WORK LESS WEDNESDAY
WLW #92
Lessons From $10,000 Of Coaching With Chris Do (Part 2)
In this episode, I cover: ​
– Insights from 6 coaching sessions with Chris Do​
– Chris’ 9 steps to build a personal brand​
– How I grew from 0-100k followers in 18 months​
– The biggest mistake people make when they try to sell a course​
– My original (bad) idea for “How To Work Less”
​– The productivity tool Chris gave me that has saved my team 10,000+ DMs
🗓️ 1. Ramit’s Lessons From The 4 Day Workweek – Blog Post
Around 2015, I read two books that changed everything:
Tim Ferriss’ The Four Hour Workweek​
Ramit Sethi’s I Will Teach You To Be Rich​
These two books blasted me off on a journey of self improvement and business optimization that ultimately led me to create this newsletter and business 7 years later.
So needless to say, I’m a fan of Ramit’s work.
Which brings me to this story…
Ramit’s company has been testing the “4 Day Workweek” through a 14 week experimental challenge.
You can read the full details of their experiment here: https://www.iwillteachyoutoberich.com/four-day-work-week/​
Here are the team’s feedback from 7 weeks in (halfway):
And here are 7 insights from 7 weeks of the 4DWW:
- It’s not 100% stress-free – As deadlines come up, people still end up feeling stressed about work. 4DWW is not a magic cure. But people are no more stressed than on the previous 5 day week.
- Holidays are weird – The way holidays work for the 4DWW Challenge is that they replace the day that an employee would typically have for their day off. When this happens, it requires a lot more shuffling of people’s schedules — which could prove to be incredibly disruptive to workflow, not to mention sucking the wind out of what would normally be a day people looked forward to.
- 4DWW is a powerful motivator – The company wants to work together to make sure everything is done so everyone can enjoy their day off.
- Time can easily run out – The team had to learn how to prioritize the work they used to get done in 5 days down to just 4. People had to work at becoming more efficient week to week.
- Work needs to be laser focused – When employees are sitting down to work, there is a higher sense of urgency in what they do. That means really dialing in their focus on exactly what needs to get done — while ignoring everything else.
- Meetings need to be concise — or removed from the calendar entirely – The VAST majority of meetings are completely unnecessary, and yes, most could just be emails or Slack messages. This is especially the case when it comes to 4DWW when people’s time becomes even more valuable. On days when there are MULTIPLE meetings, it became even more difficult to finish projects and tasks on time.
- Practice makes perfect – The 4DWW is really like learning a skill – that requires practice. Don’t expect to make the switch and not have some growing pains.
Interested in learning more? Here’s a full write up on how Ramit’s team is implementing the 4DWW.
🎧 2. How I Digested 9 Hours Of Coaching Replays In 90 Minutes
The last two weeks on my podcast, I reviewed 9 hours of coaching replays with my mentor, Chris Do, breaking down the insights and lessons I learned from over $10,000 of coaching.
There was so much value to share that I ended up breaking them down into two halves:
​Part 1 – Design Agency(Recaps Nov 2020 – March 2021)
​Part 2 – Personal Brand (Recaps April 2021 – Nov 2022)
One question I got from a lot of you:
“How did you find time to listen to 9 hours of coaching when you’re only working 10-20 hours a week?”
I’ll tell you how I did it…
đź‘€ Step 1 – Read, don’t listen
I found very early on that I could process the insights from the sessions MUCH FASTER by reading, instead of listening (even on 2x speed).
It also allowed me to easily copy notes and direct quotes right into my show outline.
✍️ Step 2 – Transcribe all recordings
I used a tool called Cleanvoice to automatically generate my transcripts.
This created 9 transcript files, which we then dropped into my podcast Notion page.
đź“ť Step 3 – Take great notes
One of the ways I was able to speed up the process happened over 2 years ago:
I took REALLY detailed notes DURING each session, and prepared notes before each session.
If you ever do a coaching session, you are doing yourself a disservice if you don’t come prepared.
So for each 60 minute coaching session, I already had 3 files of notes to review:
- Rich’s Pre-Session Notes (What I wanted to talk about, data I wanted to share)
- Rich’s Session Notes (Insights from the session and then listening to the replay the day after)
- Chris’ Session Notes (Chris would share his notes with me as well)
🤖 Step 4 – Try to use AI (and fail)
My secret hope was that I was going to be able to feed my transcripts into an AI system and get a perfect summary generated, doing all the work for me.
Didn’t work out.
I tried ChatGPT and Notion AI, and unfortunately the insights were useless.
Why? The best lessons revealed themselves to me over multiple sessions, the AI notes couldn’t handle it.
I do not recommend.
Anyways, that’s how I did it – check out the two part episodes here.
✍️ 3. How To Actually Write Good Content (The Blockbuster Method) – Article By Michael Simmons
I came across this article in my friend Colby’s newsletter 1% Better.
99% of people focus on creating “good enough” content, on a very regular basis (daily, weekly).
But it turns out, the BEST content is what gets all the views:
And the BEST content, takes a lot more time.
The solution: The Blockbuster Method.
Michael Simmons suggests you spend 100x as long on ONE piece of content, instead of creating 100 pieces of “OK” content.
Here’s the main idea:
- There is a lot of competition for mediocre content. Almost all creators dash off their content in an hour or two. You know these… ones that give a list of life tips like “get sleep,” “eat well,” and “be nice” without really bringing anything new to the table.
- There is almost no competition for blockbuster content. Almost no one spends dozens of hours on every piece of content to make it the best content on that topic in the world.
It’s a really interesting reframe on how I think about creating content.
​Check out the full article here.
⏯️ 4. The Ultimate Guide To YouTube – Article by Ali Abdaal
Want an example of blockbuster content? Here’s one.
I’m sure this took 100+ hours to compile.
If you are considering EVER starting a YouTube channel, do yourself a favor, bookmark this.
This article from YouTuber Ali Abdaal (4.5m subs) is a one stop shop for EVERYTHING you need to know to get started on YouTube.
Doesn’t get better than this.
It covers:
- 👉 Picking your niche
- đź“Ľ Creating a channel
- ✨ Your first video
- 🎥 Technical stuff and gear
- 🎬 Editing
- 🥇 How to get good
- đź“Š Analytics
- đź’¸ Monetization
- and more!
⏯️ 5. Classical Music In Old Cartoons – Twitter Thread by Vincent Alexander
​This twitter thread from cartoonist/animator Vincent Alexander captured a lot of my attention this week.
As many of you know, WCRB Classical is one of my favorite deep work stations.
Often I hear songs on there that I recognize, but don’t know where.
Turns out they may just all be from old cartoons from my childhood…