Welcome to “The Looking Glass”, a weekly newsletter journey of personal growth into mindset, meaning and mastery in work.

#32 – 02 Dec 2022

Hello friend,

Thanks again for being here!

It’s a short newsletter this week. Everyone in my household is sick, and my motivation levels have been at an all-time low.

I’m learning that while it is a joy having young children, one of the downsides is the inevitable sickness gets in the house and does the rounds. 

Here’s an insight, a question, and a quote I reflected on over the last week.

💡 Reposting what works 

Given my not feeling the greatest, I challenged myself; how could I make writing this week’s newsletter relatively painless?

Tim Ferriss has a quote:

What would it look like if it were easy?

Often we make things more complicated than they need to be. 

Maybe we have created some artificial barriers that don’t serve us.

For example, no law states that my newsletter must be at least 1,500 words long.

So what would this week’s newsletter look like if it were easy?

Then I recalled an insightful post from Rich Webster during the week:

Why you should repeat yourself more online:

He argued that we should be reposting content online. For example, social media only shows your content to a fraction of your followers. So it is a myth that everyone is seeing everything you post. So you should repeat yourself more.

Not only that, but it is also one of the most productive things you can do. You can test what works well, then keep reposting it.

Rich’s final insight:

You will get tired of what you’re saying before your audience does.

❔ Don’t give up because of The Gap 

This week I revisited a video that David Malan first shared with me when I was starting in this creator game:

When starting as a creator, we have good taste, but there is a gap between our current skill level and our desired output. 

For the first couple of years that you’re making stuff, it isn’t that good.

And so people make the mistake of quitting before allowing themselves the chance to get good.

You need to increase the volume of your work and allow time to improve.

Are you putting in the necessary reps on your creative project to close The Gap?

💬 A quote to ponder
 – On not letting others hold you back

You can lead an untroubled life provided you can grow, can think and act systematically.

Two characteristics shared by gods and men (and every rational creature):

– Not to let others hold you back.

– To locate goodness in thinking and doing the right thing, and to limit your desires to that.

Marcus Aurelius

📣 What happened this week 

My first “viral” post

I’ve previously spoken here about how I started posting on Twitter. 

This week I experienced my first “viral” thread. Well, viral in terms of my standards, haha. I only had about 90 followers on Twitter then, but my post received 65 likes and 11 retweets. It got 11,073 impressions, which is insane, given my few followers.

Did you know there are 3 main note-taking styles?

1) The architect
2) The gardener
3) The librarian

Read on to work out which one you are and what app may best suit you:

(Thanks, @anthilemoon for sharing this concept)

— Matt K. Head (@mattkhead) November 26, 2022

Why did this perform so well?

• A good curiosity-inducing opening hook
• An interesting topic for my creative audience – what type of note-taker are you?
• It had a listicle format with three different types of note-takers. People love lists!
• The idea had social proof – it was developed by Anne-Laure Le Cunff (60k followers), whom I tagged in the post.

💭

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It would be great to have you on board!

Cheers!

Matt K. Head