Don’t Depend on The People You Care About

Don’t Depend on The People You Care About

Don’t depend on the people you care about.

Lots of people getting started reach out to explain that they're having a hard time getting their existing network to respond to their work.

This isn’t about quality of work, it’s purely about reframing something it seems a lot of people struggle with:

Just because people care about you, doesn’t mean they’ll care about your art, your business, your ideas, or your experiences in trying to build them.

Just because you grew up on the same street as somebody or share the same last name, doesn’t mean you’ll be interested in the same things.

Enter: The internet. It doesn’t matter who you’re born from or next to anymore.

Do the work and let the work find the people.

I shared Visualize Value work with my personal network every day for close to a year, and almost everyone I have ever met in person couldn’t care less.

I posted a few to my personal Instagram...crickets. Shown a few people in person...blank stares.

A couple of years later, over 700,000 people subscribe to it in some way, shape, or form. Almost none of which I know personally, and most of which live in countries I have never set foot in.

TLDR: Expecting the people that care about you to care as much about your obscure obsession as you do is not going to help you.
Leverage is as much about where you are standing as how much force you are applying.

If you are building something, it is far more useful to focus on the work you are doing to produce the result than the result itself.

The constraint we apply to package our idea determines their reach & resonance. "Make 1 decision to eliminate 1,000 decisions."

Labor is generally a more interchangeable resource than vision.

To help understand this idea, consider the contrast between the two concepts ancient Greeks used to think about time.

It should be relatively simple to identify when we aren't accumulating net new experience, but in practice, it doesn't seem to be.

Language is an incredible tool. It makes it possible for us to externalize what we think and communicate it to others.