Julie Zhuo: recommendation

Transcript context

…I love that you use these tools to help work on a very specific skill that you're hoping to develop. So, you said that worked. Is that something you'd recommend to folks that are working on something like this and have a challenge there too? I do. I talk to a lot of people who want to write more because they feel like there is a lot of benefits, and maybe it's because writers often talk about all of the benefits, but a lot of people do maybe find it, as you were saying earlier, hard to get started. Right? My number one advice is try to find an angle that's going to work for you because if you find yourself writing for your audience, if you find yourself writing because you want likes or you want a certain number of views, that actually is a really hard barrier to overcome because you don't have control over all of that. But if you write because you're trying to work on a particular key skill, whether it is clarity of thinking, whether it's helping you work through some stuff that's complicated in your mind, whether it's just, again, working on being more comfortable, putting your voice out there, then make it a goal, but make it a action goal. Make it like a word count goal. I saw this on Twitter, I think it was that last year, the idea of the 30 days of just writing a thing every day or tweeting a thing every day. Right? You see this in design too. There's Inktober which is you just draw a thing every single day in the month of October, and I love those types of structures and programs. I think that they're a way to go and get into the habit of that. Everyone kind of feels like they can do anything for 30 days. You can do anything for three months if you just commit to doing it once a week. It doesn't have to be forever. It doesn't have to be some sort of like five-year thing and the commitment. That's a huge milestone. You just have to do it for a little bit and then reflect on it. Is it really helping you? Is it actually helping you get closer to that goal? And that's usually the easiest way I've found to get started. I love that. Just creating a little bit of structure for yourself so you don't have to think about it, you just do it, and I don't care what I do on that day, but I'm doing it, and maybe one time something will come out really great. This episode is brought to you by Sprig. If you've been a member of my community for a while, you know I'm a user, fan, and investor in Sprig. Sprig is a user research platform that makes getting user insights from your product as easy and fast as getting analytics. The best product and research teams at companies like Loom, Opendoor, and Dropbox use Sprig's in-product surveys to target specific users, start collecting insights, and identify issues and opportunities related to activation onboarding engagement and more. Talk about a platform that pays for itself. But I'm perhaps most excited about Sprig's newest launch which extends the power of the platform prelaunch and makes it possible to test mockups and prototypes with your own users in minutes. The testing interface is super slick and doesn't require any of the typical plugins that make testing with your own users unappealing, and with unlimited seats, you're able to invite anyone from your company to view and use insights generated by Sprig. If you want to get started, head over to sprig.com/lenny and mention that I sent you. That reminds me of something I wanted to plus-one, the point that especially on Twitter, I find whenever you're trying to go viral, it just comes across often is just like, okay, they're just trying to go viral. So lame. This person just wants a lot of likes versus I just want to share a thing that's interesting to me quickly, or here's how I want to think about it, or here's just a thing I want to remember in the future. I find those end up being a lot more successful.…

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