Sub-skills

In his book Flow, Mihaly talks about how all the pleasures of life come from jumping from one manageable problem to another.

But when one does not have such a smooth highway experience, it turns self-destruct right away.

He goes on to explain and propose actionable advice:

This is the art of collecting sub-skills. Before I was aware of this miracle, my writing was slowly reaching the pinnacle of malingering.

Because I would not set up challenging tasks that would force me to acquire new subskills, eventually, this rotten mindset would show me its true effects, and I started losing in running my business altogether.

So for the next quarter, I have taken on a new task. A task that I never liked about my ghostwriting business – finding new clients.

I had a pretty smooth run over the past 9-10 months, where I was completely immersed in just writing. Now that I have a slot opened, I will not be relying solely on inbound. I’m taking charge with outbound.

And for that I have acquired a few new sub-skills.

This is the first time I’m focusing on playing the numbers game, and for that I’ll be sending 20+ connection requests every day for the entire Q4. Though I’ll be doing this a little tastefully. Rather than sending a simply connection request, I’ll be mixing this with my free cold-work pitch as well.

Here’s how I’m planning to do this:

• Find at least 2 people in those 140 connection requests I send every week

• Dig information on them across the internet

• Write 3 posts for them

• Pitch them

Since it is very easy to start such behemoth tasks with great intensity only to lose the momentum a few weeks later, I’ll be doing this with my 2 friends. Yakshit and Manu.

It’s easier to stay accountable when you have a group of people doing the same thing. It enforces the behaviour.

We plan to pitch twice a week, on Wednesdays and Saturdays, and share the screenshots in our group.

We’re also sharing notes with each other as we’re learning a few things, so the iteration rate is faster than if I did this alone.

I’ll be reporting my findings every 2 weeks or so.

Q4 is looking exciting.

As Mihaly says,” keep raising the stakes if it becomes boring.”

No bolthole, baby.

In other news, I've decided to share my spotify work playlist (link)