Step 1: achieve success in any area
Step 2: leverage that to get media distribution (Netflix, podcast, social media following)
Step 3: create personal brand
Step 4: endorse new ventures in new but adjacent areas
This works because the hardest part of a new business is almost always getting customers.
When you have a firehose of social media distribution that problem is partially solved.
This strategy is most common in restaurants, but can work for anything.
1) cofounds Alinea, one of America’s most famous restaurants 2) parlays it into Netflix show appearances, podcasts, gets on Twitter 3) creates personal brand more than “the not chef alinea guy” 4) endorses tock app, cookwear, book
It’s a virtuous cycle with tons of cross venture synergy.
Makes me think that everyone with a business needs to be on social media personally.
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Everyone on Twitter is complaining about how few people the US has vaccinated as though we lack the logistics capacity to do so.
Others are blaming government for preventing large groups from being vaccinated.
Are we sure it’s not just a demand problem?
- a lot of people have already had the virus
- a lot of people think they’ve had the virus
- the vaccine is a pia to get and requires two doses
- a lot of people don’t have insurance or have bad insurance. Has our govt made it clear that this vaccine is free? I don’t know
- the vaccine has a list of scary side effects such as potential loss of fertility
- there are a ton more vaccines in the pipe and people may think “well I can get a better later one”
- people want to see how these vaccine candidates will turn out
- People will steal from you and stab you in the back and it will hurt you both financially and personally.
- Generally, you can't operate like the above is true, even though it 100% is.
"People are terrible" is typically thought of as "negativity" or something that only losers say after they've lost. There's some truth to that, but it's also true that there are a lot of really bad selfish people out there who will screw you HARD to benefit themselves.
I'll give you a funny example. A week after writing this article I found out that one of my close local friends had knocked off one of our products and sold it to a retail chain. I had given his son a gift of our product a year earlier.
It’s usually a mistake to purchase an irregular version of a product because it fits your needs and is cheaper.
The future is more variable than it seems and there’s a reason why the nonstandard model is not standard.
For example:
- “I’m going to buy this one green car because the color doesn’t bother me and I just need to get to work.” This backfires when you need to sell the car because the family needs a minivan or when you forget that you’ll be using that car to pick up dates.
- “I’m going to buy this nice house at a great price in this poor school district because I won’t have kids in the foreseeable future.”
In my own life I made this mistake when I was purchasing pallet racking. I was offered standard heavy duty beams and lightweight ones. I chose
This is anathema in the United States but, absent a Soviet Union like collapse in China, the US and the world at large might just be better off accepting likely Chinese ascendancy to hegemonic power.
The next cold war between China and the US is pretty scary.
China claims to not be imperialist, but I think that's bullshit. Imperialism is just what happens when you get power.
Hopefully they stop at their claims of South China Sea and Taiwan, but the way they've made their
younger population rabid nationalists does not bode well for that.
The other optimistic hopes (besides collapse of China) are that trading codependencies or mutually assured nuclear destruction will avert any major conflict.