Shawn Wang: uncertainty

Transcript context

…Hi, I'm RJ. Shawn, nice to meet you. Nice to meet you. Do you also listen to pod, or are you just here to hang out? Yes, very much. Oh, yeah. How do you feel about it? Thanks! that. Yeah. You can, you don't need anyone's permission. That's, that's the beauty of this thing. But also no one owes you anything. No one owes you their time, their attention or, you know, or, or, or responses. And I typically try to classify these things as different modes of learning in public. Mm-Hmm. , I think I have four modes that I sketched out, but the two I remember the most are Explorer and Connector, and then there are two more advanced modes, I think like Teacher or Builder or something like that. The Explorer is where you sort of like put things out as you go along. It's learning exhaust, where you don't have expectations so that anyone will read it. It's mostly just notes for yourself. And that actually, that lack of expectations frees you. Because then you're like, oh, like two people read it. Doesn't matter, it's useful to me. It's useful to my team, it's useful to me, it's useful to whoever comes after me because I documented my work and my thinking. And that's great. And I think that's, that's the way that most people should start, which is like, just lower, you're not going to be an influencer overnight, like, it's fine, completely but get your thoughts out there, and then also, but also, like, start having feelers in different directions on what works for you, what works is a combination of what you like to And what other people want from you, and you will know when people tell you they want more from you. And so then, when you get there, when you have expertise that you have that other people don't, then you switch gears into a connector, where you are now coming from a place of authority. Like, I know how to do this right, and I will teach you, because I have done this, and I have spent more time, paid more in my dues, and here's the lessons. Thank you. And then that comes to be, that tends to become more of a polished effort that tends to become more measurable or in terms of like the impact and the influence it can get. And I think that's, that's where people start moving towards. But basically just lower expectations, make it cheap to experiment, put out a lot of stuff in different directions and see where the market pulls you. Yeah so I tend to tell developers, most developers to start on Hashnode these days. Hashnode is basically Medium if it was for developers and didn't suck. Because I hate Medium with a passion and a glowing, fiery hatred. Everyone does. It's comical how bad they are. But, I use Substack for latent space. I'm pretty happy with Substack. It's an email social network. Email is one of the most important things for people to like, come back to you frequently. So that you don't, you're not subject to an algorithm, you own your audience, you know. email social network. Email is one of the most important things for people to like, come back to you frequently. So that you don't, you're not subject to an algorithm, you own your audience, you know. If you want to move off Substack someday, it'll let you take the emails and keep that relationship going with the people that you have. And that's super important as a creator. And then you can also write your own blog. And tweet, and tweet, and all that. I tend to say though Pay attention to what you enjoy, and what you spend the most time on. If you're a LinkedIn guy, be on LinkedIn. I'm not on LinkedIn, so I'm gonna do horrible on LinkedIn, because I don't know the metagame of LinkedIn. I don't know what does well, I don't know what people want. So I shouldn't even, I don't, I don't bother, I should try, because obviously there are like way more people on LinkedIn than there are on Twitter, but I'm just a Twitter guy. Like I'm, that's just, that's who I am I have, I have, I also sort of am old money there in a sense of I have an existing followership that predated Latentspace. You know, Latentspace doubled my following, but like, I had some before that. So, like, all that's great I just think, like, you're going to know the metagame, and that's actually very important, of, like, where you already spend time, like, I, I have friends who are, like, on TikTok, I have friends who are on YouTube a lot, I'm on YouTube a lot, I should do YouTube, because I know, I know what's, what's going on on YouTube, it's just, then you have to put the effort to, to do that, and I'm, I'm, like, video production is, like, the most expensive thing, anyway, long story short try to pay attention to, this, Complex mix of like, publishing platform existing embedded social network on that platform, And where you already spend times, so that you know how to create what will do well, just because you already spent time on it. Yeah, okay. People love that. It just takes a ton of work, and I would love to offload it. This is going to be another one of those where I just kind of slip together little things. And it's good. It brings you there. That's the thing, right? Like, you're not there physically. I'm here. Let's, like, bring people into the closed community. And so I would like to do more of that. for coming on. Can I, can I get your contact so that we can find you? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You're going to be on the pod. Oh, awesome. People seem to love the New Reap's recap pod, and we'll keep doing more of those when the right occasion presents itself. This was also a pick for our last listener, Jan Jung from Australia, who comes at AI from the design point of view and was very interested in our early AI UX work on latent space. If you're in SF and want to more novel AI UX ideas, reach out to him.…

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