Hello there, friend!

Last time, I tried to provide a framework of metawork that could integrate wisdom cultivation with more mundane, administrative disciplines like knowledge and project management. However, it seems to me that I painted the metawork practices focused on the How? and especially the What? layer as basically unimportant. So today, I want to try to remedy that somewhat.

As I've said before, whether you do something is a question of both your motivation and ability for that something – if it's difficult, you're gonna have to be very motivated, if it's easy, less motivation will suffice. This is one reason why big projects need to be broken down into single actionable items – the difficulty of tackling an entire months-long project as a whole is insane, but ticking off a task that doesn't take more than a few hours is doable. And if it's not, you can always break it down further into even smaller sub-tasks. The purpose of project management is to make the project work easier, to make the project succeed. Similarly, the purpose of knowledge management is to make working with information easier, from gathering information, through generating insights, to sharing and applying the final products. Taken together, this means that the purpose of metawork is to help your work succeed, to help you do what you otherwise wouldn't be able to do.

From this perspective, the end goal of metawork is self-expression. That doesn't mean that it needs to be overly sophisticated – on the contrary, the practices need to be as simple as possible, as they can easily become a burdensome overhead. But done right, they help you turn "heavy lifts" into a joyful process of discovery and creativity.

To illustrate, I will confess that the impulse for this essay was my struggle with writing this week’s newsletter. I still didn't fix the flaws in my note-taking, which makes the act of writing quite challenging at times. This in turn undermines my motivation. At the same time, I know very well the delight of arriving at new insights that only writing permits. The problem is that I still largely associate it with staring at a blank page, squeezing my brain for ideas like a cage-trapped hen for golden eggs. Despite all the flashy tools and frameworks I know and even apply in other areas (for example writing my thesis), somehow I still struggle with their application for a consistent content creation. This in turn prompts thoughts that question both my motivation and competence, which could easily spiral out of control, had I not learned not to pay them much attention.

Metawork is a way to avoid all that. It strikes me that a key metawork question is "What could the process look like if it was fun?" If it brought you naturally into flow, without relying on discipline, using only your natural interests and inclinations? Though it's quite likely that not every task can become fun, it's still a great aim.

Last week’s dig-ups

Entrepreneurship

• Ali Abdaal & Nicolas Cole – Making money as a writer. This was one of my favorite podcasts on writing and entrepreneurship ever. The key insights for me are that:

  • If you want your writing to be more than a hobby, you must realize that your niche is not about you, but your readers – you will only grow (and be able to monetize) if you are answering the questions people have, not if you just write about whatever you want.

  • To find out what these questions are in your niche, you have to write on a social platform (e.g. Twitter, Quora, Linked In, or Medium) which both provides you with feedback and helps you grow.

• Dan Koe – You can make a lot of money as an entrepreneur even with just 4 hours of work a day, but you need to focus on the highest leverage activities. For him, (as for Nic Cole) this is growing your brand. However, Dan emphasizes the importance of going broad with your writing, combining anything you’re interested in, because that’s how you create a unique voice. On the face of it, this might look like going against the advice of realizing your niche is not about you, but it’s not – choose the topics based on your interests but write to answer questions that other people with those interests have.

• Tim Ferris on growing your network – if you can and you really want to grow, consider moving to a location with high concentration of top performers in your field. Then, be willing to provide value for free and don’t immediately go after the most popular people – it’s much easier to get the attention of the “silver medallists”, while the advice you get might be just as valuable as from the “gold medallists”

Philosophy & Sense-making

• Gregg Henriques and Bruce Alderman on the importance of grammar (of all things!) for philosophy and meta-metaphysics

Reflection

I do realize that the essays I wrote so far were very much for myself, while also being quite difficult to read. This was fine in the beginning, as my only aim was to write something, but now it’s time to start writing stuff that could actually help someone. I might still write a more abstract essay from time to time, as I see them helping me articulate the Why? layer of the things I’m writing about, but I definitely want to focus on my actionable topics most of the time. Let’s see how that goes.

And that’s it! Let me know what resonated, and I’ll see you here next week.

Take care

Chris