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May 15, 2020 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams

14:46

Episode 975 Scott Adams: Systems Versus Goals for Creators

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	Hey everybody, come on in.
	Today is going to be a very special No Coffee with Scott Adams because it's the evening.
	Who drinks coffee? Well, I just had a cup.
	If I'm being honest, I just finished off a cup.
	But I did it for you so that I would be awake to give you this micro lesson on systems versus goals.
	Now you've heard me talk about systems versus goals.
	It's the topic of my book, How to Failed Almost Everything and Still Win Big.
	And I thought I would run you through a specific example because it's just more fun to look at an example.
	And you'll all imagine that you would like to be, let's say, famous podcasters or internet celebrities.
	So that's your starting point.
	And then I'll walk you through what it would look like to build systems to get there.
	Okay? We'll start with a little background.
	Number one, if you want to be a creative person, where are you going to do it?
	So you want to find the place that there's the most energy.
	So the first part of your system is you say, I would like to be a creative person and make stuff, whatever it is.
	It could be music, cartoon, art, writing, whatever it is.
	And you want to put it on the internet and you want to make money.
	So you want to go where there's the most energy and the most future.
	So take these two examples.
	Television, I would argue, is a dying form because it doesn't take into account people's attention spans.
	The shows are too long.
	They've got commercials that make you wait.
	It's predictable, scripted stuff.
	Humor as an art form is largely dead on television.
	And I timed how long it would take me Simply to turn on my television at home and actually get to a show.
	It took 18 seconds to go to a show I knew I wanted to go to.
	Do you know how many tweets I can look at in 18 seconds?
	So people's worldview is compressing and compressing.
	So you have to understand the big trend.
	Before you can decide where to go.
	Then once you're there, I'll tell you how to build the systems, right?
	So this is just picking the field you want to play in at this point.
	And then, of course, you can only watch television on certain devices, and they have all kinds of limitations.
	But take the internet. Let's say you're on YouTube or some other place on the internet.
	Everything's faster, there's shorter content.
	It's free-ish, depending on what kind of content you're looking at.
	It's more unpredictable because there's more of it.
	So it's short.
	It's far more variety.
	It's almost infinite.
	You can get a quick hit, quick hit.
	And here's the other thing.
	Remember I have taught you that if you put any kind of a penalty or friction on anything, that eventually the person will do less of it.
	Now if you look at a typical TV show or a movie, They all have the following form, every one of them, which is something bad happens to somebody you care about, and then you hope that it gets better.
	Right? That's every script of every movie, at least fictional movies, not biographies necessarily.
	But of every fictional movie, something bad happens to people that they tell you to care about, and then you just hope it gets better.
	And if it does, it's a good movie, I guess.
	Compare that to spending 10 minutes on YouTube.
	If you're picking your own short themes, you might look at a TED talk, you might look at a humorist or something, but you're never going to pick anything that makes you sad.
	I mean, not intentionally. So if you go to the internet, you're giving yourself one little dopamine hit after another, and they're really quick.
	It's like, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh.
	And you get no sadness.
	If you turn on a regular television and watch a regular TV show or a regular movie, it's packed with sadness by design.
	And then you're influenced by that.
	That gets in your head. And even though you say to yourself, well, I'm just watching.
	I'm not in that movie anymore.
	It's not affecting me, but it does.
	Because humans are pattern-copying machines, and if you watch sad things, you will get sad.
	So, all of this put together tells you that you can be pretty sure that television is the past, the Internet is the future.
	So let's just say we've figured out what our domain is.
	And the domain is going to be the Internet.
	You're going to create something.
	You don't know what it is.
	Is it going to be a podcast? Is it going to be some kind of a show?
	What is it? And let me give you one sort of example potential career path.
	Now let me say in advance that there would be presumably a million different variations of this.
	But if you get the basic idea, then all the variations make sense.
	So let's just stick with the basics.
	Alright. Let's say you want to achieve what I call boss diversification.
	The idea is that you don't want one boss to rule your life, but rather you want to have lots of bosses.
	So you want to have lots of clients.
	You want to have lots of customers.
	You want to have an audience.
	Because then, a lot of your bosses, your customers could fire you on any given day, and you still have plenty of bosses.
	Plenty of customers. But if you only have one boss, and that boss is a tyrant, and sometimes even if they're not, it just makes your life that much harder.
	So if you want something like freedom, use the math of diversification to give yourself lots of bosses.
	And that's what being a creative person can do if you get the path right.
	Here's what a reasonable looking path would look like.
	You would put together more than one talent so that you have something special.
	I talk about this as the talent stack system, basically.
	And if you look at me, for example, I do the podcasting stuff, meaning that I can talk on camera.
	So I have the skill to be able to do what I'm doing exactly now, which is talking.
	And you can understand me, and I can put sentences together.
	But I also talk about persuasion, and I've got some background in humor.
	So I've got a few different things that I can put together that when you listen to me, if I do it right, you say to yourself, I don't think I could get exactly that anywhere else.
	So it's not that my individual skills that I bring to this are special, because none of them are.
	There's not one that's really special.
	But the combination, you'd have to admit, you just don't see very often.
	So it's the combination that can make you special And valuable in the market.
	So figure out what your expertise is.
	Do you have a good voice?
	Do you have a sense of humor?
	You can figure it out.
	Just figure out what it is that makes you special.
	That's your talent stack.
	One way to start would be a blog, because there's no friction to starting a blog.
	Anybody can write a blog.
	So let's say the first thing you want to do is just write a bunch of blog posts.
	That assumes you want to be a writer.
	But if you want to be any other kind of an artist, you could put it on a blog format.
	Once you've got a little body of work, then you can start your Twitter account.
	I use Twitter as the best example of this.
	And then start promoting yourself.
	You might go into conversations in which you've written something that's relevant.
	You go into that conversation and say, yeah, I wrote something about that in the comments.
	If it's a tweet that's getting a lot of attention, and your addition of a comment of something to read that's right on point...
	Good gets you some new followers.
	So you use Twitter wisely by adding value.
	The way that you give followers is by giving them more than they're giving you.
	That's the whole thing.
	If on Twitter you're giving your followers more than they're getting, they'll follow you.
	That's all it is. So if you're wisely retweeting, you're a good curator of stuff, or you're wisely inserting your own comment and links to things, people will say, yeah, I want more of that.
	I get smarter when you're interacting.
	So you build up a little audience here, and then maybe you say, let me try it on video.
	So you take it to Periscope, and you say, it's a real easy technology.
	Literally, all you have to do is sort of turn it on and aim the Aim the device at yourself and put in a title.
	And you're live streaming. Just what I'm doing now.
	Now you can't make much money on Periscope.
	Some of you are nice enough to do the super hard thing, which is like tipping.
	But Periscope is not really designed for creators to get rich.
	It's just easy to get in.
	It's got some special, I'd say, more personal quality to it.
	It's simpler. It has a lot of advantages over YouTube, but there is one thing that YouTube can do better, which is monetization.
	So if you get a little audience on Periscope, and by the way, you can see what I'm doing here is that each level that you do something well, you try to get attention to bring you to the next level and bring up your visibility.
	So you might want to jump from Periscope to YouTube.
	You could still do both of them, You don't abandon any of these things.
	You're still doing them. You're just extending your reach.
	Now, if you have boring content, and I'm saying that humorously, boring meaning, you know, getting videos, funny stuff, family generic things, you know, nobody getting in trouble, some basic information, a TED talk, you know, those things are not boring.
	So I'm just being humorous here.
	I'm saying things that advertisers are not afraid of.
	So I only mean it boring in the sense that it's not provocative.
	So most people think, and I used to think this, that Google and YouTube were suppressing conservatives only, but it turns out that their advertising model makes them demonetize pretty much anybody who's provocative, whether you're on the left or the right.
	So I have confirmed David Pakman, for example, who's on the left, he got demonetized exactly the same time, same way I did.
	So it was really just the advertisers saying, we don't want to be associated with certain kinds of content, because why would we?
	If you were an advertiser, and you could be associated with something where there might be cursing, or something where there won't be, if you had a choice, you'll take the one where there's no cursing.
	Why would you take any risk if you don't have to?
	So Google and YouTube are trying to figure out how to make that work so that provocative stuff also could get sponsors.
	Apparently they don't quite have the system to do that yet, but I would imagine they'll get there.
	However, in the long run, provocative people can't really get monetized to any good degree on YouTube.
	So that's what the locals platform will do for you, and that's why I've moved.
	I've moved my more provocative, non-Dilber stuff over there.
	So everything that you see in the other platforms, which I'll maintain, so I'll still be doing all the same things, but there'll be some extra stuff behind the subscriber wall, because it's the only way to get monetized if you're not in the boring subset.
	And again, boring just means not provocative.
	So yeah, Dave Rubin, somebody said in the comments, Dave Rubin is the original founder of the Locals thing.
	And I just got on it.
	I've got to tell you that it's way better than I thought it would be because it fills in this whole category that didn't exist.
	And I didn't really think there was a category that didn't exist.
	But the category that didn't exist is this.
	A creator who can control their space...
	And sort of do whatever they want.
	And nobody can tell me not to do it.
	Obviously, I'm not doing anything that's horrible.
	But I can be as provocative as I want within the bounds of what I know my subscribers would want to see.
	So it just fills in that whole gap.
	So, you might be able to hear my dog going crazy.
	Which means I'm going to make this kind of short, because I have to attend to that.
	She was at the veterinarian yesterday, and she doesn't like to be in not the same room with me, and I can't let her upstairs.
	It's a long story, but she'll be fine.
	So yeah, she'll be fine.
	I just have to keep her not running around, and she doesn't like that at all.
	So there's a little bit of work to do there.
	This is an example of using systems to sort of build a system for each phase of this as you go.
	You can see that each phase had its own system.
	If you were to generalize this to writing, there's a book called On Writing by Stephen King.
	It's really hard to do this when your dog is screaming in pain downstairs.
	It's not pain, she's just mad because I'm over here.
	What Stephen King suggested is that you find whatever is the lowest level of writing that you can do that somebody will read.
	So again, you might write a blog, might write some blog posts, and then take them into the local publication and say, hey, samples of my writing.
	If they like them, they might say, oh, we'll run you in the local paper.
	And you just keep writing and building your resume up one level at a time until You get that big book deal.
	So it's always the same.
	Your system is start small, build a body of work, and then try to get attention at the next level, etc.
	Alright, I'm going to go take care of my dog.
	I hope that was useful.

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