How to build a portfolio of small bets (without hating your life):
Remember that to thrive, you must first survive. The order matters.
Instead of trying to succeed, try not to fail. Make sure your self-employment arrangement becomes sustainable quickly by going for the low hanging fruit.
Low hanging fruit are opportunities that require very little cost, time, and effort — even if it means they're not the most enjoyable and have limited upside.
Try as many of these "small bets" as you can, and run them in parallel — no need to wait for a failure to do the next.
Start by taking notice of what people in real life ask you about. Chances are that if your friends are interested in something you're doing, the internet will help you find thousands more like them.
"But what if I'm not doing anything interesting?!"
Almost everyone is. It doesn't have to be anything spectacular. You might be:
- Learning a new skill
- Doing a side hustle
- Going for a road trip
- Remodeling your home
- Studying something obscure
- Losing weight
...
In a normal economy, almost everyone is able to make a living trading their time for money. But you definitely can’t say the same thing about product owners.
Everyone wants to decouple their income from their time — the problem is there’s no predictable way to achieve that.
...
You can’t ignore the odds.
If you want to take shots at the product business, you can stack the odds in your favor with the barbell strategy.
On one side do something predictable that pays the bills, and on the other side something speculative. Nothing in between.
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You can do the barbell in parallel:
1. Find a low-stress job/gig that pays the bills and leaves you with some spare time & energy.
2. Use your spare time & energy to do whatever you want, without being beholden to anyone, and without risking anything consequential.
1/ "What's the best career advice you've ever received?"
The best advice I received was paradoxically the worst advice! But it made me realize something important.
It was my 4th year at Amazon, when a career mentor told me that everyone wants just two things from their job:
2/ Making a lot of money, and making a big impact in the world.
3/ My mentor assured me that if I kept it up, I will almost certainly achieve both, and if I worked really hard I will likely contribute to something that might even be remembered forever — maybe even have my own Wikipedia page!
The idea that you can only tweet about one topic is a myth.
I don't just imagine some topic I want to cover, and then tweet about it.
No, I tweet about the things that I happen to be dealing with at the moment. Examples: 👇
Feb-Apr 2019: I had just left full-time employment to work for myself, so I tweeted about how I prepared myself for the plunge, how I managed my personal finances while living off my savings, how I set myself up for business, and so on.
May-Sep 2019: I settled on the idea to build Userbase, so I tweeted about how I came up with the idea, development costs, trademark issues, trying to buy the .com domain (and eventually succeeding), and also a lot about AWS because I was using it for Userbase.