Building Leverage [Sep 20th edition]

Hi there,

Hope you’ve had a great week. College football is back on TV and I’m excited. I live in Georgia which is an insanely passionate state for college football. My wife loves the local team (Go Dawgs!) and I went to school at Vanderbilt (although it’s not known for our athletics lol). They both play in the SEC which will start their games next weekend so I am excited.

Switching topics from physical athletics to mental, many of you know how big of a proponent I am for meditation. As a maker/creator, it has been the single best investment as a recurring habit in helping me produce a lot of content and stay sane. Recently, I saw down to reflect on how much I’ve meditated since I began. I started in Feb 2018 and have clocked nearly 7300 min on the app Simple Habit.

My average is 7.66 min/day. I am very proud of this! I am challenging myself to push to 10 min/day by end of the year. Here’s a screenshot.

Are you someone who like meditation too? Let me know if you have any questions, happy to geek out with you :)

Anyway, since the last week, this newsletter subscriber count has gone closer to 240 readers so join me in welcoming the new folks :) 👋

Let’s get rolling with this edition:

䷉ TOP ESSAY ON MY RADAR:

Benjamin Franklin Invented the Chat Room

In 1727, when Benjamin Franklin was twenty-one, he and a few friends—among them a scrivener, a joiner, and two cobblers—formed a conversation club called the Junto. They met on Friday evenings at a Philadelphia alehouse. “The rules that I drew up required that every member, in his turn, should produce one or more queries on any point of Morals, Politics, or Natural Philosophy, to be discussed by the company,” Franklin wrote in his autobiography. The United States was not yet the United States, but already he sensed a civility problem. His solution: structured, secular chitchat, “conducted in the sincere spirit of inquiry after truth, without fondness for dispute, or desire of victory.”

Conversation clubs, inspired by the Founding Father, have never felt more necessary. Read the rest of the essay here.

🐦 TOP TWEETS ON MY RADAR:

Josh Spector @jspector

Your audience already exists. You don't need to build one from scratch. You just need to find an audience that already exists and is looking for someone like you to connect and lead them!

Toby ☕️ @tobydoyhowell

Being a thought leader is 10% the ideas you have 90% your willingness to share them

Julian Shapiro @Julian

There's been a big change in how startups grow. It's now: • Community: How much users engage with *each other* • Affinity: How much users *pay attention* to you • Tribal alignment: How much users attach their identity to you • Customer experience Those make a moat.

KP @thisiskp_

10 ridiculously simple tips I wish I knew about building an audience when I first started: I mostly winged it 🤫 Let me share my lessons so you don't have to: (a thread 🧵)

💰 TOP RESOURCES ON MY RADAR:

• Compound’s Real-World Guide to Getting Your First 1,000 Email Subscribers [Check it out]

• A Beginner's Guide to becoming a First-Principles Thinker [Check it out]

• I’m a fan of cold emails/DMs (here are some great tips!)

💰 TOP PRODUCTS ON MY RADAR:

• Referlist, increase sign-ups via gamified referrals

• Commonstock, an insanely powerful platform that democratizes investment knowledge by allowing you to track portfolios of experts and friends

• Track, the fastest calendar experience I’ve ever seen

That’s it for now. Feel free to DM me if you have any questions/comments. Have a fabulous week!

PS: Thinking you have a problem collecting weird/wasteful domain names? Don’t feel alone. There is an entire legion of people like us.