🧑🏼‍🚀 Blueprint 061

Welcome back to Blueprint.

It’s been 61 weeks (1 year + 2 months + 1 week) since I went full-time as an entrepreneur.

My goal is to go from $0 → $1M/month while transparently documenting the journey, strategy, and moves made along the way

• Each week, I share learnings & experiments (in written form)

• Each month, I share income & strategy shifts (in video form)

• You can watch the Year 1 recap video here

A reminder that everyone reading this can win at an unlimited scale. I’m writing this for the internet astronauts building their own worlds. If that’s you…let’s ride 👩🏻‍🚀

WEEK 61 METRICS & UPDATES

In this episode of Blueprint, I share a few concepts that have been rattling around my head for the past few days. Appreciate all the support!

ENTREPRENEURSHIP

Entrepreneurship

Entrepreneurship has been different (and harder) than I expected.

Coming into this, I assumed it would be a) reasonably straightforward and b) require extraordinary effort.

Given this, I set my expectations on max effort.

Besides my family & health, I was willing to give everything for as long as it took. Most weeks, I spend 70+ hours working.

But weirdly, it’s been the ambiguity and lack of clear direction that has caused me the most stress…it turns out, lol, entrepreneurship is anything but straightforward.

Here’s a metaphor for what the entrepreneurial game is really like and how it differs between beginner and more advanced players. If you’re starting out, or thinking about jumping in, maybe this will be useful…

Imagine you’re playing the game of solving puzzles. The first step is to pick which puzzle to solve.

Beginners go to the puzzle store and spend days looking at all the options. They walk down every aisle, flipping over thousands of puzzles. They make rubrics about which will be the most fun, yet rewarding to work on. Is it in my ikigai, they ask? They look at box colors, number of pieces, packaging. They call their friends to get more opinions. They think, plan, overthink, and over plan. Eventually after weeks, they finally pick their puzzle.

Moderate players (that think they’re advanced) go to the store and grab the first puzzle they see. They’ve played this puzzle game a few times and after failing on their first 4 attempts, realize that solving anything is better than nothing. So they grab the first puzzle that catches their eye and start working an hour later.

Advanced players realize that picking the right puzzle is the most important thing to get right but that never starting is the most important thing to avoid getting wrong. So they come into the store with a very strict criteria set of what they want. Their research phase is time boxed and controlled. “I need over 1,000 pieces, 3D, not square, etc.” They know what criteria matters and what is just a vanity metric. They narrow down idea selection by categorization in a matter of minutes.

The metaphor above is representative of “picking which business/idea to work on”

When each player opens their box, they realize they have way more pieces than they need and some that don’t even belong to that puzzle. Some pieces are damaged…others are wet and need to be repaired. Some aren’t even pieces…”why is there elbow pasta in here?!”

Beginners start by sorting and categorizing all the pieces. They color code them and organize by shape. They create an inventory log in a separate database. Etc. They do lots of things that seem useful, but aren’t actually the most important thing.

Advanced players grab the foundational pieces they know will matter (corners & edges) and just get started. They assume they will figure out the rest on the fly.

And so on…

I’ve learned there are really three stages of entrepreneurial game play:

1. Overthinking - walking in a circle

2. Overreacting - walking with your eyes closed

3. Optimal - walking with your eyes open

Everybody starts in the overthinking mode…this was most of my 20s.

Luckily, when I began my creator phase at 29, I already had a decade of overthinking under my belt.

I’ve spent the past 12 months in the overreacting mode. When I see an opportunity, I react immediately and begin acting.

And I did this because I thought this was the best way to waste the fewest hours and get the most done. “Action, action action”

What I realize now is that choosing what to work on is much more important than how hard you work on it.

And the challenging part, is that the framework for knowing what makes a “great thing to work on” can only be learned through failure and mistakes.

This is where it can be super beneficial to have a business partner or close peer group to help validate your approach before you sink weeks into it.

This single concept — trying to pick the right things to work on while shedding everything else — is a key focus of mine for the next few months. It’s critical I get better at this or I’ll continue walking in circles.

MR. BEAST

MR. BEAST

Last week, there was a leaked 36 page doc circulating about Mr. Beast.

It was his employee handbook. If you make content, it’s worth the read.

In it, he essentially brain dumps everything he knows about making videos, growing on YouTube, and optimal team structure.

Lots of people have broken down the biggest takeaways, so I won’t do that here.

But reading this doc sent me down another rabbit hole…

Why did Mr. Beast never start a marketing agency?

If you follow the traditional “knowledge entrepreneur” path, it looks a bit like this:

1. Learn a desirable skill

2. Use that desirable skill in a small way on your own projects to prove competency

3. Sell a course/service to others teaching/using that skill for them

This is the proven 7-figure flow that nearly every knowledge creator runs.

Mr. Beast started by learning how to grow on YouTube. And this is arguably the most valuable content skill one can have.

Surely he could have partnered with an operator and scaled an agency teaching his methods to all the top creators and brands.

So why didn’t he?

When you have expertise in a skill, you can either sell that expertise so others can use it or you can use that expertise on your own projects.

The compounding benefit of expert knowledge comes from the application of that knowledge.

If you’re a YouTube expert, but teach it to others, you only benefit from that one time knowledge transfer. You can obviously scale the teaching part to be more efficient (via a course that’s distributed via software), but the applied benefit of that knowledge is captured almost entirely by the student.

On the flip side, if you’re a YouTube expert, but use it on your own channel, you benefit from that knowledge every time you make a video…in other words, you keep much more of the compounding benefit.

Now most people would say, “why not do both?”

Because the teaching is a distraction if you’re actually good at the doing.

This has been a helpful frame for me to think through.

Let’s say I’m top 1% at making short-form video.

My default thought was to start a marketing agency where I perform these services for other brands. But unless I’m getting variable upside in the effectiveness of my work, I’m giving up the leveraged benefit.

This is suboptimal.

Instead, I should just build my own products and apply the unfair knowledge over and over (this is what I’m going to do).

The reason Mr. Beast never started a marketing agency is because he realized he could win 1000x bigger by capturing the leverage benefit himself.

ENJOYING THE RIDE

Enjoying the Ride

If you watch interviews with older successful people, they almost always say, “I wish I enjoyed the ride more.”

I’m only 1% into the journey, but I’m also noticing that I don’t spend enough time reflecting and “enjoying the ride.” 

I’d want to, but I just haven’t done it.

This seems consistent with most of my friends on this entrepreneurial path.

It made me wonder…why is it so hard for driven people to enjoy the ride?

Here’s my take…

To me, “enjoying the ride” symbolizes some form of a relaxed approach. Work a few hours, play a few hours, 3 days a week here, 4 days a week there, etc.

From my experience, this type of approach doesn’t foster the required intensity that it takes to win, especially in the beginning.

The required intensity, which seems to be everything you’ve got and then some, doesn’t have much room for relaxing (sadly).

Maybe this is too hardo of a take, but from my vantage point, winning requires max intensity for an abnormally long time.

The reason it’s been hard for me to let myself enjoy the ride is because it means I’m intentionally taking my foot off the gas.

But maybe I’m wrong with this frame…

Maybe the relaxed approach is actually just as viable and will lead to the same outcome in a more enjoyable fashion. Again, these things are hard because you only live once and don’t get to play the counterfactual.

Would love to hear others perspectives on this.

WEEK 61 BEST CONTENT

My best content from last week:

1. 🎥 | Runway video to video gen 3 could change filmmaking: Watch

2. 👀 | This AI project suggests we could be living in a simulation: Watch

3. 👩🏻‍💼 | I went to Dreamforce and it was massive: Watch

4. 🧑🏼‍🚀 | Blueprint 060 (Month 14 Recap) - Month 14 Strategy Update, Monetization, Repetition, Puzzle Solvers, Failure, Hard: Read