Listening to @EricJorgenson chat with @jackbutcher on @visualizevalue Office Hours about "The Almanac of Naval"
Covered:
- Process
- Compression
- Leverage
- Specific Knowledge
(thread)
1/
Who is @EricJorgenson?
Dropped out of College after the 4th year, joining a startup and moving to San Francisco.
Currently, Eric works @zaarly, a marketplace for home services
Has done everything that is “not coding,” currently in partnerships and projects
2/
How did the idea form?
Went to a startup weekend (hackathon) his 2nd year of college. Was told by a founder to read what Naval wrote on Venture Hacks.
Through Poor Charlie’s Almanac, found a lot of curated books, which was where the format of the Navalmanac came through
3/
Committing in Public
Committed to the project on Twitter had accountability from the masses
Was an instant “Oh Shit” moment when Naval decided to endorse it
Went from a 3 month project to a 3 year project
4/
Compression Part 1
1 million words - transcripts, thousands of tweets, thousands of articles
Started with a spreadsheet full of tweets - went through Zero to One (good tweets and bad tweets)
Then categorized all the remaining tweets as potential chapters.
5/
Compression Part 2
Added all the sources outside of the tweets (conversations, posts, podcasts)
After running out of steam, did a manuscript review with around 20 people to gather feedback in a tight time frame to react to it all at once.
Used Otter for voice recordings
6/
Book Publishing Process Part 1
Book Process
Scribe, originally known as Book in a Box, taking a manuscript and turning it into a ready to publish book.
They offer copy-editing, helping you w/ marketing and launch, getting the ISBN, going through multiple iterations.
7/
Book Publishing Process Part 2
High price, alternative is that you can piecemeal it out and self-publish but the effort is a lot higher to make it a cheaper product.
Using a term from the book Scribe gave Eric an enormous amount of leverage to spend time elsewhere
8/
Building in Public
People were asking in update all the time, the project was born in public
Had around 2-3000 emails about the book in the first year before the product even existed.
Building off of other people’s excitement in the project to generate interest.
9/
Measuring Success
Want it to have long relevance, why Eric chose to write about Happiness
Insight density - can open to any page and find value, measure through highlight density
Working with Readwise to see how many highlights are made.
10/
What's next?
More to do on this book, before potentially going onto the next book
There is a huge opportunity to take lessons from the book into more actionable items, akin to courses or Daily Manifest from Visualize Value
Potentially some Twitter Bots 👀
11/
General Wisdom
Life is a million little decisions about picking leverage, happiness.
If you do not give yourself the space to make those little decisions, one big decision won’t be able to save you
Finding a new frame of reference to govern the decisions you make
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