the same time, so we get a lot more data. And that allows us to take long feedback loops but get quicker feedback in general because we can see what's happening with our strategy across like thirty different sites, versus just one. So the feedback gets a little tighter, 'cause you have more things to use as sources of feedback.
The other thing I've started doing more of is decision tracking. So this is a really good way to evaluate things that you've decided in the past, and then like try to figure out what was good or bad about those decisions. So as a simple example, whenever I decide something that I think is kind of like an important decision, right, that . . . Whenever I decide something that I know I could end up either regretting or being thankful for, I'll try to record that in my Roam database, and add a decision tag to it, and then give myself a task to follow up in that decision in like one, three, and six months. And then when that pops back up in my to-do list at those intervals, I can go back and look at it and say like, "Okay, was this a good decision? Why or why not? What would I do differently next time? What can I get from this?" And that's been really, really helpful in creating feedback loops where there might not be any, or where it might take a long time to get to the feedback loop.
'Cause you know, as a simple example, we've made some bad hiring decisions at Growth Machine in the past, and I feel like I've learned a lot from them by going back and analyzing, you know, what key assumptions I made at the time of hiring that ended up not being true. Like, what evidence was there for those key assumptions that I should have been looking at more carefully? What evidence could I look for in the future? And that helps tighten the feedback loops a lot, 'cause like for certain things you're never going to get feedback unless you seek it out and unless you try to find it or your force yourself to get it. And that's really helpful for improving your skills, especially in some of the most important domains. Right? Like your decision-making as an entrepreneur is probably like your most important skill, but you don't always get great feedback on it, or the feedback you get might be murky.
Right? So it's like . . . The café is a good example of this, right? In looking back on it, there are good decisions and bad decisions we made, but the fact that it's closed right now is not like a fault of ours, right? It's like, there's a global pandemic. You can't prepare for that. And it's like, "Is there something we could have done to prepare better against that?" Like, not really. I mean, we already did the one thing that most other businesses are having to do now, which was diversify to online. We were already online. So it's like, you can't look back and say, "Oh, I shouldn't have opened a café because you know, in a year we were going to be in quarantine." That's not helpful. But I could look back and say like, "Okay, well we should have talked to a lot more people who are running cafés before we did this, because we just assumed . . . You know, I in my hubris assumed that we could just figure it out and it would be inexpensive. And that was wrong. And so next time I jump into something like this I need to like take the time to really analyze it.
So forcing yourself to evaluate past decisions is probably one of the best ways to tighten that feedback loop for like almost anything, if whatever you're looking for feedback on doesn't have a built-in mechanic. The other way is just gonna be getting a coach or a professional who can help you with it. Right? It's like going back to the fitness stuff. Just getting a personal trainer, somebody to help me get in better shape and figure out where I'm deficient and focus on improving that, it's like that time the feedback loop on so much more of my physical stuff a lot more, and just getting data. Right? It's like I used to think that marijuana was good for sleep, because you get tired and you fall asleep really easily, but then you get an Oura ring and you track your sleep data and you go like, "Oh, wow, that's actually like really bad for sleep. It's actually killing my HRV and raising my resting heart rate, so even though it feels like it's not impeding my sleep the way alcohol is, it's actually doing the exact same thing, just without the same kind of hangover." Right? So like, data, experts, and like forced decision analysis are all pretty good tools.
Chris (53:50): That's fantastic. Yeah. I would just underline a couple things there. It's having a process-orientation rather than a results-orientation, where results are only useful to the extent that they help you reevaluate your assumptions, where, as you said, "If I'm in this situation again, or something similar, how can I make a better decision?" Or, "Given what I knew at the time, was there something else I could have done in order to make a better decision? Would it have turned out differently?" And that it's more important to focus on that process of making decisions rather than the results of the decisions themselves. So Nakila is asking about the Scott Adams concept of talent stacks. What's your advice about how to go about picking one's talent stack?
Nat (54:39): Yeah. I mean, so for anybody who doesn't know, this concept is basically that instead of just getting really good at one thing, you get really good at a few things that combine serendipitously. So I guess if we were going to pick one for me, or if we were to define mine it would be some combination of writing, marketing, and . . . I don't know what my third one is. Sales, maybe. But yeah, I think it's intuitively true. I don't think Scott's saying anything that surprising there, and it's very easy to back up with examples. I don't think that you can necessarily pick . . . I think where he goes wrong is he's using a . . . His talent stack is a way of understanding success retrospectively. It's not a tool for planning success proactively. I don't think anybody ever sits down and says, like, "Oh, I'm going to define my talent stack. I'm going to get good at programming, marketing, and design, and then I'm going to be successful and make a lot of money." Right? People get really good at things that they're interested in, and then they can look back and say like, "Oh, it was this combination of things that made me successful."
But like, Scott never sat down and said like, "Oh, I'm gonna be like an okay illustrator and an okay writer and an okay comedian, and that's going to make me successful." Those were just the things that he was interested in, and they ended up combining in like a kind of fortuitous way. So I feel like the question is more like, "What are you interested in?" And going back to the resonance question, like, what can you spend a lot of time doing without forcing yourself to do it? And just like doubling down on those things and finding other people to cover for the areas where you're weak. 'Cause I really don't think you can make yourself good at a skill that's not intrinsically motivating for you. It's just like, you know, if you've got super hardcore parents, they might be able to beat you into being good at the violin, but like that's not going to stick once you leave the house unless you have that resonance with it.
So I wouldn't really worry about like building a talent stack, I would just worry about like finding ways you can add value to other people's lives that are intrinsically motivating to you. And once you find those, the stack of skills will naturally emerge.
Chris (56:54): Yeah. I like this notion that innovation happens at the intersections, that it's the combination of skills that you have, where if I could use as an example, Nat, it's this combination of writing and SEO knowledge and marketing and brand building, and putting that together. And that becomes a unique agency offering, where there are many specialists who can do one of these three things, but being able to combine those is something that's a unique offering. You know, for me taking the mental models from high-stakes poker and combining them with peak performance and productivity, and that creates a kind of unique niche and differentiation, that there are many people who can do one of the things that we can do, but there's no one who can do all the things that we can do. And so looking for ways to uniquely package that into a unique offering is a really good place to start.
If you look at almost any scientific breakthrough, they usually come from outside of that scientific field, someone who is bringing a unique perspective to bear. That, "Oh, how could statistics or project management or the military or Michelin star chefs have anything to bear on this problem?" But it's that intersection, the unique perspective brought to a familiar problem that usually leads to the breakthrough.
Christopher Harris wants to know, so, this says, "Zero to sixty. Going from thinking to doing. What is the fastest path from idea to doing? How do you iterate as quick as possible on the most effective thing to do?
Nat (58:45): Well no, I mean . . . Going from thinking to doing, how to iterate as quick as possible, most effective thing to do . . . I guess—
Chris 58:57(): What's the very first thing? It's like, this is something that I'd like to do. How do you go to like, "I'm doing it"? What's the very first thing to get started? Like sprinting off the starting line?
Nat (59:09): Yeah. I mean at least for me, I think that some of this is gonna be personality-driven. I naturally prefer getting started as soon as possible. And so like, because you're gonna learn way faster once you're actually doing something and you see what barriers you run into, and then go back and like find the information to get over those hurdles. Right? So a good example would be like I have some programming books, right? Like I've got these big like Ruby on Rails tutorial books, and I've never gotten more than fifteen percent through one of them, because as soon as I get to a point where I'm like relatively self-sufficient and I can like figure stuff out on stack overflow and by like asking code mentors, like that's going to make me move way faster than forcing myself through the rest of the book. So I feel like you know, getting over that hurdle is just like finding whether it's a YouTube video or a book or a coach who can get you started to the point where you get that like escape velocity of being able to figure stuff out on your own. Right?
I think a good analogy could be like you need a lot of activation energy to get into orbit, but then once you're in orbit it takes like no additional external energy to sustain, right? Because you're already like there, and you can kind of keep going on your own. And then additional inputs from there have like a disproportionately large effect, because you're no longer fighting gravity in the same way you were before you got started. So if you can just find a good source to like get you off the ground, and it really doesn't matter what source it is . . . Like, it could be a terrible source. But as long as it's enough to get you started, where you can start asking questions and like figuring things out as you go, I think that's going to help you get over that hump a lot quicker. But the biggest thing that I think trips people up is they obsess over like reading and trying to digest everything before they get started, and that's where you can run into trouble, is thinking, "Oh, I need to read ten books on entrepreneurship before I start a business." And that's like pretty much just a form of procrastination.
Right? It's like . . . Because I mean, also most entrepreneurship books are not very helpful until you've run into most of the problems in them. Right? It's like I usually still people, it's like, "Go read The 4-Hour Workweek, and then try to do something. Like, don't let yourself read any other books. Just go start something, and once you've lost a bunch of money or whatever then you can start reading other books." But Dan . . . Oh, gosh. What's his last name? Dan from Tropical MBA . . . Andrews? Yeah, I think it's Andrews— From Tropical MBA, has this good rule of, what is it? A thousand days, where he's basically like, "It's going to take you a thousand days to replace your employed salary with an entrepreneurial salary, and you just have to be willing to spend a thousand days sucking at something and just trying to figure it out before things will start to click and it will start to work, but the longer you just are reading books the longer you are delaying starting that thousand days," in the same way that the longer you're reading books or preparing to get started the longer you're delaying doing any deliberate practice. Or like . . . Reading is not deliberate practice. Reading is not even naïve practice. Reading is like procrastination on practice. Like, I love reading. It's like one of my favorite things to do, but I know that I'm never going to learn very much from a book unless I have a very specific question that that book is answering. And a lot of times reading specific books before you need them ends up not being that useful.
Right? It's like I read High Output Management by Andy Grove back when I was just starting Growth Machine and had like no employees, and I was like, "Oh, this is kind of cool. Like, it's an interesting book. Whatever." But I didn't really get anything from it. And then I went back and reread it a few months ago, and I was like, "Wow, this is like a phenomenal book, because there's so much stuff in there that's useful for learning how to be a better manager once you have employees." But if you're not even running Amazon ads yet, like you haven't even tried spending a thousand dollars on Amazon ads and you're reading a bunch of blog posts on how to optimize your Amazon ads, like you're focusing on the wrong thing. Right? Like it's pretty much always going to be better to go and fail at something with very little knowledge and then read stuff to help figure out where the gaps in your knowledge were than to try to read everything from the get-go.
Chris (01:03:41): Yeah. It's like we got a couple questions asking us for book recommendations, and we shared the links there [Nat’s top-rated, Chris’s recommendations], but I hope what you guys are taking away is that the knowledge that you need is probably not found in a book, and a lot of times that that reading can become procrastination. And I like to think about, how can we turn our consumption into production? And the easiest way to do that is to have a goal, to have a project in mind. In Experiment Without Limits, I talk about my process of learning how to become a standup comedian, and what was the fastest path to giving a standup routine onstage in front of an audience, and anything that wasn't leading towards that goal, that wasn't deliberate practice, was a waste of time. Right? I could've watched a bunch of standup on Netflix, I could've read a bunch of books on comedy, but the fastest path was to just write jokes and practice them in front of friends over and over again.
You talked about programming. There's so many people who are like, "Oh, I'd like to learn programming." It's like, "Well, take something that you want to build, and you'll have to learn instrumentally how to build that via programming. That'll be the fastest way you learn." A lot of programming is just googling, "Oh, I don't know how to do this." And then you go and do it. And then you learn through that experience, rather than like you say with High Output Management, like, "Oh, this will be interesting to know how to manage someday." Well, if you're managing someone it's a lot more actionable, and that consumption is immediately put into production, you're able to put into practice what you've learned immediately, and thus that feedback loop is really tight. 'Cause through action, through trying something, you get that feedback from your environment and say, "Oh, this worked. This didn't work. Here's what I would do next time."
And Nat, I just love what you've said here:, "Sucking is a sign of progress." That if you're not doing something that you suck at, there's something wrong. But that's what the boundary feels like. If this learning, this doing feels too comfortable, it's a very good sign that you're at a local maxima, that you're not growing at the speed that you could be, and likely that you're not taking enough risks. And so I think it's being comfortable with that feeling of stretching a little bit beyond our comfort zone, because that's where the growth comes from. That's how we become more capable. And if we can learn how to learn, we can do anything. That whatever we want to accomplish, the only thing that's separating us from accomplishing that is becoming the type of person who can do that. Right? So the skill of learning how to learn allows us to jump into any domain.
Nat, is there anything else that you'd like to share from today? Any place that you'd like to send people to?
Nat (01:06:28): Nowhere in particular. I mean, if you have any other questions, I'm definitely most responsive on Twitter, so you can ping me there. It's just @nateliason, and Chris and I and all of our other productivity nerd friends talk a lot on Twitter, so feel free to join in on the discussion. But yeah. This was a lot of fun. Is there anything else that you wanna talk about wrapping up on your end, Chris?
Chris (01:06:54): Yeah. Thanks. So I would just like to mention, hey, this conversation is recorded, so we're going to be sending this out in two days via email, so keep an eye out from an email from Zoom, and all of these conversations are hosted online at theforcingfunction.com/lunch-hour. So if you'd like to go back and read this or watch it again, you can do that at any time. And yeah, please. I always think of these as just the beginning of a conversation. So if there's something that this conversation sparked in you, if you're working on something cool and there's something that Nat and I can do to help accelerate that, please reach out. We're both very approachable. As I said, I think Twitter is a very good place to do so. And we're here to help. We'd love to add value, whether that's knowledge or pointing you in the right direction or even just giving you permission to do something that you don't think you're quite ready for. So with that, yeah, Nat, thank you so much for being here. This was a blast, and yeah. So excited to hear some of these things that you're working on and to see what new projects you take on in the future.
Nat (01:08:03): Yeah, thanks for having me, Chris. We'll talk more soon.
Chris (01:08:07): Cool. Thanks for being here, guys. See you next time.
Tasha (01:08:10): Thank you for listening to the Forcing Function Hour. At Forcing Function, we teach performance architecture. We work with a select group of twelve executives and investors to teach them how to multiply their output, perform at their peak, and design a life of freedom and purpose. Make sure to subscribe to Forcing Function Hour for more great episodes, or go to forcingfunctionhour.com to sign up for our newsletter so you can join us live.