Inspirations
“Good artists borrow, great artists steal.” - Pablo Picasso
Below are some of the incredible people I’ve been fortunate to learn from, while watching them build in public, and lessons imparted to me.
Tren Griffin has taught me innumerable lessons over the past year on business, investing, and life, all via Twitter. He is specifically able to accomplish this because of the evergreen content he created.
Tren is adept at quoting the top financial news stories of the day and, instead of generating a unique analysis for each one, linking to applicable works. They’re either his own articles published over the years, papers written by Michael Mauboussin, or other helpful readings.
The amount of time saved by having a curated catalog of information at his fingertips is impressive.
Joe DeFranco immediately hooked me by the way his charisma and personality permeated his work. As an 18 year old college kid, I immediately turned to bodybuilding.com to find exercise plans. After some actual research, I came across articles, videos, and podcasts from Joe D that were not only educational but entertaining.
He’s not selling his workouts or supplements, he’s selling himself. That’s why his “shopping cart” talk resonates with people, myself included.
David Perell has created his own personal brand centered around writing. He’s constantly sharing valuable lessons on Twitter about becoming a better writer, and just today I finished his 50 day email series on writing-related articles.
Even better than that, he was able to create that email series by repurposing content. What had originally been blog posts or sections of older newsletters became a unique, standalone offering.
Robbie Crabtree is now known on Twitter as “The Speaking Guy” after he built Performative Speaking from the ground up, in public, beginning in May 2020. His latest milestone was the acquisition of Performative Speaking by On Deck. I highly recommend his twitter thread describing his journey.
Michael Ginnitti, Co-Founder of Spotrac, is the preeminent source for all things contracts, and salary cap, and finance related across professional and collegiate sports. He not only shares the most pertinent financial information on Twitter, but his podcasts are prescient. His expertise has myself, and many other followers, better able to skate where the puck is going.
I haven’t missed a single one of his 237 podcast episodes. When it came to researching for a student project that would be presented to industry experts as part of the SABR Conference, Spotrac was the first resource I turned to. There’s incredible value in that.
What are three things all these people have in common? They created value, left digital breadcrumbs, and, as Charlie Munger advises, went where the competition was dumb.
All of these people can succinctly say “Oh, you have this problem? Here’s the solution.” Sometimes you don’t even know the problem is there to begin with.
For people who build in public, there are always digital breadcrumbs. You can stumble upon someone’s work and then, with a single click, come across an entire portfolio of work. It’s a concept that was thoroughly examined by Sam Hinkie during his second appearance on the Invest Like the Best podcast.
Lastly, as Charlie Munger says, “go where there’s dumb competition.” How many people are out there doing what these people are doing? Not many. How many were around years ago? Even fewer.
The concept of market saturation is for another day, but consider this. After a quick Google search, I found there are roughly 130 million books that have been written so far. Number of podcasts? 1.9 million.
Give yourself better odds of success.