Weekly Waves

These are weekly updates on what I'm working on, what I'm learning and what occupies my mind.
Rued

Weekly Wave #1

NEW PRACTICE
These writings is a new practice. One of weekly repetition. I do it to share what I’m doing, what I’ve learned and what I’m thinking about. Both for myself, so I can keep track of time and events. And for you, so you can follow along.

I’ll commit to write a Weekly Wave every Monday. Writing is a great way to start the day and week. And it allows for time to think about the last one. I hope you’ll find these updates interesting—maybe even amusing.

DAILY GRIND
Last week was another tough and fun one, where the daily grind fills up most of the time. ‘Strong Scripts’ is close to being fully animated, as I’ve chosen to animate every second of every lesson. The reason why is to give my best at creating a non-boring course.

As I wrote in my Webinar Manifesto, I think teaching and learning has to be interesting—maybe even fun. According to Sturgeon’s Law, “90% of everything is crap”. Fun law, but also quite true, when you look at the vast amount of content created every day. My goal is to not add on to that pile.

SAY YES
My new lifestyle design of working by myself, investing all time into things that will accumulate in the future, hasn’t allowed for “freelance” work. Why? Because one of my dogmas is: “Don’t sell hours.” This means that I don’t consult or take freelance gigs.

But. Beggars can’t be choosers, and the revenue from my courses is still lower than Trump’s ethical standards. So when the phone rang last week, I said yes to a paid gig of narrating a voice-over for a short explainer video.

I love these small voice-over jobs that I can do from home, so I said yes. And yes will be the answer to all fun gigs that don’t interfere with the overall mission of working on a business, not in it.

LEARNING CALLIGRAPHY
Inspired by Steve Jobs (3:10), I’ve taken up the skill of beautiful handwriting. The art of calligraphy helped him tremendously later on, when designing the fonts for the new Mac.

Pursuing new creative skills every month is also a new practice of mine. And yes—I do believe you can become good enough in one month for that skill to have utilisation in your life.

My approach is ‘Imitation Learning’, which is a story for itself. The basic principle is to throw yourself into practical “doing” from first second – by copying, or imitating, someone who masters the skill.

The feeling of doubling your competency every day that you get from approaching something completely new is so gratifying. I remember this feeling from when I learned guitar. It’s so addictive.

INNER LIFE
The headlines of what I’m thinking about these days revolve around focus. Gary Vee would say that my lack of focus is my focus. That I like him am creative and need to deal with many things at a time to be happy.

I can agree with him halfway, but I also believe that my biggest enemy of the past has been a lack of focus. I’ve invested a lot of time into Tallsome, Webly and other newer ideas, and I wonder what it would have amounted to, if my focus had been unidirectional.

Seeing my solopreneur path as just begun, I’m also thinking about focus in relation to where I want to end up. What does teaching animation now lead to in the years to come? My solution for this energy consuming inner life is a focus on the present day—and just work on my next course.

Which I am going to do now. Thanks for caring. Have a great week.

RUED RIIS