The value of everyone?s time starts at zero.
Always remember:
For a hard-hitting perspective on this, read this article.
Everyone acquires knowledge via experience.
The skills we pick up working a job, following our interests on the side, or studying for specifically.
At this stage, we're still responding to demand.
Investing our time to build skills that the market values until we're confident enough to sell them independently.
It takes years to acquire knowledge specific enough to be productized.
In the end, the more unique your experience, the more valuable your product.
Understand the above and you can reframe what you'd once think of as wasted time as a necessary investment in becoming unique.
For context, I stumbled upon the concept of productization long after I'd spent many years accruing a random selection of skills and experiences - and deployed them against many different types of problems.
If you're just getting started, you can do what I did (get paid to learn on the job), or you can circumvent the market by building skills off the job (get paid and learn on the side).
Remember, everyone you admire was once a beginner. The unavoidable first step in creating something valuable is creating something worthless.
It's a privilege to fail in public.
When you're operating with skin in the game, you'll be driven to iterate forever.
Think of your working life as simply a series of experiments, because it is.
Make others successful. Pick up skills in application and start to get a feel for where you add the most value. Eventually, you?ll generate results and other people will see value in your skills.
Permissionless projects = permissionless progress.
The internet makes it possible to build projects in public to validate demand.
Visualize Value didn't begin with a very specific business plan, it was simply a curiosity (philosophy, business, mindset) combined with a set of competencies (branding, design, marketing)
Remove yourself from the consideration set of other practitioners by putting your extremely specific point of view out into the world consistently.
Curiosity drives competence:
Let's say you want to learn graphic design and you love basketball.
Commit to a project where you design a piece of media every day breaking down a basketball player's last performance, or a coach's philosophy, or a team's history.
By publishing this work, you build an audience of:
Sports fans/brands (to sell design services to)
Aspiring graphic designers (to sell scalable product to)
Or, let's say you're a financial planner and you love entrepreneurship.
Commit to a project where you articulate how different business models impact the long-term financial picture of an entrepreneur and their family.
By publishing this work, you build an audience of:
Entrepreneurs (to sell financial planning services to)
Other financial planners (to sell scalable product to)